2018 09/27 Martin Nekola

Martin Nekola

"For The Freedom of Captive European Nations: Eastern European Exiles in Postwar America

Martin Nekola is a political scientist and historian, born and residing in Prague, Czech Republic. He received PhD in political science in 2012 from Charles University in Prague. His current research project is focused on the Czechoslovak Exile after 1948 and Czech communities in the USA. He is the author of three hundred articles and has published ten books in the past ten years. In the recent years, he was awarded many prestigious fellowships such as Fulbright research fellow at Columbia University; Platzman research fellow, University of Chicago; Hoover Institution International scholar.

Summary

The talk explores a poorly known story of the formation and development of organizations of political exiles from the countries of East-Central and South-East Europe in the USA in the early years of the Cold War. This story is reconstructed based on a longtime research in both United States’ and European archives, that has revealed historical facts largely unknown to the students of the Cold War anti-communist movements in exile. The talk considers in a comparative perspective political organizations and individual representatives of the Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian and other groups of exiles. Their role and standing within their movements will be explained and evaluated in the context of evolving international politics of the first decade of the Cold War (1946-1956).