Research Reflection

The last part of the IA project is a reflection on the historical process and insights I gained through the research.

This investigation taught me the importance of analyzing and understanding the source of primary evidence. For example, the conciliatory language used in government documents would understate tensions. However, relying on interviews or international news coverage of games would likely overstate animosity since the most anti- Soviet are the most likely to talk with foreign correspondents about their anti-Soviet feelings. Given these contradictions, historians must put sources into their political and socioeconomic context and synthesize the information in order to draw unbiased conclusions. Soares specifically discusses the difficulty in gauging public opinion, especially when dealing with authoritarian nations such as Czechoslovakia and the USSR. I didn’t face this difficulty in my investigation, but it is a significant challenge for historians that this investigation made me aware of. I also learned the importance of understanding the language of the subject matter. Because I couldn’t understand Czech or Russian, I couldn’t access much of the primary or secondary research available on the ice hockey rivalry and Soviet Czechoslovak relations. This limited me to secondary source interpretations by US based historians and translated documents. Both are liable to bias and misinterpretations, which made it very difficult to develop a solid thesis. In addition, there’s a lack of English language research on the topic, so my breadth of sources was limited. Fortunately, those secondary sources were in agreement with each other, which isn’t usually the case Despite this, I recognized that history has no “absolute truths” and did my best to synthesize my limited sources to come up with the conclusion that the hockey rivalry was a safe outlet to express growing tensions.