Hana Kubátová

Senior Fellow (02/2026 – 07/2026)

Fascists into Communists? Opportunism and Survival across Autocracies

This project investigates how mid-level collaborators of the fascist Slovak state—teachers, clergy, lawyers, and local bureaucrats—moved into influential posts under the communist regime after 1948. Rather than treating collaboration as a fixed label or purely ideological choice, it examines how survival, ambition, and pragmatism enabled adaptation across autocracies. While most scholarship views fascism and communism as distinct, even opposing regimes, it reveals striking continuities, showing how “former people” compromised by wartime roles rebranded themselves as loyal citizens. Drawing on archival documents, oral history, and personal records, it explores the blurred boundaries between complicity and survival, and how autocracies rely not only on loyalists but on those adept at navigating power. By tracing these reinventions, the project offers new insight into how autocracies are sustained locally, why certain historical legacies remain unresolved, and how political transitions in 20th-century Slovakia challenge simplified narratives of rupture.

Hana Kubátová is a historian and political scholar based at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University, Prague. Her research explores how ideologies take root, adapt, and persist during periods of upheaval, with a particular focus on mid-level actors in fascist and communist East Central Europe. Her work has appeared in journals such as Nations & Nationalism, Contemporary European History, Holocaust Studies, and East European Politics & Societies, with a forthcoming article in the Journal of Genocide Research. Her latest book, Christian Nationalism, Nation-Building, and the Making of the Holocaust in Slovakia, was published by Oxford University Press.  

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