In the 16th century, a tiny village nestled in the valleys of Bohemia known as Jáchymov struck gold—or rather, silver. After a period of crisis in the Bohemian mining industry, the discovery of rich veins of silver exploded across Europe. The silver was minted into a new Bohemian coin, called the thaler. Later, during the reign of Charles V, the coin would spread across all of the German-speaking countries in Europe, its name adapting to fit the local language: known as daler, daelder, and eventually, the British-adopted word dollar. This coin’s offspring lives on in your pocket today as the American dollar.
While seemingly insignificant, this town’s claim to fame did not end in the 16th century, nor was it limited to coinage. In 1789, uranium was discovered in Jáchymov, prompting the Soviet Union to establish a system of gulags there, where they later forced prisoners to mine the element after World War II. The very village that established a naming convention for the currency of Western capitalism became the heart of the Soviet Union’s nuclear program—a contradiction that is anything but coincidental for this nation.
Czechia, home to the Bohemian region, has a legacy of both Western and Russian cultural imperialism. This history has contributed to diverging Czech perspectives on contemporary European politics, namely Europe’s position toward Russia, and the nation’s identity within a globalized European Union system. Prague’s legacy as one of Austria-Hungary’s main cities, as well as the historic German suppression of Czech culture, has left a lasting Western footprint on the region—yet Czechia is one of the most ethnically Slavic countries in Europe. The stigma surrounding Eastern Europe has led many Czechs to desperately deny their Slavic heritage, instead positioning themselves within Austria-Hungary or the Holy Roman Empire to cement their identity as Western. Yet this very empire allowed Germanic culture to nearly exterminate Czech culture. So while it is imperative that Czechia uphold Western democratic norms, it must also do so without latching onto hegemonic powers and without surrendering its Slavic national identity. Otherwise, it propagates an imperiousness toward Slavic culture that can potentially contribute to the widening split in Europe.
As seminal Czech novelist Milan Kundera said in his essay, “A Kidnapped West,” after the Iron Curtain fell across Europe, “several nations that had always considered themselves to be Western woke up to discover that they were now in the East.” After 1948, the same intellectual and artistic movements that helped shape Czech identity were brought under strict ideological control by a Soviet totalitarian apparatus. Kundera’s books were banned, and he himself was exiled and stripped of his Czech citizenship. Similar political prisoners were held in a system of gulags in the very same town of Jáchymov, where they were forced to mine uranium. Political prisoners began referring to themselves as “MUKLs,” standing for “men earmarked for liquidation” because of the abominable conditions and high death rate within the confines of the camps. To root out such political dissidents, the country was riddled with an army of secret police that listened for even the whisper of antiregime sentiment, upon which the speaker might suddenly lose their job, be expelled from university, or be sent to prison and tortured.
Soviet damage to Czech national identity has persisted past liberation. Decades of forced alignment with Moscow led many Czechs to associate Russia with political repression, reinforcing skepticism toward pan-Slavic identities and thus tainting the rich cultural roots connecting countries such as Czechia, Poland, Ukraine, and Slovakia.
The Germanic legacy that Czechs often cite in this effort to reject Slavic culture is one that has repeatedly threatened to erase the nation’s cultural identity. The majority-Catholic Habsburg Empire nearly destroyed Czech culture after an effort to elect a Protestant king, heralding not only the strict re-Catholization of the population, but also a new era of German-speaking control. Bohemia’s central administration, educational system, and even Church were eventually forced to adopt German as their sole language of instruction, resulting in the dismissal and suppression of Czech culture and the reduction of Czech from a language to “mere[ly] a dialect.”
Both Czech national identity and language were revitalized as a result of a cultural revolution that culminated in the establishment of an independent Czechoslovakia in 1918. However, elements of Germanic culture continue to persist today. These Germanic cultural influences draw a distinction between Czech and other Slavic cultures, creating a source of tension for Czechia’s national identity. For example, Czechia’s demographic composition differs from the rest of the Slavic region, with 68.3 percent of Czechs identifying as nonreligious in 2021. Only 0.3 percent of Czechs are Orthodox Christians, whereas 57 percent of Eastern Europeans identify with Orthodox Christianity. Additionally, in terms of Europe’s alcohol belts, which divide the continent into three regions based on alcoholic preferences, Czechia sits alongside Germany in the beer belt, rather than with its Slavic counterparts in the vodka belt. The decided split between Czechia and its Slavic siblings exemplifies a significant cultural divide.
After the country’s release from the Soviet Union’s orbit, Czechoslovakia’s new president, Vaclav Havel, called for the nation’s “return to Europe” in 1990. Thirty years later, the East-West cultural divide remains a central issue in Czech politics. During last fall’s parliamentary election season, former Prime Minister Petr Fiala said that “[This election is] about where the Czech Republic will go. Whether we remain a strong democracy, with full freedom, with prosperity, a country that is firmly part of the West…or whether we drift somewhere to the East.” Fiala’s callback to Soviet-era trauma exhibits just how precarious Czechia’s political identity has become. Two centuries as a cultural battleground between colonial, communist, and now capitalist regimes have resulted in a nation clinging to the promises of Western democracy yet tangled in Putin’s desire to regain control of Eastern Europe.
As the Kremlin strategically extends a welcoming hand through mass pro-Russian disinformation campaigns, this tension allows pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian coalitions across Central-Eastern Europe to take hold of political life. Nearly 18 percent of Slovaks want Russia to win the war, and both Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico vehemently oppose the European Union’s support for Ukraine. Across Central Eastern Europe, international coalitions against Ukraine, such as the one between Hungary, Slovakia, and Czechia, have cropped up in light of a populist party victory in the Czech parliamentary elections last fall. For Czechia, these shifting allegiances reflect the national identity crisis it is experiencing, pulled back and forth between the promise of Western belonging and a Slavic ethnic background that Putin is all too eager to exploit.
It is through these channels that the story of Jáchymov—a village that created the Western dollar only to later power the Eastern Soviet nuclear arms race against those same Western allies—parallels that of the Czech nation. Czech culture has been molded from all sides, whether it be through the suppression of Slavic culture as inferior by the West or the souring of pride in Slavic culture by a totalitarian regime in the East. Despite this interference, the Czech people have been able to continuously resurrect their distinct cultural heritage.
These forces are still in play. With Russia’s occupation of Ukraine, it is more crucial now than ever to join the West in the democratic fight against Putin’s authoritarianism. Yet, Czech leaders must take care in balancing Western values with a preservation of the nation’s ethnically Slavic culture, for the continual self-deprecation of these roots only serves to push Slavic countries into the greedy arms of Russia. Through the acceptance of Slavic roots, Central Eastern European countries can resist forces that weaponize identity politics in order to corrupt and exploit the region for their own gain. It is important for countries such as Czechia to neither slip too far to the East nor too far to the West, but rather stand proud as a Central European nation committed to democratic values and national self-determination.
Note: At the time of publication, Viktor Orbán is no longer Hungary’s prime minister, ending his 16 years in power.