Moscow as one of the centers of the Czechs and Slovaks in Russia (late 19th - early 20th century)
Based on the study and analysis of published memoirs and correspondence, as well as materials from Russian, Czech and Slovak archives, an attempt is made to reconstruct the life of the Czechs and Slovaks in Moscow in the late 19th - early 20th centuries. The main source is the memoirs of the Czech Fyodor Kovarzhik, who lived in Russia for many years. Any historian will confirm that memoirs are a very subjective thing, and they must be treated very carefully, comparing them with other sources. Moreover, Kovarzhik's memoirs, published in the 1930s, caused a very controversial reaction of the Czech political establishment. Although the reviews claimed that the author often sinned by distorting the actual reality, the reason for the critical reviews of the book was clearly pro-Russian views of the author, who claimed that in pre-revolutionary Russia, the life of the Czechs and Slovaks, as a rule, developed successfully. This did not correspond to the official concept of Czechoslovakia's foreign policy. Russian czarism and Bolshevism were viewed equally negatively by the President of the Republic, T. G. Masaryk, and the entire ruling group of Grad, hoping for the evolution of the Bolshevik regime and trying to rely on the Russian “democratic forces” that they purposefully gathered and supported in Czechoslovakia as part of the “Russian action to help Russian emigration”. Kovarzhik was declared a right-wing, conservative, pro-czarist author. The book has not been reprinted, although it contains a lot of interesting details about the life of the Czechs and Slovaks in Russia and is worthy of translation into Russian. Separate chapters and passages of the book are devoted to the colony of the Czechs and Slovaks in Moscow.