People of the Revolution and the USSR

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Any Western Marxist theorists 1
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Any United States 62 United Kingdom 26 Russia 25 Soviet Union 6 China 3 France 3 Spain 3 Ukraine 3 Czechoslovakia 2 Hungary 2 Israel 2 Yugoslavia 2 Albania 1 Australia 1 Bulgaria 1 Canada 1 Cuba 1 Ethiopia 1 Finland 1 Germany 1 Ireland 1 Italy 1 Lithuania 1 Netherlands 1 Poland 1 Portugal 1 Somalia 1 Switzerland 1
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The revolutionary wave and the world war1917–1945 5 The Cold War and decolonization1945–현재 28 Scholars of this history1892–현재 2
Citizenship: Czechoslovakia Scholars of this history 1892–현재 Clear all

Karel Kosík

Karel Kosík
Western Marxist theorists Czechoslovakia Czech 1926–2003 ○ Natural causes

A non-dogmatic Marxist who reflected on the Prague Spring

He argued that the Prague Spring was buried again after 1989, following its burial under the Husák regime.

Karel Kosík was a Czech philosopher who reworked Marxism as a philosophy of human praxis and concrete historicity. His major work, Dialectics of the Concrete (1963), placed Marx in dialogue with Heideggerian phenomenology and earned international recognition. A leading intellectual of democratic socialism during the Prague Spring, he was expelled from the Communist Party and excluded from university life during normalization. After 1989, he argued that the memory and emancipatory promise of the reform had been buried first by the Husák regime and again by the neoliberal order, making him central to debates over the event’s legacy.

Career timeline
  • 1943–1944Joined the left-wing underground resistance Předvoj and edited an illegal journal
  • 1944–1945Arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Theresienstadt concentration camp
  • 1953–1968Researcher at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences Institute of Philosophy
  • 1963Published Dialectics of the Concrete
  • 1968–1969Professor of philosophy at Charles University and member of the Communist Party Central Committee
  • 1970–1989Dissident intellectual, excluded from university life after expulsion from the Communist Party
  • 1990–1992Lectured in philosophy at Charles University
  • 1992–2003Researched and wrote at the Czech Academy of Sciences Institute of Philosophy

Jan Pauer

Jan Pauer
Czechoslovakia Czech 1950–

The historian who interpreted the Prague Spring between the tanks and the memory wars

The experience of the occupation, the incredible solidarity in August 1968: that belongs to those very rare historical moments that not everyone gets to live through, and one can count oneself lucky to have experienced it.

Jan Pauer is a Czech-born historian who witnessed the Prague Spring of 1968 and emigrated to West Germany the following year. In 1995 he published Prag 1968, the definitive account of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and spent his career at the University of Bremen's Research Centre for Eastern Europe studying modern Czechoslovak history. In his 2011 ENRS article, he argued that the invasion marked 'the start of a civil society opposition and the historical end of reform communism,' contending that the Prague Spring was buried twice: first by Soviet tanks and then by the memory politics of post-1989 Czechia.

Career timeline
  • 1969Left Czechoslovakia and emigrated to West Germany
  • 1990–1993Member of the Czech government's Historical Commission on the events of 1967–1971
  • 1993–Research associate, Research Centre for Eastern Europe, University of Bremen
  • 1995Published Prag 1968: Der Einmarsch des Warschauer Paktes
  • 2017Co-editor of Ringen um Autonomie: Dissidentendiskurse in Mittel- und Osteuropa