Vilém Prečan, Chairman of the ČSDS Board

Foreign Minister, Ambassador, Ladies and Gentlemen, friends and colleagues,

The speeches of Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg and Ambassador Valerie Raymond, as well as the other speeches, papers, and documents that you will hear read out this evening, enable me to be very brief.

This evening’s programme and the two-day academic conference that follows, together with the exhibition that opens on Tuesday evening with a Czech-English catalogue illustrating in articles, photographs, and documents Skilling’s life and career, as well as the audio-visual interviews that will be shown at the exhibition, constitute this year’s Skilling project. In addition to this, however, Skilling will also be the topic of a history discussion programme on Czech Television, and, next year, a documentary film placing his life and work into the context of the historical events that he was concerned with. The respected documentary film-maker Lukáš Přibyl has already begun preparatory work on it.

It has already been said here why Gordon Skilling, his life and his works, merit such attention. We have been guided, however, not only by a sense of gratitude for, and recognition of, this great man’s contribution to helping us understand the past of the country in which we live, and for the fact that his works helped the world to learn, and continue to learn, about this country more than we ourselves have been able to do, and also for his contribution to our regaining the freedom that we enjoy today. To be concerned with the life and work of Gordon Skilling is a matter of being concerned with the historical memory of Czech society. Much of what happened in this country and the rest of the world during the half-century without freedom was concealed from contemporaries. Discovering this hidden past now serves to make it an integral part of the historical memory of present and future generations.

No matter how important his publications and activities connected with Czech and Czechoslovak history are, this was only part of Skilling’s work. He was concerned with the full range of international and national Communisms. As a teacher he worked in the United States and in Canada. Students attended his lectures and seminars all over the Western hemisphere and even in Japan, but not in central Europe.

We have a lot to catch up on and the preparations for this conference and exhibition have been, among other things, an impetus to take stock of the tasks that await Czech scholars of history and politics in the area of Skilling studies.

His books and articles were for decades forbidden in Czechoslovakia, and were almost inaccessible. Today, the Web makes it possible for many of these works to be available to Czech researchers and teachers. To prepare, with the permission of the publishers, a Skilling data base is the first task. At least a complete Skilling bibliography is now available on our Website.

The Czechoslovak Documentation Centre, a non-profit organization, has provided the impulse to make a Czech Wikipedia entry for Skilling. Ones in other languages should follow. On our website we have posted an overview of Skilling’s life and work in dates and we shall be posting further articles and documents in future. Since the Czech edition of Skilling’s memoirs is sold out, we are negotiating with the Prostor publishing house to digitize this large volume.

The Skilling Papers in the University of Toronto Archives, though catalogued, have for the most part not yet been researched. They comprise 164 archive boxes. Extremely valuable testimony is provided by the sets of his correspondence and the records of the interviews he conducted with many people in many countries for many years. Doing researching on them is another task we face.

We have Skilling’s memoirs, but we lack a critical historical work about this great twentieth-century figure. And something we cannot forget, and in this I hope our colleagues in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere will assist us, is compiling a set of recollections of encounters with Skilling as a teacher, a colleague, and a friend.

There will surely be more to do. I am merely outlining some of the lines of research that Czech scholars and their institutions can pursue in collaboration with their colleagues in institutions abroad, in order to make Skilling’s publications and also the treasures amongst his Papers fully available to ourselves and the whole international community of scholars.

There is one idea I have long had which just won’t let me be, and I must share it with you. For dozens of years there was a Masaryk Chair at the School of Slavonic and Eastern Studies (formerly part of the University of London, now University College London). It was the first and last of its kind; since then, there has been nothing like it in Czech historical studies. One can well imagine the great importance that a Skilling Chair of Czech and Czechoslovak History at the University of Toronto would have in arousing interest in the history of our country. A chair occupied regularly, let’s say, for three years by a Czech historian would be an institution that would undoubtedly also attract the interest of North American students. Year after year, a few seminars and later a B.A. or an M.A. degree in this field. An occasional Ph.D. culminating in a successful publication. Is this an overly ambitious objective? Utopian?

I will conclude with a recapitulation of the tasks and the dream. In the time that is left to me in these remarks, I extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone who helped make this project marking the centenary of Gordon Skilling’s birth a reality. Many institutions and individuals are responsible for its success, and I would need another ten minutes to name them all. We have at least drawn up a list of partner institutions, which is available here in photocopies and will be posted on the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre website. We were helped with funding by three private sponsors – Georgina Steinsky-Schwartz of Toronto, James Ottaway Jr of the United States, and Karel Janeček of the Czech Republic.

Of the many people who did a great deal of work to make this project a reality, I would first name a couple. Derek Paton, a Canadian with a Prague-born mother, who has been living in Prague since the summer of 1989, was the first with whom I shared the idea of having a Skilling commemorative event in 2012, though originally it was envisaged only as a modest symposium. I am indebted to him for many ideas and suggestions. He was a great help in many meetings, much correspondence, and searching for contacts. Together with his wife Marzia they also translated day and night loads of material into English and Czech. David Skilling, Gordon’s elder son, worked for the success of the conference and exhibition on the other side of the ocean, together with his wife, Jane, graphic designer. We are indebted to him for the large set of wonderful photographs and his research in the University of Toronto Archives.

I have left for the end the names of four of my close colleagues from the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre. Three ladies deserve the credit for making this project a reality – Helena Kašová, Jitka Hanáková, and Dorota Müllerová – together with Dominik Jůn, an Englishmen of Czech parents, who made the audiovisual presentation for the exhibition.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. I hope you enjoy the rest of the evening, the conference, and the exhibition.