Zápotocký: Příliš mnoho životů / Zápotocký: Too Many Lives

Antonín Zápotocký was one of the most prominent figures of the communist movement. He was connected with the party from its very beginnings and remained at the highest levels of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) until his death in 1957. The public knows many of his faces: a writer constructing his own image in the socialist realist novel Red Glow over Kladno; a prisoner in Sachsenhausen who, in the 1950s, himself sent others behind bars; a party functionary who attempted to replace Baby Jesus with Grandfather Frost in a ushanka and fur coat; and the Czechoslovak president who became a symbol of the 1953 currency reform. What lies behind the enduring myth of the “kind father of the working people,” and what is the real legacy and body of work of a man associated with the emancipation of the working class, the founding of the KSČ, its Bolshevization at the end of the 1920s, the seizure of power, and the subsequent dictatorship? Zápotocký: Too Many Lives by historian Michal Stehlík is a comprehensive portrait of a deeply contradictory personality.