The Czechoslovak Arms Industry and the Changing Face of Global Warfare, 1859–1989

Molly Pucci, Trinity College Dublin

Research Grant, 2018

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This book project, Marxism and the Interpretation of Dreams: Visions of Communism in Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, examines the history of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in the period between the First and Second World Wars. In doing so, it sheds light on the evolution of the radical political left in Central Europe and the various ways that leftist intellectuals understood and engaged with the Bolshevik revolution in its earliest years.

Rather than a political history from above, the book looks at the topic through the lens of journalism, law, literature, and nationality, four of the major ways that Central European communists engaged with the Russian Revolution in the 1920s. 

Given the difficulty of learning the Czech language, the Czechoslovak Communist Party has been given almost no attention in English-language scholarship on interwar communism. This is a missed opportunity, given the size and significance of the party, and its importance in setting major precedents for other global communist movements the world over.

The book will contribute to the history of Europe and Russia after the First World War and explore the link between mass politics and radical culture at this crucial time.

The Czechoslovak Communist Party was, per capita, the largest communist movement in Europe in the interwar period. It was the only communist party in Europe that carried out its activities legally during a time when most other movements were banned. Emerging from a strong nineteenth-century social democratic and anarchist tradition, the party was rooted in the Marxism of the late Austro-Hungarian empire, which had a strongly pluralist intellectual tradition and gave us leading theorists of nationalism and national identity.

The party was used as a “model” for important decisions made in the Communist International (the Comintern) in 1922 and 1924. The party was notable not only for its unusual mass appeal and liberal tradition, but also for its national and linguistic diversity. It was initially organized as a federation of Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, German, Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian (Ruthenian) communist parties, a structure that united different national traditions and Central European Marxist ideas and led to unique experiments in multinationalism, translations, and attempts to bridge linguistic and cultural differences through art and culture.

Because of its location between East and West, the movement was a crossroads for artistic experimentation, from Italian Futurism to Russian proletarian culture, to French surrealism. It combined Marxism with new literary and philosophical currents from East and West, from the experimental psychology of Sigmund Freud to the new philosophy of Martin Heidegger to the formless poetry of Russian avant-gardist Vladimir Mayakovsky.

This book examines the place of Czechoslovakia in the international communist movement; its complex relationship to the Soviet Union and the Russian revolution; and how (and whether) the communist movement in Czechoslovakia became “Bolshevik,” a question with implications for understanding the political radicalism of the age, the cultural and intellectual experiments that accompanied it, and the impact of the Russian revolution on twentieth-century Europe.

Through the story of the Czechoslovak communist party, this book explores three important questions: the meaning of “cultural revolution” in the 1920s premised on the communists’ belief in an indivisible link between culture and politics; the appeal of the Bolshevik revolution to leftist intellectuals in Central Europe; and the significance of law and political trials in popularizing the Russian revolution abroad.

It views the era through the lens of experiments to fuse Marxism and the radical left with artistic experimentation, ethnic and national diversity, anti-imperialism, and antifascism. In their search for revolution, leftist intellectuals of the age travelled widely, visiting Russia, Italy, the United States, Germany, and France, and translated writings from French, English, Russian, German, and Italian. The book will contribute to the history of Europe and Russia after the First World War and explore the link between mass politics and radical culture at this crucial time.