2021
Mira Markham, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Světlana: Partisans and Power in Post-War Czechoslovakia,”
Contemporary European History, vol. 30, no. 1, 2021, pp. 16–31.
In her extensively researched and well-written essay on Světlana, a Moravian underground group in postwar Czechoslovakia, Markham forwards a new, bottom-up perspective on politics and society. Combining her thorough knowledge of Czech- and English-language secondary sources with new and important archival materials, she offers an original interpretation of Světlana as more than a resistance organization or “a trap laid by agents of the regime.” She explores what the people’s democracy meant to former partisans who had fought against fascism during the war only to find themselves facing new and different kinds of oppression from the Communist regime. This case study also sheds new light on the early history of the Communist security forces, the transnational flow of information and resources into Eastern Europe just after 1948, and the lasting social effects of wartime itself. Her recounting of rivalries and tensions among former partisans brings readers close to these events and gives new depth to our understanding of how the regime perceived its own vulnerabilities in its early years and the forces within that eventually led to the show trials of the 1950s. In making this selection, committee members noted how Markham’s work engages with complex historiography and debates from both the pre-Communist and post-Communist periods while providing a fresh look at local power dynamics and the everyday struggles of people living outside the larger cities.
Honorable Mention
Baris Ahmet Yorumez, “Socialism with a Melancholy Heart: The Red-Collars and the Making of Reform Socialism in Czechoslovakia (1945-1968).” University of British Columbia, 2021.
Employing a novel approach to research on post-Stalinist Czechoslovakia, Yorumez is a historian of emotions. His work shifts us away from traditional political narratives and breaks new ground by using narrative sources to study how Czechs and Slovaks publicly grappled with remorse and angst between Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968. He impressed the committee with his reframing of the “pre-spring” period using emotions rather than traditional methods from intellectual history. For example, he contrasts the genuine remorse of Ján Rozner and Juraj Špitzer with the unrepentant voices of artists such as Milan Lajčiak and Krista Bendová. His chapter shows how the “1948ers” op-posed the dogmatism of Party hardliners in the 1950s and captures the skepticism of a younger generation who wanted to reignite idealism in the 1960s after Khrushchev’s secret speech and Czechoslovakia’s economic stagnation caused them to feel disaffected. This work shows great promise to add new layers to our understandings of authoritarianism.
Prize Committee: Kimberly E. Zarecor (Chair), Molly Pucci, Kieran Williams