Ladislav Cabada, a professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, accurately notes that political science became a “new” discipline in the former Communist bloc after 1989, and that he has taken advantage of this opportunity to study this formerly frowned upon area of research. He also rightly points out, much to the chagrin of many political scientists and historians, that the two disciplines are closely related. Indeed this volume, published in Czech in 2000 and again in 2005, and now available to a wider audience in English, is his doctoral thesis that is equally at home in either discipline.

Cabada chooses the starting date 1890 because in that year the Czech Lands saw the establishment of partial general suffrage together with the rise of modern political parties around major political figures. Naturally, the ending date of 1938 marked the demise of the first Czechoslovak republic. Prior to World War I, most Czech leftists joined the Social Democratic Party, part of the Second International, which collapsed due to national issues between the various ethnic groups, especially in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the war, Habsburg officials completely shut down political life with censorship, the incarceration of leaders, and the military mobilization of the membership. The recovery began only in 1917 when Socialists, anarchists, and other radicals attempted to work together to form a left-wing counterweight party to the “bourgeois” parties. The Bolshevik Revolution strengthened this movement with its promises of social justice, a classless society, transformation of private property, and ending the war, which produced several unsuccessful coup attempts to establish a Socialist Czechoslovakia. However, the left-leaning parties had expelled the Communists by 1922, correctly believing that they had attempted to infiltrate and seize control of the organizations and that they were blindly taking orders from Moscow. By the fifth Congress of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, the full Stalinization of the leadership and party became apparent, mirroring what had occurred in the struggles for power within the Soviet Union. Despite the overview of the rise of Communism in the Czech Lands, the bottom line is that the small number of “intellectuals” and/or “artists” were not quite understood or trusted by the leadership and the rank and file and were thus relegated to a low priority in organizational planning and to the periphery of the political scene of the party. Whenever “intellectuals” and/or “artists” would disagree with the leadership, they were condemned and/or expelled from the party.

However, here is a major failing of the work. Cabada constantly refers to “intellectuals” and/or “artists,” when it would have been best to label them as writers since the book is about the trials and tribulations of leftist Czech writers and how they approached Communism and later the motherland of Socialism, the Soviet Union. Also, as a thesis turned into a monograph, it tends to suffer many of the problems of such works including excessive quotations where, at times, a single page of text might contain almost half quotations. The translation is faulty—one such example is evident already in the subtitle: “…in Czech Lands….” In one place, we read about Archduke František Ferdinand and, in another, that the first Czechoslovak Prime Minister, Karel Kramář, was assassinated. The index is scanty and follows Czech orthography. Furthermore, the translation for much of the book is in the present tense, which makes for difficult reading when investigating a historical topic. Another problem that plagues this work is that the author consistently uses the first person to describe his methods and why he wrote about such a topic or issue. For example, Cabada writes, “In the previous chapter I talked about….which I am about to describe in more detail” (167). Lastly, the topic tends to be too narrow and specialized, and thereby, beyond the realm of interest for nonacademics.

Yet, for all these issues concerning the English translation, this is an interesting volume whose subchapters allow for an easy read. It adds to our knowledge of writers and their struggles with or lackey support of Communism, especially during the interwar period in Czechoslovakia.