This thesis is a contribution to the study of the Czechoslovakian exile in France with a special focus on the years 1968-1989, or the so-called Normalization. The aim is to answer certain questions that can only be approached through oral history. Thus, on the basis of interviews with six different narrators, we will try to understand the reasons and conditions of their departure before focusing on the establishment of their new life without reference points in Paris, far from home but also in contact with other migrants. As exile has shaped our narrators, special attention will be paid to questions of identity and memory. Keywords: Exile, Czechoslovakia, France, Communism, Normalization, Oral History.

Depuis son origine, l'Union soviétique n'a cessé d'être en France l'objet d'un vif débat politique et intellectuel, un lieu de transposition des affrontements idéologiques hexagonaux. Alors que deux images contradictoires de l'URSS se sont formées au XXe siècle – celle de l'incarnation du socialisme et celle d'une dictature repoussante – la décennie qui débute en 1975 voit le triomphe en France de l'image noire du régime soviétique, dont le bilan est jugé complètement négatif, malgré une courte période d'interrogations suscitée par les réformes gorbatchéviennes. Cette évolution est le résultat d'un intense affrontement politique et idéologique hexagonal autour de la « réalité » du socialisme soviétique au moment où l'Union de la gauche propose un projet socialiste pour la France : l'Union soviétique se retrouve alors étroitement imbriquée dans les débats politiques, syndicaux, intellectuels français, constituant alors la ligne de démarcation principale entre communistes et non-communistes. La réintroduction du concept de totalitarisme, l'identification à la lutte de la dissidence est-européenne et la dénonciation de l'impérialisme soviétique pendant la période de « guerre fraîche » constituent les différentes facettes de cette lutte dont le résultat est le développement d'un fort antisoviétisme en France, allant jusqu'à une certaine remise en cause des relations bilatérales. L'amalgame entretenu entre les deux socialismes – de l'Est et de l'Ouest – contribue à la fois à la marginalisation du Parti communiste français qui peine à redéfinir ses relations avec les partis frères, de l'affirmation du « socialisme aux couleurs de la France » au bilan « globalement positif » des pays de l'Est, mais affecte aussi de manière plus générale l'idée de socialisme en France. Après des années de sympathie pour le communisme, les intellectuels français basculent massivement dans un anticommunisme virulent: la substitution du binôme capitalisme/socialisme au profit du couple démocratie/totalitarisme se traduit par l'abandon des traditions révolutionnaires de la gauche française. La vision libérale de l'histoire triomphe alors, entraînant une condamnation totale et définitive du régime soviétique qui précède, de loin, sa fin en 1991. / From its beginning, the Soviet Union has always been the subject of a fierce political and intellectual debate in France, a place on which ideological French confrontations were transfered. During the 20th century, two conflicting images of USSR were created – the embodiment of socialism and of a repulsive dictature – but after 1975 the dark image of the soviet system prevails. Its assessment is judged as completely negative, despite Gorbachev's era of reforms. This change is the result of an intense political and ideological French confrontation about what soviet socialism really is at the time when the Union of the Left is putting forward a socialist project for France : thus, the Soviet Union becomes closely interlocked in any debate in French political parties, unions and intellectual circles, acting as a dividing line between communists and others. The reintroduction of the concept of totalitarianism, the identification to the fight of Eastern Europe dissidents and the highlighting of soviet military imperialism during the second cold war are the different parts of this fight which results in the growth of a strong anti-sovietism in France and in a kind of adjournment of bilateral relations with the USSR. The amalgam between western and eastern socialism leads to the marginalization of the French Communist Party, which is not able to redefine its relations with the eastern sister parties, from the French way to socialism (“socialisme aux couleurs de la France”) to the globally positive assessment of Eastern socialist countries. It also affects the general idea and contents of socialism in France. After years of sympathy for communism, French intellectuals massively swing to an acerbic anticommunism: the opposition between capitalism and socialism is replaced by the one between democracy and totalitarianism, and, because of that, French Left revolutionary traditions are abandoned. At that point, the liberal vision of history prevails, and leads to the total and definitive condemnation of the soviet regime, preceding by far its end in 1991.

This diploma thesis deals with Jewish institutions in Lower Silesia during the period of 50's and 60's of the 20th century. The area of focus is the Socio-Cultural Association of Jews (Towarzystwo Spoleczno-Kulturalne Zydów), which was historically the only Jewish association in Poland that was allowed to exist. The main aim of this thesis is to track down and analyse relationship of the representatives of the group with the communist party and its ideology in detail, since the party was not particularly inclined towards Jewish culture due to Israel's affinity with the West. Furthermore, after the introduction and analysis of the main sources and literature, the thesis briefly introduces a topic related to the restoration of life within the Jewish community after the World War II. After that, it concentrates on the formation and development of institutions and it follows the way members were educated in the spirit of socialism as well as how the Jewish culture was formed. The fundamental sources necessary for the study of this problematic are primarily files that came into existence as a result of certain activities of institutions, such as meetings of their bodies, documents informing about social life (invitations to events), repatriation records of the USSR saved in Archive of The Jewish...

In my thesis I analyse how the United States was depicted in Rudé právo during selected stretches of the Vietnam War. I focus on 1966 (the US already at war), 1968 (the Tet offensive) and 1969 (Nixon as president, the death of Ho Chi Minh) and I explore what image a Czechoslovak reader might have made of the US based on those periods. Next, I observe the differences between the objective portrayal of these historical events and their media coverage in Rudé právo. In my work I assume that Rudé právo did not inform about the Vietnam War objectively, but was instead subject to Communist propaganda. At the same time, I am also interested in the means by which Rudé právo obtained a subjective description of these events.

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Interview with ativist and social theorist AK Thompson.

This thesis tries to fill in the research gap on whether the ideologies of armed groups can change. Tokdemir et al. (2021) discovered that an increase in the number of competitors leads to a polarisation of an armed group’s ideology, I theorise that a decrease in the number of competitors will lead to depolarisation of an armed group’s ideology, because then the armed group gains more access to the finite resource pool. I conducted a structured, focused within-case comparison over time using discourse analysis. Discourse analysis allows for a detailed and complex operationalisation of ideology. The case study focuses on the People’s War Group/Communist Party of India-Maoist, a communist group part of the Naxalite movement in India. For the independent variable, I use multiple secondary sources to establish the number of competitors in 1991 and 2008. For the dependent variable, I analyse multiple magazine publications from 1991 and 2008 written by the PWG/CPI-Maoist to establish their ideology. The findings of this research do not support the hypothesis. There is limited change over time in the ideology of the PWG/CPI-Maoist even though the number of competitors changed between 1991 and 2008. Suggestions for future research are given at the end.

This diploma thesis deals with the polemic dispute between the subcultural magazines Tramp and Naše osady regarding the concept of the tramp identity and politicization of the subculture of tramping between the years 1929 to 1931. It examines the so-called red tramping - the inclination of part of the tramps towards communism as well as the related politicization of the subculture and its development, the platform of which is often considered to be the magazine Tramp; as well as criticism of this approach by Naše osady magazine, which advocates non-political tramping. The result of this work is the division of politicization of the subculture in the observed period into three stages: the efforts of MP Jiří Stříbrný and the media in his possession to politicize the subculture towards his politics, politicization and declaratively non-political members the culmination of a moral panic over tramping, and the communist politicization of tramps. The thesis concludes that Tramp magazine was a platform for red tramping, but only in the second half of its existence, not throughout the whole period, and that red tramping can be described as its leftist and later communist orientation, which remains largely ideological than to openly invoke the Communist Party. Furthermore, the thesis finds that the controversy,...

This thesis is based on my stay at a retro "ROH recreation - holidays in Tatras as 'then'" organized and provided by one Czech travel agency whose major customers are elderly people. The thesis focuses especially on the motivation of these people to buy such a product, and describes how they spend a holiday like that. This detailed description is an extremely important starting point for clarifying the phenomenon known as nostalgia, which is also in relation to post-communist countries referred to as 'ostalgia". Using the concepts of social memory I show that next to the officially accepted version of history there is a large number of alternative and often contradictory "memories" based on small personal histories of everyday life, which do not include Communism as a political system, but "ordinary" life in the communist times. The main goal of my thesis is to try to find the answers to the question, whether that what the older generation misses is really the communist regime itself, or the sentence "it was better under communism" hides something completely different from mere identification with a particular political establishment. Key words: ROH recreation; communism; retro; nostalgia; social memory; habitus

This dissertation analyses narratives of the Mašín brothers and their father, Josef Mašín senior. The Mašín brothers established what they called 'a resistance group' against the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, which between 1951 and 1952 killed three people. The brothers, alongside the other member of the group, Milan Paumer, escaped from the country in 1953, heading for the Western sectors of Berlin. Despite more than 20,000 East German and Soviet troops hunting them, the group reached West Berlin safely. Later, the brothers went to the USA where they joined the U.S. army. The dissertation analyzes a whole range of discourses including newspaper articles, historical papers, books, detective stories, novels, memoirs and also one episode of the Czechoslovak television series, Třicet případů majora Zemana ('Major Zeman's Thirty Cases'), entitled Strach ('Fear'), from 1975. The dissertation is conceptually embedded in cultural studies and critical theory. Drawing on Roland Barthesʼs work on mythologies, Hayden Whiteʼs theory of history and Slavoj Žižekʼs theory of ideology, the dissertation considers the relationship of the Mašín brothersʼ narrative representations with respect to the dominant ideology of the time. The first chapter of the dissertation deals with narratives produced in Communist...