Abstrakt
In the inter-war period the Czechoslovak workers'' co-operative Interhelpo in a Czechoslovak environment symbolised an ideal of internationalist success, which had no small impact on the formation of the inter-war left, as well as on the relationship of the wider public towards the "land of the Soviets". Both are reflected in the works of Peter Jilemnický and Jiří Weil, even if their literary work relating to Interhelpo was written from different motivations.
Whilst for the Slovak author the text on Interhelpo represented a point of departure from the radical left-wing positions of the 1920s, for the Czech writer it can be conceived, with a certain degree of hyperbole, as an existential enterprise. Both their literary texts and their similar yet divergent fates nevertheless point to the complicated and certainly far from black and white development of the inter-war Czechoslovak left, which in connection with its relationship towards the Soviet Union merits wider attention.