Invisible women in the Slánský Trial

Kohn, Elizabeth 2024. Invisible women in the Slánský Trial. MPhil Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

The Slánský trial of leading Czechoslovak Communists has long been seen as a quintessentially ‘Stalinist’ show trial. It has also been presented as an exclusively male story. While the fourteen Communists who formed the visible face of the Slánský trial were men, at every other stage of the proceedings – denunciations, interrogations, arrests, imprisonments, related trials – Czechoslovak Communist women were also involved. Two of these women, Alice Glasnerová and Dora Kleinová , were among the Jirst Czechoslovak Communists to be arrested in connection with the trial; and their proJiles were similar to those of their male comrades. The ways in which they were treated by the Party, however, was more complex. This dissertation brings together three strands of historiography: works on the Slánský trial, from the 1950s to the present; feminist historiography on women’s experiences under Communism; and works focusing specifically on female political prisoners. It draws on a range of archival materials, including Ministry of Interior records of interrogations, reports from cellmates, private correspondences, unpublished memoirs, photographs, interviews with witnesses, and visits to Ruzyně, Pankrác and Mladá Boleslav prisons. It argues that women’s position in the Czechoslovak Communist Party was affected in complex ways: in the 1920s and 1930s, through attempts to adhere to theoretical Marxist-Leninist blindness to gender; during and after 1968 by shifts in attitude towards Communist women. Approaching the main Slánský trial from the perspective of the women who were imprisoned and condemned in the related trials does more than simply recover their historical importance. It also reveals unacknowledged bias by Communists, dissidents and later post-Communist regimes alike. This dissertation uncovers a gender-based dimension of the Czechoslovak Communist Party which has been hiding in plain sight and which sheds new light on the Slánský trial, the experiences of women prisoners, and on the Czechoslovak Communist Party more generally.

Item Type:	Thesis (MPhil)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	History, Archaeology and Religion
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D839 Post-war History, 1945 on D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D901 Europe (General)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	26 November 2024
Date of Acceptance:	22 November 2024
Last Modified:	27 Nov 2024 09:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/174316

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