Prague Perspectives (I): The History of East Central Europe and Russia
edited by Petr Roubal and Vaclav Veber
published
by The National Library of the Czech Republic - Slavonic Library, Prague 2004
ISBN 80-7050-443-9
Preface
Prague Perspectives (I): The History of East Central Europe and Russia is published by the Slavonic Library, an institution with an eighty-year-long tradition of East European research, as a sequel to the volume Russia in Czech Historiography (Prague, National Library of the Czech Republic - Slavonic Library, 2002), which presented the state of the art in Czech Russian studies. Prague Perspectives has broader and longer-term aims; it represents the first of a planned series of publications aiming at linking the regional research of Eastern Europe to the wider European and world academic community. While the project of Prague Perspectives is still taking shape, some of the principal functions of the series are already clear. First, it is to play an emancipatory role for regional scholars as it aspires to offer a "Prague perspective," that is to say to challenge some of the stereotypical approaches of "western" social sciences and reduce the imbalance in the East-West flow of academic knowledge. Second, it has an integrational role as it informs the wider academic community about the state of the art of regional research in Eastern Europe and facilitates the establishment of new international contacts. And finally, it has in a sense a didactic role as it stimulates regional scholars to formulate their arguments in a way that allows participation in international academic discourse.
These three basic roles form the thematic focus of Prague Perspectives. The specific insight of the regional academic community resulting from the betwixt and between position of a small Central European state on the one hand, and that of the much broader common East European experience of communism on the other, set both the geographic and thematic boundaries of the series. Geographically, the socialist and post-socialist 'camp' forms the focus of the series. Transforming the Iron Curtain into a conceptual tool, the series hope to offer a specific theoretical perspective: one of the main aims of Prague Perspectives is to stimulate analysis of how the experience of the "really existing socialism" modified our understanding of such theoretical concepts as nationalism, modernity, colonialism or post-colonialism. While the present volume is clearly dominated by the historical perspective, subsequent publications aim at presenting the regional research of Eastern Europe in its inter/disciplinary variety. Following this, Prague Perspectives will attempt to strike the right balance between the two evils of the contemporary East European studies - the detailed particularism so prominent in post-socialist academia on the one hand, and the mindless application of "western" models and concepts developed for a different cultural and social setting on the other - by concentrating on comparative, relational and in a sense liminal research. Finally, from this follows that things Czech will be the subject of analysis only insofar as they reflect, stimulate, or modify some wider cultural processes.
The present volume of Prague Perspectives commemorates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Jan Slavik, a close associate of T. G. Masaryk and a prominent interwar expert on Soviet Russia. It does so not only to pay its due to the anniversary addiction of Central European academia, but more importantly because the figure of Jan Slavik embodies some of the core concerns outlined above. As his text "My Ten Theses on the History of the Bolshevik Revolution," published in this volume, demonstrates, a specific mixture of adherence to Marxist theory and the knowledge of communist reality led him to ground-breaking formulations on the social basis of communist power. Despite being undoubtedly the leading European expert on Russia, his work remained unknown due to the language barrier and to political obstacles, but also due to the structural constraints of the world academia.
Petr Roubal and Vaclav Veber