This book examines with a refreshingly wide lens the processes that led to the demolition of Most in northern Bohemia to make way for an open pit lignite mine and the building of a new town away from the mining operations. After World War II, the restored Czechoslovak government expelled the great majority of the German-speakers, who previously predominated in the Ore Mountains region. The communist government after 1948 pushed for the rapid expansion of heavy industry and a great increase in coal production. By the late 1940s, the state-owned mining company in northern Bohemia began planning to mine the large coal deposit under the historic center of Most. Government and Communist Party officials had to determine how much of the town to demolish, how to move the residents, and how to provide new housing. In 1964, the authorities began to level the town center, and the great Gothic Deanery Church was eventually the only major structure to survive—moved more than 800 meters away from its original site.

Since the demolition of old Most, various Czech scholars have published on aspects of the process. After 2000, the American historian Eagle Glassheim began to publish research on Most and the Ore Mountains region, culminating in his Cleansing Czechoslovakia's Borderlands: Migration, Environment, and Health in the Former Sudetenland (2016). Glassheim saw the expulsion of the German-speaking minority from Czechoslovakia's northern and western border areas, the economic redevelopment of the region under socialist auspices, and the transformation of the social and natural environments at the cost of great environmental degradation as all part of a single project of modernizing development, which transcended the conventional chronological divisions of 1948 and 1968–69. Matěj Spurný, a historian in the Charles University's Philosophical Faculty, acknowledges the inspiration of Glassheim's work but offers an even broader perspective. He points to important commonalities between Czechoslovak and broader European thinking about modernist architecture and urban planning that were present from the interwar period through the Stalinist era, the 1960s reform period, and into the era of “normalization” after 1969.

Spurný bases his work on a wide range of government, state enterprise, and Communist Party documents as well as numerous contemporary periodicals and other publications. He argues that modernist urban planning began in Czechoslovakia during the interwar period, notably with Tomáš Baťa's development of Zlín, and had strong connections with community design elsewhere in Europe and the Soviet Union. Those traditions continued among Czechoslovak architects through the high Stalinist period and revived after the Communist Party abandoned Socialist Realism in the middle and late 1950s. In this view, western and eastern Europe after 1945 saw similar architectural and community planning projects to advance industrial modernity, albeit by different political means. During the 1960s, Czechoslovakia continued its commitment to modernist planning and design but with a growing belief in the advances that would derive from the scientific and technological revolution and with new sensitivity to the impacts of development on social relations, the environment, and cultural heritage. Spurný sees this outlook as a form of the “reflexive modernization,” which the sociologist Ulrich Beck envisions as developing in various advanced industrial societies. Spurný argues that this outlook continued in Czechoslovakia even after the 1968 invasion because of the regime's need to legitimize itself, a dynamic that was visible in the demolition of the old Most, and the building of a new one.

Spurný offers a thoughtful and stimulating interpretation of what happened in Most, which anyone interested in the evolution of modernizing projects and government-society relations throughout the Soviet bloc should consider closely. His book adds to other recent efforts to present a more nuanced and dynamic view than hitherto available of the 1970s and 1980s in Czechoslovakia. The translation of Spurný’s Czech into English is much better than many others produced in the Czech Republic, although sloppy proof-reading mars passages here and there. Spurný’s argument is generally persuasive, but his determination to find parallels between communist Czechoslovakia and the capitalist west leads to undervaluing somewhat the differing political modalities and other factors that were unique to Czechoslovakia and the Soviet bloc. Spurný notes, for instance, the persistence of some Czechoslovak communist officials and their ingrained dirigiste mentality from the late 1950s through the 1960s and into the normalization era, but he accords somewhat less weight to this and to the revival of authoritarian methods after 1969 than other scholars might. Similarly, he notes early in the study the tendency of many in Czechoslovakia to discount the legacy of the former German population in the border regions, but this nationalist disposition largely disappears from the later analysis of the conflict between cultural preservation and destruction in Most. These reservations do not detract, however, from what is in many ways a fascinating and thought-provoking study.