Karel Bartosek

Karel Bartošek is a French historian of Czech origin. Karel Bartošek was born into a working-class background. He began studying history and became a university professor. While he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia at a very young age, he questioned the official history of the liberation of Prague in books translated into English and German. He participated in the Prague Spring in 1968, following which he was fired and expelled from the Party.

An article in Les Temps Modernes made him known in France. He then lived in Prague doing various small jobs (courier, night watchman, school supervisor, etc.). He was sentenced to six months in prison in 1972. A human rights defender, he is listed as a dissident by Amnesty International and accused by the Czechoslovak communist regime of being "anti-communist" and an "agent of capitalist imperialism." 

In 1982 he fled to France, where he brought his family. Karel Bartošek joins the CNRS . The following year, he was stripped of his Czech nationality. In 1986, he relaunched the review founded in 1979 by François Maspero, L'Alternative, under the title La Nouvelle Alternative 2. He denounces the excesses and abuses of communist regimes without being an "anti-communist."

His work Les Confessions des archives, published in 1996, is based on unpublished archives. It triggers a controversy because even if they no longer belong to communist parties, the defenders of Soviet-type communism are still numerous. But Karel Bartošek makes many revelations: Raymond Aubrac represented the French Communist Party in search of funding from the Czechoslovak communist regime; in order not to lose voters, Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communist Party, wanted to delay the announcement of the rehabilitation of those convicted of major trialsStalinists; as for Jacques Duclos, of the French Communist Party, he regularly visited the ruling Communist parties in the east to raise funds for the PCF 3. 

But the controversy mainly concerns Artur London, whose story inspired the film, L'Aveu de Costa-Gavras. London had been condemned during the Stalinist trials in 1952. Still, Karel Bartošek reveals that previously London had also been a "Stalinist" who boasted in 1949 of having "unmasked" Noel Field, a dissident communist whose trial served as a pretext at the opening of the "purge 4". Karel Bartošek points out that the "purges" of that time were intended to prevent the rise of equivalents of Tito, who could challenge Stalin's supremacy. 

They are preventive and do not target opponents, unlike those of the 1930s. Subsequently, they will target either democratic communists or non-communist democrats. Historians violently attack his work, like Denis Peschanski or like Alexandre Adler, a friend of London 5. In 1997, Karel Bartošek participated in the drafting of the Black Book of Communism. Still, he strongly contested the final result, among others, the rapprochement made by Stéphane Courtois between Nazism and Communism.