Ladislav Holy. The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation:
National Identity and the Post-Communist Social Transformation.
Cambridge, England, and New York: Cambridge University Press,
1996. x + 204 pp. $44.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-55584-5; $85.00
(cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-55469-5. Reviewed by T. Mills Kelly
(Grinnell College) Published on HABSBURG (December, 1996) Was
Svejk a Whig in Disguise? Those familiar with Czech political
history can almost recite the Whig version of events in their
sleep: the oppressed Czech people waged a struggle first for
autonomy and then for independence from the Habsburgs in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; in 1918 Tomas
Masaryk and his loyal minions Edvard Benes and Milan Stefanik
founded Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in interwar East
Central Europe; following the triple tragedy of Munich, the war,
and the Communist coup d'etat, the Czech people were relegated
to forty years of domination by a Communist regime controlled
from Moscow. In 1989 the oppress