‘Betrayed by Comrades’ (Cold War Conversations)

Liz Kohn, a postgraduate research student in Czechoslovak history, has been investigating the political and private lives of two Communist women, Alice Glasnerová and Dora Kleinová who were imprisoned as part of the infamous Slánský trial which took place in Prague in 1952. The Slánský trial, the largest show-trial to take place anywhere in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, ended with the execution of 11 leading Czechoslovak Communists, including the leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ), Rudolf Slánský.  As you will hear in the podcast, Liz had a particular reason for being drawn to the topic: one of the women involved in the trial was her late father’s first wife.

What began as an interest in family history evolved into a fascination with the experience of Communist women in Czechoslovakia more generally and to the beginnings of a thesis which explores the gendered aspects of women being attracted to Communism. In her thesis, Liz explores how women built successful careers within the Party, and how they took seriously the call to be blind to sex only to be confronted again with gender stereotypes and injustices once disgraced, framed and set up for show trial.

Liz has undertaken extensive archival research in secret police, prison, Communist Party and other archives in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. She has also drawn on archives held in London and at Harvard, Stanford and Cornell. She has written a blog charting her research and, through that, made contact with descendants of many of Glasnerová’s friends who were also arrested as part of the 1950s Czechoslovak political show trials. 

In the ‘Cold War Conversations’ podcast, Liz talks about Alice Glasnerová’s relationship with the Communist party and the impact it had on her marriage. Glasnerová was attracted to Communism from her schooldays and volunteered in the international brigade hospitals during the Spanish Civil War. Although she spent the war in America, she continued to work for the Communist party and helped refugees from Europe emigrate to the USA. After the war, she returned to Czechoslovakia and worked within the Communist government, until she was arrested and finally tried for espionage. How this came about and the impact of these events on Glasnerová, her friends, her marriage and her feelings about Communism are the main subject of the podcast.  

 https://profiles.cardiff.ac.uk/staff/pavlushtLiz Kohn’s MPhil thesis in Czechoslovak history is being supervised at Cardiff University by Professor Mary Heimann and Dr Tetyana Pavlush.

 You can hear more about Liz’s research findings in ‘Betrayed by Comrades’ (Cold War Conversations): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSzM2Ue5JpI