Cambridge Paper: (Re)Interpreting the Chodove Farmers’ Revolt.

I have recently been invited to present a paper at Cambridge University, as a guest speaker on one of their history seminar series. The full title of my paper, which I will present on 15th October, is ‘Good Hussites, Good Nationalists, Good Communists? (Re)Interpreting the Chodove ‘Farmers’ Revolt’ of 1693 in the Bohemian Borderlands’. The changing historiography and varying historical interpretations of this event is a fascinating topic, and I very much look forward to the opportunity to speak about this area of my research. A short, introductory synopsis to the paper follows below.

Good Hussites, Good Nationalists, Good Communists? (Re) Interpreting the Chodové ‘Farmers’ Revolt’ of 1693 in the Bohemian Borderlands.

In July 1693 the residents of Chodsko, a small region comprised of eleven villages on the south-western border between Bohemia and Bavaria, rose up in rebellion against their landlord, Wolf Maximillian Lamingen. Their revolt was short-lived and unsuccessful, being quickly and easily subdued by Habsburg forces. In one sense then, the Chod rebellion was rather unremarkable, forming part of a wider pattern of peasant disturbances erupting at this time, with revolts recorded in over 100 Bohemian estates in the latter seventeenth century. There were several elements that served to distinguish the aims and causes of the Chod rebellion from the more general peasant unease evident in the Habsburg lands at this time, however. The rising of 1693 was linked to the Chods’ previously independent and ‘privileged status’ in Bohemian society and their traditional, time honoured role as ‘guardians of the Bohemian borderland’, forming part of an ongoing struggle between the Chodové and the Bohemian authorities which spanned the previous 150 years.

In the intervening centuries, the significance of this ‘farmers’ revolt’ (as the 1693 rising came to be known) has been variously interpreted to correspond with and promote various dominant beliefs and ideologies, which has resulted in the events of 1693 attaining almost mythical status. Initially presented as constituting evidence of the manifestation of anti-Catholic sentiment and ongoing religious tensions in Bohemian society in the post-Hussite period, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the history of the Chodové was then ‘claimed’ by the growing Czech nationalist movement, which celebrated the Chodsko region as a bastion against German intrusion and portrayed the 1693 rebellion as symbolic of the emergent national struggle against ‘German oppression’. Finally, after the communist coup of 1948, the story of the ‘farmers’ revolt’ was widely promoted by communist propaganda as personifying class struggle, an example of the peasant masses rising up against their feudal masters. Since the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989, it has been possible for more independent scholarly analysis and interpretation of the history of the Chodové to emerge. This paper will explore the significance of the 1693 ‘farmers’ revolt’ in light of the traditional role played by the Chodové on the Bohemian-Bavarian border and in relation to the growth of Habsburg dominance and the evolution of power relations between centre and periphery in central Europe during the early modern period.

Kelly Hignett

View East Author Featured in THES.

Dr Kelly Hignett, author of The View East, was featured in this weeks Times Higher Education Supplement, in reference to her recent appointment as Lecturer in History at the University of Hull, UK. This is a year-long appointment, to replace a permanent member of staff currently on maternity leave. THES commented that:

“An expert on the criminal underworld is joining the University of Hull’s history department. Kelly Hignett, who specialises in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe, has been made lecturer in 20th-century history. Dr Hignett, who has previously lectured at Keele and Manchester Metropolitan universities, is now working on a book about the evolution of criminal networks in Central and Eastern Europe. It will examine the history of the region’s criminal underworld from the period of Leonid Brezhnev’s presidency of the Soviet Union to the post-communist era”.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=408298&c=2

Cracks in the Iron Curtain: Remembering Hungary’s ‘Pan-European Picnic’

“Hungary was where the first stone was removed from the Berlin Wall” ~ former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, speaking to mark the reunification of Germany on October 4th 1990.

Today marks the anniversary of  another key event linked to the collapse of communism across East Europe in 1989. Twenty years ago today, 19th August 1989, was the date of the Pan-European Picnic organised along the Austro-Hungarian border, in a field  just outside the Hungarian city of Sopron.

The premise of the picnic was fairly simple: organised by members of the growing anti-communist opposition parties in Hungary, the event was planned as a peaceful event to demonstrate increasing Hungarian freedom under Glasnost, and to promote friendship between East and West. Austrian and Hungarian authorities agreed to open a small stretch of the common border at  Sopronpuszta for just three hours, at 3pm, in order to allow small delegations representing both countries to conduct ‘an ordinary exchange of greetings between local populations’ on either side of the Iron Curtain. On the day, however,  hundreds of East Germans arrived at the picnic to attempt to walk across the border into Austria. A sizeable  group of around 600 people made it across the border that afternoon, in the first large-scale exodus of East German citizens to the West since the construction of the Berlin Wall back in 1961.

Cracks in the ‘Iron Curtain’ between Austria and Hungary were increasingly evident in the months leading up to August 1989 – most notably demonstrated on 27th June when then Austrian and Hungarian Foreign Ministers Alois Mock and Gyula Horn were photographed using bolt cutters to tear holes in part of the barbed wire fence marking the border between their countries:

Cutting the Iron Curtain: Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn and his Austrian counderpart Alois Mock work together to dismantle part of the 'Iron Curtain' between Austria and Hungary in June 1989.

However, the border between Austria and Hungary was not officially thrown open until September 11th 1989, and at the time of the Pan European Picnic, the Hungarian border guards were still officially working under orders to ’shoot to kill’ anyone who attempted to cross into Austria illegally. Thus the events of 19th August were seen (as former Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth described earlier this week) as ‘a test of Gorbachev’s word‘ that he would not intervene militarily to prevent the cross-border movements of people, as the Hungarians remained unsure how Moscow would react. When confronted with the large group of Germans intent on attempting to breach the border,  Lt. Col. Arpad Bella, acting commander of the Hungarian border guards on duty at Sopronpuszta that day,  described how he had “just a few seconds” to decide what course of action to take in the absence of any clear orders from above. He decided that he “did not want to be a mass murderer” so he would “do the right thing“, and ordered his guards to stand aside and allow the people to pass, observing the reactions of those who had made it safely onto Austrian soil:

“What I saw on the other side was amazing. There were people who in their panic kept running further even though they were on Austrian land. There were people who just sat down on the other side of the border and just either cried or laughed”.

19th August 1989: 600 East Germans cross the border from Hungary into Austria at the Pan-European Picnic.

Laszlo Nagy, one of the main organisers behind the picnic, has claimed that at the time ‘we didn’t feel like we were making history‘ describing the events of 19 August 1989 as ‘just the world’s greatest garden party‘. In the intervening twenty years however, and in the context of events that took place later in 1989, the significance imbued on that day has increased. Earlier this week, Jose Manuel Barroso (current President of the European Commission) issued a statement claiming that the events at Sopronpuszta had ‘helped to change the course of European History’ marking ‘the beginning of the end of the division of Europe by the Cold War‘, while  Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt (representing the current EU Presidency) also referred to the anniversary in his online blog, where he stated that:

“What happened attracted enormous attention and set in motion the process which saw the wall fall in Berlin on November 9 … for the appearance of a hole in the Iron Curtain means that the curtain in its entirety became worthless. It was like a gigantic dam which suddenly had developed a little hole somewhere. And it was at Sopron where everything really begun to crack in all seriousness”.

To mark the anniversary of the Pan-European picnic an official ceremony is being held today at Sopronpuszta, where Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom, Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai and visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel are making commemorative speeches, meeting with some of the East Germans who crossed the border twenty years ago, and unveiling a monument called ‘Breakthrough’ to formally mark the 20th anniversary of events.

You can read more about Border Guard Arpad Bella’s account of the events of that day here,  in a recent article from The Times Online, (published on 14th August 2009):

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6795400.ece

While former Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth spoke to the BBC World Service about his decision to open the border here:

Miklos Nemeth on Opening Hungary to the West

And the BBC Website also hosts this video clip, of the first East Germans to cross from Hungary to Austria twenty years ago today: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8210356.stm

Building the Berlin Wall

48  years ago today, the world witnessed the birth of one of the most iconic and enduring symbols of the Cold War.

13th August 1961: On this morning 48 years ago,  residents of the German capital Berlin awoke to find barricades had been erected across their city overnight, dividing East from West. These hastily constructed barbed wire barriers later assumed more permanency when they were rebuilt as a solid concrete structure that came to be known as the Berlin Wall.

In essence, Berlin had already been divided for 16 years, ever since the post-War Potsdam Conference (July-August 1945), where the respective leaders of the victorious Allied powers (the USA, USSR and UK) formally agreed on the division of occupied Germany, and the German capital Berlin (which lay deep within the Soviet area of control), into four separate ‘zones of influence’.  As their wartime camaraderie quickly faded and the Cold War took hold, tensions soon became evident, as had been demonstrated by the Berlin Blockade (1948) and the Soviet crackdown on workers revolts in East Germany in 1953. The Berlin Wall, however, was something new. On the 12th August SED leader Walter Ulbricht signed an official order closing the border, and as a result, on the morning of 13th August 1961, residents of East Berlin awoke to find barriers cutting across streets and through neighbourhoods,  dividing them from their friends and family in the Western sector. Police and soldiers were on the streets patrolling the barricades, while most people reacted with confusion and after 15 years of communism, resigned acceptance, as some rather bemusedly waved to their former neighbours, people they could still see, but no longer reach. Berlin was now divided, not just ideologically and politically, but physically. On 15th August the first concrete blocks were laid, and construction of the famous wall began.

The Building of the Berlin Wall:

The border dividing Berlin soon developed from the rather rudimentary barbed wire rolls hurridly unfurled, to its more common recognisable form: comprising a 27 mile long concrete structure, marked by periodic watchtowers and staffed by armed guards who had orders to shoot anyone attempting to breach the wall on sight, while other guards undertook foot patrols along its perimiter, accompanied by trained guard dogs. Travel between East and West was only possible through official checkpoints, with a special travel permit issued by the SED required. The reality meant that most East Berliners would remain ‘walled in’ for the next 28 years, as the SED publically proclaimed that leaving the GDR was ‘an act of political and moral backwardness and depravity’, although this didn’t stop the SED sometimes forcibly shipping dissidents off into exile to West Berlin, essentially using it as a dumping ground for ‘troublesome elements’ within the GDR.

1963: US President Kennedy makes his famous ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’ speech in West Berlin:

The official East German justification for the Berlin Wall was that it was an ‘anti-fascist protection mechanism’ built to protect East Berliners from evil outside forces that threatened to undermine the stability of their ’socialist people’s paradise’. In truth however, the wall was clearly erected to keep people in, rather than to keep people out. Between 1949-1961 almost 2.5 million East Germans had left for the West, and in July 1961 alone, shortly before the border was closed, 30,000 citizens of the GDR had crossed Berlin to enter the Western zone. Figures such as this meant the GDR risked ‘collapse by emigration’. This mass-exodus of Germans from East to West is the most popularly cited reason for the building of the Wall, and while it is clearly a valid argument, a recent book throws some new light on Ulbricht’s decision to close the border. In Driving the Soviets Up The Wall: Soviet-East German Relations 1953-1961 (2005, Princetom University Press) Professor Hope Harrison uses evidence from recently declassified Soviet and GDR documentation to argue that part of Ulbricht’s rationale behind building the Berlin Wall was to increase tensions with the West and thus ensure the Soviets were obligated to continue supporting the GDR. Overnight, the division of Berlin became a fait accompli and while the Western powers issued verbal condemnation of Ulbricht’s actions, they were unwilling to take any firm action that may risk a confrontation with the USSR (Kennedy was said to have remarked that ‘a wall is better than a war’ when told about developments in Berlin).

June 1987 – US President Ronald Reagan makes his famous speech demanding ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ at the Brandenburg Gate:

For the next 28 years, the Berlin Wall would act as the principal symbol of the Cold War division of Europe. Between its initial erection in August 1961 and the fall of the Wall in November 1989, many East Germans attempted to breach the Wall and cross into the West despite the obvious dangers:  using forged documentation, concealed in vehicles or even simply trying to climb over the wall and run across the border. Some were successful, but many others were not: official estimates state that around 136 people lost their lives in attempts to breach the wall, however earlier this week an activist  group estimated that the total number of people killed trying to flee from East to West Germany between 1945 and 1989 could total up to 1,347 (see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/world/europe/12briefs-Germany.html and  http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601100&sid=aLml6KENi4KI for details on both of these figures).

With so much attention focused on commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall in November this year, itcould be easy to overlook the anniversary of  it’s initial construction, but earlier this week the 48th anniversary of the building of the Wall was commemorated in Berlin. On 12th August a service was held at the Chapel of Reconcilliation, part of the Berlin Wall Memorial Centre on Bernauer Streeet (the scene of some of the most dramatic attempts to escape ‘over the wall’), while in a separate ceremony a plaque was unveiled in memorium of some of the Wall’s victims, people who died trying to escape into West Berlin. Speaking at this memorial service, German Pastor Manfred Fischer perhaps summed up the legacy of the Wall most poignantly, when he stated that the Berlin Wall ‘divided our city right through its heart. It divided Germany. It divided Europe‘.

1989: The Directors Cut?

I’m not generally a fan of the Daily Mail, but a couple of days ago I stumbled across a rather interesting article by Peter Hitchens entitled ‘What if the Berlin Wall Didn’t Fall?’ where Hitchens imagined what might have happened if the revolutions of 1989 had failed and communism had survived in Eastern Europe and the USSR. You can read his article in full here:

Peter Hitchens, ‘What if the Berlin Wall Didn’t Fall?’, The Daily Mail, (25th July 2009) @

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1202094/PETER-HITCHENS-What-Berlin-Wall-didnt-fall.html#ixzz0MjhfQ68Y

Playing the ‘what if?’ game in History is always problematic and obviously requires a lot of artistic license – ‘If Hitler had never been born, would the Holocaust still have happened?’ was a favourite back when I was studying for my History A-Level, and of course it’s impossible to know and perhaps rather pointless to ask – the facts are that Hitler was born, did rise to power, the Holocaust did occur, and the three events were obviously  and will forever be connected – though such an exercise can be useful in getting history students to think about the complicated nature of cause and effect.  But, twenty years on, it is worth remembering that although the eyes of the world were turned on Eastern Europe in 1989, at the time no one was entirely sure how the dramatic events unfolding would pan out. In the lead up to 1989, few had predicted that communism was in imminent danger and the success of the revolutions that swept across the Soviet bloc was by no means a foregone conclusion. While the world was watching with interest, the world was also waiting, with some apprehension, to find out what the East European communists would be prepared to do to stay in power, and how Moscow would react to the events unfolding across their European sphere of influence…

Hitchens envisages what might have happened if the communists had enforced repression on a larger scale in 1989, imagining ‘a massacre on the scale of Tiananman Square’ taking place in East Germany to defend the Berlin Wall as the communists clung onto power, turning the tide in Eastern Europe while a coup organised by communist hardliners in the CPSU forces Gorbachev and other leading reformists from power in Moscow, leading to the authorisation of Russian military action to reverse the liberal reforms that had already taken place in Poland and Hungary, and bring all of the Eastern European states firmly back under Soviet control. Meanwhile the Western world looked on, denouncing the events unfolding in Eastern Europe, yet not prepared to take any firm action to oppose them.

Could this have been the outcome in 1989? It was certainly possible, if not probable.

Although we know that Gorbachev had effectively revoked the Brezhnev Doctrine by 1989 (the Soviet policy that legitimated military interference in the internal affairs of its East European allies in cases where the communist monopoly of power was threatened, as had previously happened in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968) we also know that the East European communist parties still had considerable  forces of coercion at their disposal, and initially, the communists did attempt to use force to attempt to quell demonstrations and demands for reform in many cases (such as the GDR, Czechoslovakia and – later of course – Romania, where both the police and armed forces were used against initial demonstrations). We also now know that many communist leaders seriously considered the use of force on a larger scale in an attempt to cling onto power, though without the security of ‘back-up’ from Moscow, most quickly decided against this option. For example, records from meetings in the GDR show that Erich Honecker continued to champion a forceful crackdown on protests in the weeks leading up to his removal from power on 18^th October, despite being bluntly told by his security chief that ‘we can’t beat up hundreds of thousands of people’, while Czech Premier Ladislav Adamec also seriously considered using force to retain power at an emergency meeting of the Czech Central Committee held in late November, before deciding that, given the circumstances unfolding both in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere across the communist block, a ‘political compromise’ was his preferred solution.

However, I disagree with Hitchens’ view that pure force would have been sufficient to completely quell domestic unrest across Eastern Europe in 1989 – while enhanced repression may have been an effective short-term measure to restore the communist monopoly of power and may have convinced the majority of East Europeans that further anti-communist action was futile at that time, in the longer term the communists would probably have sought to ‘buy off’ their populations with some limited degree of reforms, particularly in the economic sphere, as had been the case under the Brezhnevian ‘Little Deal’ of the 1970s – which had become increasingly unworkable during the 1980s due to the mounting economic problems evident in the communist block. And even if communism had survived the upheavals of 1989, obviously one cannot assume that it would have survived another twenty years to the present day – serious problems were evident and had been exposed to both the people and to the outside world under Glasnost, so while a reversal of liberalism and the launch of a concerted large-scale crackdown in 1989 may have bought the communists a temporary ’stay of execution’, without some kind of serious reform programme it is unlikely communism could have survived in the longer term, at least in its previous form.

Maybe proceeding with  caution to develop the more ‘limited’ reforms initially envisaged by Gorbachev (if such a programme was carefully controlled and constrained by the threat of force), would have made enough of a difference for communism to survive. But, we also know that many communist hardliners were opposed to Gorbachev’s reformist programme seeing even this as ‘too radical’, and that there were attempts to force him from power such as Hitchens imagines (most famously in the failed coup of August 1991). And, had the communists chosen to rely on large-scale repression to retain power in their European ‘sphere of influence’ then the West would – almost certainly – have pursued a policy of ‘words but not action’ : spoken condemnation but without active engagement, as had previously been the case in 1956 and 1968, not willing to risk World War III over the fate of Eastern Europe which was generally accepted as being firmly ‘in the Soviet sphere’.

In Hitchens’ alternate version of 1989, the imaginary repercussions of events in Eastern Europe are wide-ranging: Margaret Thatcher remains in power in the UK as we never see the emergence of ‘New Labour’ in the 1990s (though Barack Obama has still been elected as US President in 2009, and is even ‘pictured’ at the Brandenburg gate in the article,  in an ‘How Obama MIGHT have looked confronting communism in 2009′ style mock-up photo!), the European Union fails to materialise as a significant political and economic organisation, NATO is strengthened but not expanded, and the map of Europe remains firmly divided into ‘West’ and ‘East’ with the Baltic States, Ukraine and Georgia still confined within the borders of the USSR. Other organisations such as the Provisional IRA and the ANC are also affected.  Certainly, a scenario similar to that outlined by Hitchens would have led to a dramatic cooling in East-West relations and the birth of a ‘new Cold War’ in 1989, which would have had far-reaching implications for international relations on a global scale as we entered the twenty-first century. Twenty years on, I think this makes one realise and reflect on just how pivotal the events of 1989 really were.

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Adventures in Stasiland

I recently read Anna Funder’s book Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall (Granta Books, 2003). Funder, an Australian journalist who lived and worked in Berlin for a couple of years in the late 1990s, became fascinated by the experiences of people in the former GDR during her stay, a place where, as Funder  describes ‘what was said was not real and what was real was not allowed, where people disappeared behind doors and were never heard of again, or were smuggled into other realms…’.

Anna Funder's book 'Stasiland' provides 'a journey into the bizarre, scary, secret history of the former East Germany that is both relevant and riveting' (The Sunday Times)

Funder provides a well-researched overview of the scale and scope of the Stasi in the former GDR presenting some interesting (and at times quite mind-boggling) facts and statistics: in just 40 years the Stasi generated the equivalent of all records previously produced in Germany since the Middle Ages; laid out upright and end to end the files the Stasi kept would form a line 180km in length; when the wall fell the Stasi had 97,000 official employees and an additional 175,000 informers in a country of 17 million people, giving a ratio of one Stasi officer or informant per 63 citizens (a higher ratio than the KBG in the Soviet Russia at the peak of Stalin’s terror and, if part-time informers are added to the total of Stasi representatives in the GDR, some estimates place the ratio as high as 1 Stasi representative per 6.5 citizens). She describes the methods employed  to keep citizens of the GDR under such close surveillance: the boxes of fake wigs and moustaches found in Stasi offices to assist surveillance operations (one former Stasi officer she interviewed demonstrated ‘a sense of fun’ about his former occupation describing the joy of choosing different disguises by coming into work and deciding ‘who shall I be today?!”) and the list of observation signals displayed in the old Stasi HQ (‘like a choreography for very nasty scouts’ observes Funder).

But this was not a simple case of grown men harmlessly living out their boy-hood spy-game fantasies (and Stasi officers were – almost overwhelmingly – male). Other methods employed by the Stasi were legally and morally suspect even in the totalitarian climate of what was allowed in the communist GDR. The ‘standard practices’ applied of course: mail would be opened and inspected, telephone calls intercepted and residences and hotel rooms bugged – but the Stasi even went as far as to develop a method of connecting individual typewriters to the print they made (‘as if to fingerprint thought’ Funder muses sombrely). Smell sampling was also widely employed as ‘evidence’, interrogation subjects were frequently subjected to sleep deprivation to gain ‘confessions’ (which was technically illegal, even in the GDR) and following the death of a number of communist-era dissidents from a rare kind of cancer in the 1990s – all of whom had been held in Stasi prisons around the same time – evidence was uncovered of the use of radiated tags and sprays to ‘mark’ people and objects that the Stasi wanted to track. The full extent of the Stasi’s penetration into East German society will probably never be known – despite the opening of Stasi files to the public in August 1990 and continued revelations about their activities being uncovered today, in the panic during the events of November 1989, the Stasi were ordered to dispose of many of their ‘most incriminating files’,  which were shredded and destroyed (Funder describes how over 100 burnt out shredders were discovered in a room at the fomer Stasi HQ in Normenstasse, Berlin following the collapse of communist authority in the GDR).

All of this is, of course, fascinating. But what really makes Funder’s book is the ‘human element’: the personal stories she collects from people who had lived in the former GDR and their experiences of dealing with the Stasi. Funder draws perspectives from both sides, speaking to those who represented and actively participated in the power structures of the old GDR (including numerous ‘Stasi-men’ who she contacts though newspaper adverts) and also to some of those who opposed, rejected or confronted the regime in various ways. She is always clear about the importance of this material, stating that ‘for anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told’. So we are told the stories of Herr Winz, Herr Christian, Herr Bock and Herr Bohnsack (all former Stasi employees), of Hagen Koch (who had been appointed as Eric Honecker’s ‘personal cartographer’ and had personally walked the streets of Berlin in August 1961 to paint the line where the Berlin Wall was then erected) and of Carl Eduard von Schnitzler (who had presented Der Schwarze Kanal (‘The Black Channel’) a propaganda programme broadcast across the GDR from 1960). Conversely, Funder also explores the experiences of those such as Miriam Webber (who became an ‘enemy of the state’ after an attempt to cross the Wall into West Berlin when she was just 16, and whose husband Charlie later died in mysterious circumstances whilst being held in Stasi custody), Julia (Funder’s landlady who was targeted by the GDR after establishing a long-distance relationship with an Italian man and pressured to inform on her friends and family)and Frau Paul (whose seriously ill baby was being treated in a hospital in West Berlin when the Wall was suddenly erected, who was later arrested and imprisoned by the Stasi and offered the chance to visit her son if she agreed to act as their ‘bait’ in a sting operation to arrest someone they were after while she was there – she declined their ‘offer’ and as a result would not see her son until he returned to East Berlin several years later, a virtual stranger to her).

These individual stories all combine to provide some intriguing insights into life in the former GDR, but what is perhaps most fascinating is the degree to which they illustrate that its history cannot be understood in simple black and white. Instead, a massive grey area exists when attempting to explain or understand the system that developed under communism, and the motives of those who chose to participate in, or oppose it. So while many of the former Stasi-men show little regret or remorse about their former roles (‘We had people everywhere!’ proudly proclaims Winz, while von Schnitzler still steadfastly maintains that the Berlin Wall was ‘humane’), their stories reveal how many of them too were damaged despite – or because of – their involvement in the system.  So Christian was arrested, imprisoned and later demoted to manual work on a building site for three years after he failed to disclose his extra-marital affair to his superiors (‘Any one could have an affair of course’ he explains, in an attempt to describe the perverse logic behind his arrest ‘but EVERYTHING had to be reported’) and it emerges that Koch ran into problems when he married a girl who the Stasi viewed as ‘GDR negative’ and was later arrested when he attempted to resign from the Stasi, while his wife was forced to divorce him under threat of losing their son if she did not (they later re-married).

Conversely, despite several people recounting their awful experiences with the Stasi, many former citizens that Funder spoke to continued to display significant amounts of nostalgia – or ‘Ostalgie’ – for the former GDR now that it no longer exists. Post-socialist development and re-unification have failed to live up to the expectations that many held in 1989, and ironically, many mourn the loss of ‘security’ they now associate with the GDR in a time when people recall that ‘prices were lower, everyone had work and transportation was free’. The current system is ‘better than the Weimar Republic and better than Hitler, but bring back the Communists!’ one elderly woman confides to Funder, and even Julia, who was targeted and persecuted by the Stasi, talks of the rise of problems such as unemployment, drugs, homelessness and prostitution which she still identifies today with ‘the West’ and seems to equate the fall of the Berlin Wall with the loss of her own personal security (for reasons that become apparent as her story unfolds).

You get the sense that Funder is trying her hardest to remain impartial, but nevertheless some of her frustration with this ‘Ostalgie’ does come through when she talks of the post-communist ‘myth’ that has emerged about how life was better in the GDR in many respects because ‘if you didn’t buck the system then it wouldn’t harm you’ – despite the stories she collects clearly demonstrating the opposite – and the tendency of some she encountered to present the GDR as ‘simply a harmless welfare state that looked after people’. As a result, while the primary focus of Stasiland is to explore life in the period before 1989, some interesting contemporary perspectives also emerge, particularly in relation to the existence of ‘mauer im kopf’ or ‘the wall in the head’ that still appears to influence many in Germany today.

Stasiland is available from Amazon.co.uk:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stasiland-Stories-Behind-Berlin-Wall/dp/1862076553

East European Concern Over Possibility of Closer U.S. – Russian Ties.

On 16th July 22 prominent figures from Central and Eastern Europe published an open letter to Barack Obama’s administration to express concern about recent U.S. moves to establish a closer relationship with Russia following Obama’s meeting to President Medvedev in Moscow earlier this month.

Originally published in Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza and signed by 22 prominent individuals including former heads of state, foreign ministers, diplomats and intellectuals from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, including Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel, copies of the letter were quickly circulated online. You can read the original letter in full on the Gazeta Wyborcza website here:

http://wyborcza.pl/1,86871,6825987,An_Open_Letter_to_the_Obama_Administration_from_Central.html

The authors of the letter urged President Obama to remember their interests in his negotiations with Russia, expressing fears that they may be ’sold out’ in his attempts to develop a more positive working relationship with Medvedev; warning that’ Russia is back as a revisionist power pursuing a nineteenth century agenda with twenty first century tactics and methods’ including ‘overt and covert means of economic warfare’ and admitting to ‘nervousness in our capitals’ over recent Russian attempts to advance their interests in the East European region. Particular areas of concern raised in the letter include worries about perceived NATO weakness in the face of a resurgent Russia, US inaction over the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008, and current uncertainty over previous US plans to develop missile defence bases in Poland and the Czech Republic which could ‘undermine US credibility across the region’ – see my earlier post here: http://thevieweast.wordpress.com/2009/01/28/no-russian-missiles-in-kaliningrad/

The letter comes in light of Obama’s recent visit to Moscow where he spoke of his ‘deep respect’ and desire for a ’strong and prosperous’ Russia and of his aim to  ‘re-set’ US-Russian relations in the twenty-first century by working to forge a lasting partership to ‘resolve differences peacefully and constructively’. Obama was not completely blind to recent Russian posturing in Eastern Europe however, talking of his respect for Georgian sovereignty and warning Medvedev that ‘in 2009 a great power cannot show strength by dominating other countries’ (ummmm – Iraq?). US Vice President Joe Bidden is also currently visiting Ukraine and Georgia where he expected to confirm US commitment to extend NATO membership to both states in the future, despite staunch Russian opposition, and in today’s Guardian, Tony Blinken, one of Biden’s advisors was quoted as stating that any US efforts to ‘re-set’ relations with Russia ‘would not come at the expense of other countries’ – though the Obama administration has yet to make any official respose to the concerns expressed in the open letter.

From Borderland to Backcountry

I have recently returned from spending 10 days in Scotland, where I attended a conference in Dundee  (Ok, so this was actually a combined conference trip and holiday -  I spent 4 days in Dundee and then enjoyed a brief Scottish mini-break, visiting Edinburgh and Loch Lomond!), and presented a paper about my research into the history of the Chodsko region, on the Czech-German border. The conference, entitled ‘From Borderland to Backcountry: Frontier Communities in Comparative Perspective’ was organised by Matthew Ward at the University of Dundee.

I really enjoyed the conference, and it was a great opportunity for me to present some of my findings  and initial thoughts on the history of the fascinating, but relatively little known Chodsko region. However, perhaps rather fittingly, in a conference focused on the topic of  frontiers, I found myself ‘on the frontier’ in a couple of respects. Firstly, because out of approximately 42 presentations given, just 4  focused on European frontiers/borderlands, with a single panel devoted to ‘The Frontier in Europe’ (consisting of my own paper on the Chods and 2 other papers discussing the Habsburg Military Frontier, and twentieth century Vilnius) and an excellent plenary session by William O’Reilly (Cambridge University) discussing ‘The Biology of Borders in Early Modern Europe’ – with the majority of the other presentations focusing on various aspects of the American frontier, or ‘backcountry’.  Secondly, I found myself ‘on the frontier’ because as a modern historian, my work on the Chodove, spanning the late middle ages to the seventeenth century, pushes the boundaries of my own research far beyond my usual chronological scope.  However, I initially became fascinated by the history of this small border community when I first stumbled across some papers about them in a small collection archived at Keele University in 2007, and have since established contacts with other researchers interested in Chod history in the USA and Canada, visiting the region twice to conduct more detailed research and successfully unearthing Czech and German source materials, in a process that has been both challenging and rewarding in equal mesaure. My next article on this topic will see me on somewhat more familiar ground, as I focus on modern interpretations and representations of Chod history as a symbol of Czech nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

For those who may be interested, a copy of the paper I gave in Dundee can be found below:

A History of the Chodove People

Dr Kelly Hignett

Paper originally presented at the conference ‘From Borderland to Backcountry: Frontier Communities in Comparative Perspective’ at the University of Dundee, 5-7 July 2009.

The Chodové (or Chods) were a small community of peasant farmers who played a significant role along the south-western stretch of the Bohemian-Bavarian borderland between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Acting as pre-modern ‘border guards’ the Chods regulated trade and travel through the border region and engaged in the military defence of the frontier. Their loyalty was assured by a series of royal documents granting them a significant degree of political autonomy, economic prosperity and social stature. This privileged status, coupled with the relatively isolated nature of their existence, combined to facilitate the development of a distinct borderland identity among the Chodové.

The dominance of the nation state as the foremost historiographical frame of reference in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe spawned histories which often tended to ignore or sideline the existence of frontier societies. In recent years there has been increased interest in writing history ‘from the periphery’, analysing the experiences of frontier societies in Europe from a local rather than a centrist perspective.[1] Today, a growing literature about early modern frontiers exists, but remains unevenly developed, in terms of both the range of regions studied and in terms of making broader transnational comparisons between individual areas. While the Chodové provide a fascinating ‘case study’ in their own right, their existence on one of the principal fault lines between Germanic and Slavic Europe and their role as a frontier force of real military and economic importance also combine to provide some intriguing general insights into the precarious lives of established border communities in early modern Europe.

Borderlands in Early Modern Europe

A number of criteria can generally be applied to border regions in early modern Europe. Hobsbawm perhaps said it best when he stated that ‘hardly any state could pretend to control its borders, or tried to, or indeed had clearly demarcated frontier lines’.[2] Precise territorial boundaries were often ill-defined – prior to the seventeenth century the word ‘border’ generally applied to ‘a rather vague permeable zone’[3] rather than to fixed, visible lines drawn between sovereign territories. This is reinforced by the fact that while mountains, rivers and individual place names were marked on cartographic representations of Europe, and of territories within Europe during this period, national borders were generally not.[4] Rulers often lacked either the material means or the political authority to directly exert firm control over their outer-lying territorial regions, and borderlands tended to be perceived as politically, economically, socially and culturally peripheral, meaning they were generally sparsely populated and economically underdeveloped. Many border regions were also militarised as the first line of defence against external invaders and this, combined with the precarious conditions of life ‘on the margins’ were often conducive to high levels of violence, frequent warfare and crime – smuggling, banditry, raiding and pillaging were often endemic among inhabitants of border regions.[5]

While the precarious conditions of life on the borderland often bred instability, there was also the opportunity for inhabitants to enjoy a significant degree of independence and autonomy, and in the early modern period central authorities often pursued a policy of negotiation with rather than coercion over peoples in their border regions. There are numerous examples of European rulers co-opting existing border communities, or deliberately re-settling communities to defend and police their borderlands.[6] This kind of arrangement was mutually beneficial: for the central authorities it removed the cost of maintaining a permanent border guard, while providing a force to police the frontier and act as the first line of defence during military invasion, and in return the ruling authorities recognised the independent status of these communities, granting them political, economic and social advantages in return for defending lands that they often viewed as ‘theirs’ anyway.

The south-western stretch of border between Bohemia and Bavaria exhibited a number of features ‘typical’ of other borderlands in Early Modern Europe. The frontier between Bohemia and Bavaria was dominated by a thickly-forested mountain range, a natural feature which made rough territorial demarcation possible, but the exact coordinates of the border were not formally defined until 1765. Prior to the seventeenth century, this region was sparsely populated and economically underdeveloped and while the growth in cross-border trade meant that some isolated customs posts were founded dating from the ninth century onwards, only a few scattered settlements existed, while increasing levels of cross-border trade attracted numerous ‘robber-gangs’ operating in the borderland forests. The alpine terrain meant that ‘traditional’ defences were few and far between and as the region increased in strategic importance the Bohemian authorities had to consider alternative means of fortifying their frontier. This brings us to the Chodové.

Who were the Chodové?

The Chodové were the occupants of eleven villages[7] on the south-west Bohemian-Bavarian border region, collectively known as the ‘Chodsko’ region (the historical legacy of the Chodové is such that the name is still used to refer to the region today).  In the period under consideration these were small settlements with an estimated total population of around 3000 inhabitants.[8] The Chod villages were clustered around the town of Domažlice (which was originally founded as a customs town in the ninth century and from 1242 was also fortified to protect the passes through the border) and were strategically located around the key routes through the border region:

Map showing the location of the Chodsko region and the principal routes through the Bohemian-Bavarian borderland.

The origins of the first Chod settlers are disputed and numerous theories have been suggested[9], however it appears most likely that the villages were established sometime in the latter half of the thirteenth century during the reign of King Premysl Ottokar II (1253-1278), and that the original settlers were Hungarian Slovaks, mercenaries who had impressed Ottokar II in battle and were subsequently deliberately settled in strategic locations to protect this stretch of borderland.[10] The name ‘Chod’ comes from the Czech verb ‘Chodit’ meaning ‘to go’, in a direct reference to their borderland patrols, and some of their village names also reflect their role: Stráž (‘Guard’ or ‘Guardpost’), Postřekov (‘Lookout’) and Újezd (‘an area under patrol’). These eleven villages formed a distinct, cohesive community, with their own seal, flag, administrative authority and collective rights. The Chodové were thus viewed as a distinct and homogenous group and were described as a ‘little republic within the kingdom of Bohemia’[11]

The Chods’ Role along the Borderland

Image of a traditional Chod border guard.

The Chodové performed a number of duties on the borderland with mobile ‘patrol groups’ roaming throughout the forested area under their protection. The limits of the Chodsko patrol area were clearly marked by a series of crosses cut into the bark of trees. Adult males would train their sons to know the limits of their territory from an early age, in a ritual where they would walk around the territorial limits, pointing out the various markers and then the sons would be asked to repeat the route, receiving a beating each time they got it wrong.[12] In addition to orienteering however, these markings also sent a warning to outsiders that this area was under protection.

Their day to day duties included general inspection and maintenance: ensuring the relevant border symbols were clearly marked and positioned and that tracks through the forest were passable, so fallen trees were cleared and track surfaces repaired when necessary; and the provision of assistance and protection for legitimate travellers passing through the border region – such as merchants, traders, diplomats, clergymen and even the King himself. On occasions when the King of Bohemia travelled through their region the Chods provided him with a full ceremonial guard of honour[13], and for a fee of 2 groschen the Chod would provide an armed escort for other travellers, escorting them from the limits of their territory to Domažlice and vice versa[14]. The Chodové also defended their territory against gangs of smugglers and poachers, attracted both by the possibility of profiting from illegal hunting, fishing or logging in the border forests (all activities which the Chodové were charged with preventing) and robbers and bandits tempted by the possibility of lucrative spoils due to the increasing volume of cross border trade.

At times where Bohemia came under attack, the Chodové also had a military role. Chod patrol groups would observe and report any signs of unusual military activity in the border region and signal a warning of impending invasion using a beacon system, located on high ground near each village.[15] At times of military invasion the Chodové would also obstruct the enemy by covering the main routes of passage with felled trees, a process known as ‘Zaseky’ , and there are a handful of occasions where they fought in large-scale military operations, most notably participating in the defeat of the army of the Fifth Crusade at the Battle of Domažlice in August 1431 during the Hussite Wars; fighting at Bílá Hora (the Battle of the White Mountain) in 1620, and in Bohemian attempts to oppose the invasion by the Swedish army under General Baner in 1639, during the Thirty Years’ War.

Chod Privileges

The Bohemian monarchs’ reliance on the Chodové to patrol and protect the border region required assurances of their loyalty and this was encouraged by granting the Chodsko region a ‘privileged status’ within the Kingdom of Bohemia. In 1325 these rights or ‘privileges’ were verified in writing by King Jan (John) Luxembourg, and were subsequently re-confirmed, and occasionally expanded, by a series of Bohemian rulers. In total, twenty four official documents of privilege were granted to the Chodové between 1325 and 1620, each document signed and sealed by the reigning monarch.

Royal Document of Privilege, this one granted to the Chodove in 1612.

These documents of privilege officially recognised the importance of the Chodové as ‘guardians of the borderland’ and effectively granted them a significant degree of political autonomy, social stature and economic advantages. The Chods were proclaimed free from traditional peasant labour obligations and were not bound in servitude to any noble ‘master’ but were only subject to the authority of a regional court in Domažlice which met once a month. The Chods were also exempt from the usual feudal dues, only required to pay an annual tax of 24 silver coins to the Royal Treasury, and were granted permission to log in the borderland forests (as a time when this was generally prohibited) for their own use, though not for trade.[16]

The Chodové also enjoyed a range of unwritten or ‘customary’ rights. These were not specifically included in the royal documents but were generally accepted or tolerated by the ruling authorities. These included freedom of movement throughout the entire borderland region under their protection, the right to hunt fish and graze their livestock in the borderland forests, the right to trade any surplus crops and livestock at the market in Domažlice without paying the necessary customs tolls, and the right to brew their own beer. The Chods were also granted the right to bear arms, although this was really an essential pre-requisite if they were to function as an effective border force. They fashioned their own rather distinctive weapons, known as Cakans, which were essentially hatchets on five foot long shafts, studded with nails and ending in a sharp iron point. The Cakan was a multi-functional tool, and could be used for felling trees, slaughtering bears, fighting off raiders and poachers and in the military defence of the frontier.

Life on the Borderland

Norman Housley has proposed an interesting hypothesis: that on frontiers where arable farming was practised and/or large scale cross-border trade took place, we should expect relations to generally be more peaceful than in the case of frontiers where communities lived chiefly by pastoral farming, with ready opportunities for raiding and rustling.[17] This theory appears to hold some weight in the case of the Chodové who were, first and foremost a community of farmers, subject to the usual seasonal fluctuations of rural life.[18] Even taking into account their roaming border patrols, they were a sedentary rather than a nomadic community, with permanently established farmsteads growing a range of crops, fruit orchards, breeding livestock and even keeping bees for honey.[19] While small-scale skirmishes with robber gangs occurred on a regular basis, generally speaking levels of violence and warfare on the south-western Bohemian borderline between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries were relatively low, and although there were a few occasions where the Chodové participated in large-scale military battles, they clearly saw their role as purely defensive. In 1546, when Peter Svamberg, a local noble, tried to coerce the Chods into taking part in military raids on Bavarian territory, they complained to the Emperor that such activities would counteract the nature of their role, and received a written agreement that they were not required to fight beyond the Bohemian borders.[20] Unlike the experiences of many other frontier societies in this period, in the Chod psyche warfare seems to have been viewed as an occasional necessity of their role defending the borderland, war ‘pro patria’ (in defence of the homeland) rather than forming part of a discernable pattern of frontier life.

The Chodové were far from a ‘typical’ community of peasant farmers however, and their role along the borderland had a defining influence on many areas of Chod life. The Chodové were officially classed as a ‘free people’ however although their privileges may have exempted them from the ‘robota’ (free labour) associated with serfdom, the obligations they undertook to patrol and protect the borderland were onerous, time consuming and physically demanding, meaning that in effect they were still subject to a degree of hard labour, and the frequent absence of groups of men out patrolling the border would have required the women to take on a significant role in the day to day agricultural labour and village life, in addition to running the household.

Their privileged also position allowed them significantly more freedom and independence than other peasant communities however. The Chods were given a great deal of autonomy over their domestic affairs, and a semi-democratic method of local government emerged where the adult males in each of the eleven villages elected a ‘rychtar’ (communal magistrate or judge) to represent their interests in the local court.[21] In addition, while their well-being was subject to the same seasonal economic vagaries as elsewhere, many of their privileges (such as the right to hunt and fish throughout the borderland and sell any surplus crops for profit) ensured them a higher standard of living than other peasant communities.

The importance of the Chodové role on the borderland is also reflected in the atypical design and construction of their villages. Designed for collective resistance, the Chod villages were carefully constructed in a compact block. Their wooden farmhouses and barns were built back to back at right angles around an open central square, which contained a pond (ensuring a fresh water supply if the Chodové were besieged) and a two-story stone building which functioned as a granary for storing crops in peacetime but also doubled as the last refuge for the Chod at times when they came under attack. Only a single road ran in and out of each village and at times of attack the roads and the gaps between the barns could be blocked with wooden barricades. There were thus three lines of defence protecting the Chod villages: an outer wall or fence around the orchards which ran continuously around the outer perimeters of each village, the strategic alignment of farm buildings reinforced with barricades, and finally the great stone granary. The defensive design of the eleven Chod villages distinguished them structurally from other villages in the locality, so that they ‘stood clearly apart from the other forest settlements formed to the north and south.[22]

Plan of Ujezd, a typical Chod village, clearly illustrating their compact strategic design.

Their role on the border meant that the Chod villages were sometimes targets for attack, and there were occasions where it is recorded that their villages were burnt to the ground. Chodsko was particularly devastated during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) when the Chod villages were destroyed and only around 400 of the estimated pre-war population of 3,000 survived, living wild in the borderland forests.[23]

Conclusions

Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries the Chodové performed a valuable role on the Bohemian borderland. At a time when the Bohemian leaders lacked either the material means or the political authority to impose a permanent army to patrol their border regions, the Chodové provided a hardy, armed force which could be maintained relatively inexpensively and mobilised quickly as the first line of defence against invasion. In turn the Chods were allowed to retain a significant degree of autonomy and freedom, developing a closed sense of community and cultivating a distinct independent borderland identity. By the close of the seventeenth century however, the Chodové had ceased to hold any significant presence on the borderland. Once the Chods’ usefulness on the frontier began to diminish, their independent status was increasingly contested and during the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries they lost their royal protection and were subjected to increasing levels of control by a succession of regional authorities. Sadly I don’t have time to discuss the decline of the Chodové in detail today, as it is a fascinating story, especially as the Chodove mounted a sustained challenge to the attempts to modify or erode their independence, and in a spirited fight lasting over one hundred years this small band of illiterate forest dwellers petitioned courts in Prague and Vienna, sent delegations to various court hearings, successfully raised money in an attempt to emancipate themselves from direct control by any regional authority and eventually resorted to armed insurrection in a rising that came to be known as the ‘Farmers Revolt’ (1693).[24]

Today, a statue of Jan Sladky Kozina, one of the leaders of the 1693 revolt stands on Hradek Hill, near Ujezd. Kozina was hung in Plzen in 1695 for his role in the uprising.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Chod struggle was subsequently presented by Czech authors and artists in a romantic light: as a struggle of simple peasants against feudal authority and hailed as an example of Bohemians fighting for freedom against encroaching German domination after the Thirty Years’ War. In truth however, the Chodové were the victims of a number of interconnected developments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the general tightening of feudal controls over peasant communities as a result of the ‘second serfdom’ in central and eastern Europe; increasing centralisation of state authority and the growth of autocracy – the creeping Habsburg authority over Bohemia evident from the mid-sixteenth century was compounded after Bohemian losses at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620 and from 1650 the Habsburgs established their own professional border guard to patrol the Bohemian-Bavarian borderland; the demarcation of more precise territorial boundaries following the Peace of Westphalia (1648); increased economic development and colonisation throughout the Bohemian border regions and finally, the development of new styles of warfare, particularly the introduction of firepower and the increasing use of muskets and cannons. The Thirty Years’ War not only decimated the border region but also demonstrated the powerlessness of the Chodové – a small band who fought with a clan-warrior mentality and were armed with essentially home-made weapons – in the face of more modern and professional armies. The birth of larger, more professional standing armies also enabled ruling authorities to enforce control over outer-lying territories that may previously have enjoyed significant levels of independence, and the experience of the Chodové was mirrored elsewhere across Europe in this period, as borderland territories and their peoples were bought under increasingly firm state control.

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[1] Steven G Ellis and Raingard Esser (eds), Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500 – 1850, (Wehrhahn Verlag, 2006) p.20

[2] Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1969), p.15

[3] Steven G Ellis and Raingard Esser (eds), Op Cit, p.13

[4] Gunter Vogler, ‘Borders and Boundaries in Early Modern Europe: Problems and Possibilities’ in Steven G Ellis and Raingard Esser (eds), Ibid, p.29

[5] For a more detailed discussion on this topic see Kelly Hignett, ‘Co-option or Criminalisation? The State, Border Communities and Organised Crime in Early Modern Europe’ in Mark Galeotti (ed), Organised Crime in History, (Routledge, 2008), pp. 35 – 51

[6] For example the Russian Cossacks, the Croatian Uskoks, Hungarian Hajduks and the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers.

[7] The eleven Chod villages are Postřekov, Klenčí, Chodov, Újezd, Stráž, Tlumačov, Mrákov, Klíčov, Chodská Lhota and Pocinovice.

[8] No precise figures exist for the population of the Chodsko region until after the Thirty Years’ War which had decimated the region, however there were an average of 35-40 farmhouses in each of the eleven villages, so multiplying these by the average peasant family size in this period gives us a total population estimate of around 3000.

[9] These theories include suggestions that the original Chodove may have been descendents of early Celtic settlers, an ancient Cech tribe of forest dwellers, criminals who ‘from being the scourge of the forest’ were co-opted into settlements to act as border guards, or mercenaries of Hungarian or Polish origin who chose to settle permanently in Bohemia.

[10] Eduard Maur, ‘Der Streit uber den Sinn der Chodengeschichte’, Zapadoceskey Historicky Sbornik, vol 3, (Plžen, 1997), p.183, and ‘The History of the Chod’, Report from the LePlay Collection on Bohemia, archived at Keele University, UK (1929), p.1

[11] ‘The History of the Chod’, Ibid, p.2

[12] Jiři Jánský, Kronika Česko-Bavorské Hranice, Vol. 1, 1400-1426, (Domažlice, 2001), p.204

[13] Josef Haas, Die Choden und ihra Fahn (Museen und Archive, 1992), p.377 and ‘History of the Chod’, Op Cit, p.3

[14] Jiři Jánský, Op Cit, pp.222-223

[15] ‘The Country of the Chod’, Report from the LePlay Collection on Bohemia, (1929), archived at Keele University, UK

[16] The 24 Royal documents of privilege were originally written in Latin, the lingua franca of early modern Europe, but have been translated into modern Czech in Frantisek Roubik, Chodské Majestáty [Chod Privileges] (Prague, 1945),

[17] Norman Housley, ‘Frontier Societies and Crusading in the Late Middle Ages’, Mediterranean History Review, Vol. 10 (1995), p. 107

[18] I have explored this issue in slightly more detail in Kelly Hignett, ‘Co-option or Criminalisation?’ Op Cit.

[19] Czech Historian Eduard Maur refers to the Chodove as ‘settled walkers’, ‘protection farmers’ and as ‘the farming guards of the Bohemian border’, ( Eduard Maur, ‘Chodove – Psohlavci, Jejich Prezdivka Prapor a ‘Znak’’, Acta Universitatis Carolinae – Philosophica et Histoica, Vol 2 (1987), p.381 and again, this can be compared with other border communities such as the Cossacks, Hajduks and Uskoks who saw the establishment of permanent farmsteads as impracticable due to the violent and unpredictable conditions of borderland life.

[20] Jana Koutna, Chod History (Domažlice, 2001 – Translated into English by Eva Tochor, 2002), 3

[21] ‘History of the Chod’, Op Cit, p.2

[22] ‘The Country of the Chods’, Op Cit, pp.1-2, 5 and ‘A Chod Farm’, Report from the LePlay Collection on Bohemia, (1929), archived at Keele University, UK

[23] ‘History of the Chod’, Op Cit, p.5

[24] A detailed account of the Chodové fight against the nobility and royal authority can be found in Jana Koutna, Chod History, Op Cit.

Poles Remember 1989 Revolution

Twenty years on, will present-day tensions overshadow past glories in Poland?

Tomorrow (4^th June) marks the 20^th anniversary of the landmark Polish elections of 1989, the first ‘semi-free’ elections in communist Eastern Europe, and the day when representatives of trade union-come underground dissidents-come political opponents Solidarity dealt the final fatal blow to communism in Poland, sweeping to victory by winning 99% of all seats in the upper senate and all contested seats in the Sejm.  As Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first post-communist democratic prime minister in Poland recalled earlier this week: “Twenty years ago, what seemed impossible became possible”.

Solidarity Election Poster From June 1989.

Today, the majority of Poles remain rightly proud of their role in the revolutions of 1989, seeing themselves as the standard bearers of anti-communist resistance in Eastern Europe. Many claim that it was the success of Solidarity in the June elections that finally opened the floodgates for meaningful reform across Eastern Europe, inspiring their communist neighbours to follow their lead and take decisive action to cast off Soviet rule. As a result, over 120 events are being organised throughout Poland to celebrate and commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the June 1989 elections, including re-enactments of communist-era protests and numerous exhibitions, conferences and concerts, with the anniversary celebrations receiving widespread media coverage both within Poland and internationally. CNN, for example, are showing a series of programmes about the Polish role in the events of 1989 entitled ‘Autumn of Change: The New Poland’, and I found this short video on YouTube:

Some however, have been left disenchanted, feeling that Poland’s part in the events of 1989 was too quickly over-shadowed by the fall of the Berlin Wall later that year, an event which, for many people today, remains the defining symbol of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. I recently wrote about Polish complaints about their perceived under-representation in the EC video ‘Twenty Years of Freedom’ (see ‘Video Commemorating 1989 Revolutions Creates Controversy’ (18^th May) @ http://thevieweast.wordpress.com/2009/05/18/ec-video-commemorating-1989-causes-controversy/ ), and earlier this week, former Solidarity leader and former Polish President Lech Walesa also expressed some resentment at the lack of recognition generally given to Poland’s role in the events of 1989 in comparison with events in Germany, in an interview with the Financial Times where he complained that: “They shouldn’t be ridiculous with that wall, and made into heroes because they [East Germans] were running away [to the west] while Poland fought”.

Polish anniversary celebrations have also been marred by domestic quibblings, with the recent economic downturn taking its toll. The central festivities commemorating the 4th June elections were originally planned to take place in Gdansk, whose shipyards were famous for the anti-communist strikes of the 1980s and the birth of Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement. However, the threat of violent protests by the modern-day Solidarity trade union led Prime Minister Donald Tusk to recently announce that, in the name of national unity, the official celebrations would be moved to Krakow, stating that ‘Solidarity … wants to carry the symbolism of history, but Solidarity today is a medium sized trade union, and June 4^th is  a national day. It cannot be highjacked by any political movement’.

While Krakow may be a safer, less controversial and – arguably – a far more picturesque location for official dignitaries to quietly celebrate Poland’s ‘twenty years of freedom’, it lacks the same kind of resonant symbolism as Gdansk, which is still remembered as the raw cradle of anti-communist dissent in Poland. Today however, the prevailing mood in Gdansk is one of anger at the current economic failings rather than nostalgia for the past. Mismanaged and heavily subsidised under communism, Polish shipyards have found it increasingly hard to restructure and adjust to function in a competitive global economy during the last twenty years. An EU investigation launched in 2005, recently ruled that the Polish government had breached EU rules by providing state aid to keep their domestic shipyards in business. As a result, two such yards, at Gdynia and Szczecin have already been sold to foreign investors leading to the loss of thousands of jobs. EU officials announced yesterday that they were committed to saving the historic Gdansk shipyard, which was awarded a European heritage label in January 2009. While the past significance of Gdansk will doubtless be remembered across Poland tomorrow however, its future currently remains uncertain.