Searching for Borders of Freedom. Foreign Trips of Czechoslovak Musicians and Athletes between 1948–1989

0565660 - ÚSD 2023 RIV NL eng J - Journal Article
Mücke, Pavel - Krátká, Lenka
Searching for Borders of Freedom. Foreign Trips of Czechoslovak Musicians and Athletes between 1948–1989.
International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity. Roč. 5, č. 1 (2022), s. 111-136. ISSN 2666-6529. E-ISSN 2213-0624
R&D Projects: GA ČR(CZ) GA19-09594S
Institutional support: RVO:68378114
Keywords : Cold War * Czechoslovakia * foreign trips
OECD category: History (history of science and technology to be 6.3, history of specific sciences to be under the respective headings)
Method of publishing: Limited access
https://brill.com/view/journals/hcm/9/1-4/article-p111_008.xml

In the era of the “people’s democratic” and later “socialist” Czechoslovakia (1948–1989), foreign trips, and even more business trips because of their financial impact on one’s life, represented privileges that were to be granted by the ruling elites only to reliable and closely-watched Czechoslovak citizens in the name of the “public interest.” At the same time, the business trips became a kind of litmus test of the loyalty and the “importance” of the travelling (in case of disapproval, non-travelling) individual in the regime’s eyes. In this context, the paper focuses on the lived experience of musicians and athletes concerning foreign trips. Finally, it discusses the potential contradictions between some popular stories in the Czech collective memory on the one hand and more detailed micro-historical probes on the other hand, which demonstrate the interpretive richness of the discussed issues.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0337170