Section Archive From the Archives
“My first love was a drill”: building the socialist state
After the communist coup, Czechoslovak Radio was at the political vanguard
and transformed into a tool of propaganda. One of the first big changes at
Radio Prague was that our familiar call signal from Dvořák’s New World
Symphony was replaced by a stirring socialist anthem – “Ku předu
levá”. The words are simple: “Left foot forwards, left foot forwards,
and never a backwards step.” All broadcasts acquired a political hue.
Here, for example, is a factory worker, talking about his first love: More
Milada Horáková: dignity in the face of fanaticism
Many people in Czechoslovakia greeted the communist coup of February 1948
with enthusiasm, in the belief that the horrors of the war should never be
allowed to happen again. But following the model of Stalin’s Soviet
Union, it was not long before a period of political terror began, with
thousands of arrests and then a series of political show trials. The most
horrific symbol of the period was the trial and execution of Milada
Horáková. She had been one of the most enlightened politicians of the
pre-war Czechoslovak Republic, a champion of democracy and women’s
rights, and had spent most of the war in Nazi prisons and concentration
camps. More
The unresolved mystery of the death of Jan Masaryk
“We are a small country with a great tradition of freedom. We shall not
give it up.” These are the words of Jan Masaryk, the son of
Czechoslovakia’s first President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, addressing
American servicemen in Plzeň in a tone of great optimism in November 1945.
During the wartime occupation Masaryk had served as Czechoslovak foreign
minister in exile in London, and he remained in the post after his return
home, deciding to stay on even after the communist coup of February 1948.
His immense popularity meant that the communists put up with his presence,
although his pro-Western views, reinforced by the fact that his mother had
been American, were totally at odds with the rest of the government. More
“Business as usual” after the 1948 coup
In the immediate aftermath of the political coup in Czechoslovakia in
February 1948, the communists were keen to give the world the impression
that it was business as usual and that nothing out of the ordinary had
happened. In this respect Radio Prague as the international service of
Czechoslovak Radio was expected to play its part, and so the communists
asked the handful of British nationals working for one of
Czechoslovakia’s biggest companies to make a statement in English for the
radio. As a result one of the British staff of the shoe-making giant Baťa,
which had already been nationalized more than two years earlier, addressed
Radio Prague’s listeners on March 1 1948, exactly a week after the
communist coup: More
February 1948: a new political order enters by the back door
In last week’s programme we heard about the Communist-led government that
emerged from Czechoslovakia’s elections in May 1946. Although the number
of parties allowed to take part had been limited, Czechoslovakia was still
a multi-party democracy. But the governing coalition was an uneasy one,
with the non-communist parties pushed into ever greater isolation, while
the communists, with the weight of the Soviet Union behind them, gained an
ever stronger foothold. More
A. J. P. Taylor: faith in socialist Czechoslovakia
A. J. P. Taylor (1906-1990) was one of the best-known and most influential
British historians of the 20th century. He is remembered in particular for
his provocative left-wing political views and his conviction that German
history made the country uniquely inclined towards aggression and
expansionism. This made him an ardent opponent of attempts to rebuild
Germany’s economy after the war, and a strong supporter of
Czechoslovakia’s growing alliance with the Soviet Union. In July 1946,
just after elections which saw the Communists emerge as the strongest
single party, Taylor visited Czechoslovakia. More
Will Lawther and J. B. Priestley: the British left and post-war Czechoslovakia
During World War II, the political left in Britain and the United States
had come to identify itself strongly with the fate of the Czech nation.
This was partly a reaction to the shame of Munich in 1938, when
Czechoslovakia had been abandoned by her allies, and it was reinforced by
the role played by the British miners in launching the Lidice Shall Live
movement. This had followed the Nazis’ destruction of the Czech mining
village of Lidice in June 1942. In this spirit the president of the British
Miners’ Federation Will Lawther, came at the end of 1945 to lay a wreath
at the grave of the men of Lidice. More
After 1945: something like normality
In From the Archives this week we carry on where we left off at the end of
August in our chronological journey through the Czech Radio archives. We had
reached the point just after the end of World War Two; after the initial
euphoria, the hard work of rebuilding the country began: not least at the
Czechoslovak Radio building itself, which had been shot to pieces in the
Prague Uprising and received a direct hit from a German aerial torpedo. More
Jiří Dienstbier remembers a fateful day
Because August 21 is the fortieth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the radio played such a central role in the
events of those dramatic days, in this edition of From the Archives we
shall be hearing the memories of one of the key journalists involved in
those dramatic events. Jiří Dienstbier was one of Czechoslovak Radio’s
star reporters at the time. Later he was to become one of the best-known
dissidents of the ‘70s and ‘80s, and after the Velvet Revolution he was
the country’s first post-communist foreign minister. On the morning of
August 21 1968, he was one of several radio journalists, playing a
cat-and-mouse game with the Soviet occupiers, as the Soviets tried to
silence the radio station. In some of the recordings that survive, you can
hear quite distinctly tanks and machine-gun fire in the background. More
Olga Szántová: the voice of Radio Prague
It was five years ago this week that our much-loved colleague, Olga
Szántová, died at the age of 71. As a child she had spent most of World
War II in New York, which was where she picked up her perfect East-Side
English. Olga became one of the most familiar voices of Radio Prague’s
English broadcasts during the political thaw of the 1960s, and she was also
among the radio journalists who managed to carry on broadcasting secretly
during the Soviet invasion of 1968, as several recordings from the time
still bear witness. More
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