Русская Прага

I often think that my interest in many things Russian started with my time as a missionary there for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but I sometimes think that the interest started earlier (or, to take a more Eastern approach, I was fated to be interested), when I chose to learn about Russia for a fifth-grade country report.  My mission introduced me not only to Russia, but to a wider world (in part thanks to coming in contact with missionaries from Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Mongolia), and I learned that there was so much more to learn.  Meeting my wife, who was from the Czech Republic, I was introduced to another fascinating people, culture, and country.  Unsurprisingly, since both the Czech Republic and Russia are in Europe, there are commonalities and overlaps in their respective histories.  Learning about some of those seemed like an interesting thing to do.

Русская Прага (Russian Prague, my translation) by Natalya Ivanovna Komandorova (ISBN: 978-5-9533-3746-5) presents an overview of some of the common history between Russia and the Czech Republic.  It starts in tsarist times and ends with a small section about post-Communist interaction between the two countries.  The medieval links between the two countries were focused largely on trade with a little religion thrown in, typical for a time when church and state were intimately intertwined.  The many interfamilial marriages and constantly changing alliances during the 1700s and 1800s resulted in some interaction between the two nations, and academic and intellectual interests were added to the subjects of correspondence.  These reasons for a Russian presence in what was then Czechoslovakia exploded in the early 1900s as Russia experienced what is nowadays referred to as brain drain when the Bolsheviks came to power.  Czechoslovakia, and Prague in particular, proved to be a welcoming place for Russian academics, politicians, and intellectuals who wanted to escape persecution and restrictions on their freedoms in Soviet Russia.  There were links between the two countries in the post-World War II era, too, but they tended to be less positive.  The Soviets worked to keep tabs on and even control the Russian diaspora.  Russian-Czechoslovak relations took a hit they would never really recover from when the Soviets invaded in 1968.  Modern relations between the two countries have returned to the medieval focus on trade with a significant level of distrust toward the Russians on the part of many Czechs.

The book, written in Russian, was not really what I expected, and disappointing for a couple different reasons.  The biggest fault I had with the book was its focus on pre-Soviet history.  I thought a chapter or two would have sufficed.  Instead, there were only a couple chapters that discussed ties between the two countries during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras.  The post-Soviet era really only got a few pages.  For a book that was published in 2009, there should’ve been a lot more on this timeframe (20 years!).  I also found the section on the imperial times to be rather boring since it just seemed like short biographical sketches of various Russians that were either expatriates in or frequent travelers to the Czech lands.  Finally, the book was presented from a fully Russian viewpoint.  That isn’t necessarily a surprise given that the author is Russian, but a more nuanced approach would’ve served the book well.  The last section, which told of the author’s travel to Czechoslovakia as a university student, was particularly disappointing.  She seemed to discount the experiences of the one Czech in their group who was willing to say aloud what many of his countrymen thought about Russia post-1968.  It also seemed that the result, according to the author, of the interaction between the two countries was a benefit for the Czechs, while there was almost no discussion at any time of what the Russians gained from the two countries’ relations (other than that those who went to Czechoslovakia to avoid the Soviets were benefitted).  It was interesting to learn more about the ambassadors and emissaries pushing national interests in the medieval times and to see how much of a friend to liberty the pre-World War II Czechoslovak country was, but, overall, the book was relatively dry.
 

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