The ‘Club of Politically Engaged Conformists’?

Khrushchev’s February 1956 ‘Secret Speech’ at a closed session of the Soviet Union’s 20th Party Congress sent shockwaves throughout communist Eastern Europe that threatened to destabilize the fragile political and ideological legitimacy of the Soviet bloc regimes. In CWIHP Working Paper No. 66, “The ‘Club of Politically Engaged Conformists’? The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Popular Opinion and the Crisis of Communism, 1956,” Kevin McDermott and Vítězslav Sommer argue that 1956 represented a ‘crisis of communism’ of monumental proportions, but although Czechoslovakia remained a haven of political stability compared to neighboring Poland and Hungary, the Communist Party was thrown into disarray and Czech and Slovak citizens responded to the cataclysmic events of 1956 in multifarious ways ranging from outright opposition to the regime to steadfast loyalty.

Kevin McDermott is Senior Lecturer in Political History at Sheffield Hallam University. He is the author of Stalin: Revolutionary in an Era of War (2006) and co-editor of several volumes, including The 1989 Revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe: From Communism to Pluralism (2013); Stalinist Terror in Eastern Europe: Elite Purges and Mass Repression (2010) and Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe: Challenges to Communist Rule (2006) (all with Matthew Stibbe). He is currently writing a study of communist Czechoslovakia.

Vitezslav Sommer received his PhD from Charles University, Prague in 2011. His dissertation explored the origins of communist party historiography in Czechoslovakia and its development in the Stalinist, post-Stalinist and reform communist period (1950–1970). He is at present a post-doctoral researcher at the Sciences Po in Paris (ERC project ‘A political history of the future: knowledge production and future governance 1945-2010 - FUTUREPOL’). He is the author of Angažované dějepisectví: Stranická historiografie mezi stalinismem a reformním komunismem, 1950–1970 (Engaged Historiography: Party Historiography between Stalinism and Reform Communism, 1950–1970), Prague 2011.