STANLEY Z. PECH PRIZE, 2024
(Articles published between 2022-2023)
John Paul Newman, Maynooth University, Ireland
“Suicide and the Hermeneutics of Political and National Community in the Interwar Czechoslovak Republic,” Slavic Review 82, no. 3 (Fall 2023): 595-615
In a truly original and impressive work of historical discovery and analysis, John Paul Newman examines a crisis that obsessed interwar Czechoslovakia but has been forgotten by posterity. In a nation that at times glorified young men who took their own lives (think Jan Palach), a purported rash of suicides in the new state challenged the national myth that the fall of the Habsburg Monarchy had freed the Czech people. The effort to explain the persistence of suicide spurred scholarly analysis of the phenomenon, national navel-gazing, and a search for blame. Newman’s innovative approach traces how contemporaries rationalized the allegedly national phenomenon as a patriotic individual choice or attributed it to a wider crisis within society. Through three clearly written and impressively documented case studies, Newman persuasively explains, “The prevailing tendency in the interwar period was less to apply solutions to the problem than it was to explain it in terms that were acceptable to the patriotic national culture of the times. The crux of this problem was the need to distort a linear statistical fact so that it bent towards the notion that the national present had broken decisively with the imperial past.” T.G. Masaryk’s scholarship on suicide influenced contemporaries to seek societal explanations with a particular emphasis on Habsburg authoritarianism and its legacy. The apparently high suicide rate among Czech immigrants in the United States, however, raised uncomfortable questions about national character, which scholars countered with claims that in Bohemia the regrettable phenomenon was more common in the German-speaking borderlands. The Legionary movement retrospectively lionized Colonel Jiří Jan Švec, who took his own life on a train in revolutionary Russia, and worried over despair among enlisted men and veterans in the new democratic army – until, at least, it became clear from statistics that soldiers did not actually suffer from higher rates of suicide and could be lauded instead as uniquely impervious to the social disease. As Newman perceptively and cogently concludes, contemporary Czechs sought “less to resolve the admitted problem of suicide but rather to alchemize it into a form that was palatable and well-adjusted to the new patriotic narratives of the interwar republic.
Honorable Mention
Chad Bryant, Kateřina Čapková, and Diana Dumitru, “Undone from Within: The Downfall of Rudolf Slánský and Czechoslovak-Soviet Dynamics under Stalin,” Journal of Modern History 95, no. 4 (December 2023): 847-886.
Undone from Within” offers a comprehensively innovative analysis of the events that led to the 1952 trial of Rudolf Slánský trial and his thirteen co-defendants. Mining an impressive range of previously uncited documents from former Soviet and Czechoslovak archives, Bryant, Čapková, and Dumitru together bring fresh insight to this formative moment in the early years of Communist Eastern Europe. Through its deft dissection of the mechanisms of political trials, the article reveals a far more complex picture of how Soviet power buttressed and was but-tressed by maneuvering within the Czechoslovak communist leadership. The authors’ emphasis on bottom-up dimensions over top-down dynamics brings to light the pervasive “cultures of denunciation” that mixed personal rivalries, political ambitions, and, for some, antisemitism, with efforts at self-preservation and the fear of being denounced. The committee particularly marveled at how the authors richly detailed the lead-up to the trial and how they interwove discoveries from far-flung archives into a coherent and persuasive, revisionary narrative. The committee was even more im-pressed by the truly collaborative nature of the project, which is a model of all that scholars with different expertise can achieve when working together.
Prize Committee: Benjamin Frommer (chair), Phillip Howe, and Clare Morelon
Emerging Scholar Prize, 2025
(Qualifying scholarly texts published between 2023-2025)
Jonathan Parker, UT Austin
Dissertation chapter, “Recruitment, Manpower, and the Nationality Issue in Slovakia”
Jonathan Parker’s dissertation chapter, “Recruitment, Manpower, and the Nationality Issue in Slovakia,” examines the difficulties faced by state authorities in establishing state-wide institutions such as security services in Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1924. He notes, “Czechoslovakia differed within its borders not only in terms of putative ethnicity and language, but also in its infrastructure, economic development, and state structures. The security services in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia could rely on an already existing body of trained and experienced men to police the republic and an industrial economy to supply and transport them. However, in Slovakia the apparatus of the state had to be rebuilt virtually from scratch by importing personnel and materiel from the Bohemian lands. This posed numerous challenges and made it easy for some to charge the authorities with Czech colonialism and domination over Slovaks.” (31) He shows, however, how these charges were rooted in the state’s response to material differences in infrastructure and labor power in the Czech and Slovak regions rather than from an a priori belief in Czech superiority. The author moves productively and seamlessly between the perspectives of central police authorities to those of the men serving as gendarmes in Slovakia. Indeed, Parker’s rich archival work and insightful analysis shows that the line between empire and nation state frequently blurred after WWI less for ideological reasons than for pragmatic ones.
Prize Committee: Tatjana Lichtenstein (chair), Julia Mead, Philip Howe
CSA Book Prize, 2025
(Books published between 2023-2024)
This year saw many submissions of high quality. After careful consideration, the committee has decided to award a joint prize for the best book in Czechoslovak Studies 2023-2024 to Rosamund Johnston’s Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969, and Claire Morelon’s Streetscapes of War and Revolution. Prague, 1914-1920.
Rosamund Johnston, University of Vienna
Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024)
This groundbreaking exploration of Czechoslovak Radio before 1969 offers valuable insight into the lives and thoughts not only of Czechoslovakia’s radio journalists but also into the listening habits of Czechoslovakia’s citizens. Utilizing rarely accessed archival records at Czech Radio, Johnston demonstrates how radio journalists brought sincere and complex ideological beliefs to their reporting while also serving as interlocutors between government superiors, the listening public, and the wider world. Johnston successfully demonstrates how journalists and their public related to propaganda and “truth,” shaping the politics in Cold War Czechoslovakia. By exploring previously unknown material, the book is a crucial contribution to understanding the role of media in pre-normalisation Czechoslovakia.
Claire Morelon, University of Manchester
Streetscapes of War and Revolution. Prague, 1914-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024)
This fascinating study upends traditional Czechoslovak state mythology and paints a sophisticated picture of patriotism in everyday life during and beyond World War I. Focusing on the lived experience in Prague’s streets, Morelon casts a society concerned about material and psychological well-being, interacting with temporary signage, government offices, cafes, and outdoor public spaces, seen through the lens of police records. In connecting the beginning of World War I through the riots and disruptions of the early republic, Morelon reveals a consistent logic of political well-being removed from national politics and political symbols, instead concentrated on relationships among the public and the authorities. Going beyond traditional periodisation and prioritising of nation-building, the book is an innovative contribution to the scholarship on the late Habsburg Empire and interwar Czechoslovakia.
Prize Committee: Christopher Campo Bowen, John Paul Newman, Molly Pucci