Pan-Slavism in the evaluation of Czechoslovak historiography of the cold-war era

The article analyzes one of the most significant directions in the development of Czech and Slovak historiography during the Cold War period, i.e. the treatment by Czech and Slovak historians of the concept of Pan-Slavism and the role this ideological and political trend has played in the development of Czech and Slovak national statehood in the course of the Middle Ages, Early-Modern, Modern, and Contemporary periods. In addition to that, political, ideological, spiritual and historiographical factors are discussed which affected the way PanSlavism and the Slav agenda in general were understood by Czech and Slovak historians. On the basis of the historiographical analysis of a large amount of articles and monographs by Czech and Slovak historians published from mid 1940s to late 1980s, the author arrives at important conclusions. One of them states that in Marxist historiography the history of relationships between the Slav nations and Russia have turned into an ideological battle-field. Academic debate tended to be fierce political polemics. In socialist Czechoslovakia the Slavic research of the new and latest periods witnessed the emergence of politics into science and science into politics. At the same time historical research in Czechoslovakia would have the plurality of opinions and conceptions until the suppression of the Prague spring in 1968. The 1960s saw the culmination of interest among Czech and Slovak historians in the Slav topics. Their research works contained direct analogies between national movements of the Czechs and Slovaks under the Habsburg monarchy and their intention to safeguard their model of socialism from the Kremlin in the late 1960s. This could not but lead to poorer quality and efficiency of scientific debate and to increased ideological tension. The historical polemics about Slavism and Pan-Slavism aroused public interest. In 1968 a lot of Czech and Slovak historians took the side of the reformers struggling for “socialism with a human face”.