Abstract
This text depicts the mechanisms that created the underworld and the profiles of people who formed a part of it in post-Second World War Czechoslovakia. The chronological framework is set between the end of the Second World War and the declaration of the so-called Socialist Constitution.
It therefore covers the establishment of the Communist monopoly on power in February 1948, the period of Stalinism, the post-Stalinist thaw after 1953, and the amendment of Communist policies in the second half of the 1950s. It also shows the continuities between the principles set at the end of the war and the politics of the post-1948 period, as well as points to several continuities which go back deep into the nineteenth century.
The existence of the underworld contrasts with the determination of the post-war political authorities to create a better and more moral society, which took radical forms after the establishment of the Communist monopoly on power. More precisely speaking, the underworld often grew out of this determination on the part of the authorities as well as from some specificities of the post-war welfare and economic politics.
The text illustrates these mechanisms using the example of a number of personal destinies. For this, it uses a variety of sources: criminal reports; interrogation protocols and intelligence of the Public Security Service (Verejna bezpecnost) and various departments of the National Security Corps (Sbor narodni bezpecnosti, SNB); reports of the National Committees (Narodni vATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH ACUTEbory) and of the Ministry of the Interior and legal norms.
The topic is approached from the perspective of the social and economic history of state-socialist regimes.