(in English) In my thesis, I have decided to continue the theme I have already pursued in my previous bachelor's degree research. It consists of biographies of selected outstanding volunteers who took part in the Spanish Civil War in 1936-1939, with a special attention given to their lives after 1948. Following the life story of Osvald Závodský, I have chosen to focus on the life of Bohuslav Laštovička (1905-1981), a former officer of the Army of the First Czechoslovak Republic, and later a Communist journalist and publicist. In Spain, he served as the first commander of the "Gottwald" anti-aircraft division, then he was a member of the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in London. Following the liberation, he worked as the first director of Czechoslovak Radio. In 1948, he was an ambassador in Moscow, and later a deputy at the Ministry of Defence. After political restrictions during the political trials era, he became a chairman of the National Assembly in the mid-1960s, and remained in this post until 1968. As a member of the Federal Assembly he served until his dead in 1981. I intend to fill this biographical lacuna drawing on archival research, secondary literature, public press of the period, and last but not least memories of Laštovička's comrades-in-arms and his own, in order to...

The aim of my work was to cover the activity of the Poor School Nuns de Notre Dame since they have been found. The high attention was paid to their centralization to the Nunnery´s branch in Kardašova Řečice in the fifties. I have tried to outline the period of problematic religious and political systems that kept clashing. The work is divided into several topics that describe particular spheres of persecution. The most extensive chapter {--} Kardašova Řečice {--} captures the time since the institute had been established to the day when the last nun left it. There are the memories of the witnesses that narrate about nuns and their activity in the House for Seniors and Citizens unabled to work. The whole work is accompanied by the archival material, but also looks at the nuns´ witness with the true-life experience.

The thesis "Be fit, build your homeland, defend peace" or Physical Education and Ice Hockey in Post-February Czechoslovakia looks at thema of this popular winter sport by sociocritical discipline optics through sport's sociology. This unconventional approach focus on social practise rather than tables of results ice-hockey teams. The czechoslovak stalinism did not display itself only over repressions and polical demagogy. It strived for a creation of new social order that should have been better than previous were. It is appropriate to remember this, in order to understand behavior and motives of then people. The thesis perceives nature of czechoslovak physical education and ice hockey after 1948 as an integral part of European physical education systems through which modern state applies biopower claims.

The author deals with some specific problems of the post-war development of Lidice between 1945 and 1989. The diplomante ponders upon the questions of memory on Lidice, Lidice memory and Lidice as a place of memoir. In her introduction, based on numerous talks with the Lidice narrators, the author tries to find out what kind of memory place Lidice is and who it may concern. The follow-up chapters reflect the worldwide reception of Lidice tragedy; moreover, they feature some talks with the women named Lidice after the village. Next thematic part is focused on the actual construction of the village as well as on two organizations that were in charge of the whole building process: Society for Lidice Reconstruction on one hand and British movement "Lidice Shall Live" on the other hand. Author also introduces the movement founder Barnett Stross. Further chapters describe a typical course of that time reverent memories in Lidice using some articles from Rude Pravo and showing the way how Lidice was misused by the communist regime to serve as a propaganda of socialism. The memories of the narrators, acquired and processed through an oral history method, the archive sources of both the State District Archive in Kladno and the National Archive in London in particular, became a source base of the author. Key...

This thesis focuses on the study of factionalism in the Communist Party of Vietnam and relates it to the recent problems of the Vietnamese regime. In order to determine the causes of the current crisis in Vietnam and introduce the environment in which Vietnamese elites operate, this study analyses both formal and informal structures of the political system of Vietnam and the principles of their functioning. This thesis criticizes misleading usage of faction as an analytical tool in the works on Vietnam and presents Andrew Nathan's factional model elaborated for China which is applied to Vietnam in a slightly changed form. We present evidence showing that the central political arena in Vietnam displays factional characteristics. Those findings are linked to the problem immobilism in Vietnam which is connected with instability caused by the absence of political initiatives and needed reforms (mainly the political one). Attention is also drawn to the need for the development of a theory of factionalism. Key words: The Communist Party of Vietnam, factional theories, political system of Vietnam

"Communist Women in the 1920s" is about the women, who established the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and worked to build it up. It describes women of Czech nationality in the territory of the Czech lands during the period 1921-1929. The focus is mostly on the women's headquarters, which directed the work. Following political, social-economical and cultural levels, interest is also paid to the psychological aspect. The theses is divided into thematical chapters, each depicting events chronologically. The introductory chapter presents the reasons, why some women turned to the left and others to the right in the Social Democratic Party. Subsequent chapters describe the organization of women in the Communist Party, their concrete workload, life style of working-class women and functionaries, relations with the Soviet Russia, intraparty political development, comparison with other parties and biographies of female communist functionaries. In this work were used archival materials (mostly records of party meetings and personal materials located in the National Archive in Prague), contemporary women's newspapers and memoires of women.

PhDr. Vít Šimral, LL.B. (Hons) Party Politics in Intercivilisational Encounters: The Modernity Cleavage Abstract The thesis presents an extension of the Lipset - Rokkan model of cleavage-based party politics. It employs concepts of civilisational analysis, particularly the concept of multiple modernities as devised by Shmuel Eisenstadt, to describe the emergence of anti-Western fundamental movements in Russia and Egypt at the start of the 20th century. The introductory chapter discusses the existing literature and recent trends in mainstream studies of party politics, noting particularly the divergence between research into Western and non-Western political parties. The second chapter focuses on the Rokkanian branch of party studies and the use of the cleavage concept outside the political region of Western Europe. In the third chapter, the concept of 'modernity cleavage' is presented, based on theoretical assumptions common both to the Rokkanian agenda and to civilisational analysis. The fourth and fifth chapters deal with the empirical analysis of two cases, the Russian Communists and Egyptian Muslim Brothers, respectively, with the goal to extract findings from presented historical data through a basic-level comparative and ground-theoretical approach. In the final chapter, the thesis is concluded with a...

(in English) The author tries to describe the transformation of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in relation to itself and the surrounding environment, especially in the period from 17th November to 21st December 1989. He will use primarily the articles from Rudé právo and a stenographic record of the unscheduled session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia on 24th and 26th November 1989 which was published under the name Poslední hurá. He considers it appropriate to put into context the events of November and December 1989, with political development in Czechoslovakia in January, at the turn of June and July, and in October 1989. This analysis attempt will be based on the principles of general linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The combination of hegemonic analysis and deconstruction will be used as a method of workflow. When analyzing the transformation of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, the author attempts to rely primarily on three principles deriving from discourse theory. The identity is not a fixed essence but it is created in the political struggles of the content of specific concepts. There have been attempts to fully fixate the identity of individuals, groups, society. But the identity is...

(thefts of socialist property) This diploma thesis observes how the problems of thefts of socialist property in Czechoslovakia were presented in the Rudé právo, the press body of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, between 1986 and 1989, or which discrepancies appeared in this presentation. The view on thefts of socialist property in the terms of law comes before the real core of the thesis - by putting stress on the definition of the socialist property in the Constitution, the given criminal act in the Penal Code, the view of the juristic literature on the social dangerousness of the given action, here represented by the Socialistická zákonnost journal. Afterwards the author focuses on how the problems of thefts (but also that of protection) of socialist property were related to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (or rather to its officials), top managers and rank and file employees, which he illustrates on particular cases. In the end the author compares the articles of the Rudé právo with some empirical findings - in relation to the survey of the Institute for public opinion poll by the Federal statistical office about the discipline and the check on the workplace, in relation to the statistics about the economic criminal activity mentioned in the German written...

Sentencing in the Czech Republic: An Empirical Investigation Abstract Sentencing is in many respects still terra incognita. This holds true especially for other countries than common law ones and those in the Western and Northern Europe. This dissertation thus empirically studies sentencing practices in the Czech Republic using quantitative methods. It is composed of four articles focusing on various sentencing issues: Firstly, on the influence of judicial experience on sentencing using longitudinal data analyzing judges' trajectories from 2008 onward. It shows that increasing experience reduces inter-judge disparity. Secondly, on analyzing previously underappreciated measure to achieve policy change: Informal authority of the supreme institutions. In 2016 the Prosecutor General's Office and the Supreme Court organized several meetings and seminars for prosecutors and judges in order to persuade them to impose more fines. This paper illustrates that these informal tools might have been underappreciated as they are highly effective. The third paper is dedicated to studying a particular extra-legal characteristics influencing sentencing in Prague: The weather. It builds both on psychological literature showing that weather influences mood and mood often impacts behavior and decision-making and on previous US...