Petr Roubal

This study looks at the role of the Federal Assembly in the Velvet Revolution. With the disintegration of the communist party, the Federal Assembly became unexpectedly a key constitutional institution with far reaching powers in times of rapid political change. The revolutionary movement Civic Forum forced through a legislation that enabled to recall substantial part of the members of the parliament and replace them by its own candidates through co-optation. This method of “cleansing” of the parliament had far-reaching consequences for the post-November Czechoslovak political culture.

On the example of working-class Prague quarter of Žižkov, the article studies the interrelation between heritage protection of late nineteenth-century tenement housing and neoliberal city policies after 1989. It locates the common root of both phenomena in the strong sense of crisis of socialist modernist urbanism among urban planners and architects since the early 1970s. The criticism of socialist urbanism culminated shortly before the Velvet Revolution of 1989 in a public struggle against demolition and redevelopment of the entire Žižkov quarter, led by a group of young architects. The article concludes by describing a bitter victory as the quarter’s architecture was eventually saved, while neoliberal urban policies and gentrification eroded its working-class nature. This process illustrates a major shift in urban expertise from social planning under socialism to neoliberal discursive planning in which a “story” of a city is constructed through preservation of belle-époque tenemen...

... “Ten, který byl… [The One That Was…].” Česká literatura 47, no. ... but early on became influenced by the theories of Juri Lotman, whom he introduced into Czech academe. ... example of Tartu-Moscow semiotic school led him to move beyond the strict boundaries of literature and to ...

1 For the other Czechoslovak rituals see R. Krakov-sk ý, Rituel du 1er mai en Tchécoslovaquie: 1948– 1989 (Paris, 2004); V. Macura, «Das glückliche Zeitalter. Semiotische Ansätze zur Deutung eines Konstrukts», in Kommunismus und Osteu-ropa. Konzepte, ...

... “Ten, který byl… [The One That Was…].” Česká literatura 47, no. ... but early on became influenced by the theories of Juri Lotman, whom he introduced into Czech academe. ... example of Tartu-Moscow semiotic school led him to move beyond the strict boundaries of literature and to ...

Under communism, the symbolic potential of the body was multiplied in the mass gymnastic displays in order to portray the society as disciplined, strong, happy and beautiful and thus to legitimize its leadership. These gymnastic rituals followed the volkisch tradition of 19th-century mass gymnastics, which aimed at mobilization and homogenization of the `imagined community' of the nation. Behind the symbolic play of the mass gymnastics, there was, as Kracauer pointed out, a deeper relationship between modernity with its mode of production and gymnastics with its mechanization of the body. The relation, however, was not a direct one, mass gymnastic displays were used to aestheticize the mass production and therefore to deny the very logic of instrumental rationality that both the gymnastics and the production were built upon.

Thinking through Transition is the first concentrated effort to explore the most recent chapter of East Central European past from the perspective of intellectual history. Post-socialism can be understood as a period of scarcity and preponderance of ideas, the dramatic eclipsing of the dissident legacy (aswell as the older political traditions), and the rise of technocratic and post-political governance. This book, grounded in empirical research sensitive to local contexts, proposes instead a history of adaptations, entanglements, and unintended consequences. In order to enable and invite comparison, the volume is structured around major domains of political thought, some of them generic (liberalism, conservatism, the Left), others (populism and politics of history) deemed typical for post-socialism. However, as shown by the authors, the generic often turns out to be heavily dependent on its immediate setting, and the typical resonates with processes that are anything but vernacular...

Every five years from 1955 to 1985, mass Czechoslovak gymnastic demonstrations and sporting parades called Spartakiads were held to mark the 1945 liberation of Czechoslovakia. Featuring hundreds of thousands of male and female performers of all ages and held in the world’s largest stadium—a space built expressly for this purpose—the synchronized and unified movements of the Czech citizenry embodied, quite literally, the idealized Socialist people: a powerful yet pliant force directed by the regime.

In this book, Petr Roubal explores the political, social, and aesthetical dimensions of these mass physical demonstrations, with a particular focus on their roots in the völkisch nationalism of the German Turner movement and the Czech Sokol gymnastic tradition. Roubal draws on extensive interviews and archival research to investigate the many facets of this sporting tradition, from the reactions of ordinary, non-political gymnasts who appropriated and challenged official rituals to the organizational demands of the Spartakiads, such as the incredible finances involved and the knowledge and skills required from hundreds of former Sokol officials. Featuring an abundance of archival photographs, Spartakiad takes a new approach to Communist history by opening a window onto the mentality and mundanity behind the Iron Curtain.

Stručná studie o procesu odvolávání poslanců Federálního shromáždění a kooptaci nových poslanců na jejich místa na přelomu let 1989 a 1990. Na základě archivních pramenů a rozhovorů s bývalými poslanci studie ukazuje, jak kooptace zapadají do širšího rámce listopadové revoluce. Rozebírá vznik ideje kooptací (zejména roli Zdeňka Jičínského), i jejich nesnadné prosazení proti vůli samotných poslanců. Věnuje se také důsledkům kooptací, které měly důležitý vliv na formování polistopadové politické kultury, mj. zahájily politickou kariéru mnoha polistopadových politiků (např. Miloš Zeman, Lubomír Zaorálek, Miroslav Macek či Vlasta Parkanová).