The study focuses on the history of the Russian white émigrés in the then Czechoslovakia. The author shows that the white émigrés were perceived by the then Czechoslovak government as the future intelligentsia for new free Russia and for independent and free Ukraine. The emigrants were offered the opportunity of completing their studies, continuing their creative activities, or extending their education. The emigrants founded their own professional institutions, organized social life even for the Czech majority to make it familiar with the Russian culture. To the Czech environment, they translocated some of their festivals associated with Orthodoxy and folk tradition. After the Czechoslovak-Soviet Treaty of Alliance was signed (1935), the emigrants´ position got worse. The activity of domestic communists introduced Soviet festivities to Czechoslovakia. After 1945, new Soviet citizens arrived in Czechoslovakia, and the white émigrés became a persecuted group. Some of them were abducted to Soviet forced labour camps (Gulag) by Russian bodies. The domestic communists implanted new Soviet festivals, feasts and ceremonies – Great October Socialist Revolution celebrations, Grandfather Frost and others – with the help of the Association of CzechoslovakSoviet Friendship in Czechoslovakia. In 2001, the Czech Republic officially acknowledged the Russian national minority that got its historical rights as a minority thanks to the Russian white émigrés in the 1920s. Several associations within the minority try to renew original Russian traditions and feasts in the Czech environment.
This study focuses on the ethno-cultural situation in one of the regions of the Czech borderland, from where almost the entire population was displaced after the Second World War. Ethnographic, historical and geographical methods were used for the research. The studied region consists of the small town of Tachov and 12 surrounding municipalities, which include a total of 38 settlements. Before the Second World War, the Tachov area was inhabited almost exclusively with people of German ethnicity. After the war, most of these people were displaced to Germany under the Potsdam Agreements. The area was then inhabited by various groups of Slavic inhabitants from the Czechoslovak interior and other countries, including Czechs and Slovaks from the Czechoslovak interior who were looking for a chance for a new life across the border, and repatriates from the Czech or Slovak minorities in Volhynia, Hungary, Romania. The study shows how the seemingly ethnically homogeneous structure of the population is in fact culturally differentiated. It turns out that the data on the ethnic structure of the population do not reflect the real cultural diversity of the region. It is necessary to use other statistical data that describe the cultural structure indirectly. Above all, however, it is necessary to carry out ethnographic research which can both characterize the current state and contribute to its explanation using the historical method.
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