This article elaborates on two striking silences concerning the Communist prosecution of traitors in Poland between the 1950s and the 1960s: an absence of the concept of treason in the records of the secret police, prison administration, and the prosecution, and the historiographical silence regarding the political uses of psychiatry against dissenters and alleged traitors. Drawing on case studies of individuals prosecuted under Article 29 of the Minor Penal Code for the humiliation or ridicule of the Polish state or for fascist crimes, it shows how diagnoses of schizophrenia or paranoia enabled the compulsory confinement of citizens expressing anti-Communist and anti- Soviet attitudes in closed psychiatric institutions. The article thereby proposes an alternative genealogy of Communist punitive psychiatry and a comparative perspective that highlights potential continuities between two periods of ideological consolidation: the NEP and early Stalinist era, and the Polish postwar period. Therefore, it examines the critical nexus between the concept of social danger, the identification of traitors and social enemies, and the role of psychiatric confinement within this system of ideological policing. Finally, it argues that the flexible and disguised categories of treason under Polish Communism, together with the pathologization of dissent and ideological disloyalty, point to an underlying biopolitical and disciplinary project that enabled the terror of the prosecution of actual and potential deviant behavior, the shaping of the socialist personality, and the construction of socialism as a lived social reality.
Among the new states established in East Central Europe after the First World War, Czechoslovakia was the most democratic – and the most precarious. In order to defend the state against domestic political threats, the authorities relied on Austrian and Hungarian penal law, which, however, they soon found to be insufficient for both practical and ideological reasons. Czechoslovak legislators therefore looked to older republics for examples of how to protect the state’s democratic constitution. In March 1923, parliament passed the Law for the Protection of the Republic (Zákon na ochranu republiky), which covered both crimes traditionally considered to constitute high treason and attempts to change the “democratic-republican state form.” Unlike the Austrian and Hungarian legal codes, the law thus formulated an expectation that citizens’ loyalty extend from the state as such to a specific political system. This article analyzes how the law’s genesis, its specific stipulations, and its early application bear witness to Czechoslovakia’s transition from a post-imperial ad-hoc creation to a fully institutionalized nation-state. As such, the law reflected both of the paradoxes of militant democracy and the post-imperial ironies that abound in the history of the first Czechoslovak Republic.
The article depicts major approaches in recent Polish historiography (2015–2025) on Central European betrayals by analyzing and comparing works written, amongst others, by Agnieszka Haska, Adam Danilczyk, Andrzej Nowak, Jan Pomorski, and Piotr M. Majewski. The principal part is divided into three segments: the first on popular history writings; the second on historiosophical works; the third on regional analyses. Those examples indicate such phenomena as: the difference in reasons for studying treason between conservative and non-conservative scholars; the essentialization of Central Europe as a betrayed land; the assumption of the intersubjective character of treason. The core of the article is supplemented by an autoethnographic appendix on the process of learning how to write a history of treason.
Slovak political Catholicism was an important and controversial part of Slovak political thinking, represented by the Hlinka Slovak People’s Party during the first half of the 20th century. The party is known for its undermining of democracy, suppression of fundamental human and civil rights, and implementation of policies and ideologies inspired by fascism. Between 1940 and 1942, the party advocated the so-called Slovak National Socialism, an ideology based on the social teachings of the Catholic Church and German National Socialism. This study examines Slovak political Catholicism and its radicalization through the lens of Catholic modernism. It demonstrates that the innovation of conservative Catholic thinking and the adoption of fascist elements are specific Catholic responses to secularization, forming part of Catholic modernism.
