SLAVIC 144: Communism and the Politics of Culture: Czechoslovakia and the Cold War in Eastern Europe

First-year students: Welcome to Harvard! Please feel free to email me at jbolton@fas.harvard.edu if you have any questions about this course! I encourage all first-year students to take a 100-level course in the humanities -- a smaller seminar that will introduce you in a structured way to big questions about politics, history, or literature. This is such a course, which will mix lecture and discussion as you encounter the European experience with the Cold War and Communism from the 1940s up until 1989.

Professor Jonathan Bolton
Tu Th 10:30 am - 11:45 am
Fall 2026

What was Communism, and how did it shape the intellectual life of East Central Europe after World War II? How do artists and writers counter the ideological pressures of the state? What role, if any, can literature, film, and art play in political liberation? This course will examine the literature and film of Czechoslovakia within the larger context of European history during the Cold War, with a focus on how the intense political pressures of revolution, invasion, and occupation can shape a country’s literature, drama, art, and music.

Starting from the 1948 Communist takeover in Prague, we will learn about the show trials of the 1950s, the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of 1968, the rise of the Czech "New Wave" in film, the music underground and dissident movement in the 1970s, and the Velvet Revolution, a hallmark of the peaceful overthrow of Communism in Europe in 1989. We will examine institutions of cultural control like censorship and the rise of the opposition publishing networks known as samizdat (and we'll have the opportunity to see and handle authentic examples of samizdat from the collections in Widener Library). This course will introduce you to the history of Eastern Europe during the Cold War, with special attention to key problems in the study of ideology, aesthetics, and politics.

All readings are in English, and no prior knowledge of Czech history or East European history is required. 

Here is the syllabus from spring 2025, when the course was last taught. It received Q scores of 4.89 for "course overall" and 5.0 for "Instructor overall." I will make a few changes for fall 2026, but the main sections of the course will remain the same. 

Please feel free to contact me at jbolton@fas.harvard.edu if you have any questions!