Through the Labyrinth of Revolution

Historian Jiří Suk in his book Labyrinth of Revolution: Actors, plots and crossroads of a political crisis deals with the Czechoslovak November Revolution of 1989 in a synthetic way, based on a thorough study, with critical insight and at the same time with a sense of the dramatic nature of the material. At its centre is both the Civic Forum as an actor of political change and the struggle for power and the shape of the incipient social transformation. In the first part, the author traces the chaotic formation of the power counterweight to the communist "state party", depicts the ideas of Václav Havel and other protagonists about politics and traces their dissident roots and transformations under the pressure of "real politics", It presents the clashes and compromises of individual political subjects in the game for power during the negotiations at the "round table" and during the reconstruction of governments, compares the different dynamics of development in the Czech lands and in Slovakia, and concludes its interpretation by describing the manoeuvres around the presidential election of Václav Havel as a key point in the first phase of the takeover of power. In the second part, the author analyses a number of topics that dominated political events in the first half of 1990: the split in opinion and organisation of the Civic Forum and the germination of new political parties in its womb, disputes over the reconstruction of the legislature, the shape of the electoral law and economic reform, the outbreak of the Czech
-Slovak conflict in the "dash war", the problem of the State Security and its agents, the different approaches to the Communist Party and to dealing with its legacy, the difficulties in communication and in relations between the centres of political power, outlines the situation and prospects of the Civic Forum after the victorious elections as a key point in the second phase of the revolution.

The author guides the reader through the intricate path of living history with the ever-present awareness that it did not unfold in a clear-cut direction, but was the result of variously acting and constantly changing vectors of political forces, branching into developmental alternatives and knotted at the crossroads of power strategies and conflicts. It does not squeeze events into "transitological" and other schemes, nor does it get carried away by the actors' retrospective self-projections, On the contrary, by comparing and analysing a wide range of sources - the most important of which are the transcripts of tape recordings from the meetings of the Civic Forum's governing bodies and interviews with its representatives - it attempts to reconstruct the events in their multifaceted and ambiguous form, and only in its medium does it examine the adequacy of historical, political science or sociological concepts and typologies. On this basis, it attempts to answer a number of fundamental questions about the nature of the period under study and its defining forces, and also outlines the political characteristics of some of the key figures.

Jiří Suk (1966) studied history and archives and postgraduate political science at Charles University in Prague. He is a research fellow at the Institute for Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where he focuses on the history of the communist regime after February 1948, the intellectual and political legacy of dissent and the post-communist transformation after November 1989. In addition to a number of scholarly publications, he has made his mark on the general reading public with Labyrinth of Revolution (2003, 2009), for which he received the Magnesia Litera Prize. In 2013 he published the book Politics as Absurd Drama. Václav Havel in 1975-1989.

From the moment of its publication, this comprehensive book must be counted among the main sources and the first serious analyses of post-Soviet development, without the study of which any further work on the subject will be incomplete

Jan Bures, Letters

Suk's book is the first attempt to take an overall view of what we have come to think of as the November Revolution, and h