Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

Stanislav Budín - Communist outlawed by the party

Publication at Faculty of Social Sciences |
2015

Abstract

Stanislav Budín represented a type of journalist who was always influenced by ideology, both in his work and in his life. We can find the origins of this attitude in his childhood in the Russian part of Galicia.

As a Jew he faced many restrictions (being barred from studying, for instance). He left his family in 1921 and after some time settled down in Czechoslovakia, where he started to work for the Communist Party political newspaper in 1934.

In the second half of the 1920s and during the 1930s the party was divided into a number of groups with different outlooks. The party paper could not ignore the disputes that stemmed from this unpleasant situation.

Budín became a member of the Communist Party, quickly became involved in its organization and in 1934 became editor-in-chief of the communist paper Rudé právo. The book mainly explores Budín's efforts to organize cooperation between communist and socialist parties in the struggle against Nazism.

The leaders of the Communist International in Moscow mostly refused to cooperate with socialist parties in the fight against Hitler in 1935; this led to Budín being thrown out of the Communist Party over his views. Later he tried to return but was repeatedly rebuffed.

During WWII Budín lived in the USA. He supported Beneš's wing of the foreign anti-Nazi revolt (President Beneš directed Czechoslovakia to ally with the USSR).

After his return to Czechoslovakia he was a supporter of the Communist Party and in 1950 was given a position in the clippings archive. In 1966 Budín started to work at the journal Reportér, which he headed for a year and a half from 1968.

In 1969 he retired and wrote his memoirs. In December 1976 he signed the Charter 77 protest document.

This thesis is based on the hypothesis that Stanislav Budín is a prototype of the ideological journalist. His work at Rudé právo in the 1930s, at New Yorské Listy and on radio after 1945, as well as his articles in Kulturní politika and Reportér, belong to the political press category.

He predominantly supported the ideas of one political movement or party and tried to influence public opinion.