Comrades and spies

Abstract

When Czechs consider their involvement in the global colonial system, they usually imagine themselves as the victims of Soviet imperial power. This is the case among those Czech anthropologists whose research under state socialism was tightly circumscribed. But focusing on this history alone enables Czech scholars to obscure their nation's participation in “colonialism without colonies” and to maintain presumptions of “colonial innocence.” In fact, Czechs themselves imposed internal colonialism on the Roma and on people living in the country's sub‐Carpathian region. Some Czech scholars are increasingly reflecting on Czech colonialism, but others still perceive the decoloniality debate as a Western import in the postsocialist era. Nonetheless, anthropology's decolonizing projects may offer ways forward, helping us understand how Cold War imaginaries persist in academia.