Hezké dětství, nebo každodenní boj o přežití? Rodinné zázemí a mladá léta Miloše Jakeše

The study focuses on the childhood and youth of Miloš Jakeš, a leading functionary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, who held the highest office of General Secretary from 1987 to 1989. Based on local archival sources, personal documents and critical analysis of memoirs, it seeks to examine his life story before entering politics, especially his childhood experiences growing up on the rural periphery of South Bohemia in the 1920s and his subsequent move to the Bata Company in Zlín for education and work. The aim is to identify the influences that shaped Jakeš’s personality and his worldview and to answer the questions of which social group in interwar Czechoslovakia the young Jakeš represented and what role social determinants, background influences as well as plain coincidence played in his later career. The text attempts to broaden the knowledge of the social backgrounds of the elites of state-socialist Czechoslovakia, what were the possible sources of their social mobility, and whether it started before their entry into politics.