Karel Kaplan left Pardubice for Prague to take up a position in the central party apparatus in 1960, specifi cally the Ideological Department of the Central Commit- tee of the KSČ. For Kaplan, the 1960s were the years when he acquired a thorough
8 LAUŠMAN, Bohumil: Kdo byl vinen? Jak umírala československá svoboda [Who was to
Blame? How Czechoslovak Freedom Was Dying]. Vienna, Independently published by the author in 1953. There is a certain piquancy in the fact that Karel Kaplan’s father had been a close colleague of Laušman in the Pardubice region (see CUHRA, J. – KOPEČEK, M.: Jde o to, jestli se k pravdě přibližujete, p. 12).
9 KAPLAN, Karel: Příspěvky k ekonomickému a sociálnímu charakteru vesnice Pardubické župy v letech 1918–1938 [Contributions to the Economic and Social Character of the Village
of the Pardubice Region in the Years 1918–1938]. Pardubice, Krajský dům osvěty Pardu- bice 1960.
10 In the introduction to the book, Kaplan wrote that the history of the village answers the question of “why there are so many various obstacles in the thinking of the peasants that make it hard for them to understand the advantages of socialist large-scale production. […] If we want to compare what the socialist village will bring us and specifi cally farmers, we are forced to turn and look back.” (Ibid., p. 4).
knowledge of the Communist Party archives and associated work in their reha- bilitation commissions. They were also a decade when he published two major historical monographs and came to identify fully with the movement of reform historiography,11 and the worker in the party apparatus with an interest in the recent
past became a respected historian. In the perspective of his later work, the 1960s were also above all a period of preparation, fi lled with detailed investigation of the archival sources and no less important personal meetings with actors of the historical events that he was studying.
Kaplan’s publication activities in the 1960s at fi rst continued to be infl uenced by the spirit of his prior work in the fi eld of party propaganda. The publications Až
k vítězství Hradeckého programu [Up to the Victory of the Hradec Programme]12 and A Victory for Democracy,13 published also in English, were redolent of the 1950s. The
fi rst was a popularising account of conditions in the East Bohemian countryside in the years 1945–1948. The second, the brochure on the “victory of democracy,” was intended for propaganda purposes abroad, to explain the functioning of the “people’s democracy” in Czechoslovakia in glowing terms and answer its opponents. The basic axis of the text was an account of the events leading up to the takeover in February 1948 as the struggle between a new form of democracy, represented by the Communists, and the supporters of the outdated First Republic system, with the result glorifi ed as the victory of a qualitatively better form of democratic government founded on the voluntary participation of the broad masses of the people. One stage of Kaplan’s career as a historian came to a defi nitive end with these two publications, and we might also see a certain symbolism in the fact that the last of Kaplan’s efforts in the fi eld of party propaganda came out in 1963, when the fi rst signs of the incipient reform process were appearing.
Kaplan’s two books in the subsequent years were wholly in line with the trend known as reform historiography, which in research into recent history gradually gained majority status and acted as the historiographical support for the process of Czechoslovak reform. In terms of chosen themes, Kaplan moved distinctly closer to the questions that were later to be typical of his work in his “classical period” (works published in exile and then in Czechoslovakia, later the Czech Republic, after 1989). In 1966, already working at the Historical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, he published the book Utváření generální linie výstavby socialismu
11 One example might be Kaplan’s article entitled “Current Tasks of the History of the KSČ” published in 1963. Its argumentation is in line with criticism of the functioning of party historiography of the 1950s that were voiced at the time (IDEM: Aktuální úkoly dějin KSČ [Current Tasks of the History of the KSČ]. In: Nová mysl, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1963), pp. 62–70). 12 IDEM: Až k vítězství Hradeckého programu: Příspěvky k dějinám rolnického hnutí v letech 1945 až 1948 ve východních Čechách [Up to the Victory of the Hradec Programme: Contributions
to the History of the Peasants’ Movement in Eastern Bohemia in the Years 1945–1948]. Havlíčkův Brod, Východočeské nakladatelství 1962.
13 IDEM: A Victory for Democracy: Czechoslovakia 1945–1948. Prague, Orbis 1963. The pub-
lication came out in German, French and Italian as well. I use the English edition in the quotation as I worked with it while writing this article.
v Československu [The Formation of the General Line of the Building of Socialism in
Czechoslovakia],14 an analysis of the formation of the programme planning principles
of the KSČ after it took over power in February 1948. With this book, Kaplan dropped regionally based studies for good and turned to important national themes of com- munist rule in Czechoslovakia. In general, the book was also a signifi cant contribu- tion to the then revived and topical theme of the possibility of a Czechoslovak road to socialism as a real alternative to Soviet Stalinism.15 Kaplan argued in favour of
a specifi c form of socialism in Czechoslovakia which he counter-posed to the policy embodied by Stalin and based on the theory of the “intensifi cation of class war.” Two years after Utváření generální linie výstavby socialismu v Československu, Kaplan published his second monograph, Znárodnění a socialismus [Nationalisation and Socialism].16 This was a work in which his fondness for economic history found full
expression. It was based on a large amount of statistical data and offered abundant factual material. At the same time, however, it adopted a critical approach to one of the most visible features of the postwar change of regime in Czechoslovakia and like the previous book considered alternatives, i.e. other approaches to the socialisation of the economy.17
During his work on the rehabilitation commissions, Karel Kaplan gained an ever more detailed knowledge of the extent of the political repression that had taken place in the 1950s, especially the planning and course of political trials. As someone with regular access to what were normally entirely inaccessible materials from the communist archives, he became one of the few historians to have a detailed knowl- edge of the dark side of the politics of the KSČ in the fi rst years after the February takeover. For Kaplan, uncovering the power mechanisms of the 1950s meant not merely fi nding what was to become one of his constant themes as a scholar in fu- ture years, but also thoroughly reconsidering his own personal views of the ways in which socialism had been built in Czechoslovakia.
Kaplan’s fi rst signifi cant publication based on detailed research on the political repression of the 1950s was the lengthy essay entitled “Zamyšlení nad politickými procesy” [“Refl ections on the Political Trials”], printed in 1968 in three instalments by Nová mysl [New Mind], the central ideological journal of the Communist Party.18
Kaplan not only presented an account of the machinery of the political trials, but also
14 IDEM: Utváření generální linie výstavby socialismu v Československu: Od Února do 9. sjezdu KSČ [The Formation of the General Line of the Building of Socialism in Czechoslovakia:
From February to the 9th Congress of the KSČ]. Praha, Academia 1966.
15 This was obviously a key theme of reform historiography, and also the basic problem of the Czechoslovak reform movement of 1968 altogether.
16 KAPLAN, Karel: Znárodnění a socialismus [Nationalisation and Socialism]. Praha, Práce 1968.
17 Kaplan’s important role in research on the economic history of postwar Czechoslovakia is not much emphasised today despite the fact that Kaplan published several studies on this topic during the 1960s. Apart from the book Znárodnění a socialismus, his other most important contribution was the unpublished monograph Desetiletí [Decade], dealing with the economic development of Czechoslovakia in the years 1945–1955 and written in the years 1967–1968. 18 IDEM: Zamyšlení nad politickými procesy, 1–3 [Refl ections on Political Trials, 1–3]. In:
focused on the course of rehabilitations, i.e. an extremely topical theme. Although he concentrated mainly on the trial of Rudolf Slánský and his “associates,” this time he did not omit to mention the importance of the repression of non-Communists. Overall Kaplan conceived this essay as a contribution to the discussions of 1968 about the reform of Czechoslovak communism. In the context of Kaplan’s output, it was a breakthrough text, a kind of prelude to the monographic studies he later devoted to the topic. Furthermore, unlike in his later Czech texts published in exile or after 1989, Kaplan also revealed the personal motivations that led him to publish material containing such momentous information. The following passage is testimony to his own diffi cult personal dilemma and throws light on the feelings that impelled him to the study of the history of communist Czechoslovakia: “Like every Communist who cares deeply about the fate of the republic and socialism, I experienced bitter moments when, some time ago, I became acquainted with the details of the 1950s. Those were moments of inner suffering, severe depression and sense of contradiction, which were intensifi ed constantly and urgently by questions from the ranks of the younger generation – their justifi ed disgust, their reproaches and accusations of cowardice […]. We must prevent the repetition of illegalities in any form and scope. This requires a series of measures in our political life, in the political system, but knowledge of the truth will also certainly contribute to it, and this cannot harm but only benefi t the party.”19 From this conviction, for-
mulated from the position of reform communism, it was already but a small step to the de-ideologised, strictly empirical approach that was to be characteristic of Kaplan’s best work.
If Kaplan was seeking through historiography in the 1960s a way to remedy past errors and wrongs, in the next decades, he wanted to give testimony, and above all map – describe in detail on the basis of archival materials the processes and events that had long remained hidden, in one of their forms, from the Czechoslovak and Western public. The collapse of the reform process and Kaplan’s subsequent move from the academia to the unoffi cial academic structures of Czech dissent was most probably the fi nal impulse to his “turn to the empirical.” It was a turn that led to Kaplan’s defi nitive abandonment of historiography as an instrument of political intervention.