Michael Quinn

One of the landmarks of Czechoslovak literary scholarship during the Cold War was Milada Souckova's A Literary Satellite: Czechoslovak-Russian Literary Relations, in which she describes the dynamics of Soviet cultural imperialism by using Czechoslovakia as an East-European paradigm. The current widespread relief, both in Russia and elsewhere, over the dissolution of Soviet-style Communist rule in Europe has not, however, eliminated the problem of “satellite” cultures. Tito's Yugoslavia was for years the model of a multi-national state that could provide a Communist alternative to Stalinism, yet the recent terror in Bosnia has made it only too clear how power in the service of political ambition was merely repressed and contained in Yugoslavia, not eliminated from provincial ideology. Another potentially “multi-national” satellite was modern Czechoslovakia, which was greatly simplified under the Warsaw Pact specifically to avoid such comparisons and tensions. Unlike the former Yugoslav states, which were provinces in a relatively independent country, Slovakia was to some extent a satellite of a satellite. Whether it is preferable for such a small country to declare its independence, which the Slovaks have finally done for themselves, of course remains to be seen. But there is a sense in which the Slovaks, despite what are often the best intentions of their stronger partners, have for a long time been doubly obscured, doubly dominated and also doubly determined to assert their autonomy. As the focus of political resistance writing and its scholarly appreciation moves, in work like Barbara Harlow's, into the third world, it may be well to keep in mind that the history of reform writing is still not done in Eastern Europe, especially when the rebirth of nations often includes, as it may in Slovakia, the rebirth of a repressed, insufficiently examined fascism.

If it seems odd to some proponents of contemporary cultural studies, with its Marxist basis, to think of a Marxist imperialism, such was nevertheless the case in the history of Stalinist expansion. The different but sensible theories of imperialism that Marx and Lenin proposed become just

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