A mini-Comintern in Central Europe: Rethinking interwar Czechoslovak communism

Following her acclaimed Security Empire: The Secret Police in Communist Eastern Europe (2020), historian Molly Pucci has published a new monograph examining communist and left-wing movements in interwar Czechoslovakia within the broader framework of Central Europe and the global ambitions of the Communist International (Comintern). Appropriately, Pucci does not confine her analysis to the boundaries of a single nation-state. Instead, much like the actors she studies, she approaches communists and their allies as participants in the transnational networks of the Comintern and its national sections. At the center of her account stands the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC), a multiethnic political project that enjoyed considerable electoral support and remained the only legal communist party in Central Europe throughout the interwar period.

Yet this is not a conventional party history built around congresses, factional struggles, and organizational developments. Across five thematic chapters devoted to intellectual history, the national question, journalism, literature and art, and law and class justice, Pucci reconstructs the vibrant intellectual world of a multinational revolutionary movement marked by both ideological creativity and organizational discipline. Drawing on an impressive range of archival, scholarly, and literary sources, she highlights the tensions that shaped communist politics and culture. Compared with fascism and Nazism, the intellectual milieu of interwar communism appears here as both more ideologically diverse and more intellectually sophisticated, even as it remained embedded within the hierarchical structures of the Comintern.

Although the book promises a study of the interwar period as a whole, its primary focus is the 1920s. As a result, developments associated with the Stalinization of the CPC after 1929 and the rise of Klement Gottwald receive comparatively limited attention. At the same time, the book’s transnational and multilingual perspective is one of its greatest strengths. Pucci effectively revives Central Europe as a meaningful analytical category, moving beyond frameworks shaped by the bipolar logic of the Cold War. Her narrative ranges from Berlin and Poland to the Soviet Union and beyond Europe, while within Czechoslovakia it encompasses not only Prague and Brno but also the borderlands and Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Like the communist leaders, couriers, instructors, and activists who populate the book, Pucci moves effortlessly across national and linguistic boundaries. The result is a richly multidimensional study that convincingly demonstrates how difficult it is to understand the post-1945 communist order without appreciating the legacies of interwar communism.

The opening chapter, “Two Types of Communists,” explores the eclectic roots of both communism and the CPC. Pucci depicts the party as a remarkably flexible organization whose members combined parliamentary activism with strike organization and legal political engagement with clandestine activities. The chapter traces how the relative pluralism of the mid-1920s gradually gave way to the disciplining forces of Stalinization, including political education at Moscow’s International Lenin School. Communist writers such as Josef Hora, Karel Teige, and Ivan Olbracht illustrate the intellectual dynamism of the movement and demonstrate the close relationship between communist politics and broader cultural developments.

In “A Small Central Europe,” Pucci examines the formation of a transnational communist identity and presents the CPC as a “mini-Comintern,” functioning simultaneously as a communication hub and a refuge for communist exiles from neighboring countries. The chapter is particularly effective in demonstrating the shifting balance between internationalist commitments and national considerations in communist politics. “Journalistic Dreams and Nightmares of Bolshevism” turns to the communist press, emphasizing its central role in communication, mobilization, and political education. While the chapter provides a useful overview of the multilingual and politically diverse communist press, specialists on Czechoslovakia may find its treatment somewhat selective. Notably absent is Došlo na slova komunistů (2024), the recent source edition devoted to the interwar communist press.

“Life is Poetry!” situates the communist movement within the broader landscape of European modernism through its discussion of the avant-garde group Devětsil and the writer Jiří Weil. Although parts of the chapter read more as a concise introduction to the avant-garde and Soviet literature than as a contribution to communist history, this contextualization will be particularly valuable for readers unfamiliar with Central European cultural history. At the same time, Pucci uses Weil’s trajectory to illuminate the broader experiences of communist intellectuals across the twentieth century, including the changing reception of their work after their deaths.

The strongest chapter is arguably “The International Search for Class Justice,” which examines law, surveillance, and the concept of “class justice.” Pucci analyzes state monitoring of the radical left as well as major international campaigns surrounding political trials, from Georgi Dimitrov to Sacco and Vanzetti. She demonstrates how communist organizations transformed such cases into powerful instruments of international mobilization, using them to publicize political goals, cultivate martyrs, and expose what they regarded as the structural injustices of capitalism and fascism. Particularly compelling is her analysis of the shifting position of communist activists across the twentieth century: some moved from being targets of state repression in the interwar era to becoming agents of repression within postwar security institutions, only to become victims once again during intra-party purges. The career of Karel Šváb offers a striking illustration of these reversals. Pucci also highlights Moscow’s persistent interventions in the interpretation of both interwar and postwar political trials. As she notes, while “judicial murder” became a common term for the post-1948 show trials, similar language had already been employed in interwar communist campaigns against the prosecution of party activists.

Although the specifically Central European dimension recedes somewhat in this chapter, it provides one of the book’s most significant contributions by demonstrating the centrality of legal activism and communist lawyers to the movement as a whole. It also illustrates how the Comintern expanded its political reach into previously neglected rural and socially marginalized regions.

Pucci’s command of the relevant scholarship and source material is evident throughout the book. In the concluding chapter, “The Legacy of the 1920s and the Idea of Central Europe,” she argues that after 1933 Prague emerged as the principal center of Central European communism outside the Soviet Union, offering space for debates that could at times be more open than those conducted in Moscow itself. Her treatment of the interwar CPC carefully balances continuity and change. On the one hand, she emphasizes the party’s roots in the political and social world of the late Habsburg Empire and its anti-fascist activism, which contributed significantly to its postwar prestige. On the other hand, she shows how the growing influence of nationalism and antisemitism alienated some long-standing party members, including figures such as Karel Kreibich.

The interwar CPC also served as a formative environment for many postwar communist leaders, including both hardline Stalinists of the 1950s and reform-oriented communists of the 1960s, as well as influential officials elsewhere in East Central Europe. Ultimately, however, neither the party nor the region could escape the growing influence of Stalinism. As Pucci suggests, Stalin’s writings—above all the Short Course—came to symbolize ideological orthodoxy and centralization in the Soviet Union, while in parts of Central Europe they could initially be perceived as a form of resistance to the totalitarian challenge posed by Nazism.

Pucci has produced a thought-provoking and ambitious study that offers a fresh perspective on the role of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia within the international communist movement. Multilingual, transnational, and intellectually expansive, the book successfully bridges national historiographies while demonstrating the continued value of Central Europe as a category of historical analysis. It will be of interest not only to historians of communism but to anyone concerned with the political and cultural transformations of twentieth-century Europe.