CZECH, THE PRAGUE SPRING AND NATO BOMBS: A contribution to the study of the political history of the Czechs and Slovaks
Shevchenko, Kiril. 2024. Czechs, the Prague Spring and NATO Bombs: A Contribution to the Study of the Political History of the Czechs and Slovaks. Belgrade: Institute for Political Studies. ISBN 978-
86-7419-391-4
This monograph, which is both substantial in structure and in writing, was originally written in Russian under the title From Improvisation to Zugswang: The Prague Spring of 1968 and the Warsaw Pact, and was translated from Russian by Msc. Dajana Lazarević.
The author, Prof. Dr. Kiril Shevchenko, deals with the history of Czechoslovakia and points to the most important events that befell its political scene, including debunking the myth of the Prague Spring of 1968 and its consequences. All political fairy tales among the Slavs begin with stories about reforms, freedom, cultural development, the law of nations, the fight against censorship, free economic development, and end with the loss of identity, territory, people's lives, corruption and the use of Western bombs.
Although Shevchenko mainly deals with minority groups of Slavic peoples (Ruthenians and Sorbian Serbs), he is the author of studies and monographs on Czechs and Slovaks, issues related to the Union and identity, that is, Orthodoxy and Slavs, and thus makes important contributions to the study of neglected scientific issues for the Slavic world. In this sense, the book before the readers is not surprising, an epochal scientific material that has provided a kind of anatomy of the psychosocial portrait of the Czechs, their politics, but also the politics of the West and the politics of the USSR, and of course the Russians.
For those less familiar, the author Kirill Shevchenko is a professor at the Branch of the Russian State Social University (RGSU) in Minsk (Belarus). At the same time, he lectures at the Department of Russian History of the Smolensk State University (SMOLGU, Smolensk, Russia). He is the author of more than 200 publications in Russian, Serbian, Czech, English and Ruthenian, including five monographs. For decades, he has been one of the most active Russian-Belarusian authors in the Serbian lands. It can be said that Shevchenko is a people's diplomat in the field of science, because cooperation with Serbian colleagues also occurs outside of institutional support.
