Československý syndrom ruskýma očima – Ptáková-Filipovičová Elvíra (2014)

The book attempts to capture the complex and often very painful relationships between Russians and Czechs - Russians in the Czech Republic and Czechs in Russia - against the backdrop of historical events of the last century that shaped and marked the relations of both nations. The author - herself a Russian - presents a genre-diverse book that includes her own diary entries from the early 1950s, memoirs of witnesses, sketches, notes, all richly supplemented with photographic documents. Against the backdrop of individual authentic events from the personal lives of ordinary Russians, a picture of a politically complex time emerges. For the Czech reader, the book is particularly engaging due to the Russian perspective on mutual relations and pivotal historical events... Initially, there were members of the NKVD and 'Smerš', essentially criminals endowed with power, who insidiously lured Russians living in Prague (especially from the circles of emigrants who believed they could find their new future in interwar Czechoslovakia) in 1945 to replenish the ranks of the insatiable Soviet Gulag. After them, in the late 1940s, came agitators who exploited people's emotions, their relationship to their former homeland, and sent them, though not directly behind barbed wire, but practically into the closed zone of the then Soviet Union. And finally, the well-known...