It takes me about three hours to get to Vsetín. I leave the train station in Brno at 5:02 AM on an express through the flatter parts of central Moravia, transfer at 6:55, and then travel to the end of the line on a little local train with grimy windows and low red seats.
The train ride into the hills. All photos provided by the author.
Vsetín is the unofficial capital of Moravian Wallachia, a region located at the eastern edge of the Czech Republic and the western edge of the Carpathian Mountains. It’s known for its difficult landscape and traditions of rebellion, which makes it something of an exceptional place in a country more typically associated with gently rolling hills and passive resistance. During the final months of the Second World War, Wallachia became a center of the antifascist partisan movement, which is what first brought me here. While doing research on former resisters and their postwar fates, I became interested in how ordinary people in this peripheral part of the country experienced the political transformations that followed liberation from Nazi occupation. My dissertation, which I’ve been researching here in the Czech Republic since January 2021, examines political life in Moravian Wallachia between 1945 and 1954.
The Liberation Monument on Vsetín’s main square at Christmas. It honors fallen resisters — participants in the rebellion against Habsburg rule in the seventeenth century, soldiers who fought on the Allied side during the First World War, and members of the resistance to Nazi occupation.
After the Second World War, the Czechoslovak state was reestablished on a new ideological basis of national unity, social equality, and popular participation, rather than the liberal democracy of the interwar period. Existing village, town, and district governments were dissolved and replaced by locally organized committees intended to be fully accountable to the popular will. But visions of radically participatory, decentralized democracy enabled arbitrary and chaotic governance, and postwar cooperation quickly gave way to political intrigue and ideological division. This revolutionary period culminated in the consolidation of a highly bureaucratic, repressive dictatorship under the Czechoslovak Communist Party.1
I usually cut through the town park on my way to the archive.
The relationship between abstract bureaucratic institutions and concrete local realities shaped Czechoslovak postwar politics. It was especially important in Moravian Wallachia, a region whose people were simultaneously modern citizens and members of tight-knit village communities. Decisions made by political leaders in the capital of Prague shaped everyday life, but so did informal structures of authority, traditional customs, and common histories. And while a lot has changed in Wallachia over the past seventy years, this remains true today.
Crossing the bridge near the archive on a cloudy morning.
The Vsetín State District Archive — Státní okresní archiv Vsetín, or SOkA Vsetín in the footnotes — is in an industrial area about a fifteen-minute walk from the train station. I’m usually the first visitor to arrive, and there are never more than two others at the reading room at any time. Some come to do academic research, but most visitors are there for other reasons — a man putting together a brochure about the history of his local soccer club, a woman designing signs for an educational trail through a nearby forest, or people looking for documents necessary to complete official business.
I’m based in Brno, the second-largest city in the Czech Republic, where the main archives and libraries for my research are located. A few times a month, though, I travel out to Vsetín to examine documents produced by local government officials and Communist Party functionaries. Over the past year, I’ve examined the records of citizens convicted of political misdemeanors like swearing at policemen and laughing at the flag. I’ve read complaints about rude neighbors, overcrowded buses, and inappropriate circus acts, and I’ve learned what people named their cows. These matters couldn’t have interested high-ranking officials in Prague, who received information about this region in abstract form, as hectares of land under cultivation, hours of labor completed, and potatoes produced. But they provide a more sharply detailed picture of local societies, although it’s still a picture shaped by the state bureaucracy.
Some Czech district archives are in castles or monasteries, but SOkA Vsetín’s building is a bit more modest. It used to be the district construction office.
The archivists at SOkA Vsetín are guides to this bureaucratic world. They belong to it themselves, as academically-trained experts, state employees, and official guardians of formal knowledge who sign off on every folder I open. But they’re also well-connected locals whose work maintains and deepens their region’s long memory, and their knowledge goes far beyond what is contained in the archive’s depository.
Zdeněk Pomkla usually works at the back of the reading room, offering advice and suggestions, sharing stories and recommending old movies. He’s one of the first people I bring any of my research questions to. If he doesn’t know the answer himself, he knows who to ask. On one of my visits late last summer, I mentioned to him that I was having a difficult time finding sources about state repression related to agricultural policy. He turned to his colleague, Eva Adámková, who was at a nearby desk. “You have kulaks in the family,” he said. “Don’t we have their files?”
The reading room.
Kulak is a Russian term that Czechoslovak Communists borrowed for their own languages. It refers to prosperous farmers who took advantage of their less fortunate neighbors. Officially, this hypothetical class of rural exploiters was called the “village rich.”2 It wasn’t always clear who could be labeled as a kulak, particularly in a poor region like Wallachia. Sometimes, it was defined as a farmer who owned more than a certain amount of land, but it could also mean someone who employed seasonal workers, owned expensive machinery, or simply stood in the way of official plans.
Communist leaders argued that collective agriculture under state direction would be more rational and effective than small-scale private farms. Farmers would get access to mechanical equipment that they could never purchase on their own. Their tiny, scattered plots would be consolidated, and they would learn to implement modern agricultural techniques. Local Party officials held that incorporating agriculture into the planned economy would not only increase production, it would bring an end to poverty in Wallachia. They also predicted that kulaks would try desperately to thwart their plans, manipulating their neighbors to advance their selfish interests.
Eva explained to me that a relative of hers had been one of three men from a village near Vsetín imprisoned for sabotage. She left for the depository briefly and came back with a court verdict, which I read back at my table. Among the saboteurs’ crimes were sowing potatoes where they were supposed to sow beets, and sowing potatoes where they were supposed to sow grain. The plan they had been instructed to follow, they insisted, wasn’t sound. It wasn’t the correct soil for these crops. Furthermore, they argued that the plan didn’t have majority support in the village, making its implementation illegal.3 The judge saw their opposition as evidence of a coordinated conspiracy. He dismissed their arguments as “absolutely petty. . . from a higher perspective.”4
These three defendants were not the greedy kulaks of official propaganda. They were respected villagers whose objections Communist functionaries chose to understand as deliberate subversion. One was the former mayor, a gregarious man known for holding card games at his house long into the night.5 The second defendant was the former chairman of the local agricultural collective, whom an official publication had celebrated the previous spring.6 The third was a lay leader in the Protestant church and the head of the volunteer firefighting brigade, an important social institution in the Czech countryside. During the 1930s, he served as the local chronicler, an official position in all Czechoslovak municipalities. Each year, he wrote about the weather and the harvest, listed births, deaths, and marriages, and described important events in the village.7 He was also an Esperantist and a skilled musician who sang at weddings and funerals in exchange for help around his farm — a relationship that local Communists reinterpreted as capitalist exploitation.8 In the fall of 1952, all three men were sentenced to prison terms of between four and six years, stripped of their property, and banned from the Vsetín district.9
I learned more about the circumstances of their persecution over the next few months while studying the minutes of district Communist Party meetings. Two years earlier, officials had selected their village as one of the first sites in the district to implement a new type of agricultural plan. After inspecting the area and conferring with local functionaries, a team of agronomists determined what crops were to be sown where, adjusted the placement of paths between the village and the fields, assigned inconveniently located parcels of land owned by one farmer to be worked by another. But when officials called farmers in to sign their names to this plan, many of them refused. This demonstrated the malign influence of “various local hotshots,” a district Party functionary reported. One farmer had said that he needed some time to think before agreeing to the plan, upon which he immediately left for the Esperantist’s house.10
Walking in the hills during the summer.
Local publications hailed the village and its plan for introducing modern farming to Wallachia.11 But the plan ran into problems almost immediately. Farmers failed to plant the designated crops or work the land that had been assigned to them. Members of the agricultural collective quit. For the authorities, this confirmed that internal enemies — kulaks! — were deliberately stirring up resistance to undermine their efforts. Party leaders used the local loudspeaker system to declare officially that the former chairman, the former mayor, and the Esperantist were members of the “village rich.”
In the summer of 1952, district officials called a meeting with leaders of the village Party organization. Together, they agreed to the arrest and expropriation of the three men. District officials questioned whether the local agricultural collective would be able to manage their land. Would it be easier just to arrest one of them? “The comrades from the local organization say that with the help of district state and Party officials they will be able to handle this great task,” the meeting minutes read.12 After the harvest, all three farmers were arrested and tried.
The new local chronicler recorded the mood that descended over the village that year. The volunteer fire brigade fell apart, and local celebrations went unattended. “Mass apathy is growing towards everything happening in the community, or towards everything that is necessary to do for society in the village, and everybody tries to avoid all responsibility…” he wrote, combining official rhetoric and sincere regret. “Neighborly concord gave way to rising jealousy and even hatred.”13
The following year, the farmers’ cases were reopened, their sentences were reduced, and they were allowed to return home. I didn’t understand at all why this had happened until I got permission to read one of the court files. The men and their families petitioned the president for a pardon. The Esperantist’s daughter laid out a detailed case on her father’s behalf. Objectively speaking, she argued, he was no kulak. He did not exploit workers, he did not participate in capitalist accumulation, he did not own heavy farm equipment, and his farm was by no means especially large.14 The village council agreed. They had not implemented the agricultural plan properly, they admitted. The Esperantist had been incorrectly declared a kulak “because of the rapid momentum of political and economic events.”15 While he had indeed subverted the plan, he had not done so as a class enemy, the judge ruled. But the Esperantist’s property was not returned, although his request for amnesty had the support of the local government and police as well as the district and regional court. “If he truly wants to work honestly for the benefit of all,” they wrote, “he has the opportunity to do so in the collective farm.”16
Eva had heard a story about how one of the leaders of the village Communist Party association came to see the former mayor after his release. This woman explained that she was meant to testify against him, but she became suddenly ill on the day of his trial. She interpreted this as a sign that she had been wrong, and asked his forgiveness. The Esperantist continued singing at weddings and funerals. All three men lived out the rest of their lives in the village.
There’s an idea that the Communists waged war on the countryside, and that their victory was inevitable. Rural communities had few effective defenses against the repressive modernizing state, whose forcible social intervention deliberately broke traditional bonds beyond repair. We might tell the story of these three farmers this way, and there would be some truth to it. I would suggest, though, that archival documents and local memories reveal something more complex. This isn’t to provide a happy ending to a sad story, much less exonerate the Czechoslovak Communist regime. These men suffered under an abusive, repressive political system which enlisted their neighbors in their persecution. But this story does not so much reveal a monolithic state enacting its will on a helpless rural population. Rather, it shows the chaotic interactions between state bureaucracy, official ideology, and local society. It also demonstrates the strength and tenacity of these men, their families, and their communities. Official plans faltered and failed, but local bonds endured.
This has become a theme of my research over the last year. In another sense, it’s become a theme of my trips to Vsetín as well. The same common ties that bound the writers of official reports, party minutes, and local chronicles to their subjects also bind the archivists and the researchers to the past. The district archive is a scholarly and administrative institution, but also a subject of history and a site of memory, and the typewritten world of bureaucracy is part of the textured world of human experience.
- For more on postwar Czechoslovakia and the rise of the Communist regime, see Kevin McDermott, Communist Czechoslovakia, 1945–1989: A Political and Social History (New York: Palgrave, 2015); Bradley Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004); Karel Kaplan, The Short March: The Communist Takeover in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1948 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); and Martin Myant, Socialism and Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1948 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
- The leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party considered even more unlikely translations, like “capitalist element in the village” and “the element we are fighting in the village.” See Molly Pucci, “Translating the State: Czechoslovakia’s Search for the Soviet Model of the Secret Police, 1945–52,” Kritika 18 (Spring 2017), 342.
- Protokol o hlavním líčení, 29 September 1952, SOkA Vsetín, fond Okresní soud Vsetín, spisová značka T-170/52-22.
- Rozsudek, 29 September 1952, SOkA Vsetín, f. Okresní soud Vsetín, spisová značka T-170/52-22.
- “To jsou oni,” Vsacká jiskra, 30 September 1952, p. 1.
- “Slavnostní večer JZD v Pržně,” Jiskra: vesnické noviny okresu Vsetínského, 21 April 1951, 2; SOkA Vsetín, f. MNV Pržno, inv. č. 18, p. 242.
- All Czech and Slovak towns and villages have been legally required to maintain local chronicles since independence in 1918, although not all have been updated regularly, and Czech chronicles were not maintained during the Second World War. Chronicles can be fascinating, colorful, and useful sources, or not, depending on the chronicler. They are still kept today.
- Kronika obce Pržna, SOkA Vsetín, f. MNV Pržno, inventární číslo (inv. č.) 18, 25; “Protokol o veřejném zasedání,” 17 November 1953, SOkA Vsetín, f. Okresní soud Vsetín, spisová značka T-170/52-22, 2. The information about card games is not confirmed by written sources.
- SOkA Vsetín, f. MNV Pržno, inv. č. 18, 85.
- Hospodářsko-technická úprava půdy v Pržně, 13 October 1950, SOkA Vsetín, f. OV KSČ Vsetín, inv. č. 60, karton (ka.) 52, 1-2.
- “JZD Pržno na prvním místě v druhém týdnu mírové soutěže,” Jiskra: vesnické noviny okresu Vsetínského, 15 August 1951, p. 1; “I na Valašsku budou lány,” Vsacká jiskra, 31 November 1951, p. 1.
- Zápis ze schůze POV KSČ Vsetín, 24 June 1952, SOkA Vsetín, f. OV KSČ Vsetín, inv. č. 62, ka. 54, 1; Kronika obce Pržna, SOkA Vsetín, f. MNV Pržno, inv. č. 18, 239.
- Kronika obce Pržna, SOkA Vsetín, f. MNV Pržno, inv. č. 18, 270-271.
- Žádost o prominutí trestu pro T.M., rolníka v Pržně, 15 August 1953, SOkA Vsetín, f. Okresní soud Vsetín, spisová značka T-170/52-22, 2-3.
- Dobrozdání o T.M., 1 November 1953, SOkA Vsetín, f. Okresní soud Vsetín, spisová značka T-170/52-22.
- T.M., žádost za milost, 6 November 1954, SOkA Vsetín, f. Okresní soud Vsetín, spisová značka T-170/52-22.
