Přehled o publikaci

Children’s magazines in Czechoslovakia, following Soviet practice, initiated a “correspondents’ movement” in their pages at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s. Between 1949 and 1951, the key role in popularizing child correspondents was played above all by the weekly magazine Vpřed, a periodical for older children aged ten to fourteen. Child correspondents were presented as collaborators of the editorial staff. In addition to submitting their literary and artistic works, which already had a long tradition in children’s magazines, correspondents were expected to report on current events in their local surroundings. The editorial board of Vpřed soon began to give preference to “news-style” contributions and thus used its readers to promote the newly emerging Pioneer movement in Czechoslovakia. At the same time, correspondent activity became one of the means of recruiting children into the Czechoslovak Youth Union Pioneer Organization (Pionýrská organizace ČSM) in schools. The editors deliberately drew on the formal model of the readers’ club movement, which had had a strong tradition in Vpřed but was forced to cease to exist at the beginning of 1949. The correspondents’ contributions were bound by a number of instructions, turning the correspondents into heralds of the new order and exemplars of the young generation’s political engagement. In this way, the phenomenon of child correspondents contributed to the post-February crisis of children’s magazines, whose content rapidly degenerated into the promotion of communist ideas and the educational doctrine of the new regime.