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Th is text looks at the early Communist intellectual movement in Slovakia (in an area that, for part of the time under discussion, was affi liated with the the Hungarian Soviet Republic) organized around the journal Kassai Munkás (Th e Košice Worker). By placing this movement in the context of the development of Western Marxism and the incipient Marxist aesthetics of György Lukács, who was among those who published in the journal, the paper characterizes the movement's contribution to discussions of the meaning of proletarian culture, which elaborated on the concept of social culture developed by Lukács in his radical period.

This paper focuses on the development of the political thought of Czech Marxist philosopher Egon Bondy. It examines his criticism of state socialism in the Eastern Block from a Marxist perspective, and it outlines the development of his analysis. The study covers the period from the late 1960s until the Velvet Revolution in 1989, a period during which Bondy explored the historical constitution and nature of a ‘new ruling class’ in the USSR, as well as deeper trends of convergence between Eastern and Western politico-economical systems. In the 1980s Bondy analysed the reasons for the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. Even though Bondy was, during most of the period of state socialism between 1948–89, a forbidden author, he was also one of the main critics of the political approach of Charta 77 and Václav Havel. This criticism is also outlined in the paper.

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Abstract Football, the most popular game all over the world, reached the territory of todayʼs Czech Republic in the last decades of the 19th century. In Prague districts and suburbs especially, many Czech and German sport associations started to engage in this sport activity originally born in Britain. The sudden and long-lasting interruption of a positive development due to the mobilization in summer 1914 along with significant political and social changes following the end of First World War, isolated pre-war events and made of them the unique relict environment which forms the main topic of this paper. Leaving sports results aside, the study describes the period after 1900 in which football clubs were established, the enthusiastic amateur transformed into a professional player, loyalty to different teams stemmed on the basis of nationality and social status and football moved from the suburbs’ playgrounds to newly-built, larger and better-quality arenas.