Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

The situation relating to the perception of Slovak history became
even more complicated after the creation of a new state – the
Czechoslovak Republic. On the one hand, Slovaks again acquired
their own Slovak educational institutions, which had been almost
completely liquidated in the old Hungary, and gradually – with
Czech help – built up a complete educational system, as far as university
level. Professional Slovak historians were also educated in
the Czechoslovak Republic between the Wars, and began to have
some influence. On the other hand, ‘Czechoslovak history’ was created
as an artificial construct in the Czechoslovak state, and this
powerfully enforced the image of the supposed, age-old shared
history of Czechs and Slovaks; the same thing happened with the
equally artificial – and thus anachronistic – ‘Czechoslovak territory’.
So, within this framework, the history of the Slovaks and of Slovakia
was relegated to a kind of appendix to Czech history.
This remained the position during the first decades of the re-established
post-Second World War Czechoslovakia, only now the
thousand-year continuity of Slovak history was rewritten through
the officially enforced Marxist interpretation of history as an unremitting
class struggle between the oppressed classes and the
exploiting classes. At the same time, social oppression was linked
to national oppression – on the part of ethnic German ruling classes
in the Czech lands and on the part of ethnic Magyar exploiters and
oppressors in Slovakia. However, from then on, in Czech synthetic
works of ‘Czechoslovak history’, the history of the Slovaks and of
Slovakia was still only a kind of appendix to Czech history.
From the 1960s onwards, Slovak publications on the history of Slovakia
did not baulk at treating the history of the Slovaks from the
early 10 th century to 1918 – that is, an entire thousand years – as
part of the history of the Kingdom of Hungary. This understanding
of Slovak history during ‘the Hungarian millennium’ is also found in
Slovak historiography after 1989, when the ideological dominance
of the Marxist, or supposedly Marxist, interpretation of our history
came to an end.
All these changing fortunes in the interpretation of Slovak history
were manifested in the course of just one century: the 20 th century,
a time when, thanks to education as well as to the press and the
electronic mass media, history could – and perhaps did – play a
177 Milan Zemko