David Vaughan

One thing that was not cultivated in communist Czechoslovakia was the art of public speaking. Anyone of a certain age will remember the endless monologues of party…

By the mid 1960s political control over many aspects of cultural and social life in Czechoslovakia had relaxed considerably. This was the height of the “New Wave” in…

In last week’s From the Archives we featured Martin Luther King, interviewed by Czechoslovak Radio in 1963. But Dr King was not the first civil rights campaigner to…

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal…

Martin Brown is an English historian with a particular interest in twentieth century Czechoslovak history. His mother is Czech and he speaks both languages fluently…

The early 1960s saw dramatic developments in the Cold War, with the building of the Berlin Wall and then the brinkmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But there were also…

Czechoslovakia played an active part in the Soviet Union’s propaganda war with the United States during the 1950s, a time of edginess and paranoia on both sides. There was…

Jan Rybář has spent the best part of the last two decades at the sharp end of news reporting. As a correspondent he has travelled the world, witnessing the collapse of the…

Even after the death of Stalin in the Soviet Union and Klement Gottwald in Czechoslovakia the 1950s remained a period of high political tension between East and West. The…

When Joseph Stalin died on March 5 1953, it sent shockwaves round the world. In Czechoslovakia his personality cult had been almost as overwhelming as in the Soviet Union…