Interhelpo: the Czechoslovak dream that turned into a Soviet nightmare

Czechast with Jaromír Marek, journalist and author who produced a TV documentary and a whole book about a story that takes us far from Central Europe—deep into the heart of Soviet Central Asia, to what is today Kyrgyzstan.

At the end of March of 1925, nearly exactly a hundred years ago that I am recording this episode, hundreds of Czechoslovak men and women packed up their lives and joined a bold, utopian project conceived by the Communist Party. Jaromír Marek followed the story for years:

Jaromír Marek|Photo: Martin Kozlovský, Czech Radio

“Interhelpo was a project organised mostly by Czechoslovak communists in the 1920s. It was the communist party which was advertising for it, organising those groups. And the people were mostly workers, not very educated, ordinary men and women, gathered in this project with the very idea to move to the Soviet Union.”

But this wasn’t just a political experiment—it was a massive life gamble. These were people who gave up everything for the dream:

“Many of them sold their houses, their properties, their fields, their little farms, and put the money together as a real commune, purchased some agricultural and even industrial means, and they travelled for months across the European part of Russia and finally they ended in a city, or it was not a city, it was just a station of caravans in that time, now the city of Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan.”

Joinery workshop built by Czechoslovak Interhelpo settlers|Photo repro: Jaromír Marek, 'Interhelpo'

And the dream didn’t last. As Stalin’s purges swept through the Soviet Union in the 1930s, many of the original Interhelpo settlers were arrested, imprisoned—or worse. For Jaromír Marek, speaking to survivors and their families left a lasting impact:

One of the participants of the Interhelpo mission was the later communist politician Alexander Dubček (center)|Photo repro: Jaromír Marek, 'Interhelpo'

“I must say it was a very, very powerful moment when I realised how brutal, how all these, it was based on complete brutality and nonsense, the system. But of course, I had the information before, but it was a very personal memory of a very particular, very concrete old lady.”

So join us as we uncover the nearly forgotten journey of the Czech, Moravian and Slovak communards who went east—not west—and paid a heavy price.

Departure of the first Interhelpo transport from the railway station in Žilina, 1925|Photo repro: Jaromír Marek, 'Interhelpo'