The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring 9780801462153

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THE GREENGROCER AND HIS TV

THE GREENGROCER AND HIS TV The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring Paulina Bren

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2010 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2010 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2010 Printed in the United States of America Librarians: A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8014-4767-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8014-7642-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing Paperback printing

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For my mother, Halina, and my daughter, Zsofi

That’s right. That’s right. That’s what matters. It’s the tube. Richard Nixon speaking to his television set as President Carter addressed the nation from the Oval Office (from an interview with David Frost in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, February 12, 2006)

I know: it’s nothing new. Every power has tried to protect itself against its critics. And each time it has proved futile because life’s truths sooner or later rise to the surface. . . . But the pity is in the years that are lost, the works that are written for the drawer. . . . The years race ahead and in the meantime aesthetic values disappear. . . . It is because the decision of what will be on view is made by people who, without having the qualifications for it, decide whether to publish that book or this one; moreover, they run amok in books already written, crossing out the names of the living, making them as good as dead. And all of this only so that they can hold on to their power. I know that these things are not written about in the press, but do not imagine that people are not informed down to the very last detail about each of your decisions, about the living standards of the elite, about their private lives. . . . And you, my dear comrade, share a part in the grand lies: lies about this being the best democracy, lies about this being the “rule of the workers,” lies about you having a genuine love for our state. From an anonymous letter sent to Czechoslovak Television’s Prague headquarters on March 7, 1977

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

“A Criminal Comedy but of a Revivalist Spirit”: The Beginning and the End of the Prague Spring

11

2.

Purge and the Remaking of a Socialist Citizenry

35

3.

Intellectuals, Hysterics, and “Real Men”: The Prague Spring Officially Remembered

61

The Quiet Life versus a Life in Truth: Writing the Script for Normalization

85

1.

4.

5.

Broadcasting in the Age of Late Communism

112

6.

Jaroslav Dietl: Normalization’s Narrator

130

7.

The Socialist Family and Its Caretakers

159

8.

Self-Realization and the Socialist Way of Life

177

Conclusion

201

Notes Bibliography Index

209 239 247

Acknowledgments

When a book and a life become intertwined, the acknowledgments are inevitably inadequate. To begin at the beginning: my thanks to Eva Chmelová and Ivan Exner, talented painters, friends, and guides in late communist Prague, where I first got a whiff of normalization. Adéla Zrubecká and Petr Petr helped create a soft landing back to London and tolerated my fascination with the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic even though they themselves had just gone to great lengths to get out. Curiosity turned to scholarship under the guidance and infectious enthusiasm of James Felak at the University of Washington. It is also there where I met my friends, now colleagues, sometimes academic co-conspirators, Mary Neuburger, Kate Brown, Veˇra Sokolová, and Melissa Martin. I came to New York University to work with Tony Judt because of his all-too-rare ability to understand postwar Europe as both East and West. I remain in awe. At NYU, I was also fortunate to work with Molly Nolan, who helped me learn from the rich German historiography. Warm thanks go to Jan Gross and Jerry Seigel. Two other scholars have meant a great deal to me and my work, all the more since they adopted me when they had enough students of their own: Anson Rabinbach at Princeton University and Padraic Kenney at the University of Indiana, Bloomington. I thank Padraic for his comments on the last stages of the manuscript. My time in New York as a graduate student was made still better by the presence of my dearest friends: Anne Dunham, Vivian Trakinski, and Adrienne FitzGerald (“the girls,” as Jeno˝ Menyhárt calls the triumvirate). The friendship of Jeremy Mindich (whose letters, like Anne Dunham’s, had me laughing out loud on a Prague tram more than once), Becca Gallager, and Shari Spiegel in New York; Anna Bryson, Derek Paton, Thea Favalora, and the late Jana Klepetarová in Prague; and Andreea Anca, Gábor Komáromy, and Ágota Révész in Budapest cannot go unmentioned, for each has meant much to me. Of course what has allowed me to be in these many different places, for both study and research, has been the generosity of numerous funding institutions. My thanks to the Jackson Fellowship at the University of Washington and the MacCracken Fellowship at New York University. My archival research in the Czech Republic and Hungary was funded by a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship and an International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council. The necessary time to turn research into a viable dissertation was forged by the American Council of Learned Societies’ Dissertation xi

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Fellowship and by New York University’s Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship. The Institut für Wissenschaften vom Menschen offered an amenable environment to begin that process and figure out what was important about my research; later, Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry offered the same hospitality. Despite this generous funding, researching the communist period in postcommunist Czechoslovakia proved to be no easy task. Pavol Salomon, then head of the Czechoslovak section at the Open Society Archives in Budapest, eased my initial research, spoiling me for what was ahead. In Prague, I am especially grateful to the Czech Television Archives, headed by Vít Charous. The award for most helpful archivist easily goes to Petr Doležal, who turned his office into my reading room and suffered the inconvenience with grace. From what was then still called the State Central Archives, I thank the director of the post-1945 section, Dr. Nosková, for allowing me access to materials, and Mrs. Dvorˇ áková and Mrs. Prˇíkaská, who cheered my days, especially when the heating had broken down and the toilet paper had run out. Despite these physical inconveniences, I consider myself lucky for having been among the last to use the reading rooms on Karmelitská street in a building that, among its many transformations, had been soldiers’ barracks under Emperor Josef II. At the Libri Prohibiti archives, my thanks go to its director, Jirˇí Gruntorad, and in particular his army of young staff members who many a time unwaveringly photocopied materials for me at the last minute. Along the way I spoke with numerous people who said something that proved invaluable to me. I have little doubt they have long since forgotten these conversations, but I nevertheless thank them here: Jacques Rupnik at a conference in New York; Jirˇí Pehe, then at the Prague castle; Janet Savin in the hallway of the State Central Archives over sandwiches (or, in her case, greengrocers’ discarded greens); Milan Otáhal at Prague’s Institute of Contemporary History; the late Jan Havránek at Charles University; Klaus Nellen at Vienna’s IWM; and Maya Nadkarni over many dinners in Budapest. I also thank the Vassar College Department of History, especially my colleagues turned friends; Kristin Carter, also at Vassar, for her insight into television and media literature; Irena Reifová at the Department of Media Studies at Charles University for her generous spirit; and my two impressive Vassar research assistants, Sarah Riane Harper and Jonathan Asen. I further thank the editors at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History for allowing me to reprint here parts of my article that appeared in the journal’s Fall 2008 issue. Last, my appreciation to everyone at Cornell University Press, and especially John Ackerman for his enthusiastic support coupled with wit. Needless to say, any mistakes found here are entirely due to my own negligence.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xiii

My family has been central to this project. My mother, Halina, ferreted out books and articles that interlibrary loan could not, translated sticky colloquialisms when I was at my wit’s end, and read and reread the manuscript; my father, Pavel, ordered DVD bootlegs for me and hauled books back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. Both have babysat more times than I can count. My sister, Kamilla, packs a mean care package, and my brother-in-law, John Hurley, helped give me the time to finish the manuscript. My in-laws, the Márkus family in Hungary, have provided good food and good wine. To all of them my heartfelt thanks. Finally, kisses go to my husband, Zoltán, and our daughter, Zsofi, my fellow travelers in this complicated but interesting life that we have carved out for ourselves.

Introduction

Walk through the city of Prague and you will encounter the elegant nineteenthcentury street Parˇízˇská ulice, one of the main arteries leading out from the Old Town Square; follow it to its end (passing the old Jewish cemetery and synagogue on your left) until you come to the Vltava River. Across the river is a steep hill with a large park that overlooks the city. This was the official marching ground for May Day Communist Party parades from 1948 to 1989, and it was on May Day in 1955 that an enormous statue of Stalin was unveiled right there. Measuring over one hundred feet, the granite monument dominated Prague’s skyline. It was not only Stalin standing there, although he was front and center, with his right arm thrust into his long military coat, Napoleon-style. Behind him— enormous and yet dwarfed by Stalin’s overwhelming proportions—stood Soviet citizens on one side and representative Czechoslovak citizens on the other. The latter included an industrial worker in a rubberized apron, a female agricultural worker with a sickle, a member of the intelligentsia with a raincoat tossed casually over his arm, and a watchful soldier making up the rear guard. Humor being perhaps the only constant throughout the period of postwar communism, it was not long before this group statue of Stalin and comrades was transformed into a running joke on the streets of Prague. There was the one about how Stalin had barged to the front of the line at the butcher’s; another had Stalin reaching for his wallet to pay back the Czechs and Slovaks for this exorbitantly expensive piece of socialist realist art. But perhaps the biggest joke was that merely a year later, in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev began to chip away at Stalin’s personal mythology with his so-called secret speech at the Twentieth 1

2

THE GREENGROCER AND HIS TV

Party Congress in Moscow. Stalin went from hero to villain. Even so, Prague’s statue remained defiantly untouched, in large part because there were still too many Stalinist skeletons lurking in the closets of the Czechoslovak Communist Party leadership. To give but one gruesome example: following the execution in 1952 of top party officials (most of them Jews), falsely accused of treason in Czechoslovakia’s notorious Stalinist show trial, their confiscated property was sold off at bargain prices to their former colleagues and friends among the party elite. The avarice was such that the wife of the country’s future leader, Antonín Novotný, bought up the china service and bedding belonging to the family of the executed foreign minister, Vladimír Clementis. She was familiar with the china, if not the bedding, from her many social visits to the Clementises’ home.1 It is not altogether surprising, then, that because the party leadership had such intimate ties to the atrocities perpetrated under Stalinism, it would be another six years before Prague’s statue was toppled. It was finally done on Moscow’s orders and with 1,600 pounds of explosives. Although the blasting operation was supposedly top secret, it is nevertheless said that schoolchildren were brought to the site by their teachers so they could learn firsthand about both history and political whimsy. Rumor has it that enterprising citizens hauled away parts of Stalin as personal souvenirs—that his ear reclines somewhere as an amusingly shaped backyard swimming pool. But either way, over the next two and a half decades, the vast plinth remained empty. One night in 1987, two years before the end of communism, I accompanied friends, avid cavers, on an expedition into the sprawling bomb shelters that secretly lay beneath Stalin. Unable to travel abroad, my friends had made a hobby of traveling underground. After the 1989 Velvet Revolution, those cavernous multilevel rooms were discovered and turned into Prague’s first rock club. Up above, an enormous ticking metronome was placed on Stalin’s empty plinth, somewhat poetically, or at least rhythmically, marking the passage of history. Later, in a ghastly piece of short-lived publicity, the American pop icon Michael Jackson had a giant replica of himself erected upon the same spot where Stalin had once stood. The Greengrocer and His TV is about Stalin’s empty plinth. It is about the period of late communism that sits uncomfortably between the destruction of the Stalin statue in 1962 and the erection of the metronome and Michael Jackson after 1989.2 The story of the Stalin monument in Prague—its creation, its destruction, and the pedestal that lay empty for twenty years—serves as an appropriate metaphor for late communism but also for what we do (and do not) know about the 1970s and 1980s in the Eastern Bloc.

INTRODUCTION

3

That the post-1968 Czechoslovak Communist Party kept the plinth empty, that it was never able to find a replacement for Stalin, speaks to the ideological vacuum left behind by the 1968 Prague Spring and the Soviet-led invasion that brought it to an end. Once the dust had settled over the Prague Spring and its hopes for a Czechoslovak-style state socialism, the parade of new Communist Party leaders looked much like a television rerun. These were the men (yes, men) who had ruled over the country during the days of Stalin, but this time around they championed a different version of communism, which they called “normalization” (normalizace). But what did that mean? The party itself did not know. It knew what normalization was not: it was not the Prague Spring; it was not “socialism with a human face”; it was not reform communism; it was not the rule of writers turned political celebrities, such as Václav Havel, Milan Kundera, Ivan Klíma, and Ludvík Vaculík. The purge that followed 1968 helped make all that clear. But defining normalization, or what Havel would later call “post-totalitarianism,” took much longer. It was a long and often bungled process, but in the end normalization shaped a generation and defined a political culture that in many ways remains in place. Moreover, it was a political culture shared by citizens of the Eastern Bloc during these last two decades of communism when political idealism had taken such a pounding that the experience of everyday life was referred to officially as “real socialism,” to differentiate it from the hopes of the past and fantasies of the future. What then was “normal” in normalization? That nothing, and yet everything, was normal was hinted at by ordinary citizens’ own adoption of the term normalizace. They used it, at first with irony and later less so, to describe the society in which they now found themselves living and working. The normality of normalization is central to this book because the people, no less than the regime, yearned to normalize their lives after the tumult of 1968. The 1970s and 1980s were about the coming together of normalizing desires from all sides of the political spectrum. But Stalin’s empty plinth also speaks to the glaring absence of scholarship on late communism. It is astonishing that twenty years after the end of communism in Eastern Europe, almost all the literature remains preoccupied with Stalinism, with an occasional venture into the territory of the Khrushchev era. Historians write about postwar communism in Europe as if it had ended in the 1960s. This has contributed to a continued lack of serious differentiation between early and late communism, thereby unwittingly feeding into a discredited cold war view that insisted on the “totality” of the communist experience. To argue that this scholarly dearth exists because the fall of communism is still too recent is no longer reasonable. Certainly, no one who has taught an undergraduate college

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THE GREENGROCER AND HIS TV

class recently would think to make that argument since today’s student was not alive when the Berlin wall fell. The reasons, then, are more complicated. As the term “normalization” implies, the 1970s and 1980s were intended to be without events, stagnant. As historians, how do we begin to write a history of nothingness when we are trained to look for defining moments, to uncover change, transition, transformation? The literature on the 1968 Prague Spring is extensive and rich; it was an event, after all, and an exciting one at that, with jazz and literature and high political stakes. And the work on the 1989 revolutions is growing, too, with its political dissidents, mass demonstrations, manifestos, and street theater at historians’ disposal. In contrast, nothingness is daunting or, worse still, boring. It is partly for this reason that the first wave of scholarship on late communism published in the 1970s focused almost exclusively on dissent and human rights. Here, after all, were signs of change, of people responding to the repressiveness of real socialism and its representatives. In the case of Czechoslovakia, that meant the principal sign of this change was the dissident organization Charter 77, with playwright Václav Havel at its helm, about which H. Gordon Skilling wrote impressively and in great detail.3 A few years earlier, Vladimir Kusin, from Radio Free Europe in Munich, had published the first and, to date, only other book on normalization, but here, too, after documenting the post-1968 purge and government policies that followed, Kusin spent a substantial part of his book on the newly emerged Charter 77 organization.4 Of course, Kusin and Skilling, like others at the time, were significantly limited by the sources at their disposal, and just as important, by assumptions about what the available sources, in particular the official media, could reveal. The conclusion, indirectly or not, was made that if the official sources were unreliable, then the unofficial sources—such as underground literature and dissidents’ political tracts—were the reliable ones, the authentic windows into everyday struggles during normalization. In the 1980s, the focus on dissent was extended to include civil society, understood as pockets of independent activity that existed outside or parallel to official structures and that could potentially be the breeding ground for a mass-based opposition to communism. In a chapter titled “A Glorious Resurrection: The Rise of Civil Society,” Vladimir Tismaneanu wrote, “The main battlefield in the 1970s and 1980s was the restoration of hope for social change. . . . In all the East Central European countries . . . social movements and groups emerged to challenge the powers-that-be and to announce their intention to create networks of informal grassroots initiatives.”5 Similarly, Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the 1980s, remarked that “one could write the history of East Central Europe over the last decade as the story of struggles for civil society.”6 This emphasis on civil society by scholars working in the West further intersected with ideas being

INTRODUCTION

5

generated by East European dissident writers, such as György Konrád and Václav Benda, whose theories of antipolitics and a “parallel polis,” respectively, sought to identify viable and independent political spaces in which ordinary persons could hone their skills as democratic-thinking citizens. But civil society soon became a catchword that caught everything. As Garton Ash himself admitted, civil society had come to mean anything “from glee clubs to Charter 77.”7 And if civil society was so pervasive, did that not make everyone a dissident? As we now well know, this was not the case. If anything, as revelations about collaboration continue to emerge, it seems that even the dissidents were not always dissidents. Certainly, by the late 1980s, particularly among the younger generation, there was a growing willingness to challenge the state, as Padraic Kenney demonstrates in his work on grassroots political opposition in the mid-1980s in East Central Europe.8 Poland and the Poles, however, were notoriously willing to rise up, and even when periodically silenced, Jan Kubik argues, they used the limited public space available to them to signal their unified defiance.9 Collective and visible protest began to take place in Prague in the late 1980s, but perhaps more descriptive for the case of Czechoslovakia was the offhand remark by Václav Havel’s second wife (a mediocre normalization-era actress) that not until after she had met Havel in the 1990s had she ever heard of Charter 77—which goes to show that ordinary people (even the well-connected ones) often did not know, or did not care to know, about “the rise of civil society.” With the fall of communism in 1989, the expectation was that the archives, once opened, would reveal all. They did not. The prolific yet circumscribed scholarly output of Prague’s Institute of Contemporary History testifies to this. The institute, founded after 1989 to explore the country’s postwar communist history, has published a vast array of document collections about 1945 to 1968. But the histories of post-1968 have been less sure-footed. Among the best works so far have been Milan Otáhal’s reassessments of Charter 77 and Miroslav Vaneˇk’s oral history projects. In other words, the basis of this new research is not new archival documents. My own initial research experiences testified to this, too. When I began the archival work for this project in the late 1990s, materials on the 1970s and 1980s were closed off to most researchers because the events were still recent. But scholars at the institute had been given access to materials of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, and, arguing my case based on their access, I, too, was allowed in. I was sure that it would be merely a matter of reading these top secret files before I could begin work on my book about normalization. Nothing of the sort. Normalization’s leadership was made up of communism’s survivors, the very men who had managed to avoid or overcome the treason trials, purges, arrests, reforms, and counterreforms of the past twenty years; if they had learned anything by the 1970s, it was that they should leave nothing in

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writing. Theirs was a world of doublespeak, of endless speeches with nothing but words piled on like verbal car wrecks. It is worth recalling that the match that lit the spark of revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989 was a speech made by the brand new party leader, Milosˇ Jakesˇ. A clandestine recording of this speech made its rounds, with tape cassette copies rapidly reproduced and passed from one person to another. The recording demonstrated to the public in embarrassing detail the extent of Jakesˇ’s and, by definition, the party’s inability to lead. Jakesˇ’s ruminations on the problems of supply and demand included, for example, the following: “But we know whether this product will or will not be on the market . . . we know it, we’re not so stupid as that . . . and now the question is whether we’re capable of putting even more onto the market . . . and if we’re not, then we’re not, and then we know that we’ll be getting ourselves in a bit of a jam as far as that market goes, and that people will start cursing us out.”10 Not words to inspire confidence. But Jakesˇ’s speech also gives a taste of what the archives hold. Discovering that the archives do not automatically yield the postwar story has pushed scholars—as it did me—to step back and reconsider how to find and interpret communism’s artifacts and residues. This is most evident in the work of a new generation of historians on the Soviet Union who, taking their cue from, among others, Sheila Fitzpatrick’s and Stephen Kotkin’s work on Soviet everyday life, have found ways to rethink the early communist experience in terms of culture as politics.11 But even here the focus remains on the Stalinist era, about which the newly opened archives are far more vocal because the issues at stake demanded that one take sides. This brings us back to the original question: how to write about the later period of communism, about stagnation, and about the nothingness of the 1970s and 1980s. Even as historians continue to skirt the issue, some anthropologists, sociologists, and gender scholars have had to confront late communism in writing about postcommunism, with a few— most notably Alexei Yurchak—focusing specifically on late communism. Trained differently than historians, comfortable with alternate tools, anthropologists and sociologists have been less hesitant to look in all the wrong places, so to speak. I demonstrate here that it is also right for historians to look in all the wrong places. After confronting the limitations of the Central Committee archives, I began to ask everyone I could about normalization, then a still undigested past that had ended ten years earlier. People were hard put to answer but almost inevitably began to talk about some television serials they had all watched during normalization, written by one writer, Jaroslav Dietl. This brought me to the Czech Television Archives, which opened up for me an entirely new view of the 1970s and 1980s. I have never had any intention of writing a history of socialist state television; what I found there was far more valuable. It was a way of

INTRODUCTION

7

seeing—literally and figuratively—Czechoslovakia’s normalization and Eastern Europe’s real socialism. What follows is a history of late communism that uses television as a prism through which to view the 1970s and 1980s. The archival documents I use include television serials, correspondence between the head of state television and the Central Committee, viewers’ letters to Prague’s television headquarters, but also newspaper articles, radio programs, debates and disagreements among dissidents printed in the underground press, and, yes, even the Central Committee archives. It is no one single source but the juxtaposition of these various texts, visual and written, that begins to unravel what was so normal about normalization—the nothingness of late communism. The figure that stands at the center of this book is the greengrocer. Over the years, the greengrocer—Václav Havel’s greengrocer specifically—has come to represent late communism. It is the greengrocer who, if anybody, took over Stalin’s empty plinth. In his seminal essay “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel tells the story of a Czech greengrocer—a stand-in for the ordinary citizen—who receives a political banner (reading “Workers of the World Unite!”) along with the day’s shipment of carrots and potatoes. Without thinking about it twice, probably without so much as reading the banner, our greengrocer displays it in his shop window as asked. In so doing, argues Havel, he announces his compliance. More significantly still, he consents to the rituals of everyday life under communism and thus “enters the game, he becomes one of its players, he makes it possible for the game to continue being played, for it basically to continue, simply to exist.”12 Havel’s greengrocer epitomizes the ordinary citizen who acted out of fear without ever fully realizing it. Havel called on him to stop and to begin to “live in truth.” In the following chapters, I show how Havel’s paradigm of truth and its presumed opposite, inauthenticity and falsehood, fails to hold up. During normalization, the lines of difference were blurred, decision making became more complex, and ethical ambiguity proved to be the burden not only of the greengrocer but also of the antiregime dissident and the party apparatchik. The Greengrocer and His TV reconfigures what we know, or think we know, about late communism. Ordinary citizens did not, as has been argued so often, lead lives bifurcated by clear-cut public and private realms: a compliant public mask at work and a liberated self at home. Instead, the prevalent political atmosphere more closely resembled what the scholar Lauren Berlant has described as endemic to the United States as well in the 1980s: a government-sponsored casting out of public life in favor of “simultaneously lived private worlds.”13 This is significantly different from so-called inner emigration, from insisting that while citizens were compliant (or at least appeared to be compliant) within the politicized public

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sphere, they found solace in the depoliticized space of their homes, their private spheres. It also suggests that there were some significant similarities between East and West after 1968. The Greengrocer and His TV speaks against our existing historiography of binaries. The emphasis on dissent and civil society, further filtered through the still dominant scholarly interest in Stalinism, has meant that the 1970s and 1980s are most persistently conceptualized in terms of official culture versus unofficial culture, of the first (state-planned) economy versus the second (black market) economy, of the party elite versus the dissident elite, and of the politicized public sphere versus the depoliticized private sphere. The image evoked is of two neatly dug trenches on either side of a field: in one trench sit those persons belonging to official party-state structures, while in the other, perhaps in less regimented recline, sit those who have declared themselves in open opposition. And in the no-man’s-land between the two trenches is the so-called gray zone.14 In the following pages, the gray zone expands and reaches into both trenches. Although this book is not a history of socialist television, its history and impact need to be remarked upon. After 1968, the Communist Party embarked on an intimate yet tendentious love affair with television, and soap opera-like television serials about contemporary everyday life became a primary means of communicating with the public. Of particular significance were the serials written by Jaroslav Dietl, whom one participant in a dissident debate about Dietl described as having been more central to shaping post-1968 communism than both First Party Secretary Gustáv Husák and the Central Committee combined.15 That television would have to play a vital role in politics seemed certain by 1972, by which time 80 percent of Czechoslovak families already owned a television set.16 During the Prague Spring, the television screen had proved its political potency when it spread word of reform communism from elite enclaves to the streets. The Czechoslovak Communist Party leadership, the men of normalization, consequently became obsessed with television: with what it had done to them during the Prague Spring, with what they would do to it in the postinvasion purge, and with what it could ultimately do for them during normalization. It is important to remember that Czechoslovakia’s socialist citizens in the 1970s and 1980s were significantly different from television viewers today. They watched without remote controls, channel surfing, or anything vaguely resembling viewer choice. The complete lack of the latter ensured that Dietl’s well-written dramatic serials were watched by an overwhelming majority of the country, incorporating all imaginable demographic groups. They were a transfixed audience of citizen viewers, unburdened by commercial interruptions or the delayed pleasures of video recording. But the socialist citizen viewer, despite the lack of choices, was

INTRODUCTION

9

undoubtedly “making, remaking and unmaking meaning” in what he or she saw on the television screen.17 In this sense, television offered an acceptable stage for negotiating the world of late communist normalization and for working out one’s relationship with the state. The gifted Czech literary historian Vladimír Macura wrote that the “propagandistic language” of the Czechoslovak Communist Party “can still be considered to be a foreign, unaccepted code—a code with which ‘they’ speak. But ‘the world of socialism’ as a semiotic construct can no longer be understood as something comfortingly ‘other’ (outside). It is ours, we were its creators.”18 The Greengrocer and His TV is the story of that creation and its creators. Normalization is recent history, with raw scars, and the ongoing struggle over its memory and forgetting (to borrow the phrase from writer Milan Kundera) can be traced alongside Jaroslav Dietl’s television serials and their postcommunist rebroadcast. When I began my research at the Czech Television Archives, only the scripts were at my disposal. The head of the archives, however, was kind enough to arrange for me to see some episodes of the television serials, many of which were still on film reel. It was just me, a darkened office, an equipment technician, and the whirl and heat of the antiquated projector. A year later, a private independent Slovak television station began to rebroadcast a normalization-era television serial, The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman (discussed in chapter 3), as part of its late-night program schedule. People watched, its audience grew, and soon bootleg copies of the Slovak rebroadcasts were on the market in the Czech Republic. Czech Television, the successor to socialist state television and therefore the owner of all normalization-era broadcasting, began to discuss showing Major Zeman in the Czech Republic as well. That ignited a nationwide debate: some claimed that these serials were nothing more than communist kitsch, while others considered them insidious propaganda that needed to be kept under lock and key. The debate over the television serials was the first (and in many ways last) public discussion about the recent past. What happened next was that Major Zeman was shown on Czech television, with historians’ panels slotted in at the end of each episode to explain to audiences what in the serial had been historical truth and what propaganda. Then gradually, all the other serials, the ones considered less overtly “political,” were simply shown one by one, without the historians, as just one more offering on that day’s television schedule. Normalization had been successfully normalized. Now we come full circle. The serials I discuss here, particularly those by Jaroslav Dietl, are no longer a part of Czechoslovakia’s difficult history, to be viewed critically. They have become a part of national culture with which everyone can and

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should identify. They are being systematically transferred to cheap DVD format and sold at newspaper kiosks and supermarkets for no more than the price of a cup of coffee. They are there for everyone—yet again. Major Zeman—minus the historians—has already been issued in this mass-produced, inexpensive format. When I recently returned to Czech Television to choose photographs for this book, I was competing for images from the serial The Woman behind the Counter (discussed in chapters 7 and 8) with two men designing the DVD cover for its imminent release. I did not live in Czechoslovakia during normalization, but having “lived” with normalization for the last ten years, I confess that I felt a surge of kinship when I heard the ring tones on their cell phones: it was the television serial’s upbeat theme song, hinting of happy days to come.

1 “A CRIMINAL COMEDY BUT OF A REVIVALIST SPIRIT” The Beginning and the End of the Prague Spring

A day after St. Nicolas Day, when the streets were overrun by men posing as St. Nick in bishops’ hats, accompanied by red-horned devils, the Ideological Commission met in Prague. It was December 7, 1964, and the commission, appointed by the Communist Party’s Central Committee, was charged with keeping the lid shut on Pandora’s box of postwar revelations about Stalinism. As in the rest of the Eastern Bloc, Nikita Khrushchev’s disclosures about Stalin’s crimes had forced the Czechoslovak government to open up its prison doors and send home those political prisoners now known to have been falsely accused. But that had been in 1956. For a decade afterward, the Czechoslovak Communist Party had managed, rather effectively, to stave off the larger consequences of the de-Stalinization that swept through the region. While Stalinism’s victims were being routinely rehabilitated elsewhere, their innocence declared retroactively, Prague remained mute. The Czechoslovak Communist Party rebuffed any attempts at public remembrance and especially the calls for accountability and reform that inevitably accompanied them. At this time the only confessions of guilt, let alone remorse, that the party was willing to make were made securely behind closed doors. The 1952 Slánský trial stood at the epicenter of the party’s postwar fabrications. It had been one of the most defining show trials of the Stalinist era, replete with memorized scripts co-written by Soviet advisers flown in especially for that purpose and a live radio broadcast of defendants’ confessions and judges’ pronouncements. Fourteen Communist Party leaders and bureaucrats were charged with treason; eleven of them were executed and three imprisoned for life. Of the 11

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fourteen accused, eleven were Jewish. Such a statistic suggested that attitudes ripe under Nazi occupation had had currency in communist postwar Czechoslovakia as well, much in the same way that Stalinism and post-Stalinism continued to intertwine. There were no clear demarcation lines yet regardless of who might wish to draw them. Heda Margolius Kovály, wife of one of those executed in the trials, was among the few “civilians” privy to these initial, closed-door confessions by the Communist Party. In February 1963, the party issued a document that “only carefully selected Party officials were permitted to see” but that Kovály had heard “almost . . . verbatim by the following day.” In it, the party finally “conceded that all the people who had been convicted at the trials were innocent, that their confessions had been extorted by illegal means, and that during the interrogations a range of brutal and inhuman procedures had been used.”1 For Kovály, a concentration camp survivor, as her husband had been as well, this was all too familiar. Two months later, she was summoned before the Central Committee, where this same document was read out loud to her. She asked whether it would now be made public, to which the party apparatchiks replied, “Out of the question! The Party has decided to handle the whole affair internally. Nothing will be made public.”2 When asked to return with a list of losses that had resulted from the arrest and execution of her husband so that she and her son might be compensated (although on terms favorable to the State Treasury), she drew up a list that included not property but life: “Loss of Father. Loss of Husband. Loss of Honor. Loss of Health. . . . Loss of Faith in the Party and in Justice.”3 In June of 1963, the party permitted a small notice to be published in the country’s newspapers. It announced that the men executed in the Slánský trial had been rehabilitated. Any more than that still remained off-limits.4

A Young Lady for His Excellency, Comrades! It was against this backdrop that the Central Committee’s Ideological Commission now met. One of the items on the agenda for this December meeting seemed to be of a more frivolous nature: a theater play written by a popular television writer, Jaroslav Dietl. Titled A Young Lady for His Excellency, Comrades! A Criminal Comedy but of a Revivalist Spirit, it was a light-hearted romp about a financially strapped spa town. After some brief discussion, the commission members unanimously agreed that the play was not to be performed “under any circumstances” because of its “erroneous political orientation.”5 That it had an “erroneous political orientation” was clear to all of them.

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Writer Jaroslav Dietl at his desk, 10 December 1982 (Czechoslovak Press Agency; photographed by Karel Vlcˇek)

To those uninitiated in the subtle balancing act between consenting to deStalinization and fending off potential antiparty revolt, the play might have seemed innocuous, belonging merely to the genre of absurdist theater popular at the time. At first glance, it is a play about an acting troupe that, in need of cash, decides to put on some light entertainment because—as they agree—vaudeville sells and everyone is fed up with serious thoughts. The play the actors improvise is set in a fictional spa town that, like them, is bankrupt. When superficial efforts to spruce up its facades fail, the local authorities agree that to survive they must inject capital into the town. They will do this by negotiating a multimillion contract for “our country’s industry” with His Excellency, who, it is implied, rules over a wealthy Arab state. What follows next is a farce that clearly mimics the growing communist crisis in the early 1960s. His Excellency’s arrival in the spa town is introduced through an official press conference for which the young communist press officer is instructed to follow normal procedure and answer the reporters’ questions by reading unrelated responses from a piece of paper. He successfully does so. But such typically staged public relations begin to run aground as His Excellency makes demands that stretch beyond the parameters of these well-rehearsed gestures and countergestures. First His Excellency requests “a young lady.” Flabbergasted, the town

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officials weigh their pressing need for foreign currency against their allegiance to official policy stating that the sexual exploitation of women has long been abolished. They eventually agree that while prostitution has died out “as a stateregistered business,” the young press officer should go ahead and comply with His Excellency’s wishes. He is sent off to the “club de luxe” with instructions to find “a young lady” and the advice that he must practice what he was taught at the party university: he must “generate policy” as he goes along. At the club, the press officer is immediately ensnared in a lively discussion about the current economic situation with the husband (also pimp) of a local prostitute. Then, left briefly alone with the wife (also prostitute), he is given an earful of her own financially related marital problems. Her husband, she tells the press officer, wants to expand internationally with the business. “He keeps insisting that we must tear ourselves away from these small Czech standards, and that we must finally show the rest of the world that even we can accomplish something,” she explains. The press officer—responding, according to Dietl’s stage notes, as if he were an employee of the Foreign Ministry—sides with her husband: “I understand where your husband is coming from. We can exist only if we develop in pace with the rest of the world and each one of us has a direct responsibility to know how our field is developing elsewhere—and that counts for you [and your profession] as much as it does for me.” Later he adds, “We have a lot to learn from capitalism on that front.” The price is set and she is hired as “the young lady” for the visiting Excellency. Since her business is officially illegal, to receive her “honorarium” she is registered as the new director of the Press Office. But it turns out that “with a millionaire’s typical perversity,” His Excellency in fact had wanted a young woman merely to accompany him to official gatherings. The hired prostitute must now be taught certain social skills or, at the very least (as the town authorities agree), “etiquette, modern dance, basic economy, a concise history of the spa people’s liberation movement, and songs and tales from the lives of the spa people.” But with no time even for these basics, she is instructed on how to fend off all potential criticisms. If, for example, she is asked about the bad condition of the roads, her teachers prompt her to “explain how many kilometers of asphalt road there were before the war—the First World War, that is—and immediately it will become clear just how much we have advanced.” When all else fails, she is told, always state the following: “Anyhow, it’s you people who lynch blacks.” Yet it turns out that His Excellency is interested in a different woman altogether—the chief director of the spa town. She and her colleagues object (presumably to being prostituted by and for the town), but the young press officer insists that this is too important an opportunity for international trade to pass up. She objects further, this time on ideological grounds: “But we’re on the

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other bank of the river from them, no?” The press officer replies that the whole world is watching to see what they will do and that it is really a question of how far they are willing to step into the water and get wet. Unable to decide for themselves on “which bank of the river” they stand, she orders a call to be put through to “the capital” “because only the capital can decide if we can finally go into the water without getting wet.”

Reading between the Lines As one might guess, Jaroslav Dietl’s banned play read like a thinly (and for the Ideological Commission not so thinly) disguised allegory of contemporary times. In 1953, Stalin had died; in 1956, Khrushchev had declared Stalin a persona non grata, after which the Hungarians had waged an unsuccessful but embittered revolution; and in 1962, the Stalin statue that had towered over Prague was dynamited out of sight. These events, like the message of the play, would be the lead-up to the 1968 Prague Spring, which, as the Czech-born Oxford historian Z. A. B. Zeman wrote on his first trip back after World War II, was quite different from the “passionate, emotional” 1956 Hungarian revolution. The 1968 democracy movement in Czechoslovakia would prove to be “more of an intellectual exercise. Even under extreme pressure the Czechs and the Slovaks kept their emotions in the background as much as they could. They negotiated, argued, ridiculed.”6 A Young Lady for His Excellency, Comrades! most certainly ridiculed. Thus Dietl’s play was representative of the times. Indeed, perhaps it was even ahead of its time because, as its subtitle declared, it was of a “revivalist” rather than a revolutionary spirit. But it would have taken the members of the Ideological Commission little time to unravel the play’s multiple meanings and sharp jabs. That prostitution—like so much else—had been eradicated merely on paper but continued in practice not only was true but also represented a widespread hypocrisy typical of postwar communist rule. The laments of the husband-pimp are characteristic of those uttered in the early 1960s by industry managers trapped within the confines of short-sighted policies devised by a centrally planned economy. The responses of the young press officer—spoken in the parlance of the Foreign Ministry—echo the complaints being made by progressive party apparatchiks who soon would drive the reform movement forward. The desire to compete on a world stage was a desire heard during the 1960s within both literary and economic circles. The wife-prostitute is taught the most imperative of diplomatic skills: to fend off valid criticisms with a litany of absurd achievements accomplished under communism (the most ludicrous of which compares the number of paved roads present in the 1960s with the number in

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the closing years of the Habsburg Empire in the very early 1900s). Sharp reminders of American imperialism and racism are then rolled out as a last resort. But perhaps what most threatened the members of the Ideological Commission about Dietl’s play (and ironically, it was this same commission that was later accused of encouraging the Prague Spring instead of restraining it) was its ending. The head director of the spa town is unsure by now on which bank she and her cohorts officially stand: do they not represent the bank of the river that is directly across from that of His Excellency? No one is sure any longer. Moreover, do they stick in a toe, a whole foot, or do they plunge headfirst into the river that flows between these two banks (that is, between socialism and capitalism)? Indeed, by 1968, four years after Jaroslav Dietl’s play was presented to the Ideological Commission for review, the Prague Spring reform movement would become centered on this very question: few people wished to swim directly across the river to the other bank, and most intellectuals certainly preferred to stand in the river that flowed somewhere between communism and capitalism. But to do so would prove to be too unstable a balancing act.

Writers as Resisters As the play also suggests, 1968 found its beginnings in theater. Intimate theater venues, most famously Prague’s Theater on the Balustrades, served up J. Topol’s play The End of the Carnival, which traced the absurdity of local officials implementing collectivization in one small and angry village; Václav Havel’s The Garden Party, which parodied central planning and the planners; and Milan Uhde’s King Vávra, a transparent portrayal of the current party leader, Antonín Novotný, and his uncanny resemblance to an ass. New or else revamped literary journals (Literární noviny, Mladá fronta, Host do domu, Plamen, and Kultúrný život) also did continuous battle with their assigned censors, managing to publish cuttingedge work and quietly but steadily loosen the censors’ noose. This continuous testing of boundaries opened the door to the publication of two novels in 1966 that resonated with the reading public because of both content and style: Milan Kundera’s The Joke and Ludvík Vaculík’s The Ax. Both books described how their narrators, thinly disguised versions of the authors themselves, came to terms with their postwar support for communism and their later disillusionment with it. Clearly, the growth of this word industry went hand in hand with revelations and disclosures, a casting off of the past that moved from the personal to the public as the 1960s advanced. For the novelist Milan Kundera, the previous author of odes to Stalin, to admit (albeit in fictionalized form) to his political naiveté in those early postwar years was much more than mere titillation. It spoke

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to the pressing issues of culpability, deceit, idealism, delusion, and the transposition of wartime values onto a postwar world, which had served to normalize an inhumane level of physical and moral violence—of which the Slánský trial was the extreme example. This literary output spoke to what the Communist Party was not yet willing to say out loud. Among the reform-minded, language slowly began to be stripped of official-speak making way for words that could create meaning again. Once this was done, language was used to delve back into the recent communist past. It was for these reasons that the 1967 Writers’ Congress was poised for a confrontation between the increasing number of disillusioned party-affiliated writers—such as the aforementioned Milan Kundera and Ludvík Vaculík—and First Secretary Novotný’s literary apparatchiks charged with forcing the writers back in line. Writers at the congress, held in June of that year, took turns at the podium to lambaste the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, of which they themselves were the architects or at least valued assistants. Forty-year-old Vaculík, author of The Ax, reflected on the almost twenty years of communism that had passed since the February 1948 Communist Party takeover of Czechoslovakia: an event that he, like so many other young Czech intellectuals, had embraced in the aftermath of war, the disappointment of Western Europe’s Munich Pact with Hitler, and the devastation, physical and moral, that had accompanied World War II and the Holocaust. Now, twenty years later, in what would become the speech that signaled the beginning of the reform movement, Vaculík criticized the “ruling circles” and insisted that, contrary to what they continued to maintain, the end had not justified the means because the end point offered little to cheer about. He insisted that “in twenty years not one social question [lidská otázka] has been solved—from people’s primary needs . . . to more subtle needs. . . . And I fear that neither did we rise on the world scene; I feel that our republic has lost its good name.”7 For the Czechs especially, who saw their place both geographically and symbolically as very much in the center of Europe, this was a serious blow. It is important to recognize, however, that Vaculík and his fellow partyaffiliated colleagues who took to the podium at the Writers’ Congress were not demanding an end to socialism. The struggle between communist reformers and communist hard-liners for control of the country’s ideological future was not about wading to the other bank of the river (to borrow from Dietl’s play): it was about the nature of the river, of socialism itself, that flowed in between. They were all firmly within the socialist camp. But the party leader, Antonín Novotný, either did not understand that the writers did not wish to end communism or felt that any discussion of any kind was simply too incendiary.8 So he turned his back on the Writers’ Congress, made a public show of attending instead the graduation festivities of the Prague Communist Party College, and

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shortly before leaving for the Soviet Union for his holiday, set about putting two writers on trial.9

Student Protest The intellectuals’ defiance at the Writers’ Congress in 1967 had been preceded in part by that of the students, which was particularly on show during the so-called majáles, an annual springtime bacchanalian homage to the nineteenth-century romantic Czech poet Karel Hynek Mácha. This customary celebration of spring and love had been banned following the 1956 majáles procession that wound through the streets of Prague with “a group of gagged and blindfolded marchers representing the editors of the youth daily [newspaper] Mladá fronta.”10 It returned in full force, however, in 1965 with the election of the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg as king of the majáles.11 In 1966, the majáles took a more political turn when “students, apprentices, clerks, workers, most of them between 17 and 23 years old,” marched through town calling out slogans such as “We want freedom, we want democracy” and “A good communist is a dead communist.”12 Again, Novotný responded by putting twelve of the youths involved on trial: all were found guilty. The push and pull between Novotný’s nonreformist government and the intellectuals and students, who were increasingly finding both a desire and a way to critique the past and the present, was backlit by changes in the very atmosphere of daily Czech life. The American journalist Tad Szulc described the cultural vibe of 1960s Czechoslovakia as synonymous with “jazz and the big-beat sound,” and with “blue jeans and beards,” “as if in retaliation against years of Stalinist monotony and boredom.”13 Indeed, much of youth behavior during the 1960s was more about style than politics as young people began for the first time to carve out their own identities as generationally separate from those of their parents. In this, they were most certainly on the same wavelength as their Western counterparts. Paul Berman notes, too, that while differences abounded in 1968, “in quite a few places there was, as everyone recognized at the time, a common theme. It was the split between the young and the old.”14 The May celebrations and rallies, the jeans, and the beards were not, at least initially, a political thesis as much as the expression of a basic discontent to which the members of this generation, the first to have grown up under communism, believed they had a unique right. As one Czech nineteen-year-old explained to the journalist Alan Levy: “The Stalinists of the 1950’s, they wrote off our parents, but they counted on us. They shouldn’t have. I’ve lived all my life under one system, so I have every right to criticize it.”15 These sentiments were confirmed through the new scholarly

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field of youth studies, which had emerged alongside the official resuscitation of sociology. In the West, the new emphasis on youth highlighted how carefree this generation’s life, played out in the midst of a booming postwar capitalism, was in comparison with their parents’ and grandparents’. In France, Germany, and elsewhere, this prosperity troubled its youth. As one young writer and political activist wrote, “After the veterans of Verdun, of Mauthausen [the Nazi death camp] and of Indochina, we will be veterans of the cinemathèque.”16 Czech youth, on the other hand, like their counterparts throughout the Soviet Bloc, did not feel particularly pampered and so largely evaded such pangs of guilt. Moreover, with the working class pushed to the forefront under communism and eagerly offered opportunities for education and career advancement as never before, many of these Czechoslovak youth were in fact from the working classes. If no longer working-class, they were first-generation middle-class (although of course never called that). By contrast, Tony Judt writes that in Paris the young demonstrators “were overwhelmingly middle-class” and “it was their own parents, aunts and grandmothers who looked down upon them from the windows of comfortable bourgeois apartment buildings as they lined up in the streets to challenge the armed power of the French state.”17 In Prague things were different: the playwright Václav Havel had not been a beneficiary of the system which he now defied—as the offspring of a wealthy and influential Czech family, under communism he had been barred from a conventional university education. But while Czechoslovak youth were not tormented by their frivolity, the Communist Party was. As a 1965 internal government survey asserted, this generation was politically disadvantaged for never having experienced World War II or “the consequent class war” that, for their parents’ generation, had functioned as “the greatest school of life.”18 Citing surveys and interviews with students and young workers, it lamented their physical comforts, ample leisure time, and unending demands (which—inadvertently repeating the clichés of class—they claimed were material among young workers and cultural among university students). But this generation’s demands had also begun to extend to the political; as government reports confirmed, these youth unflinchingly critiqued the shortcomings of socialist society, feeling they had earned the right. Despite the participation of young workers in this generational discontent, the Prague Spring that was then brewing was not a workers’ revolt. That would come later, in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion—an affront that galvanized workers to take action, organize, and make real demands, although by then futile. But during the Prague Spring, Gerd-Rainer Horn has pointed out, “[W]orkers were reluctant to confront the regime that had permitted trade unions to exist for the first time in twenty years.”19 Many workers were also suspicious of the people

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behind this new push for change and reform—the intellectuals, the students, and the intelligentsia, to whom the Prague Spring ultimately belonged. Czechoslovakia was a workers’ state, which meant that the party encouraged an ambiguous stance toward white-collar pursuits. It was one of the complaints made in 1968 by Czechoslovakia’s students that since “studying” was viewed as nonlabor, university students were expected to compensate for this with “heightened [official] political activity and, once they’d finished studying, with as low a salary as possible.”20 The working class was the beneficiary of what the party had had to offer, and it continued to stand firmly at the center of the country’s postwar political identity. In contrast, the Prague Spring was almost entirely reliant on the ambiguous terrain of words and ideas, the favorite tools of those held suspect by the state, even if they were aligned with the party and its institutions. In the autumn of 1967, a few months after the Writers’ Congress, everyday student life was transformed into a key political event that began the avalanche toward the Prague Spring. On the night of October 31, the lights went out at the Strahov dormitories located just behind the Prague Castle next to the Strahov Monastery. The dormitory had been experiencing electrical outages for some time, an inconvenience that usually caused students to curse the inadequate electrical output, float burning slips of paper from their windows, and then congregate in small groups in the courtyard, from where they moved on to Prague’s pubs and nightclubs. But on this night the students gathered in the courtyard shouting, “Let’s all go out!” According to one of the students there, they all began to march toward the castle and then further down the steep Nerudová Street leading to Little Quarter Square, chanting, “We want light!” They were quickly surrounded by police cars, and when they turned to climb back toward the castle, the police drove their vehicles up and down the street, squeezing the students back onto the narrow sidewalks. The pivotal moment came when the police followed the students into the courtyard of the dormitory, which students had assumed was a safe zone, and there attacked them with batons and tear gas.21 Intellectuals, cowed by the Novotný-led backlash against them following the Writers’ Congress, now came out on the side of the students, and so began the steady revolt that would find Novotný out by the end of the year and a new unknown, the young Slovak politician Alexander Dubcˇek, in his place.

Television as Political Stage By 1968, television was already the dominant medium in the West. In the United States, the gruesome televised images from the Vietnam War changed public opinion, and live scenes from the 1968 Democratic National Convention in

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Chicago turned a demonstration into a historical event. In France, Judt writes, May 1968 was “a revolution apparently unfolding in real time. . . . Its leaders were marvelously telegenic; attractive and articulate young men leading the youth of France through the historical boulevards of Left Bank, Paris.”22 But for the countries behind the Iron Curtain, it is more often thought that television’s role was significantly smaller, if at all relevant. The editors of a notable collection of essays on 1968, for example, write that “in most of Eastern Europe and in the Third World the media played a markedly different role than in the West. Whereas members of Western societies ‘could literally watch’ the unfolding of worldwide events, in communist and Third World societies news was mostly obtained from sometimes heavily censored radio and newspapers [sic] reports or through informal networks.”23 While in part true, this assumption overlooks a different kind of historical “unfolding,” one that was probably visible only to a native viewer. For the disclosures and confessions that had begun in the literary world made their way onto the communist screen before finally infiltrating the streets and eventually the upper echelons of the party. In June 1963, Jirˇí Pelikán became the new head of Czechoslovak state television. A committed socialist but, like so many others now, one who was intent on pushing for reform, he steered programming so that it increasingly echoed the demand among the intelligentsia that society open up to allow for constructive criticism and individual decision making. Because of Pelikán, Czechoslovak television was at the forefront of political and social change in 1968. But even before his arrival, it had provided a gathering place for those wishing to push existing boundaries. In late 1962, for example, Brno television studios produced I’ll Add My Two Cents’ Worth! (Budu do toho mluvit!), a discussion program (still then a novelty) aimed at young people, for whom the topics under discussion were of special interest. Although talking about relations between students and teachers, procedures for university acceptance, and the like might not seem particularly provocative, it was the atmosphere of the show that signaled something new and progressive: “In the studio dozens of randomly chosen participants were gathered; on the podium and darting right in among them was the show’s presenter, Josef Krˇivánek, with a microphone in hand.” The press response was instantly favorable: “The evening’s program provoked one to think, it revealed the unused opportunities of television.”24 Pelikán built upon the philosophy behind such innovative programming as I’ll Add My Two Cents’ Worth! In an interview published in February 1967, while still pushing for more freedoms, he insisted, “So far it’s been the case that every word stated on television is taken to be an official opinion, and that ties the hands of our television journalists. . . . Television first and foremost needs to make space for a personal approach and for the right to make mistakes . . . for individuals

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who would be able clearly to formulate their own opinions. . . . I believe that we have such people but they need the opportunity to express themselves.”25 Like the writers and students, Czechoslovak television was not always given that opportunity and was frequently reprimanded for stepping beyond what First Secretary Novotný, ever fearful of post-Stalinist reform, considered an acceptable level of criticism. Following an overly polemical discussion about the state of the economy on the television program Face to Face (Tvárˇí v tvárˇ ), for example, its presenter, Jan Drda, disappeared from the screen; and when journalist Otka Bednárˇ chose the north Bohemian tramping movement as the topic for a television report, the Czech communist daily Rudé právo (Red Law ) came out with a rebuke against the program and the tramping movement in the form of an extended “letter” titled “Examples of Behavior That Do Not Benefit Our Young.”26 But Novotný could not fight the changing climate indefinitely. When he invited the Soviet general secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, to Prague, Brezhnev famously insisted that the conflict be resolved quietly and internally: “Eto vashe delo” (“It’s your own affair.”)27 With that proclamation, whether intended or not, Novotný’s legitimacy slipped away. In January of 1968, party leadership was passed on to Alexander Dubcˇek, a little-known politician, young by the relative standards of the geriatric party leadership and considered by much of the political elite to be a malleable compromise candidate.28 Foreshadowing the atmosphere that would dominate the coming year, in the final showdown at a party plenum, Dubcˇek chided Novotný, “[Y]ou do not, comrade Novotný, welcome the opinions of others.”29 One would imagine that such an exchange between Communist Party leaders would warrant close attention, but, at least at first, the majority of Czechs and Slovaks viewed the change of leadership as a merely bureaucratic move, of no particular interest to them, and so settled into the New Year with a shrug. Instead, it would be the media that signaled the new age. Although radio waves still dominated it was the television screen that was capable of driving the point home. That politics, recent memory, and everyday life were about to change was made clear on television one night in January by the scholar Eduard Goldstücker. Goldstücker’s life embodied his generation’s complex destinies. Born into the Habsburg Empire, in the interwar years he became a communist student leader. During World War II he was fortunate enough to make his way to England, where he worked with the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. After the war he was for a short time a diplomat before becoming one of the communist regime’s victims and being imprisoned in 1951. After his release in 1955 during the political thaw, he turned his efforts to studying and teaching German literature and in particular Kafka, whose nightmarish view of the world seemed to mimic his own very real experiences. He became known to the public in 1963 when he organized

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an international conference on Kafka in the Czech town of Liblice. This quickly turned into a well-publicized statement about many Czech intellectuals’ identification with Western Marxism over Soviet communism, and it highlighted their sense of alienation, reflecting that of Kafka’s most famous protagonist-turnedbeetle, Gregor Samsa, encapsulated in a carapace that was not his own. After that Goldstücker had become chairman of the Writers’ Union and thereby chief editor of the union’s important cultural weekly, Literární noviny (The Literature News), which had only recently been wrested from Novotný’s lackeys. During a television interview that evening, Goldstücker was asked why he was changing the name of the weekly from the old name, Literární noviny (with which the paper was so closely identified), to the new name of Literární listy. Goldstücker made it clear to television audiences that as far he was concerned, the journal had been tainted by Novotný’s regime, and thus a name–change was necessary. Television viewers watched in wonder. A few days passed, and when none of the expected reprisals materialized, the media took their feet off the brakes.30 Goldstücker’s performance was the first of many such moments on the television screen in 1968. On one occasion, he spoke to a group of university students, explaining, “The world is watching whether we shall be able to do what history has not yet known—to unite socialism with freedom.”31 On another occasion, he did a show-and-tell, holding before the cameras before-and-after photographs featuring former communist leaders who, purged, imprisoned, or else executed, had subsequently been airbrushed out of existence. Together these doctored photographs narrated the Communist Party’s forged pictorial history of postwar Czechoslovakia. Milan Kundera would later write about the same in one of his novels: all that had remained officially of Foreign Minister Clementis, executed in the 1952 Slánský trial, was his hat propped on top of party leader Klement Gottwald’s head, to whom Clementis had lent it on the cold February day when they stood together triumphant on the balcony in Prague following the Communist Party’s takeover of power. As a way to make amends for these and other distortions in the weeks and months that followed, “television arranged confrontations between former political prisoners and their torturers from the secret police or prison staffs.”32 When Prague’s chief of police was invited to the television studios, he looked into the cameras and, visibly embarrassed, apologized for the brutal treatment of students by the police during the Strahov dormitory demonstrations in autumn 1967.33 With the media now at the forefront of change, and certainly much further along than traditional political institutions, the public’s previous distrust of the media melted away, and as journalist Helena Klímová wrote, “the two parallel monologues: the monologue of official public opinion and that of genuine but private opinion,”34 finally came together.

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Television screens now filled regularly with live broadcasts of impromptu political meetings and news programs that “wound late into the night, and were excitedly watched by viewers, as evidenced by the light coming off of the television screens and projecting through windows into the city night.”35 On his return to Prague, a taxi driver remarked to the historian Zeman that he and his colleagues no longer had time to discuss football down at the pub: now it was only politics.36 Zeman witnessed this even more directly at the hotel where he was staying: “As rebellion flickered across the television screen in the lobby of my hotel, the staff, drivers whose taxis stood deserted outside and Czech-speaking guests came to watch it. Public questioning of members of the party, the government, the army, with a few writers thrown in, was the most popular pastime those days.”37 A foreign journalist in Prague wrote, “Tape recorders disappeared from the market; the insatiable ones would record radio programs at the same time they were watching TV.”38 Dubcˇek conceded to the media that it was “impossible to imagine the public’s participation in politics without your active work.”39 It was the media that had moved the political dialogue out of the exclusive literary domain, from behind the closed doors of reform-minded party apparatchiks, and fully into the public sphere. And though what was on the screen there was not as visually startling as the images beamed from Vietnam that were fueling much of the activism in the West, the experience of watching television in Czechoslovakia in 1968 was revelatory. The television stars that year were the ordinary people who appeared daily on the screen. As meeting after meeting was broadcast live, students and workers, men and women, made themselves heard. In a live broadcast of a meeting of party members working at the agricultural cooperative in Horomeˇrˇice, opinions exploded, and one excited participant insisted that the days of “divide and conquer” were over: “We know that there were such people among us who wished to create rifts not only among party members but also in the public in general—to separate off, on the one side, the intelligentsia, on the other, workers and agricultural workers.” She insisted that “today we needn’t worry that one social group here would somehow like to rule over the other.”40 But her experiences in the past as a Communist Party member had been quite different: “If we did [speak the truth], then we were silenced.” She recalled a regional women’s meeting at the Radio-Palace in Vinohrady, Prague, where she had tried to say something and had been cut off by one of the party functionaries. When later she asked why, she was told, “ ‘Comrade, you know, at the meeting there are also politically unaffiliated women and we didn’t want you to say it in front of them.’” To which she had replied (she now told television viewers), “ ‘Do you imagine that the unaffiliated [nonparty members] somehow live separately from us? [In fact,] they see things better than you do.’”41

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Surpassing even these bold statements, the Horomeˇrˇice agricultural worker ended her speech with the sort of inflammatory conclusions that would rapidly ruffle the feathers of less reformist communists as well as Czechoslovakia’s Soviet Bloc neighbors: “It is imperative,” she stated, “that democracy is rejuvenated, for people to have at least four parties to choose from in their districts. And then it would further be necessary to introduce, as we wanted to long ago, cooperative stores alongside state stores.” While such talk was not welcomed by the detractors of the Prague Spring, it was embraced by many television viewers, who after the program sent in letters documenting their enthusiasm for such honest discussions. One letter declared, “The reportage from the Horomeˇrˇice Agricultural Cooperative provoked in me serious political questions. Most of all it was exciting because of its sincerity, openness, and truthfulness.”42 In the same spirit, state television sent mobile broadcasting units into the streets to ask people what they thought. The American journalist Alan Levy, living in Prague, recalled watching these “man in the street” reports that included “a minor civil servant awakening” to the atmosphere of the Prague Spring as he gingerly admitted, “‘Yesterday I didn’t think I could say what I think. Today I think maybe I can.’ [and] a factory hand in his late twenties reflecting on the future: ‘I hope our children won’t be afraid to tell the truth like we were.’”43 It was further evidence that, as Kieran Williams has shown, any reformist efforts by the party machine, “still populated by petty bureaucrats,” “lagged well behind the media.”44 It was for this reason that the media were proving a threat.

Lost in Translation Jirˇí Hájek, a former professor who in 1967 had come out in support of the Strahov student demonstrators and was now the Czechoslovak foreign minister under Dubcˇek, reported in frustration: “[W]ith few exceptions, the Soviet comrades do not understand the situation in our country. They are not familiar with Czechoslovak history, the composition of Czechoslovak society, the mentality of our people, or our democratic traditions. That is why the openness of the Czechoslovak press and radio has evoked such bewilderment, and why opinions have even been expressed that this development is abetting the enemies of socialism.”45 Hájek’s assurances to the Soviets that few Czechs and Slovaks had any desire to abandon socialism (indeed, this had been fully borne out by the findings of the recently resurrected Institute of Public Opinion)46 fell on deaf ears or, worse, was interpreted as the cunning propaganda of anticommunist perpetrators. Moscow responded to the unfamiliar by playing up its most comfortable role of Big Slavic Brother, with the Politburo even penning a chummy

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personal letter from Comrade Brezhnev to Comrade Dubcˇek. In it Brezhnev detailed his angst over events in Czechoslovakia, describing his sleepless nights over Prague’s recent transgressions. Finding it difficult to express himself, to find the right words, he wished he could “put my thoughts down on paper, without worrying too much about polishing my phrases.”47 But the Prague Spring, and the language it employed (which Moscow was finding so objectionable), was being lost in translation in the West too. While the Soviets were trying to bring the Czechs and Slovaks back into the MarxistLeninist fold, political activists in the West had embarked on their own love affair with Marxism. According to Tony Judt, Marxism was then still the “one grand theory,” the “Master Narrative offering to make sense of everything while leaving open a place for human initiative.”48 Daniel Cohn-Bendit and other student leaders have since distanced themselves from some of the excesses of the discourse that emerged, yet Kristin Ross, arguing for the resuscitation of 1968 as a political movement (as opposed to a youth-driven, “socio-hormonal frustration, a biological convulsion,” as the writer Raymond Aron would have it), notes that it “brought together socially heterogeneous groups and individuals whose convergence eroded particularities, including those of class and age.”49 Particularities of class and age, however, were easier to dispel in 1968 than the more often ignored particularities of geography and political happenstance. When the West German student leader Rudi Dutschke (aka “Red Rudi”) first visited Prague in spring 1968, Czech students, although anxious to tap into the revolutionary language from across the Iron Curtain, found it difficult to place that language: “Is he a Maoist, Trotskyite, Marxist, even a Liebknechtist, or else simply an ordinary beatnik who provocatively enters into discussions . . . in the uniform of today’s protesting youth: in jeans, a sweater, an overgrown shock of raven hair?” asked Milan Hauner, an admirer of Dutschke who tracked his visit to Prague for the radical Czech university newspaper Student. Dutschke’s charisma electrified the crowd, but his speech was less impressive. When he speaks, continued Hauner, “German romanticism and revolutionary radicalism are wed. In our circumstances, he perhaps was able merely to garner tired surprise [from his audience].”50 Following his formal presentation, Dutschke met informally with Czech students. Here the situation went from bad to worse, and as Hauner admitted, a certain “embarrassing mutual schooling” took place. Apparently (and not surprisingly), Dutschke was highly critical of current capitalism and at the same time excessively optimistic about its transformations under a “direct democracy,” whereas for Czech students, their young lives thus far lived under communism, “the situation was just about the opposite. And even Rudi’s well-formulated phrases did not manage to convince [them] that the future direct democracy with ‘new people’ will not lead to the abuse of power.”51 Even as

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the Prague Spring grew more radical over the course of the next few months, these differences between East and West did not evaporate. On the contrary, in May a Czech student delegation met in Berlin with Dutschke, who was convalescing after the failed assassination attempt on him. Again, while the students were awed by his rock-star status, over the course of “two improvised discussion evenings, the deep disagreement between our group and the German interrogators visibly revealed itself.”52 The rub for the Czech students was the German students’ inability to distinguish utopia from reality, and theory from practice: “We did not hide our deep skepticism toward any kind of perfect utopia,” Hauner noted. The German students’ main emphasis, he wrote, was “the creation of an ideal type socialist democracy whose main foundation had to be the control of production and decision making by all workers based on a system of representative councils at all workplaces, for purposes of guaranteeing the growth of initiative from below.” While they all agreed that this was a sound idea, since Czech students, like Czech intellectuals, remained rooted to the idea of socialism, the two groups ceased to agree the moment conversation turned to the practical application of these ideas. The Czechs insisted that the application of a theory “always rests on living people and historical conditions,” making it messy and more complicated than initially anticipated. The German students, much to the annoyance of the Czechs, maintained their orthodox theories even though the Czechs offered them “an expansive palette of empirical examples based on our twenty-year history.” In this cross-border interaction, language— even the sort of Marxist language with which they themselves remained deeply entangled—sounded meaningless to the Czech students if unaccompanied by hard-earned experience or else the willingness to learn from the experience of others.53 In the political turbulence of 1968, the Czechs seemed without an ally even as socialism with a human face was being feted all over Europe.

The Invasion Dietl’s 1964 theater play A Young Lady for His Excellency, Comrades! concludes with the head director of the spa town picking up the telephone to call “the capital” (Moscow?) to ask permission for the town leaders to finally dip into the murky waters of the river that flows between the two banks. In the play, the audience never learns whether this permission was granted. But in the nonfictionalized world of 1968 Czechoslovakia, the answer was clearly heard in the early hours of August 21 with the rumbling of tanks on the cobbled streets of Prague and other cities, a noise first mistaken by many to be no more than the sounds of late-night city traffic. But by morning it was clear that under the auspices

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of the Warsaw Pact Treaty, the Soviets—along with token Bulgarian, East German, Hungarian, and Polish armed forces—had entered the country to bring the Prague Spring to a premature close. The media were the first to be attacked, with tanks and then censorship. The battlefield on the morning of August 21 was quite literally outside the Czechoslovak Radio building in the Vinohrady section of Prague, immediately north of Wenceslas Square. The attack on radio turned into a battle between citizens and armed forces after the station broadcast a statement by the Central Committee condemning the invasion. Prague citizens, hearing this, headed off to the radio building. As Alan Levy, an eyewitness to the events, wrote, “Statistics are not precise, but at least five Czechs died in the Battle of Radio Prague. And, before the broadcasters were finally evicted from their headquarters, sixty-five Czechs were taken to Vinohrady Hospital with ‘shot wounds, lacerations, lesions, wounds caused by grenade fragments and shots from tank grenades.’”54 When the radio building was finally stormed, and broadcasters were shut down in midsentence as they insisted to their listeners that truth would prevail (the motto inscribed on the King Wenceslas monument just a stone’s throw south of them), the Soviets began to broadcast a proinvasion “Radio Vltava” from a transmitter in Dresden. The telltale sign was the broadcaster’s “poor pronunciation and grammatical errors . . . it was the same antiquated Czech (an obsolete Moravian dialect) that Soviet advisers and interrogators were trained (in Moscow) to speak.”55 Radio Prague, despite the fact that its headquarters were now occupied by troops, continued to operate for at least a week longer through various underground and covert locations, including “a studio disguised as a ladies’ room.”56 The announcers warned listeners to ignore Radio Vltava, urged that unarmed citizens engage in passive resistance (such as the successful removal of all street signs), listed areas with heavy shooting to be avoided, and offered a reassuring presence, particularly through their oft-repeated mantra and station identification:”Be with us, we are with you!” It was because of the continued transmission of Czech radio that delegates to the Extraordinary Fourteenth Congress of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, a meeting since known as the Secret Vysocˇany Congress, were able to gather on August 22, less than two days after the invasion. Summoned over the radio, they arrived in Prague “by train and by car, by bicycle and on foot” and were led to the congress, held clandestinely inside a factory, by city residents and factory workers.57 In contrast to the violent confrontation at Prague Radio, Czechoslovak Television pursued an extended game of cat and mouse with the occupiers. At five in the morning on August 21, Kamil Winter, head of the news department, along with cameramen and television presenters, most notably Kamila Moucˇková, made their way to a studio location in Prague’s first district, where they broadcast

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news of the invasion. At 8:30 a.m., soldiers tore into the studios, sent everyone out, and shot up the equipment. Television broadcasting promptly shifted to another location in Prague, the Skaut Cinema, from which scenes from the streets that camera crews were filming throughout Prague were broadcast on television. Broadcasting then switched over at around 11:00 a.m. to a transmitter on the Cukrák Mountain near Prague.58 Vladimír Sˇkutina, a popular television personality during the Prague Spring, was on air at the Cukrák location when Soviet troops finally arrived there, having been sidetracked by actors dressed as American soldiers for the shooting of the American film The Bridge at Remagen. The Cukrák showdown, as described by Sˇkutina part tragedy and part comedy, was seen by millions of television viewers. At 11:45, with the transmitter surrounded by troops, the staff simply turned the cameras onto the intruders: the television screen filled with pictures of the occupying forces’ planes flying overhead as uniformed soldiers on the ground “surrounded the building and advanced in jumps, forming a big circle around the transmitter, [and] hiding behind trees.”59 Although Czechoslovak Television’s formal broadcasting locations were now disabled or under siege, television operations still continued for a short while longer with the help of improvised studios. For example, at one point the station broadcast out of the offices of Tesla, the behemoth electronics manufacturing state enterprise in Prague-Hloubeˇtín, with the help of Tesla employees, and from Kletí in southern Bohemia, where the local Czech army unit gave the television staff army uniforms for camouflage.60 In the meantime, Dubcˇek and members of his cabinet had been forcibly flown to Moscow, where they were essentially held under house arrest. When they were returned to Prague, Dubcˇek went on the radio to address the nation. In his now famously halting and highly emotional announcement on August 27, a week after the invasion, Dubcˇek revealed that an “agreement has been reached regarding measures aimed at a rapid normalization of the situation.”61 It signaled the start of the second era of postwar communism in Czechoslovakia, a period of twenty years known first officially, and then colloquially, as normalization. A month later, at what was to be the last Czechoslovak Communist Party plenum at which hard-liners and reformists still sat side by side, a Moscow preapproved resolution was read out in which the role of the normalized mass media was described bluntly as serving the state in its engineering of human souls: “The press, radio, and television are first of all the instruments for carrying into life the policies of the Party and state.”62 The new censorship law outlined what normalization would mean in the long term. No longer was it to be decided on by appointed censors, as had been the case in the past: the new censorship law now relied on self-censorship and mutual control. In its bare form, the post-1968 notion of self-censorship might have seemed more benign than the pre-1968

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system of assigned censors, but in practice it was not. To great effect, the publisher would watch the editor in chief, who would watch the editors, who would watch the writers. Not only were writers watched, but they monitored themselves.63 During normalization, the writer Ludvík Vaculík would wistfully recall the time “when censors in Czechoslovakia had their own building, address, their directives and their own morals,” and were therefore tangible, nameable, and someone with whom one could “forge relationships . . . bend the rules.”64

Capitulation With this new form of censorship in place, the Soviets could afford to orchestrate the handover of power from reformists back to hard-liners at a more leisurely pace than originally planned. At first the Soviets had expected that the changeover would be carried out immediately following the invasion: naive and ignorant or perhaps merely disbelieving, they were surprised by the Czech and Slovak disdain for the pro-Moscow politicians they had lined up to assume power. The initial regime change, therefore, was not only delayed but reshuffled, and Alexander Dubcˇek was allowed to linger in power. It was this slowed pace that actually played into the hands of the Soviets. It lulled Dubcˇek and some of his Prague Spring government colleagues—the “men of January,” as they came to be called—into believing they could hold on to power as long as they met Moscow halfway, with the halfway mark, of course, being drawn and repeatedly redrawn by the Soviets. But the men of January were not the only ones to be fooled and to fool in turn. The writer Milan Kundera, at least initially, believed that with Dubcˇek still in power, reform would continue, albeit more slowly. In an essay titled “The Czechs’ Lot,” Kundera praised the Czech propensity for level-headedness (as opposed to revolutionary ardor). Most likely still buoyed by the significant acts of bravery and unity that had played out in the early weeks after the invasion, Kundera framed the Czechs’ heralded pragmatism not as capitulation or an overeagerness to adapt or collaborate but instead as an ability to create values and act ethically in times of hardship. He criticized those who had fled Czechoslovakia since the invasion, as well as their dire predictions that the worst was yet to come: “People who today are falling into depression and defeatism, lamenting that there are not enough guarantees, that everything could end badly, that we might again end up in a miasma of censorship and trials, that this or that can happen, are simply weak people, who only know how to live in the illusions of certainty.”65 Václav Havel, disturbed by Kundera’s conclusions, offered his reply in the journal Tvárˇ: “Really. How much easier it is to say to ourselves how good we were before

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August and how marvelous we were in August (when those evildoers came here after us) than to examine what we are like today, who among us is still good and who not at all, and what must be done so that we are true to our previously earned merits!”66 In a way, Havel was already worrying over what Ernest Gellner would later describe as the Czechs’ “consensual tendency.”67 Someone else who did not agree with Kundera, who watched the rapidly changing political climate with alarm, was a young university student named Jan Palach. Imagining he could stop the steady retreat of reform by calling attention to the passivity that had set in since the invasion, and inspired by the similar protests carried out by Buddhist monks in Vietnam,68 he set fire to himself in Prague’s Wenceslas Square in front of horrified passersby. Signing his short and succinct suicide note as “Torch Number One”—for he had drawn the first number among this group of “volunteers who are willing to burn themselves for our cause”—Palach wrote, “Because our nations are on the brink of despair we have decided to express our protest and to wake up the people of this land. . . .” The first of his demands was the “immediate elimination of censorship.”69 But by January 1969, when Palach committed his act of self-immolation, his demand was already impossible for Dubcˇek and his reformist colleagues to meet. They were unwilling to rock the boat, convinced as they were that compromising with the new sheriffs in town might yet save the day. Media coverage of Palach’s morbid protest against censorship only further confirmed its presence. That day’s evening radio news included just a brief and official government report of the incident and made no mention of the suicide note that the twenty-one-year-old Palach had left behind. The next day, as Palach lay dying in a hospital from his burns, the now Moscow-controlled Radio Prague distributed a memorandum to its staff forbidding anyone to broadcast programs or segments on Palach. The only exception was made for the youth broadcasting division, which was ordered to provide carefully crafted information on Palach and his suicide with the sole purpose of deterring young listeners from following suit.70 But in a last-ditch effort to retain some modicum of independence, however fleeting, Czechoslovak Television’s Prague studios managed to stage a live program discussion about Palach. In its aftermath, hard-line normalizers angrily claimed the program had been knowingly planned “to create a [nationwide] psychosis with the intention of stirring up a crisis over the death of J. Palach.”71 The Soviets were no less irate, insisting this was an organized campaign intended to provoke “nationalist, anti-Soviet moods.”72 Thus, despite a great outpouring of national grief over Palach’s painful death, Dubcˇek and his ministers responded hazily, thereby ensuring a yet greater estrangement between the public and Dubcˇek, who was becoming politically prudent to the point of collaboration. It was left to the students to organize the

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funeral procession. The funeral was not only for Palach but, in a larger sense, for the death of the Prague Spring: thousands of people wound their way through the streets of Prague in mournful silence. Students at Charles University issued a statement that summarized the grief, the anger, and the guilt: they blamed the Soviets for Palach’s death, the Czechoslovak political leadership for its betrayal, and themselves for their failure to bring permanent political change.73 Students, only recently politicized, now resolutely turned their backs on politics.

Setting the Tone This silence was punctured briefly on March 28 when Czechoslovakia defeated the Soviet Union at the Hockey World Championships in Stockholm. The entire country sat glued to their television screens, and when the Czechoslovaks scored the winning goals, having physically assaulted the Soviets to the vicarious delight of television viewers, crowds rushed out into the streets to celebrate and to release their shared frustration and anti-Soviet, anti-normalization sentiments. The most infamous outcome of this was the shattered glass window display at the offices of the Soviet airline, Aeroflot, on Wenceslas Square. But even here it turned out that the Soviets and their allies in Czechoslovakia were a few steps ahead: cobblestones had been placed outside Aeroflot by the secret police, encouraging demonstrators to pick them up and fling them through the windows, thereby creating official justifications for a clampdown. Indeed, a couple of days later, on March 31, the Soviet minister of defense, Marshal Grecˇko, arrived in Prague to protest the destruction of the Aeroflot offices. On April 2, unprecedented levels of censorship were put in place.74 On April 17, Alexander Dubcˇek was replaced as first secretary by his friend and fellow Slovak Gustáv Husák, who would rule over normalization for the next eighteen years until his retirement in 1987. Dubcˇek was left hanging on as a member of the Central Committee. As the one-year anniversary of the invasion neared, Václav Havel, knowing that Communist Party pressure for Dubcˇek to repudiate the goals of the Prague Spring would increase, wrote to him privately. He urged him to remain resilient, to “behave the way a majority of us still hope you will behave.” Havel outlined the three paths that were now open to Dubcˇek. One was to “carry out a thorough self-criticism, acknowledge the failings and negligence of your leadership, entirely endorse the Soviet interpretation of events”; the second was to “remain silent”; and the third was to resist “all pressure on you and once again [to spell] out openly and truthfully your plans, your policy, and your understanding of the reform politics of the Prague Spring.” Havel urged Dubcˇek to grasp this third

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option. Yes, it would lead to his immediate expulsion from the party, but it might also force through a significant political crisis or, at the very least, damage the smooth passage of political consolidation. If nothing else, it would leave Czechoslovak citizens feeling less betrayed. Most important, wrote Havel, such an act of defiance could “become a yardstick for [citizens’] own behavior, a compass needle pointing to a more meaningful future.”75 It would, in other words, represent the first public act of “living in truth” under normalization, a dissenting state of being that Havel would elaborate on over the next few years. But Dubcˇek chose to remain silent. In contrast, others with far more to lose came out into the streets in a series of violent demonstrations in Prague, Brno, Liberec, Opava, Havírˇov, and elsewhere during several days surrounding the first anniversary of the August 1968 invasion. The police, but especially the people’s militia, shot into the crowds, killing two in Prague and two in Brno. An eyewitness to late-night demonstrations in Prague on August 21 sent a report out to the West: “Still before my eyes I see that young man . . . as he ran away across the lit-up Námeˇstí Míru Square. . . . From all sides police officers appeared and with a sharp command they released their dogs onto the poor young man. I shouted—Gestapo, Gestapo! The young man shot as fast as an arrow across the grass on Námeˇstí Míru chased by a black German Shepherd.”76 Members of the police, the army, and the people’s militia who took part in shooting, beating, and arresting the demonstrators, were rewarded with hard-to-find consumer durables such as specially inscribed watches, transistor radios, electric razors, and photo cameras, as well as recreational vouchers and even cash.77 Dubcˇek was rewarded for his collaborative silence by being purged from the Communist Party once and for all by the men of normalization whose favor he was still trying to court. A year after the August 1968 invasion a government fully committed to normalization, led by the new general secretary, Gustáv Husák, was in place. Much later, after the collapse of communism in 1989, Husák would lament, “The concept of normalization was not my invention. We all voted for it as the only possible outcome. If some country experiences an earthquake—what then? It tries to normalize life. And what can it do when a 100,000-plus-strong army descends upon it?”78 Despite this apparent sense of helplessness, Husák set about his task with vigor, working fourteen to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week; he claimed that he wanted to bring Czechoslovakia out of not only its political and economic crises but also its crisis of values.79 That is to say, normalization would do away with the Prague Spring and its residue, but would also instill a new and more appropriate set of values in its place. What those values might be, Husák and his fellow normalizers probably did not yet know, and consequently the early years of late communism seem largely improvised. But in August 1969,

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two things were clear to the Communist Party and its leadership: first, that the public sphere, so central to communist ideology and yet dangerously tainted by recent events, needed to be reconceptualized; second, that the media were to be tamed and then fully incorporated into the task of shaping a post-1968 political state. This was to be a distinctly new era of postwar communism.

2 PURGE AND THE REMAKING OF A SOCIALIST CITIZENRY

In April 1969, when Gustáv Husák was named the new general secretary, most citizens let out a sigh of relief. Here was a man who represented political moderation; a committed communist, certainly, but also a close friend of Dubcˇek, a supporter of reform communism, and, perhaps most important, a survivor of Stalinism. Imprisoned in the 1950s on the trumped-up charge of “Slovak bourgeois nationalism,” Husák had experienced the full reach of the Communist Party: first from the highest echelons of power as a prominent Slovak apparatchik and then from the inside of a jail as one of the party’s political victims. He knew what it meant to send a man to prison, but he also knew what it was to be that man. One Central Committee member who voted for Dubcˇek’s dismissal and Husák’s nomination, despite her lingering sympathies for the Prague Spring, found comfort in the fact that Husák had been “in the socialist jails, and they didn’t spare him there, he apparently lived through a lot. . . . He saw it all with his own eyes, he lived it. And so I said to myself that that kind of person cannot betray and that it’ll be better than if someone from the old Novotný guard is there.”1 All of which made Husák’s almost immediate announcement of a fullscale purge doubly unexpected.

The Purge Whether the purge was really Husák’s choice or that of the Kremlin and its standins within the Czechoslovak government is still debated.2 Either way, Husák was 35

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reluctant to call things by their proper name. Within official documents, he banned the use of the words “cleansing” (cˇistka) and “screening” (proveˇrka)— whose precision accurately described the two-step process of the purge—and insisted on replacing them with a milder and far hazier terminology–namely, “party card exchange” (výmeˇna stranických pru˚kazu˚) and “interview” (pohovor). Historian Jirˇí Manˇák points to this as evidence not merely of Husák’s ambivalence toward the purge but also of his wish to preserve both his personal legacy and his immediate power.3 Despite Husák not wanting to call a spade a spade the cleansing, initiated in the summer of 1969, began with the dismissal of all well-known and publicly recognized reformists still in decision-making positions. The media came under the closest scrutiny. During these summer months, not yet a year after the invasion, the handful of reformist newspapers, journals, and magazines that had managed somehow to hold on, or else had lingered shakily alongside Dubcˇek, were now permanently shut down. Those that remained underwent drastic personnel changes, particularly among editorial staffs.4 State television and radio witnessed the arrival of new directors and management teams, for the media needed to be fully behind Husák and normalization before the second stage of the purge was unleashed—the screenings that would touch the lives of far more citizens than the initial cleansing. The purpose of the purge was to set the path toward normalization, lining it with the detritus of the Prague Spring, and along the way to reframe the paradigmatic “us–versus–them” by which citizens defined their relationship to the state. Purge had long been a tool used by the Soviet Union, and consequently by the Soviet Bloc, to recalibrate relations between citizens and the state in favor of the latter. It was the building block of what Zygmunt Bauman has called the “gardening state,” which necessitated a periodic pruning of its population.5 It meant, as Amir Weiner has written, a “view of society as raw material to be molded into an ideal image.”6 But the utopianism that this reinvention entailed, whether or not accomplished by violent means and never confined to communism although well suited to it, had dissipated considerably by the 1960s; nor could the purge be expected to reinstate it (although some in the normalization government would continue to hope). Weiner’s observations about the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Second World War—pointing to its relentless and largely successful purification through purge as well as its reinvention through mythmaking—cannot be applied in the same way to the Czechoslovak case. For the Soviet public, both elite and ordinary, World War II reaffirmed the country’s revolutionary ideology and became “the focal point of their lives”; it bore the power to reignite political faith.7 In contrast, the year 1968 dashed political faith and, more important, the sort of blinkered viewpoint on which it fed. In Czechoslovakia, the return of an

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active identification with the party by the majority of the population was out of the question after the Prague Spring. What remained was merely reactive, and the defining event that held sway—indeed, that would haunt rather than help forge restorative myths—was 1968. The purge seemed to acknowledge the real politics of the post-1968 period even as it harked back to the Stalinist 1950s. The first strike was narrowly retributive; swift and severe, it targeted those whom the regime saw as entirely unfit for normalization. But the second strike, aimed at the majority, was often circuitous. Professional chastisement was sometimes followed by unexpected opportunities to repent and reap benefits for doing so; others headed toward a rapprochement with normalization and the normalizers only to turn back once halfway there. The purge not only assessed Czechoslovakia’s citizens but directly gave them the opportunity to assess themselves and one another. Consequently, it was an event with indelible effects on both the individual and the collective.

Normalization’s Protagonists For the men who represented normalization, the purge was a glorious comeback. They had been reinstated by Moscow precisely because they possessed a record of consistent communist orthodoxy or else had demonstrated an aptitude for adapting to abrupt changes in the political climate. Four men in particular would play a large part in normalization and in the history that unfolds here: Gustáv Husák, the general secretary; the Presidium member Vasil Bil’ak, the government’s number two man, in charge of both ideology and foreign policy; Central Committee Secretary Jan Fojtík, the new watchdog of culture; and Jan Zelenka, the head of normalized state television. While all were instrumental in shaping normalization and reenvisioning late communism, they were frequently at odds with one another. In large part this was because of their own tangled personal histories that reached back across the years, from World War II to the Prague Spring. Zvi Gitelman rightly points out the advantages afforded to János Kádár, the leader of Hungary’s own post-1956 normalization, by the complete purge of everyone associated with the revolution; it meant that “the Hungarian politburo in 1957 had mostly new faces, and they were able to make a fresh start.” In contrast, in Czechoslovakia “the invasion did not lead to a decisive political break with the past,” and the normalization regime included “different historicalpolitical strata.”8 The recent past, as much as the regime ached for it to be erased, could thus never be forgotten, for it remained written upon the leadership itself. General Secretary Gustáv Husák belonged to those who excelled at rapidly sensing the winds of change and just as quickly adapting to them. Released from

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prison in 1960 during the post-Stalinist thaw, rehabilitated three years later, he soon returned to the political scene—but as a moderate reformist. He appeared to be a genuinely enthusiastic supporter of Dubcˇek, publishing a clearly reformist article as early as January 1968, which even then suggested either a rigorous reformist bent or else a finely tuned political compass. In the article, Husák criticized the past “bureaucratization of social institutions that contributed to a violation of the relationship between the leadership and the citizenry.” Outlining what the future should hold instead, Husák wrote stiffly but surprisingly, “Today’s European man wants to know what is happening in his state. He wants to understand it, to say something about it, to help decide about his nation’s fate and living conditions, to elect its leadership and, then, according to its actions, wants to laud, criticize or recall it.”9 But there appeared to be limits to Husák’s liberal attitude. In spring 1968, the writer Ladislav Mnˇacˇko left Czechoslovakia and emigrated to Israel as a protest against Czechoslovakia’s official pro-Arab, anti-Israel foreign policy (borrowed from the Soviets). Mnˇacˇko, like most Czech and Slovak intellectuals, saw in Israel’s predicament Czechoslovakia’s own during the 1938 Munich crisis when Czechoslovakia was sacrificed to its neighbor, Hitler’s Germany. Husák, contrary to other reformists, came out publicly against Mnˇacˇko’s protest. The radical student weekly Student in turn came out against Husák, who until then had been considered a leading reform communist.10 Still, Husák continued to show signs of being one, despite his attack on Mnˇacˇko. In a meeting of the Presidium a couple of months later, when the politician and later political dissident Zdeneˇk Mlynárˇ argued for retaining some state censorship, fearful of how fast state control was slipping away, Husák vehemently disagreed.11 Husák was therefore an unlikely candidate for the Kremlin’s hand-picked general secretary of normalization.12 But once the Soviets had gauged the Czechoslovak response to their “military aid,” conservative Soviet loyalists, including Vasil Bil’ak, who were excitedly standing in the wings were promptly crossed off the list of candidates for the top position. During the forced negotiations in Moscow, at which Dubcˇek and his cabinet ministers were held hostage in the most fundamental sense, the Soviet leader Brezhnev recognized that the bespectacled, avuncular-looking Husák might be the man they needed.13 Foremost a political creature, Husák must have been quite easily persuaded to take the top position— perhaps, like his colleague General Jaruzelski, Poland’s communist leader following the repression of the Solidarity movement, he believed that by taking control himself, he was saving his country from a yet worse fate. In contrast to Husák, Vasil Bil’ak was exactly what he appeared to be. A staunch orthodox communist, Bil’ak was disliked by the public too much to be considered

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seriously for the highest office. But his conservative convictions helped put him at the helm of two key spheres of control, foreign policy and ideology, and ensured him a place in the inner circle as a favorite of the Soviets. While Husák had joined the Communist Youth Union in the 1930s as a teenager, had gone on to law school, and when the war came, had fought with the communist underground resistance, the significantly younger Bil’ak had begun his political career just as Husák’s was prematurely waning. First apprenticed as a tailor, Bil’ak, also a Slovak, entered the Communist Party School of Higher Political Education, graduating in 1953 at the height of Czechoslovak Stalinism.14 Later, when Husák was scheduled to be released from prison during the post-Stalinist amnesties, Bil’ak vehemently opposed his political rehabilitation. Bil’ak’s prominent presence in the Prague Spring government demonstrates to what extent this was not a uniformly reformist regime, although in retrospect it is often imagined to have been so. At an April 1968 Central Committee meeting, Bil’ak made note of his distaste for the new fashion of unraveling the party’s unseemly past: I don’t even understand many of the things that are put forward as progressive. What does it mean to destroy the political system? What other kind of political system is it supposed to be? I have to admit I don’t understand, for example, that “people must come clean.” Who among us is totally clean who has participated in the struggle for the past 30, 25 or however many years? . . . [Another thing I don’t understand:] So as to strengthen our friendship with the Soviet Union, we must request to take a look into their archives, how they interfered in our problems. . . . Who will this help? An intellectual and moral terror against the communists is taking place; I’m not afraid to say it even though I will be declared dogmatic.15 In this last statement, Bil’ak was certainly right: he was indeed declared to be a dogmatist, and for good reason. Soon after the Soviet invasion, when rumors spread (which proved to be correct despite Bil’ak’s denials well into the 1990s)16 that he had formally invited the Soviets to save Czechoslovakia and had thereby offered them a legal pretext for invasion, he was quickly removed from his powerful position of first secretary of the separate Slovak Communist Party. Yet despite the hatred with which Bil’ak was generally viewed, he managed to hang on to his seat on the Presidium with admirable tenacity, and when Husák was handed the job of general secretary, Bil’ak became one of the eleven Central Committee members to have a seat in the new Presidium. To seal the deal, at a September 1969 Central Committee plenum, Bil’ak turned his back on Dubcˇek, his former

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friend and colleague, and let it be known that he now considered himself to have been duped: My attitude toward comrade Dubcˇek is completely clear. I liked him very much and even today I don’t feel any anger toward him. I only feel bad—I feel incredibly bad—that we were so wrong in electing him. And it just makes me all the sadder that comrade Dubcˇek did not recognize when he pulled away from us and cast his lot with those Kriegelites [former professor and Prague Spring foreign minister Frantisˇek Kriegel; later the only cabinet member not to cave in to pressure to sign the Moscow Protocol] that he wasn’t even conscious of how much under their influence he was. . . . I only feel sad that he did not realize then, and even today does not realize, what these false notions and mistaken practices did to our party and our whole society.17 Bil’ak probably did not feel so sad, in fact, for with Dubcˇek now gone, he and Husák were on the winning team. Theirs was almost a power-sharing leadership, arranged by the hand of Moscow, “with honors and eulogies going to Husák and the duty to sharpen his policies to Bil’ak.”18 But Husák felt little affection for his colleague, later declaring that he had been a thorn in his side. In interviews after 1989, Husák complained that Bil’ak “belonged to the fifth column that Brezhnev cultivated here. He drove me crazy the whole time. I had to support him because Moscow did. Who can make sense of the Soviets’ colonizing methods? I guess no one.”19 Yet it was not Bil’ak, predictably ensconced among the ultraconservatives, but Husák, the reform communist dabbler, who was the surprise beneficiary of Soviet colonization. Bil’ak, awarded for his dogmatism by being placed in charge of both ideology and foreign policy, was also appointed head of the Central Committee’s refurbished Ideological Commission. The earlier commission, which had judged Jaroslav Dietl’s play A Lady for His Excellency! unfit for audiences, had since been charged with supporting rather than preventing the growth of so-called rightwing forces—the new catchall phrase for reform communists. The normalized Ideological Commission, with Bil’ak as chair, included (like its predecessor) all key officials from culture, media, education, and the arts, and was considered an influential political body, probably more so now that the Central Committee had announced that “we consider the increase of responsibility among workers in the mass media, most of all communists, as the main method of political influence.”20 That the new commission had an uphill struggle before it Bil’ak made clear at the first meeting: “Most citizens of the CˇSSR, but even a significant number of party members, responded to the decisions made at the April plenum [where Dubcˇek was replaced with Husák] with reservations and, to a significant extent, even

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Vasil Bil’ak (left) in conversation with Gustáv Husák (right) during the Prague Spring at a reception in the Prague Castle, 30 April 1968. At the time, Husák was prime minister and Bil’ak first secretary of the Slovak Communist Party. (Czechoslovak Press Agency; photographed by Jirˇ í Finda)

rejected them,” he noted. Further evidence for resistance lay in the recent “string of negative acts, even provocations,” and “the refusal to put up red flags” on important holidays. The recent one year anniversary of the invasion had provided another opportunity for dissent, at which time Bil’ak had seen ample evidence that “antisocialist and opportunistic forces still have a strong influence among us.”21 One of the commission’s most important members was normalization’s ideological front man, Jan Fojtík, responsible for steering propaganda, culture, and media. He had begun his career as a journalist, working in the 1950s as an editor of the Czech daily newspaper Rudé právo before he headed off to study at Moscow’s

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Presidium member and Central Committee secretary Jan Fojtík (left) in Berlin with East Germany’s leader, Erich Honecker, less than a year before the Wall came down, 3 February 1989. (Czechoslovak Press Agency)

Academy of Social Sciences. According to a former coworker at the newspaper, whose description of Fojtík was transcribed by Radio Free Europe for its files, Fojtík was a highly intelligent political intriguer who seemed destined for great political prominence stymied only by his drinking. He apparently had been forced to leave Moscow after getting drunk, ridiculing then General Secretary Novotný, and calling the ideological chief, Jirˇí Hendrych, his very own predecessor, “a fat pig”—all of which was dutifully reported to the Central Committee in Prague. Promptly called back to Prague, where he readied himself for expulsion from the party and presumably the start of a new life as a manual laborer, Fojtík was instead asked to write a series of anti-Yugoslav articles for Rudé právo. He gratefully took on this test of loyalty, after which Moscow invited him to return to his studies. In the 1960s, Fojtík returned to Prague again, this time triumphant, to be deputy editor in chief of Rudé právo. On the side, he wrote articles and speeches for First Secretary Novotný and the newspaper’s editor in chief, Oldrˇich Sˇvestka, neither of whom was particularly good at or interested in writing them himself.22

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Jan Zelenka (right) shaking hands with Gustáv Husák, 10 January 1973. The official caption for this press photograph read, “Members of the Communist Party Presidium, along with other representatives of the government, wished General Secretary G. Husák all the best on his birthday tomorrow. In the name of the delegation from Czechoslovak Television, its central director, Jan Zelenka, passed on the good wishes.” (Czechoslovak Press Agency; photographed by Karel Mevald and Jirˇ í Karas)

Fojtík’s coworker and Radio Free Europe informant further recalled that in fact Fojtík was highly critical of the Soviet Union and appalled by the behavior around him on all levels, including the extravagant lifestyles and living standards of the Soviet leadership. In alcohol-laced conversations with the editorial staff of Rudé právo, he would refer to members of the Soviet Politburo as those “drunken old crones.” He claimed that the one advantage of having spent time in Moscow was that he had abandoned his “youthful illusions.” When drunk (which appeared to be often), Fojtík was filled with self-loathing.23 In the spring of 1968, although he tried at first to side with the reformists at Rudé právo, the editorial staff tired of his saying one thing and then writing another, and eventually asked him to leave, after which he threw in his lot with the “dogmatists,” such as Bil’ak and his old friend Sˇvestka, the former editor in chief. Jan Fojtík was, therefore, a great careerist first and foremost, one who when drunk perhaps shuddered—ever so briefly—at the contradictions between his private thoughts and public deeds. During the next twenty years of normalization, Jan Fojtík would often lock horns with Jan Zelenka, head of state television. Both had been born in the 1920s, and both had begun their political careers as journalists, rising in the party ranks. Never fond of the reformists—in fact, far from it—Zelenka was now saddled

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with the task of reigning in state television, and, as the following chapters will show, at times he would prove to be a realist born of circumstance.

The Screenings By the time the second and more comprehensive stage of the purge began, in January 1970, these men were in place. It was this second phase—the so-called screenings—that would affect the most people. Party membership screenings as such did not automatically translate into a purge. These screenings in and of themselves were not new; similar screenings, or party card exchanges, had been carried out before. The first one occurred in 1945–46 in response to worries about “the wisdom of large-scale, unregulated recruitment of all applicants,”24 when the party served as a safe haven from all sorts of sins committed during World War II. Another screening had already been scheduled for 1969, decided on at a time when it was still considered a political spring cleaning. But what had been functional would now become punitive. The post-Prague Spring screenings, a process of public and private inquiry, centered around interviews conducted by 70,217 specially created committees composed of 235,270 members instructed to decide “whether to renew the person’s party membership card or to expel him from the party, or else cancel his party membership.”25 During the course of seven months, the commissions interviewed 1.5 million party members.26 Renewal, cancellation, and expulsion represented entirely different versions of one’s professional and, in some cases, even private future. With party membership renewal one could reasonably expect career advancement; party membership cancellation signaled the possibility of demotion; and party expulsion meant the difference between having an office and cleaning one. But even those people who did not belong to the party—the majority of the country, for party membership had always been considered a hard-earned privilege—were affected. For them there were questionnaires that asked the fundamental question: do you agree or disagree that the invasion was an act of necessary international military assistance? To agree did not mean to pass through the screening with flying colors, but to disagree certainly guaranteed a failing grade. And once one had answered this and other questions, those answers became a part of one’s official identity, placed in a personnel file (so-called cadre files), a trailing albatross until retirement. Members of the cultural and academic fields clearly were the favored targets during the postinvasion screenings.27 This intelligentsia, as they were called, had been the most instrumental in firing up the engine for the Prague Spring and

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then fueling its passage into the consciousness of the larger population. The party insisted, moreover, that the “humanities-based intelligentsia” was as ideologically radical and politically volatile as the country’s students. The party was willing to look more kindly upon the “technical-based” intelligentsia, who they believed had avoided many reformist pitfalls because of their capacity for scientific and thus “rational thinking.” In the same spirit of conservative categorization, professionals working in the field of agriculture, perhaps by virtue of their distance from the urban centers where the reform movement had thrived, were judged to be the most loyal, practically untainted by the ideas of the Prague Spring.28 One other differentiation was crucial—namely, the national. Over the next twenty years, the Slovak experience of normalization would prove to be significantly different from the Czech, as would be organized resistance to it. In part, the seeds for this lay in the purge, which decimated the Czech intelligentsia more thoroughly than the Slovak, something that Gil Eyal rightly notes was done “with Moscow’s blessing.”29 Significantly, however, the purge was aimed at mass culture first and foremost, and the result, as the writer Heinrich Böll famously said in 1972, was “a cultural cemetery.”30 In the cultural sphere, proximity to Prague, the epicenter of 1968 reform, became less determining. As an anonymous report by persons working in culture in three regions of Bohemia claimed, the purge and its effects might have been delayed in the provinces by about two years, eventually taking place from 1971 to 1974 (regardless of official claims that the purge was over by 1971), but when it did come, it struck hard. The result was an even greater “cultural rigidity” than in Prague.31 Party experts boasted that, within two years of the invasion, up to 70 percent of personnel working in the Czech “ideological apparatus” had been purged.32 Statistics certainly do suggest that the number of those purged in less ideological areas was much lower.33

Suspect Television The Prague Spring had begun—and ended—not as a political revolution but as a revolutionary experience of words and images. Radio dominated, but television had offered proof of its potential supremacy by juxtaposing visual impressions with words, transmitting pictorials of reportage and confession, and turning revelation and defiance into immediate and lasting pictures that millions of viewers shared. Television’s performance as a unique communicator between state and citizens guaranteed its place at the top of normalization’s surveillance list. The reformist head of state television, Jirˇí Pelikán, had been swiftly removed in the first postinvasion reckoning, after which an interim manager had been

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brought in before Jan Zelenka finally took over. Zelenka would steer state television through the following twenty years of normalization. Asked to draw up an analysis of state television’s previous and current susceptibility to reformist ideologies, Zelenka, still new to his post, concluded that unwanted political infiltration had started well before January 1968—when members of television, together with various artists’ unions, took issue with television’s role as “a powerful tool of the political party and government” and insisted instead that it become a cultural institution.34 This was, according to Zelenka, merely a ruse because the moment that television was wrested from party control (under the pretext of changing it from a political to a cultural institution), Dubcˇek and his allies grasped television’s reins and “television [truly] entered politics.” Television news broadcasts offered a public platform for the entire cast of Dubcˇek’s cabinet as well as for reformist intellectuals such as Ludvík Vaculík, all of whom “disoriented the unsuspecting viewers and in many cases directly lured them onto paths in opposition to the party, the Soviet Union, and against socialism generally, while claiming that citizens were being offered the chance ‘to form their own opinions.’”35 In the process, wrote Zelenka in his 1970 report, some television personalities had achieved a level of intimacy with viewers that elevated their status beyond that of talking heads. Popular television newscasters—and here Zelenka made sure to mention Kamila Moucˇková, who had heroically broadcast during the invasion—topped the bill, but there were still others such as the heretic economist of the Prague Spring, Ota Sˇik, who appeared in his own television series, a series that “evoked in his viewers . . . a sense of hopelessness over our economy . . . and, on the other hand, portrayed in rosy colors all that was associated with capitalism.”36 Too many television presenters, argued Zelenka, had begun to see themselves as publicists for their private political views, and the television exposure they received for airing these personal opinions “reinforced their inner sense that they themselves . . . are something more than ‘mere’ journalists, that they are the bearers of some kind of new and specific powers.”37 Thus, even before Zelenka was called in, the television news department managers had been replaced, and Kamila Moucˇková had “been barred from the television screen and sent to another workplace.”38 It was under these circumstances that Zelenka found himself in charge of state television, and from the party’s perspective, his summation was grim. He estimated that there were still approximately two thousand employees practicing some form or another of passive resistance, and only a handful of loyal, “politically engaged” workers. He calculated that in the news department, he had only six committed employees, whereas approximately one hundred well-trained personnel had been the previous norm. These six, moreover, were inexperienced and learning as they went. In addition, news from abroad was being hampered

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by correspondents—in Paris and Geneva, for example—who had refused to return to Czechoslovakia when summoned back after the invasion. Other wellknown and publicly recognized television journalists had gone abroad and signed on with Western broadcast institutions.39 Certainly the postinvasion atmosphere at state television must have been antagonistic at the very least. Zelenka later told the Ideological Commission that in August 1969, in the week leading up to the first anniversary of the Soviet invasion, rumors had circulated that Czechoslovak television employees would go on strike. Television presenters and newscasters received anonymous warnings that if they agreed to appear on screen on the day of the anniversary, physical consequences would follow. Scared off, most newscasters and onscreen personnel refused to show up for work, which left that day’s television presentation to a young, inexperienced, and terrified woman who insisted that the head of the news department sit in the studio with her while Zelenka and two armed policemen sat just outside.40 For these reasons, television required a thorough cleansing to become normalized, and in September 1970, Zelenka circulated a memorandum to department heads, informing them of the government’s demand that state television’s screenings be completed by the end of the month. The reason cited for this urgency was television’s role as “a central, powerful, political institution.”41 The enclosed instructions were straightforward: each employee was to fill out a questionnaire—a sample of which was attached—answering each question in detail. It asked, for example, whether one had ever signed the Two Thousand Words manifesto, the widely disseminated pro-Prague Spring document written in late June 1968 by Ludvík Vaculík, which mixed the serious, the humorous, and the anti-Soviet (even the Prague Spring leaders had found it too bold, and—despite there being no more censorship—had requested that television not report on the manifesto’s popularity)42. Another of the questions hinted at guilt by association when it probed the personal histories of relatives living abroad, asking whether they were there “legally or not.” Yet another question sought clues about possible “Western” influences by inquiring about one’s recent travels and holidays, particularly outside the Iron Curtain. Another question bluntly inquired as to one’s attitude to the Czechoslovak Communist Party, first during the year 1968 and then following the invasion.43 Even when the screenings were over, state television remained under close scrutiny by the Central Committee and was vulnerable to further vetting (and accusations of insufficient zeal) throughout the 1970s and 1980s.44 Television was an especially easy target since its mistakes and slipups—of which there were more than a few—were played out on the screen for all to see. For example, the short-lived minister of education and rabid purger, Jaromír Hrbek (who was

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incensed by the reluctance of publishers to print his work even though “they have paper to publish the works of Sigmund Freud”), accused Zelenka of still allowing former ‘68ers to appear on the television screen. He found it outrageous “that at the same moment that we are carrying out dismissals and expulsions of signatories of the Two Thousand Words manifesto, one of its initiators, Zdeneˇk Servít, appears on the television screen: an academic, . . . who, excuse me, starts to cite some American about how ‘I want to step out of this world, I’m searching for sanctuary in my pipe, from today’s miserable world, etc.’ ”45 After yet more gaffes in the wake of this recitation of Allen Ginsberg’s Beat poetry, in February 1972 Zelenka issued a directive calling for background checks on all “members of the cultural front” prior to their appearance on the television screen.46 Then, a year later, in April 1973, the Control and Auditing Commission declared that it would be interviewing all persons in “‘important’ cultural positions, the editorial offices of local papers, radio and television studios.”47 The commission’s intent was to ensure either that everyone working in the field of ideology was a current member of the Communist Party or else that his or her presence had been approved directly by the party.48 The purge at state television seemed unending. The writer and dissident Milan Sˇimecˇka, author of a pithy account of the early postinvasion years, describes how television “announcers, interviewers, comperes, actors and presenters from every field, whose faces had been familiar to viewers for years, were no longer seen.”49 Surrounded by television’s ghosts of yesteryear, of persons seen “just yesterday” before disappearing abruptly, “programme controllers lived in fear of being telephoned . . . and being hauled over the coals for something that had escaped their vigilance,” with the result that “live broadcasts were axed in case anything but constantly regurgitated clichés should sneak their way into a programme.”50 But, as the regime was learning, despite all sorts of precautions, slippage was always possible. In one case out of many, the head of the ideological division of the Central Bohemian Regional Committee wrote to television headquarters in Prague to complain about recent reporting carried out at a local agricultural cooperative (JZD) by ill-informed Prague television journalists. “During this television report,” he wrote, “your workers allowed an exposed carrier of right-wing opportunism, Mr. Kunc, the former director of the Sˇestajovice JZD . . . , who is known as the main initiator of the reestablished Agricultural Party in the year 1968, to appear on screen.” This information had been “passed on” to him by “one of the workers in our local television news” who had been with the Prague journalists on the “assignment conducting a survey at the JZD.”51 A full inquiry followed. The producer of the offending television report submitted a written statement in which he admitted that he had failed to contact the appropriate regional office about the television crew’s arrival at the agricultural

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cooperative; he conceded that such a forewarning would have given them the chance to make sure that Mr. Kunc was nowhere to be seen. The segment producer’s supervisor further submitted a statement in which he offered some tepid support of his employee, admitting to Zelenka that he would hate to lose him at this time because of the staff shortage: “I watch him nonstop, and he goes after assignments to prove that he wishes to make up for his past. If I had a replacement for him, I would think about this matter differently.” The producer was permitted to keep his post but was ordered to pay for his mistake—five hundred crowns a month for six months, beginning March 1972.

The Case of a Television Talk Show Host The shortage about which the producer’s supervisor wrote was caused in part by the purge, which rid the system of qualified personnel, and in part by many a person’s initial reluctance to work for the normalization regime. For example, at first compliant actors were hard to come by; most would not cooperate with the new management of state television and film and refused to do voice-overs and dubbing for films from the socialist countries that had participated in the invasion.52 This defiance was in many cases laudable, but it was also a necessary means of self-preservation. Jan Zelenka, who now regularly appeared on the television screen, described to his colleagues the repercussions of television exposure during early normalization: After Fojtík, Zelenka, and [Rudé právo editor in chief] Moc appear on the television screen, it’s them that all sorts of filth targets and attacks, it’s them that bear all kinds of reactions, because their faces are familiar. When they go to the delicatessen, there everyone says: Those are them swine. . . . And not surprisingly, some of them have since become fearful. Why should one further complicate his life on the street, in the cafe, etc.? I offer it as an explanation as to why it’s so difficult . . . to find comrades who will, without anonymity, show their faces to millions of people.53 And yet, as the months passed and normalization’s constant drone began to settle into the crevices of one’s consciousness, many people began to face the reality of what lay ahead. Thus, a friend of one of the purged Prague Spring television presenters appealed to Jan Zelenka: “[Milena Vostrˇáková] cannot understand how after so many years of quality work, she should be denied the possibility to appear as a television presenter because of one single, insignificant blunder.”54 In Vostrˇáková’s case, Zelenka and his fellow normalizers were

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unwilling to overlook what her friend referred to as an insignificant blunder but which they saw as an irreversible betrayal of party loyalty. Less clear-cut was the case of the popular actor and television personality Miroslav Hornícˇek, who, at least on the screen, appeared to have done everything right. As the host of a popular television talk show called Conversations [Hovory], he was applauded for his work in Czechoslovak Television’s evaluation report for the fourth quarter of 1969, receiving high praise for keeping viewers focused on their screens and entertained so soon after the invasion.55 But in 1970, during a private conversation with a fellow actor, it somehow became known to the authorities that Hornícˇek had “let himself slip here and there,” as he reminisced about the recent past, and that at one point he even seemed to have uttered “a provocative, political invective.”56 Although this incident had not taken place on the screen, Hornícˇek and his talk show were both taken off the air. Determined to make his way back to the television screen, Hornícˇek wrote directly to Zelenka asking for help. He began his letter by reminding Zelenka that they had last seen each other in the city of Brno when Zelenka had presented an award to Hornícˇek, who was still then in good standing. But since that evening, Hornícˇek lamented, there had been only silence from Zelenka. Hornícˇek had been promised that his talk show, Conversations, would return to the air when the 1971 election period was over, but that had not happened. After that, gossip began to circulate that he had been imprisoned or else had emigrated. Hornícˇek had contacted Czechoslovak Television immediately and asked to appear on screen briefly so he could clear up the rumors. He was permitted to do so, addressing his television viewers at home: “I live here [in Czechoslovakia] and I wish to live here. . . . I wish to add my bit to our mutual task [of rebuilding communism].” Yet despite this gesture of goodwill toward the normalization regime, Hornícˇek had continued to carry the stigma of political untrustworthiness.57 This is what Hornícˇek could not comprehend. In his letter to Zelenka, he laid out the extent of the political work he had been doing voluntarily since August 1968; for example, he had visited the President Zápotocký Mines no less than twice in the present year. He also reminded Zelenka that “[p]olitical engagement in each of us is necessarily of a different type, and a person must serve with what it is he can do.” He believed that what he could do best was to entertain the public, and he wished to continue to do so as his part in serving “this country.” Like others who tried to walk the fine line between returning to official life and linking up fully with normalization, Hornícˇek refrained from referring to the party or the regime directly and instead spoke of his country—a loyalty that presumably was more palatable to him. Perhaps because of this obvious ploy, Hornícˇek’s letter failed to arouse Zelenka’s pity. Or perhaps because Hornícˇek did not stop there but clumsily went on to criticize the regime while also struggling

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to appeal to it: “I watch from a distance with amazement and a little sadness television programs that are petit bourgeois or else bourgeois in tone,” Hornícˇek wrote, “and I ask myself again whether the stated criteria [for one’s removal from public life] count only sometimes and only for some people or if the reasons are objectively valid.” Zelenka gave his answer not to Hornícˇek but to the Central Committee secretary, Oldrˇich Sˇvestka. Zelenka sent Sˇvestka a copy of Hornícˇek’s letter, adding a note to it that read, “I will invite Miroslav Hornícˇek over and I will explain to him that nothing is stopping him from appearing on television except he must leave it to us to decide what we consider to be politically engaged and what we do not.”58 The conversation must have gone well, or else Zelenka decided that Hornícˇek would do more good on the television screen than at home, for Hornícˇek returned to the screen and continued to be one of the country’s most beloved entertainers.

Reentry into Official Life This very human desire to fall back into the official embrace—which Hornícˇek’s letter to Zelenka depicts so well—dovetailed with the regime’s own dawning recognition that it could not run a functioning state without a sufficient number of well-trained personnel. It was the inevitable conundrum linked to all largescale retributive purges and in no way limited to the communist arena. In postwar France, for example, in the reckoning that followed participation in the collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II, an extensive purge (épuration) was conducted to root out collaborators. Although the majority of government administrators undoubtedly had collaborated in one form or another, Peter Novick demonstrates in his history of the French purge how Charles de Gaulle and his government agreed almost from the start that there would not be—indeed, could not be—any serious purge of the civil service.59 This was particularly the case for the legions of local civil servants who were vital for the smooth functioning of local services; preliberation instructions to local prefects even specified “a certain indulgence.”60 And while no cry for indulgence emanated from Husák’s government, it faced the same challenge of balancing revenge and ideological purification with the mundane but necessary demands of a functioning state. Moreover, just as in the case of the postwar French purge, while writers and artists were seen as both blameworthy and expendable, apparatchiks more often were considered capable of redemption. To borrow from Herbert Lottman, also writing on the épuration, it had to be so “if only to keep the factories humming.”61 Secretary Jan Fojtík, the drunken newspaper journalist turned normalization’s ideological watchdog, had been among the first to insist that once the purge was

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over, the rapid selection and training of qualified cadres had to follow immediately.62 The idea was to rebuild personnel with the aim of creating a network of loyal cadres immune to reformist appeals who would act as a safeguard against any resurgent reformism inside or outside the party.63 What this implicitly meant was that skills, education, talent, and professionalism could no longer be sufficient criteria for career placement and advancement: political loyalty would be the primary currency for employment. Class background, for example, now was reintroduced into admissions for higher education, whereas in Hungary, five years after 1956, it had ceased to be part of the evaluation.64 Whether it was for admission to university or merely to high school, the background and current activities of both students and their parents counted and were viewed as a guarantee of political loyalty. The language of political engagement, in the form of a loud gesturing of party allegiance, thereby became embedded in the culture of normalization. One can read it in the letters of appeal sent to Central Committee members as well as to other political elites by both casual friends and anonymous supplicants. For example, when an old comrade from the wartime communist underground resistance contacted Zelenka with the request that he help find a job in television for his daughter, Olga, a recent graduate of Charles University in Prague, Zelenka’s old friend proudly laid out his daughter’s academic credentials. Zelenka wrote back that he was ready to help but that first he would “need to know more precisely how she engaged herself at the university, but not only in her field of study, but politically, how she worked in the Socialist Youth Union, for example, with party organizations, and so forth.” “You understand,” Zelenka added, “we are television and here the cadre requirements are extremely high.” The follow-up letter from Zelenka’s wartime friend went to great lengths trying to prove his daughter’s political fidelity despite his admission that he himself did not belong to the party.65 Political engagement as the primary prerequisite for employment was particularly alarming to actors, performers, and entertainers who in the past had been left alone by the authorities as long as their work did not politically provoke. Now both their public performances and their private convictions (and, in the case of Hornícˇek, their private conversations) came under scrutiny. This took on a concrete form with the introduction of so-called requalification exams; entertainers, and musicians in particular, hoping to perform as professionals in public venues, first had to qualify for (and later renew) a license to do so. This meant an examination in most cases, as well as an interview in front of a committee of judges, who were there to gauge political commitment. Performers were asked by the committees such questions as what they were doing “to bring optimism and joy to their audiences” and then further reminded—if it was not

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already clear—that one could not separate art from ideology.66 To be demoted to amateur status, as the famous dissident rock band The Plastic People of the Universe would later be, meant to be barred from performing in any public arena, large or small. This level of renewed political monitoring had significant consequences for those now wanting to reinsert themselves into official life. It meant not only having to disavow one’s previous allegiances but to exhibit newly adopted political loyalties with consummate enthusiasm. The more rigid normalizers among the leadership, first and foremost Vasil Bil’ak, did not even want to hear of purged reformists being allowed a path back into official life. His rather ludicrous alternative solution was to turn factory workers overnight into loyal, white-collar professional cadres—obviously an unfeasible plan that harked back to the bungling naiveté of the 1950s when a working-class background was considered a sufficient qualification for even the most specialized of jobs.67 As it was, by 1975 it was estimated that 40 percent of top officials did not possess the necessary qualifications, while 75 percent of expelled former reform communists were employed in menial labor.68 Early on, then, it was evident to many of those who stood with the moderates—and this included General Secretary Husák, despite his support for the purge—that the only reasonable solution to this consequence of the purge was to allow reentry into the party ranks for repentant reformists. The young communist dreamers and their youthful exuberance that had propelled the party forward in the early postwar years were now a thing of the past. Hungarian leader János Kádár, adjusting the old adage (“Those who are not with us are against us”) to new times, had famously proclaimed in 1961 that “he who is not against us is with us.” Pointedly, in January 1970, Husák uttered his own particular version of the same—“He who is not against us is our potential ally.”69 It was an acknowledgment of the public’s diminished political fervor but also the propagation of the view that—unlike in Hungary, where goulash communism was successfully simmering—a lack of dissent against the regime did not automatically read as consent. In 1970 the party had envisioned overcoming widespread reservations toward normalization by “ensuring that every person gets appropriate work and a guaranteed existence”—assuming, of course, that they passed the screenings.70 But even then the regime recognized that the intelligentsia would be more difficult to entice, less likely to be ensnared with this classic bread-and-butter approach. This troubled the party because, as one official pointed out, “[W]e’re talking about people who are politically experienced and often theoretically erudite.”71 In other words, these were the people whom the state needed. The answer, as outlined by the Ideological Commission as early as 1970, was to help the intelligentsia

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overcome its political mistakes, after which the party would find them “positions where society can best use their experience and qualifications.”72 General Secretary Husák reached out to the professional classes for the first time in a pivotal speech he made in the industrial city of Ostrava on September 10, 1970: “We do not believe in ‘hereditary sin,’ we do not insist that a man who commits a mistake or acts wrongly should carry that burden to his death. . . . We now want to focus our sight on what needs to be done in the future.”73 Bil’ak, the staunch conservative, strongly disagreed with the moderates, however. He rejected what he called the “opinions of those panickers” who claimed that “we cannot do without these people, these experts” who had been expelled from the party for their reformist sympathies.74 The friction between the two camps—one represented by the more moderate Husák and the other by the politically orthodox Bil’ak—had remained relatively subdued over the issue of the purge but became more volatile over reentry. In the months leading up to the 1971 elections, as the purge came to an official close, Husák made it clear to the public that this was the time of reckoning: everyone would have to decide on which side of the fence he stood.75 As Miroslav Müller, head of the Central Committee’s Cultural Department, stated at a congress of the Czech Artists’ and Sculptors’ Union: “There are a number of Czech artists who are making an effort to get back into line with the artists’ associations. We welcome such people. But those who try to slip in craftily without first cleaning their dirty shoes will find the door closed.”76 That is, the desire to return to an active work life was not enough in and of itself. It had to be accompanied by the repudiation of one’s former political beliefs and the public embrace of normalization. Jirˇí Hájek, normalization’s prolific writer on cultural issues, summed up the rules for former Prague Spring supporters: “[I]t would be wrong to give them the impression that our society expects from them nothing more than decent behavior, an appearance of optimism, and an occasional formal declaration (which, after all, if not backed up by deeds, often amounts to nothing more than lip service).”77 Stifling personal disagreement with the normalization regime was insufficient; active approval was demanded. By 1972, Husák had won out over Bil’ak and had pushed through a policy that would allow for the reentry of former reformists, although acquiring the entrance pass would also require something of them. In his closing remarks at an October 1972 ideological plenum, Husák stated, “Patience is necessary, especially when approaching talented people, true artists, scientists, the people who can be won over for socialist society, with whom we can establish contact and bring them closer to the working class. We do not speak about this with the intention of announcing a general amnesty or anything like it, but to make clear the distinction between those who can be won over, and those who cannot, who are clear-cut enemies, who, even today, take a hostile stance.”78 This was the victory

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of what Bil’ak sarcastically dubbed the liberal “blue-sky theory.”79 But as one who had proven himself capable of frenetic chameleonism, Husák had correctly assessed the capacity of former reform communists to change their colors.

Recantation When the party tentatively began to offer its outstretched hand to the intelligentsia in 1970, at first few grasped it. The cultural division of the party bureau admitted in March 1970 that “so far the majority of well-known writers have been unwilling to enlist their services for the active support of our politics,” and a few months later that “the area of culture, especially the arts, was unusually influenced by rightist opportunism and that in this area—with the exception of the healthy core—there is a low level of class-oriented and internationalist thinking.”80 In June 1970, a majority of journalists were offered the chance to recant and reenter active political work. Many took up the offer, but approximately onethird still refused to do so.81 Such certitude began to wane, however, as it became increasingly apparent that normalization was to become a permanent fixture in Czechoslovak life. Nor, when considering the string of failed attempts at reform in East Central Europe from 1953 onward, could one realistically imagine an imminent end to communist power. In his diary entry for March 1970, film director Pavel Jurácˇek described how this recognition was sinking in: “We’ve all come to terms with it, at present it’s about surviving, waiting it out for two years, five years. . . . No one knows. . . . People have in their amazement retreated into privacy and caution. They know they’ll survive it, that everything has its end. Horoscopes, prophecies, omens, and palm reading are much in fashion now.”82 Speculation, fantasy, and the paranormal seemed, at least in the opening years of the 1970s, no less normal than normalization. Thus, even as official ideology moved in on the memory of the Prague Spring, individual citizens began to recast 1968 as firmly belonging to the past, to history. “It was beautiful, it was very beautiful,” wrote Jurácˇek, “and not one of us will forget it until the day we die. . . . And at home we will all preserve and take care of bundles of newspapers, and magazines, photographs, flyers, and tape cassettes collected during those months in the year ‘68.”83 As Prague Spring memorabilia was stored away in the back of closets and boxed up in attics, attitudes began to change. Jurácˇek cataloged the gradual reentry of actors, directors, and musicians into the service of the party: [The normalizers are] counting on starving us out so that finally we come to them and humbly do whatever they want of us. They want

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us to admit that we’ve “seen” our mistake with our own eyes. . . . They constantly let themselves be heard saying that they’re not taking the opportunity away from any of us as long as we’re willing to film pieces with which we prove our “good will.” . . . There are enough of them around—those well-meaning ones—who [say they] wish to save film, television, and all culture—who act as if they’re concerned old geezers sacrificing their precious legacy in order “to help” and “to protect” by occupying the positions which would otherwise be taken up by “much worse” people. The relationship between the party and willing celebrities was nowhere better exemplified than in the case of the famous Czech crooner Karel Gott. No less adored in West Germany than in the Eastern Bloc, Gott played the game to his full benefit. Of him, Jurácˇek wrote, “Karel Gott invites into his home the likes of Zelenka and [Czech culture minister] Bru˚zˇek ostensibly to put in a good word for [singer and Prague Spring activist] Marta Kubisˇová!!!”84 Despite these cozy relations, puritanical party policy did not always sit well with Gott: “It was a time, dear children of future generations,” noted Milan Sˇimecˇka in his account of postinvasion life, “when it was forbidden for a young man to appear on the screen with hair over his ears and when no woman would be permitted to enter the television studios unless the doorkeeper could discern a bra fastening in the middle of her back.”85 Gott, thinking himself too valuable to be bullied by such rules, wrote to the Ministry of Culture in 1971 threatening to stay abroad.86 What followed was documented by Milan Kundera in his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “When Karel Gott, the Czech pop singer, went abroad in 1972, Husak got scared. He sat down and wrote him a personal letter (it was August 1972 and Gott was in Frankfurt). The following is a verbatim quote from it. I have invented nothing. Dear Karel, We are not angry with you. Please come back. We will do everything you ask. We will help you if you help us.”87 Gott—or “the idiot of music,” as Kundera refers to him—returned and was soon doing the rounds of radio and television, laughing off the rumors of his flight from the Czechoslovak Socialist Federal Republic.88 For the majority of people, however, those whose disappearance would do little harm to Czechoslovakia’s image abroad or to the mood at home, a return to the party’s embrace included not only a public retraction of their earlier political convictions but, worse, an often humiliating self-criticism. One’s written affirmation of loyalty toward the new regime became the property of the government, thereafter always on hand for degrading publication in the event of possible pangs of conscience and second thoughts. The more public the person, the more public the self-criticism. In late 1971, Alois Polednˇák, former director of

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Karel Gott (left), upon having received the title of National Artist, with Jan Zelenka, the director of Czechoslovak Television, 30 April 1985. (Czechoslovak Press Agency; photographed by Karel Mevald)

the Czechoslovak film industry and a well-known politician during the Prague Spring, was released from prison, shortly after which he publicly stated, “I have had enough opportunity and enough time to examine in great detail my attitudes in the years 1968 and 1969. I am really sorry, deeply sorry, that through my deeds and behavior I harmed the interests of this country, and I want to do everything possible in my future activities to rectify these mistakes and offenses of mine.”89 Polednˇák’s self-criticism was strategically published shortly before the 1971 elections, parallel with Husák’s statement that this was a time of reckoning during which people would have to choose, once and for all, on which side of the barricade they wished to stand. It was a painful choice to make: the humiliation of recantation or the solitude of oblivion.90 Understandably many succumbed to the call, unable to imagine a future in which they could no longer practice their skills, develop their talents, or provide their children with a higher education. In 1973, the acclaimed poet and scientist Miroslav Holub publicly recanted, confessing his regret for

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having signed the Two Thousand Words manifesto and for having failed to see “during the fateful crisis . . . the counterrevolutionary danger”; he now confirmed his “respect” for “the constructive effort of the new party and state leadership.”91 Two years later, in 1975, the writer Bohumil Hrabal, known abroad for Closely Watched Trains, joined the now reconstituted and fully normalized Czech Writers’ Union so that he could again publish his work for the average Czech, who had been and would continue to be his primary muse. In an interview for the cultural weekly Tvorba (Creation), Hrabal explained that he regretted his “recent isolation” and admitted that as a Czech writer he felt “tied to the Czech people, and to [his own] socialist present and future.”92 The decision to reenter the official sphere demanded a denial of the recent past for the benefit of the new regime. But even putting aside the prerequisites for reentry, memory seemed increasingly expendable, and it was presentness that counted. The past was cordoned off, tainted, and criminalized, while the future appeared as a blurry and uncertain horizon. The film director Jurácˇek described this dominant atmosphere in his diary: In Prague there is sadness. This winter is supposedly the longest in the last sixty years. . . . Loads of people are now gone—in Austria, Germany, Canada, Australia—and they will never return. . . . It’s impossible to guess what will be tomorrow, in a week, in a year; to live from one day to the next, from one day to the next, from one day to the next, FROM ONE DAY TO THE NEXT. . . ! . . . To sleep, drink, make love, to move from one place to another and back, to consciously be aware of time passing by—more than that has not remained of life: only that this isn’t human life, it is the existence of a prison inmate whom they did not tell how long he will be imprisoned and so he can only tell himself with uncertainty that surely at some point it’ll be over.93 On these grounds, reentry often seemed justifiable, perhaps even necessary. It was, however, a path pursued mainly by the professional classes, the intelligentsia. Those among the working class who had erred politically seldom needed to plead for reentry because manual labor, and the obscurity that came with it, was the baseline punishment for the purged. Moreover, it was students, writers, artists, and white-collar workers who had been the instigators of the Prague Spring. The working classes had seemed altogether more ambivalent during 1968. In fact, in March of that year, in an open letter, university students had bemoaned this chasm between social classes. “We are very offended by the opinion that students are trying to bring about a return of capitalism, unemployment, hunger and poverty to Czechoslovakia,” they wrote publicly. “It hurts us all the more that we sometimes hear this directly from workers.”94 It was finally the

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invasion that spurred workers to identify more closely with the Prague Spring but less for the movement’s political ideas than for the response it had evoked— most egregiously, the now permanent Soviet army occupation of Czechoslovakia. At the same time, they watched as many among the former intelligentsia cast off their earlier identities as reform communists and donned the cloak of normalization. The third and final phase of the purge was political trials. From 1969 to 1972, 653 persons in the Czech lands alone were sentenced to prison.95 While individual trials directly affected the least number of people, the larger purpose of these trials was, as the historian Milan Otáhal has noted, to “break any kind of opposition in the public . . . to incite fear so as to ensure against even passive opposition.”96 Not in style and outcome but certainly in purpose, they approximated the Stalinist show trials of the 1950s, whose object, Judt has argued, “was not to seek or illustrate the truth but to confirm a certain version of reality.”97 The absence in these trials of so many of the Prague Spring’s most prominent figures—both politicians and intellectuals—helped foment fear rather than allay it; it suggested that to be unknown and ordinary could lead to calamity rather than immunity from the regime’s retribution. In January 1971, the Presidium approved the creation of a list of the most dangerous of normalization’s opponents, those who were to be monitored and harassed on a continual basis. Regional committees submitted the names of ten thousand people to be included on the list.98

Engaging with Normalization Ultimately the purge did far more than expunge unrepentant reform communists from official, public life. The purge, with its screening committees and questionnaires and follow-up investigations, forced a substantial part of the populace to address the new normalization regime and to place on record their relationship with it. The purge was as much about what one had done in the recent past as what one was planning to do in the future. The purge of Dubcˇek had dethroned him as general secretary, briefly sent him to Turkey as ambassador, and finally deposited him in the offices of Slovakia’s State Forestry Administration as an ordinary employee.99 The sociologist and committed reformist Radovan Richta, the man who had thought up Prague Spring’s most famous phrase, “socialism with a human face,” opted to become what the historian Hans Renner has accurately described as “a ruthless inquisitor who, in return for a high position in the normalized world of science, started a witch-hunt against his former colleagues and political friends.”100 These colleagues and friends, as a consequence of the purge, ended up as stokers, window cleaners, and sometimes involuntary exiles abroad.

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The historian Milan Hübl, a friend of Gustáv Husák’s who had worked to have him released from prison in the late 1950s, was rewarded by him after 1968 with a prison sentence of six and a half years.101 Hübl was a friend not only of Husák but also of Milan Kundera, whom he visited shortly before his arrest. The meeting, retold by Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, contributed to Kundera famously naming Husák “the president of forgetting”: a forlorn Hübl predicted that “the first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, it culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history.”102 In part, that was the goal of the purge—to eliminate the recent past and replace it with a falsified stand-in. But a still larger consequence of the purge was that it forced citizens into dialogue with the regime. This became clearer still with the introduction of the reentry policy, which offered the possibility of a return into official structures, although not always with a guaranteed soft landing. But as Zelenka’s correspondence with some hopeful reentrants clearly suggests, it was the regime that would set the parameters for these returns. All told, the purge demonstrated that those who continued to work in an official capacity, in a position in any way commensurate with their training and credentials, were seldom there by accident but rather because of conversations they had had with the normalization regime and its representatives, be it in a committee interview, on a questionnaire, in a letter requesting reentry, or in a self-criticism ordered by the party. It meant that despite the continued widespread use of “them” to describe Husák’s government and its functionaries, many Czech citizens would become—indeed, had already become—the cocreators and comanagers of normalization.

3 INTELLECTUALS, HYSTERICS, AND “REAL MEN” The Prague Spring Officially Remembered

In Milan Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, written when the author was already living in France, one of the characters describes 1971 as the year of forgetting and proclaims, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”1 It was a favorite theme of Kundera’s. At the 1967 Writers’ Congress, when writers en masse defied the party leadership, Kundera had stood up and warned against the country’s “vandals,” who “lack awareness of historical continuity and culture, who want to change their nation into a desert without history, without memory, without resonance, without beauty.”2 In the year that followed, these vandals were pushed to the political sidelines as 1968 opened up into a year of remembering. That spring, Stalinist exploits finally came out into the open, and Eduard Goldstücker could face the television cameras holding up officially doctored photographs alongside their unfalsified originals. But by the early 1970s, these same photographs—and the history they told— were once again being banished from view. Typical was the directive passed on to the editor at one Prague publishing house: “On the basis of decisions by our superiors in several party and state organs, I ask you to carry out an editorial control of your photo archives . . . [in order to] isolate from the archives all photos (especially group ones) that include compromised person(s), and not just from the years 1968–1969, but also from earlier times.”3 The practice of destroying politically sensitive images became commonplace. At Czechoslovak Television, where the power that images could elicit was fully recognized, the general director, Jan Zelenka, regularly ordered his office to be cleared of such supposedly 61

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scandalous fare as the German mass circulation magazine Der Spiegel and its even more banal English-language counterpart, Time. As a member of the Communist Party’s upper echelons, Zelenka was considered impervious to the effects of these magazines’ well-photographed messages, while less politically committed individuals were not to be trusted with the evocative images. Yet to re-create a nation as a blank slate without history or memory, to whitewash an entire image rather than merely erase a small part of it, was a Herculean task that the normalization regime could not hope to carry out. Still, it tried: during one typical clean sweep of Zelenka’s office, the two employees in charge of removing the offending materials were forced to redirect a truck of seemingly benign photographs because the customary paper mill could not process the emulsion on them. Having to come up with an alternate plan for their disposal, the two employees decided to bring the photographs directly to Czechoslovak Television’s furnace for incineration. But as they were about to depart, they were summoned to Zelenka’s office, where he informed them that management had just learned the stoker at the furnace was the poet and political dissident Andrej Stankovicˇ (presumably, the very sort of person who least could be trusted with Der Spiegel and Time). Management swiftly took care of the problem: Stankovicˇ was fired, and as soon as he had left the furnace room, the two employees were sent in to burn the photographs.4 But the absurdity of such an incident merely underscores that while normalization’s leaders might have wished to rule over a land of forgetting, history perpetually spun back on them. This was not surprising, for, as Kundera wrote in the same novel, Prague was filled with “the ghosts of monuments demolished—demolished by the Czech Reformation, demolished by the Austrian Counterreformation, demolished by the Czechoslovak Republic, demolished by the Communists. Even statues of Stalin have been torn down. All over the country, wherever statues were thus destroyed, Lenin statues have sprouted up by the thousands.”5 As Kundera well knew, erasing memory proves impossible because memories inevitably linger; what remained instead was to shape memory.

Celebrating the Past Regime change is marked, as Kundera suggests, by the toppling of monuments: exploding Stalins in the late 1950s, decapitated Lenins in the late 1980s. But the Prague Spring had been too short-lived to have erected monuments. It left not physical remains but individuals, living and breathing reform communists, whose removal was taken care of during the postinvasion purge. Extracted from official life, from official structures, many of them considered this a sort of death, a burial to which there were often all too few witnesses. In some of these

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cases, the “political life of dead bodies,” as Katherine Verdery calls the trace effects that decayed bodies and rusted statues (i.e., replicas of the same flesh and form) exert on politics,6 would make their way into antistate dissent, particularly the Charter 77 group, whose ranks were filled with the purged. But for now, what the purge offered was a depopulated landscape of the recent past. This also had an impact on what the Soviets wanted most, besides compliance, from the Czechs and Slovaks: from the outset, they demanded a retelling of the Prague Spring that would serve as the official collective memory of 1968 as well as an ideological launching pad for normalization. Secretary of Ideology Vasil Bil’ak was put in charge of the rewriting. He explained to his colleagues in the Ideological Commission that it was imperative they dig deep to uncover the roots of the Prague Spring, that “each of us must, after all, ourselves come to terms with that Sˇikomania [a reference to Prague Spring economist Ota Sˇik], and it’s not enough to simply distance ourselves from his person. We must know what we got into in those days, and what conclusions we take from it. It wasn’t after all accidental that the politics of Dubcˇek . . . found such a large number of supporters. And we will not soothe ourselves with the thought that it was a case of the masses becoming disoriented.” In his view, the very social fabric of Czech society was to blame and not merely some lone intellectuals and economists. Bil’ak insisted that since Czechs were fundamentally middle-class, they were naturally receptive to anticommunist sentiments: “When we consider the Czech nation, [we must remember] that before the war more than 40 percent of the population belonged to the commercial classes; the roots of petit bourgeois sentiments, from which arose [right-wing] opportunism and efforts to social-democraticize our party, to rid it of its Leninist character, to build socialism according to petit bourgeois illusions, these efforts we cannot place on the doorstep of Sˇik or some other theorist who confused the [intelligentsia] front and then also the masses.”7 But if the intellectuals were not to blame, who was? Someone needed to be found responsible, especially since regional ideological committees were clamoring for an official account of 1968 and, presumably, for the blame-names behind it all. As regional apparatchiks readily admitted, they were floundering when faced with questions about the Prague Spring. Without a clear directive from the center on what to tell the people, they feared saying the wrong thing. One member of the Central Committee’s Ideological Commission noted that he had recently sat in on training seminars being held across the country for the new party functionaries and that it was evident from these that “we need better information. We can’t answer questions if we don’t have the facts with which to do that.”8 Yet this urgent need did little to expedite the process, suggesting something of the difficulties encountered in writing up the official record of 1968. Because of

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the snail’s pace with which the official account was being prepared, rumors spread, and Jan Fojtík was forced to address them: “There are voices out there claiming that we don’t want to work on an analysis. That is not true, but an analysis is not born easily. It is necessary to reach deeper points of view gradually. . . . This year we see things with a greater depth than we did last year, because new incidents reveal themselves, and a deeper knowledge of these incidents even changes many a person’s angles for approaching these things.”9 His argument—that time offered a sharper view of the past—was no doubt employed as a stalling tactic and the crux of the matter came down to the old communist joke that while the future is easy to predict, it is the past that keeps changing. While Bil’ak, Fojtík, and others labored over the official report on the Prague Spring, recent history continued to spring up on them, particularly in these first postinvasion years, which saw an unprecedented number of official anniversaries that demanded to be celebrated. In this time of political consolidation, it was all the more important for the party that communist milestones be marked officially and loudly with festivals, speeches, plaques, and declarations. Such ritualized celebration offered countless opportunities for the party to reappropriate the postwar years as a time of eager initiative and robust development, and in the process to define normalization as the beneficiary of this legacy. The Ideological Commission, in other words, was put in charge of this mythmaking. Celebrations for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s 1945 liberation by the Soviet Red Army were scheduled for 1970, and Jan Fojtík believed that this relatively uncontroversial anniversary should be used to remind the Czechs and Slovaks of the widespread sympathies both for the Soviet Union and for communism generally that had dominated immediately after World War II. Fojtík pointed out to his colleagues on the Ideological Commission that one of the key debates during the Prague Spring had been whether the Czechs should have voted so overwhelmingly for the Communist Party in the 1946 elections and whether they had—as Fojtík so delicately put it—thereby “boarded the correct train.”10 By using the anniversary of the Red Army liberation to revisit these early years after the war, the party could demonstrate the error in the recent claim that the Czechoslovak people had had communism forced upon them. No such thing had happened, Fojtík told his colleagues, and the public needed to be reminded that socialism was very much of their own making. Eduard Benesˇ, Czechoslovakia’s president in the 1930s and then again for the short quasi-democratic period of 1945 to 1948, was usually absent from or else vilified in official communist histories. But Czechoslovak Television’s Jan Zelenka suggested that the 1968 nostalgia for a noncommunist Czechoslovakia and its politicians should now be used to the advantage of the party, and Benesˇ should be reintroduced to the public to make a salient point or two: although

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Benesˇ had not been a communist, he had voluntarily forged diplomatic ties with Soviet Russia during the war and after the war had cooperated with the leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Klement Gottwald. Zelenka elaborated: “It would be good, psychologically, for some people . . . to somehow emphasize that after Munich, and based on the experiences of the war, even the bourgeois politician [President] Benesˇ . . . understood that the only possibility for Czechoslovakia’s existence in this Europe lay in close cooperation with the Soviet Union. That is the one single spot where I think it would be good to use Benesˇ.”11 But as soon as one left the relatively safe territory of the 1945 to 1948 period, postwar communist history constituted a more slippery slope. With no official, Soviet-approved report yet available, how could one begin to discuss the since-repudiated Stalinist 1950s and the pre-Prague Spring liberalizing 1960s that had ended in invasion and occupation? The retelling of either decade, let alone of the year 1968, was fraught with potential political land mines for any normalization functionary, particularly for those politically astute individuals who now sat on the Ideological Commission and preferred to remain silent until they knew what the official line was to be. Thus the commission’s draft position papers about the 1950s and 1960s (expected to set the tone for locally organized celebrations across the country) were criticized by some of its members for portraying these times “too much in terms of economics . . . making it seem as if all social development is based on and periodized by the [five-year plans].”12 Yet the relatively safe language of economics was ultimately preferable because unlike the language of politics or culture, it could more easily mask these very uncertainties. Amir Weiner has written about “the politics of myth,” arguing that the Second World War helped realign Soviet political identity. As Benedict Anderson and others have also shown, the shared belief in myth (although agreed upon as reality by a given community in a particular time and place) is vital to creating cohesive communities.13 Mythmaking, however, melds with memory, and certain memories and their carriers must be expunged from the larger community for the myth to function. Or, as Weiner has argued, “Inclusion and exclusion within the Soviet body were defined to a large degree through both the commemoration of cataclysmic events and the simultaneous erasure of the counter-memories of groups and events deemed incompatible with communist harmony.”14 Commemoration, and through it the reformulation of post-1968 communist identity, was the Ideological Commission’s task. But because of the simultaneously ongoing purge, which aimed precisely for the erasure of these countermemories, when it was time for the normalizers to write up a new history of 1968, it was eerily unpeopled and thereby reduced to a laundry list of falsified facts and miscalculated figures. Key personalities from the Prague Spring could

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not be named, having been made invisible through the purge, nor could the less significant players be made visible, for that would imply a mass movement, or at least a popular one. Instead, they all seemingly vanished into thin air. This was quite different from Hungary after the 1956 revolution. There, because of the violence of the revolution, the post-1956 normalizers had been burdened with real bodies, which they could not make disappear. Historian Istvan Rév recounts a 1957 meeting of the Budapest Party Committee, whose members struggled over the unpleasantries of these actual dead bodies. The Kerepesi Cemetery in Budapest was the final rest stop for the heroes of the revolution (understood here as the loyal communists who had died defending communism); their plots were automatically underwritten by the state. But directly across from them, on ground less than spitting distance away, lay the so-called counterrevolutionaries (meaning the Hungarian reform communists). While the committee struggled to solve this indignity, one party secretary declared, “According to the law still in force, exhumation of bodies can take place only in the presence of the relatives. Imagine, comrades, what would happen if we deliberately gathered the relatives of the counterrevolutionaries and started to dig out their dead one after the other from their graves?” The problem was further complicated by what a deputy of the Politburo described as areas where “the bodies of the revolutionaries are somewhat mixed up with the bodies of the counterrevolutionaries.”15 Finally a decision was made to separate the heroes from the traitors, as much as was possible, through “horticultural methods” (that is, by planting bushes and flowers).16 It was infinitely preferable to have had a revolution and invasion largely absent of dead bodies, but this very absence made official remembrances of 1968 that much more elusive. With the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Czechoslovak Communist Party looming, one member of the Ideological Commission straight off warned that since the Presidium still had not published its official analysis on recent events, it was becoming ever more difficult to draw conclusions without fear that these conclusions might go against the eventual findings in the official analysis.17 It is interesting to note, however, that even with its abundance of bodies, the Hungarian leadership in the aftermath of 1956 was just as jittery about the question of anniversaries and commemorations. Rév recalls a very similar party meeting in Budapest, which finally dissolved with the unanimous agreement that they would first have to ask the leadership what it wanted from the commemorations before they could decide how to proceed.18 Among the Czechs and Slovaks, it was only the infamous minister of education Hrbek who, undeterred, plowed ahead and complained that all these draft position papers passing through the Ideological Commission were inadequately blunt about what had happened in 1968 and, if anything, cowardly in their

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treatment of the counterrevolutionaries. Referring directly to the most recent draft for the anniversary of the founding of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, he stated, “I was very disappointed by the passage on 1968–1969. . . . It is presented in the shyest manner possible, it is unacceptable. . . . As for the [promised official] analysis, hopefully basic positions will be laid out there, but I would most definitely reject the argument that we don’t already have enough historical studies dealing with recent events. And if it is true that we don’t have enough historical studies, we certainly do have enough facts.”19 Minister of Education Hrbek, as always, was quite off the mark.

The Lesson In December 1970, more than two years after the invasion, the Czechoslovak Presidium finally unveiled its analysis of the Prague Spring in a document titled Lessons from the Crisis Period within the Party and Society after the XIIIth CPCz Congress. The document became known simply as The Lesson, succinctly underscoring its intent. It was first published in the daily newspaper Rudé právo in January 1971, followed by a print run of several million pamphlets.20 The document did what it was meant to do—that is, it satisfied the Soviets by offering an unmitigated justification of the Warsaw Pact invasion along with the promise that in the future Czechoslovakia would avoid repeating political mistakes that would require the same “international assistance.”21 Moscow’s approval of the document was made official when the Soviet Political Publishing House published two hundred thousand copies of it, in booklet form, one day after it was first printed in Czechoslovakia.22 But The Lesson also produced something unexpected: an officially sanctioned provocation of sorts. Since the invasion, there had been suspicion and rumor that individuals within the Czechoslovak government had opened the way for the “legal” invasion of their own country by the Soviets, and that they had done so by passing on a signed letter of invitation calling for help against the counterrevolutionaries. This idea in fact had first been put forth by the Soviet Union following the invasion but then quickly dropped when the streets of Prague proved empty of welcoming committees. Now it reappeared in The Letter and thereby “raised the ‘invitation thesis’ to the level of official Party doctrine.”23 Before publication, the assumption had been that The Lesson would be written up in such a way as to mend relations between the ultraconservative Bil’ak and the moderate Husák, but the long-awaited document on 1968 did the opposite. Bil’ak continued to deny that he was one of the signatories of that letter (although he was—along with Oldrˇich Sˇvestka and three others), but at the same time he did not distance

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himself from the invitation thesis, thereby further exacerbating tensions between himself and Husák. Last, despite Bil’ak’s initial statement that 1968 could not be blamed merely on the intellectuals, that everyone had to dig deeper to find the culprit that was within, one of the central lessons of The Lesson was the untrustworthiness of intellectuals. A 1973 article in Filosofický cˇasopis (The Philosophical Journal ) about the negative influences of the Frankfurt School philosophers on Czech intellectual circles during the 1960s cited a passage of The Lesson: “For a whole decade these [petit bourgeois] layers in society oriented themselves politically and culturally toward the West.”24 The backlash against intellectuals had begun immediately after the invasion, but now it was formalized in The Lesson.

The Intellectuals As early as 1969, Jirˇina Sˇvorcová, Czech actress and earnest proselytizer of hardline communism, had ridiculed the 1963 Kafka conference, which had had a great influence on Czechoslovakia’s reform-minded intellectuals. She renamed the famous conference “the Kafkiada,”25 a belittling term that implied incorrigible childishness and conjured up images of intellectuals chattering away with all the seriousness of circus clowns. Sˇvorcová’s comments were part of a string of attacks against participants in the Kafka conference, the first being delivered in September 1969 by a Professor Jaromír Lang in an interview with the Soviet Komsomolskaya Pravda and reprinted in a variety of Czech newspapers. Lang lamented that it was this 1963 conference that had sparked the dangerous and, once under way, seemingly irreversible process of replacing proletarian writers and their solid socialist ideas with Western writers and their bourgeois worldviews. The Kafka bashing continued with earnestness into 1972, the ninetieth anniversary of Kafka’s birth. In a discussion on Radio Prague, Ladislav Chmel, editor in chief of the newspaper Novinárˇ (Journalist), outlined his view of what had happened in the course of the Prague Spring: “Our culture and arts allowed themselves to be entirely influenced by existentialism; that is, generally speaking, a philosophy about the futility in everything . . . about the wasted efforts of building socialism, of trying to create a socialist society. . . . Simultaneously, what these authors [Kafka, Camus, Sartre]—who began to be published here in great numbers—did not manage to implant in people’s minds, the mass media tried to make up for by propagating these authors and their philosophy.”26 Chmel insisted that these “feelings of absurdity [typical to] Western man” were unnatural to the majority of people in socialist Czechoslovakia and that a major task of normalization would be to help “overcome the cult of this nihilistic philosophy.”27 Normalization’s new set of cultural critics thus insisted that the alienation described

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by Kafka was felt merely by marginalized, nonrepresentative Czech and Slovak intellectuals who were so anxious to mimic their West European counterparts that they had even adopted their neuroses.28

The Jews The targeting of intellectuals—via the renewed attack on Kafka and, even more so, on the “Kafkaists”—was interlaced with a potent dose of anti-Semitism and anti-Westernism, the two often linked. Anti-Semitism had been employed rabidly in the 1950s Slánský show trials and was now being used again, although in the more mitigated fashion that the times demanded. “Zionist conspiracies” (as they were called) thereby played a part in the public retelling of the Prague Spring. Although the Czechoslovak Communist Party was opposed to anti-Semitism in theory, its practice was quite different, and the party’s anti-Semitism seemed to be defiantly on display after 1968.29 Jewish members of the Prague Spring elite were specifically singled out, and the name brought up most often was Frantisˇek Kriegel. Kriegel had committed a double sin: he was Jewish and he was also the only politician among Dubcˇek’s cabinet to have refused to sign the Moscow Protocol, the document that agreed to the normalization of Czechoslovakia. Expelled from the party immediately thereafter, he was placed under twenty-fourhour surveillance by the secret police. In 1977, he joined with the newly formed dissident group Charter 77 and shortly after gave an interview to the German weekly Die Welt. In retaliation, a Czechoslovak Television announcer informed viewers that Kriegel, now a dissident, once had been friends with then party first secretary Antonín Novotný but had betrayed him “like a Judas.” This was not surprising, added the television announcer, since both Judas and Kriegel were from the same “tribe.”30 One viewer who had watched the television report on Kriegel wrote to Prague headquarters to complain about the blatantly anti-Semitic remark. Czechoslovak Television was unrepentant: the correspondence department wrote back to the viewer denying there had been any anti-Semitic connotations to the statement and, as if unable to leave it at that, further stated that the point made by S. Knotek, the television presenter, had been perfectly clear to everyone: “Judas betrayed Christ, and Kriegel betrayed Novotný.”31 This television viewer refused to give up and sent a second letter in which he flatly rejected Czechoslovak Television’s fatuous claims of innocence and demanded that the letter be handed to Jan Zelenka directly (television viewers frequently expressed this wish, seeming to believe that Zelenka, whom they knew well from the television screen, would see to it that justice was done). The correspondence department again wrote

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back, this time to inform the viewer that under no circumstances would it be bothering Zelenka with his letter, and that the weakness of his argument was proven by the fact that he was the only viewer to have written in claiming to have heard an anti-Semitic slur. Actually, this was not true; at the very least, one other person had complained about Knotek’s remark as well. Interestingly, this other viewer was fully supportive of normalization (as he made it known in his letter) and entirely opposed to the activities of political dissidents. Nevertheless, he wrote to Czechoslovak Television, “Surely there are enough arguments with which to criticize the authors of the Charter [77] without having to resort to the methods of Dr. Goebbels.”32 While some viewers might have remained unconvinced about the links between Judaism and political treachery, Czechoslovak Television and the Communist Party needed little convincing. A report on the success of the post-1968 purges at television headquarters in Prague made the preposterous claim that the purge committees had managed to discover from the screening interviews that Jirˇí Pelikán, the preinvasion reformist head of state television, had put together a contingency plan in case of a reformist defeat. This plan had revolved, so the report insisted, around two groups of men under Pelikán’s direction who had pledged to work surreptitiously at television headquarters even after the onset of normalization and Pelikán’s ouster. Members of the first team had spent World War II in the West, working in “imperialist” propaganda services. The second team was made up of “Zionists who focused first and foremost on the mass media.”33

The Imperialist Agents Pelikán was a great thorn in Czechoslovak Television’s side, and since he was not (conveniently) Jewish, he was instead slotted into the category of capitalist-sponsored imperialists. A committed political leftist, Pelikán had emigrated to Rome after the invasion, where he continued to champion the reform communist cause in part by publishing a Czech émigré journal called Listy (Letters).34 To discredit him and the journal, in 1976 Czechoslovak Television produced The Scandal in Rome, an “investigative” piece about Pelikán’s “covert” activities. Pelikán’s journal Listy was said to be sponsored by Radio Free Europe, with each issue having to be approved by it (and, presumably, also the American government and Central Intelligence Agency). In The Scandal in Rome, this was confirmed by Pavel Minarˇík, a genuine Czech secret agent who had infiltrated Radio Free Europe in Munich for a number of years before returning with much fanfare to Czechoslovakia (where he gleefully reported on the debilitating

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infighting of Czech and Slovak émigrés working there). The Scandal in Rome included footage in which Pelikán was seen to be discussing anti-Czechoslovak propaganda with his American handlers. This footage was amusing, however, to those who knew either Pelikán or Prague’s drinking holes. Pelikán was a nonsmoker, but footage in The Scandal in Rome showed a fuzzy black-and-white celluloid image of a man chain-smoking, all the while shaking with nervous energy and fear. The alleged meeting was filmed not in Rome but at a wine bar in Prague called U ˇs evce Matousˇe, which many television viewers instantly recognized.35

Museums of the Recent Past Like intellectuals and Jews, Western agents—either imperialists or émigrés in the employment of imperialists—constituted well-sketched culprits in official memories of the Prague Spring. Their existence was further made clear through a series of traveling exhibits organized in the first years of normalization and intended as educational tools for the public still confused by the events of 1968. These exhibits, organized by local secretaries of ideology, presented so-called documentary evidence about the nefarious activities of reform communists now referred to as “rightist opportunists,” “antisocialist forces,” “counterrevolutionaries,” and “revisionists.” Under exhibition titles such as “They Didn’t Get Away with It” and “The Evidence Is in the Documents,” leaflets, photographs, and newspaper headlines from 1968—everyday objects from just a year or two earlier—were encased in glass for public viewing.36 One exhibit titled “The Intentions and Means of the Enemies of Socialism in Czechoslovakia” that opened in Pilsen in 1970 claimed, for example, to examine the direct interests of the West in the spread of reform communism in Czechoslovakia: “[In 1968] over 847 foreigners from Western states came to visit our country. Of course they were not all spies, far from it, but even so among them there were indeed unwanted elements.” One such element was, for example, “twentyyear-old Douglas Burke, an American state employee from Boston. Supposedly only out of curiosity, he got himself mixed up in Prague demonstrations in August 1969,” where “apparently he wanted to show our tough guys the correct tone of an American university upbringing,” so “he threw stones at members of the State Police, lit garbage cans on fire, and damaged cars.”37 Foreign elements were described as having penetrated Czechoslovakia in 1968 and, in many cases, “documentary evidence” suggested that they were still within Czechoslovakia, disrupting normalization, amassing arms, and readying for battle.38 But another and still more important purpose of these traveling exhibits was to demonstrate who had managed not to be duped by Western agents (posing

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in any number of guises), by the media (run by Jews), and by intellectuals (playing at anticommunist existentialism and nihilism). A 1970 exhibition—this one held in the spa town of Carlsbad—displayed letters sent during the Prague Spring to various state functionaries by loyal communists warning against the spread of reform communism. Among those who had detected this new political virus early on were predictably many members of the new normalization government—including two signatories of the secret invitation letter to the Soviet Union, the Central Committee secretary, Oldrˇich Sˇvestka, and the presidium member Alois Indra.39 The message in these traveling exhibits was clear: even when everyone else seemed to have been disoriented by the chaos of reformist debate, these men had recognized the dangers posed by the counterrevolution under way in Czechoslovakia. They had, in other words, even then represented the singular voice of reason and normalcy during a time of chaos. Another exhibit made the similar argument that while Western intelligence officers and antisocialist émigrés, masquerading as benign visiting foreigners, had tried “again to separate socialist Czechoslovakia from its friend and ally, the Soviet Union, and to push it gradually back to capitalism,” it was this handful of loyal communists who had remained unswayed by the foreigners’ ideological bait. They alone had recognized that the country was “on the brink of civil war [and] the entry of the allied armies into Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968, was a necessary solution and the only correct one.”40

Making a Case for Mass Hysteria But if only a minority of citizens—destined to be the leaders of normalization— had kept a clear head, the majority must have failed to do so. The notion of mass hysteria, which only the normalizers had been able to detect clearly at the time, was developed in literature and film throughout the 1970s, gradually transforming earlier “factual” and “evidentiary” accounts of the Prague Spring—as The Lesson claimed to be—into largely symbolic narratives.41 Despite Bil’ak’s earlier insistence that “we will not soothe ourselves with the thought that it was a case of the masses becoming disoriented,” this is exactly what happened.42 Among the early literary efforts portraying mass hysteria was a play titled For You the Bell Will Not Toll! (Tobeˇ hrana zvonit nebude! ), which told the story of a fictional court case held in a small town. The court case, which all the town’s residents attended, centered on an incident that had taken place in August 1968 when, in an angry frenzy, the town’s citizens had tried to lynch the wife of a local communist who was “a loyal friend of the Soviet Union.”43 A few months later the novel Conscience (Sveˇdomí) appeared. Here the hero was a young party

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official confronted by the attractive-sounding slogans and the ready-made answers of the reform communists. Having experienced a traumatic youth, he did not have the internal mechanisms to resist this new avalanche of stimuli. But his susceptibility to the “revisionist opportunists” was not inscribed with evil intent—as it was in the case of the intellectuals and careerists who wooed and confused him.44 Both the desire of the small town’s inhabitants to lynch the communist functionary’s wife and the young party official’s dance with madness suggest a year in which rational thinking was thrown aside in favor of a loose, fluttering hold on sanity. A year later, in 1974, the film Hippopotamus (Hroch) arrived in cinemas. Until then, new films had tended to avoid politics despite calls for ideologically committed cultural productions: directors, playing it safe, suddenly seemed to prefer cinematic fantasias and children’s fairy tales. In contrast, the septuagenarian director of Hippopotamus, Karel Steklý, had already tried his hand at making a film about the 1968 crisis period, but it was not until Hippopotamus, his second attempt, that he met with any success. The film was variously described as a farce, a parody, and an ironic depiction of the Prague Spring political leaders. The plot centered around a hippopotamus at a zoo who became a celebrity after swallowing a man who remained alive in its belly. Characters, each resembling members of the Prague Spring government, proceeded to use the hippopotamus as a publicity gimmick for their own careerist plans. One scene in the film, for example, reenacted a real photo opportunity from 1968 when Dubcˇek had joined the public at a swimming pool and, following a series of swimsuit-clad dives, cheerfully signed autographs.45 Despite some critics’ complaints that the film was too complicated, oblique, and intellectual for the public,46 the overall message of the film was clear enough: Prague Spring politicians had been mind-manipulators relying on effective publicity tricks; they had made the world go mad; they had propagated an atmosphere in which a hippopotamus sang and where political interviews were conducted in public baths.47 But even if critics agreed that Hippopotamus possessed just the right message, the film was ultimately too complex for a general audience, and it failed to receive the sort of attention that such a politically aligned film could customarily expect. Nevertheless, it underscored the need to produce popular fare that would trumpet this same version of the recent past but in an accessible form.

The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman The desire to produce an effective film on the topic of 1968 might well have been connected to what Peter Apor and Oksana Sarkisova see as the primary potential

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effect of the moving image in relationship to the past, a process whereby “films act as ‘virtual museums,’ putting on displays and contextualizing the artefacts in a manner similar to museum exhibitions.”48 But it was the small screen that would prove to be the best showcase. In 1975, Czechoslovak state television produced a television serial to honor the thirtieth anniversary of the 1945 Red Army liberation of Czechoslovakia. The serial, titled The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman (Trˇicet prˇípadu˚ Majora Zemana), displayed the themes of intellectuals gone mad, of Western imperialists, of “Zionists,” and of a mass hysteria among ordinary citizens versus the level-headedness of the normalizers and brought them together seamlessly. According to an article in Rudé právo, written to mark the end of the Major Zeman serial (the last episode aired in 1980), the producers of the serial had re-created the atmosphere of the crisis years perfectly, and the episode titled “Witch Hunts” had been “so far the very best artistic interpretation of the crisis year 1968.”49 Major Zeman was an adventure criminal serial about the state security forces produced by Czechoslovak Television in conjunction with the Czechoslovak Army and the Federal Ministry of Interior. According to Jarmila Cysarˇová, who has written on the development of the television industry in Czechoslovakia, some remaining documents in the Czech Television archives and also in the archives of the Interior Ministry show that a close working relationship existed throughout normalization between the Ministry of the Interior and Czechoslovak Television.50 Following 1968, and particularly after the police actions against demonstrators in 1969, state security forces recognized that they needed to improve their public image. Subsequently, the 1971 yearly forecast plan put out by the press department of the Federal Ministry of Interior introduced the idea of producing a series of so-called krimi films based on familiar criminal episodes in Czechoslovakia since 1945.51 From this first intimation that the public image of state security forces might benefit from joining hands with television’s light entertainment department, Major Zeman emerged. The premise behind Major Zeman was to chronicle (and in the process rewrite) the thirty years of postwar communist history in Czechoslovakia. The serial’s plotline began in 1945 and ended in 1975, with one episode devoted to each of the thirty years. The point was for each episode to center around a primary story based upon a real historical event that had taken place in Czechoslovakia in that particular year. These historical turning points (now episodes) were taken directly from the archives of the Ministry of Interior and were reworked to conform to the Communist Party’s interpretations of a slew of pertinent, contemporary issues such as agricultural collectivization, Czech émigré circles in the West, 1960s reform communism, and Prague’s current political dissenters.

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The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman was produced with an eye to Westernstyle popular entertainment and in this sense could not have been more different from the intellectual parody attempted by the film Hippopotamus. The authors of the serial fully intended to address a younger generation of television viewers. In their opinion, the sorts of police heroes that were being idealized were either “bourgeois” pre–World War II types or, “worse still,” “American policemen as heroes.” “Surely we don’t want,” they argued, “that the young grow up along the lines of the indifferent, gum-chewing, killing, American-type ‘rough school.’” Instead, this domestic television serial was a way to present “an ideological counterbalance—our own magnetic hero, active, contemporary and yet still appealing.” The creators of the serial intended for Major Zeman to be not only entertaining but “most of all politically significant.”52 Once the serial was broadcast, it was unanimously agreed that the producers had achieved what they had set out to do. At the start of each Major Zeman episode, as the opening credits rolled, the screen filled with a fast-paced montage of car chases, guns, and the chiseled features of Major Zeman (played by the attractive and decidedly aristocratic-looking actor Vladimír Brabec), his jaw set firm in his determination to fight crime. The montage was set to a score of upbeat popular music. Major Zeman, the serial’s protagonist, was a police detective whose personal and professional life had been shaped by Czechoslovakia’s postwar politics, and the Communist Party figured as the serial’s quiet hero alongside Zeman. Zeman was motivated—from the closing days of the war to the 1970s, when he faced a resurgence of antisocialist forces in the form of normalization’s dissidents—by personal grievances that included, among other things, a murdered father and the unfortunate death of his first wife: tragedies that he must avenge by destroying the anticommunists who wreaked such havoc. But most of all, Major Zeman, this dashing representative of the party, offered a consistently calm and reassuring presence, giving the impression that even in the face of political turmoil such as the Prague Spring “the party is controlling the situation, is managing, and knows how to continue”—as Jan Zelenka would later describe the goal of Czechoslovak Television programming as a whole to the Ideological Commission.53 The most sensitive historical moments faced by both Zeman and the Major Zeman serial were, of course, the crisis years: 1967, when the winds of change began to blow full force through cultural circles; 1968, the year of the Prague Spring; and 1969, representing the introduction of normalization. Like the Ideological Commission, which had been unwilling to commit itself to a narrative of these years until the official, Soviet-approved version had been produced and published by the Presidium, the writers of the Major Zeman serial made sure

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to pass on their drafts for these three most potentially volatile episodes to the television chairman, Jan Zelenka. Zelenka in turn felt comfortable enough to edit the episodes for 1967 and 1969 but sent 1968 on to the Central Committee’s ideological secretary, Jan Fojtík, for revisions and comments.54 The episode for 1967, heavy-handedly titled “Clowns” (once again prompting reminders of the Kafkiada, the clownish turn of phrase used by the actress Jirˇina Sˇvorcová to discredit the 1963 Kafka conference), introduced viewers to the serial’s key Prague Spring reformist character, Pavel Danesˇ.55 He is a drunken, narcissistic, untalented, but alluring poet, who hangs about Prague’s cafes and theater clubs cynically manipulating his audience’s emotions and political beliefs through the recitation of meaningless, empty, yet lyrical words. This Svengali was thought by some to be a clear allusion to the playwright and dissident Václav Havel, while others guessed him to be Havel’s friend and fellow playwright Pavel Kohout. The author of the “Clowns” episode, however, had used the writer Jan Benesˇ, imprisoned under the communist leader Novotný, as his model. Other characters in the episode were similarly intended to play on the viewers’ real memories of 1968: for example, Professor Václav Cˇerný (Professor Black), a key intellectual figure for the reformists, was renamed Professor Bílý (Professor White) and vilified in the original drafts of “Clowns.” For the final filmed version, he was given yet a different name, the Germanic-sounding (and thus “foreign,” non-Czech, and potentially fascist) Professor Braun (Professor Brown).56 Nothing was left to chance in this serialized retelling of recent history, and characters’ names were up for constant discussion. Milena Balasˇová, the notoriously bad-tempered head of the Prague studios, badgered the creators of Major Zeman over the name of the hero. He was originally called Major Herych, but Balasˇová insisted the name was too German and wanted to see a Czech name for the role of hero. When they came up with Zeman, she protested that Zeman was merely a Czech-ized version of the German name Seemann.57 In the episode portraying the year 1968, called “WitchHunts,” Major Zeman is victimized by these clownish reformists introduced in the earlier episode: he is demoted from his job by the politically motivated reform communists who have infected both the Communist Party and the country with their ideas.58 For the length of that year, Zeman is portrayed as a steadfast dissident, a man who remains loyal to his principles and suffers as a result: he is not only demoted to a petty desk bureaucrat but given the cold shoulder by former friends who have joined the reformist bandwagon and now refuse to acknowledge Zeman on the street as he walks by. Jirˇí Procházka, the author of this and the majority of the serial’s other episodes, was apparently inspired by Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, and the reference is inserted into the episode. Before Zeman takes the stand in his own trial, he borrows The Trial from a colleague, who asks: “Do you think that Kafka

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will help you against them?” Zeman replies, “That I don’t know. But I want to understand it so that I can defend myself.”59 The point is not only that Zeman’s trial is as absurd as the trial of the protagonist K. in Kafka’s novel but that reading the favored literature of the reformists might help Zeman decode the troubled and illogical minds of those now in charge. But it is not only the recently condemned Kafka who is brought up in the episode “Witch Hunts”—television and its central role in furthering the program of the Prague Spring also figure suggestively. In “Witch Hunts” a television producer is preparing an incendiary program series called “And What Do You Say to That, Professor?” in which the fictitious Professor Braun addresses cultural and political taboos from the 1950s.60 It was a page out of recent history, now reimagined on normalization’s television screen.

“The Well” It was the episode representing the year 1969—among the most famous and purportedly one of the easiest to write, with the least editing and rewriting required—that carried the theme of mass hysteria and national psychosis to its extreme. The title was “The Well,” and the episode famously opened with Major Zeman (still in his demoted position of petty police bureaucrat in Zˇizˇkov, a working-class Prague district) attending to the identity card of an old woman from the area.61 The old woman (“without any respect,” as the script notes)62 starts to holler at Major Zeman: “I know very well what kind of scoundrels you coppers [esenbák] are! . . . In 1968 you all crawled away, but now you’re daring to show yourselves again.” In contrast to the shrill old woman leaning over his desk, Zeman is a crumbled but noble creature. Exhausted by the insanity of the previous year’s events, he snaps at her to be quiet and notes that she has been getting into arguments all morning while standing in line. But the old woman replies, “And, what, you wouldn’t pick a fight if you came to the store at ten in the morning and they’d already run out of milk? Make sure that there’re supplies in the stores, and we won’t fight anymore.” The old woman’s verbal pyrotechnics intentionally underscore an important point: that the regular supply of consumer goods (which would soothe a disgruntled public) require peace and order and not political mayhem. The old woman moves on and when Zeman looks up next, his former boss, Major Zˇitný, is standing there. Dubcˇek is still in power but times are changing, for the invasion has taken place (although there is no overt mention of it), and Zˇitný asks Zeman if he might be willing to try his hand at solving a murder in the Czech countryside. He explains that the murder is starting to make the sorts of headlines that could prove to be even more destabilizing for the country at a time when it continues to teeter on the brink of civil war. The murder is a bizarre

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case involving members of a single family in a Czech village, and rumors are already spreading throughout the country—in large part because of the poet Pavel Danesˇ and his continued contacts in the media—that the murder might have been a provocation orchestrated by the secret police.63 Zeman must prove that this is not the case. Zeman travels to the village, where he joins up with the local police aide, Masˇtalírˇ. Once liked by his neighbors, Masˇtalírˇ is now vilified, wrongly suspected of having turned in one of their own during the previous year. As he explains: “Last year, in ‘68, they broke my windows. . . . God knows what would have happened to me if they hadn’t come.”64 The “they” is presumably the Soviet army. Zeman, sensitive to Masˇtalírˇ’s fears, tells him, “If we continue to be scared like this, we’ll never put this republic back together. That fear will take root in us.” At the same time, however, there is much to fear. The murder under investigation is altogether gruesome: Mr. and Mrs. Bru˚n have been found dead on their property. Mrs. Bru˚n’s head has been cleaved open with an ax and her body burned by a fire set inside the house. Mr. Bru˚n has been found drowned at the bottom of a well, his wrists slashed. Inexplicably, the trees in the garden have all been chopped down. Their only son, a professor at the Department of Humanities at Prague’s prestigious Charles University, who was visiting his parents at the time, is found covered in blood, unable to speak, at the front gates of his uncle’s house three kilometers away. That the Bru˚n family will not be particularly missed by their neighbors is made clear from the start. They are known villagewide as kulaks, wealthy peasants ruled by greed. Their very name, Bru˚n, sounds decidedly German (or perhaps even Jewish?) and implies foreignness. Their oddity and that of their son is explained by his having been conceived and born when Mr. and Mrs. Bru˚n were already “well into their forties.” As the plot of “The Well” unravels, it further turns out that the 1968 attack on the police aide Masˇtalírˇ—when his windows were smashed—had been led by Professor Bru˚n. But contrary to widespread assumptions, this attack on the village policeman was not motivated by politics. The reason had been Professor Bru˚n’s personal animosity toward Masˇtalírˇ; no Casanova to begin with, the professor had finally found a girl, only to have her leave him for Masˇtalírˇ. But the supposed retribution did not end there. Not only had Masˇtalírˇ’s windows been smashed, but he had had to suffer the equally brutal act of someone’s hammering a copy of Ludvik Vaculík’s Two Thousand Words manifesto to his front gate. Here, too, it was assumed that the frustrated Professor Bru˚n, in another uncontrolled burst of jealousy, had been behind this. But when Major Zeman asks Masˇtalírˇ about it, Masˇtalírˇ shrugs it off and explains that, despite local gossip, he had never planned to take revenge against Professor Bru˚n by having him expelled

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Production shot from The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman. Major Zeman (left) climbing down into the well to investigate the Brün family murder. (Czech Television Archives; photographed by Jaromír Komárek)

from the university. Drawing an image of a fair-minded post-1968 purge—and contrasting it with the feverishly deranged mind of a reform communist hammering manifestos onto other people’s property—Masˇtalírˇ explains why he would never consider taking revenge on Professor Bru˚n: “How do I know if it was really him? And without evidence I don’t carry out revenge on anyone—I don’t want to get back at anybody about those times. And why should I? You cannot take revenge on someone who is ill, who in a fever cried out and acted out. . . . It’s more important to look for and punish those who infected him and who created his fever. No, I don’t want revenge! I only regret that something ugly stayed inside people’s hearts from that time, so that they continue to lie, to criticize. . . .” Masˇtalírˇ speaks with the ease and calm also characteristic of Major Zeman. In contrast, when they take Professor Bru˚n from the mental institution, where he

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is now residing, back to the scene of the crime, his doctor must stand by with a sedative-filled hypodermic needle in case the former reform communist gives in to his precarious mental state. It is during this return to the scene of the crime that the professor is finally able and willing to narrate the turn of events on that murderous night. His recollections are spliced with dramatic flashbacks, which offer an unusual level of guts and gore quite uncharacteristic of the socialist small screen. Just as vivid depictions—or indeed, any depictions—of sex were off-limits in the decidedly prudish climate of official culture, so, too, were scenes of grotesque violence. And yet here they are on full display. The professor, trembling with the rush of recent memories, admits that it was his father, following an ongoing dispute over money with his uncle, who quietly picked up the ax and went to the bedroom where Mrs. Bru˚n had retired for the night. We the audience hear the screams, and then watch—in flashback mode—as the professor makes his way to the bedroom, finds his mother’s head hacked open and his father shifting his weight from one foot to another as he rhythmically swings the ax from side to side, grinning like a lunatic. The scene appears to be taken straight out of a Hollywood slasher movie. As if this were not enough, Mr. Bru˚n then turns to his son and states, “We won’t live in this cruel world, not even you. I won’t leave you here alone.” He demands that his son cut down all the trees (so no living thing is left), after which he tries to force him to cut his wrists (thus the knife wounds found on the professor). When he faints, Mr. Bru˚n throws his son down the well. Coming to, the professor is desperate to scramble out of the steep abyss; just then, he looks up to see his father, who has also slit his wrists, plummeting toward him. When he lands in the water at the bottom of the well, the father, still conscious and seeing his son is too, tries to drown him, but instead it is the professor who successfully plunges his father’s head under the water and holds it there, before climbing out and, in a state of trauma, making his way to the uncle, whose greedy disputes with Mr. Bru˚n had been the catalyst for the night’s horror. The professor ends his confession with the following declaration to Zeman: “I know I deserve to be punished. Punish me! I’m asking you!” But Zeman replies, “For what? Fate has punished you enough already.” He then turns to the attending doctor, who has already had to use the hypodermic needle (in fact, during the narration, the professor/former reform communist asks for it), and in an avuncular tone says, “Please take him back to the institution.” The murder, then, was a self-inflicted act, committed by one member of a family against another. The legacy for the living, for him who survived, is hysteria, insanity. As a metaphor, the incident is rife with symbolism, suggesting a bloody civil war—an image that many leading normalizers had used soon after

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the invasion to describe the urgent state of affairs that required them to call for Soviet intervention. As Zeman boards the bus back to Prague, he tells Masˇtalírˇ, who now has been brought back into the village fold, “Lots of work still awaits us before we manage to clear away this mess from last year’s nonsense and confusion. . . . But we will manage it.” When Zeman returns to his office in Prague, his colleague is waiting for him with breaking news: “Dubcˇek has fallen!” he cries joyously, as if Dubcˇek had been a dictator, the leader of an illegal coup d’état. But Zeman makes clear that he is still as uninterested in politics as ever: “I don’t know anything about that. I simply had some work to do,” he replies in answer to his colleague’s rousing cheer, and then quietly turns back to his desk. His colleague asks him who, after all, was the murderer, and Zeman muses, “No one. Only the great expanse of man’s loneliness, and our inability to find a way back to the people in time.” It is a strangely poetic way to sum up the Prague Spring from the perspective of the normalizers.

Audience Response Major Zeman was widely publicized during 1974, with articles and interviews appearing daily. In the six years during which the thirty episodes of the serial were written, filmed, and broadcast, towns all over Czechoslovakia organized pre-premier festivities. The best-known industrial enterprises, agricultural cooperatives, and mines welcomed visiting writers, producers, and actors from the serial as well as employees of the Ministry of Interior.65 When the last of the thirty episodes was finally finished in September 1979, cultural editors and literary and film critics were invited to the Film Club in Prague to celebrate with colleagues working on media-related projects for the departments of military defense and state security.66 This was not the first time that such high-level social gatherings had been organized around the Major Zeman serial. After the taping of every ten episodes, the press department of the Ministry of Interior had organized joint get-togethers for employees of its ministry and the creators of the serial. The first such party took place in October 1974 at a villa in the Vinohrady section of Prague. About this first occasion, it was later noted that “this sort of meeting was the first of its kind, when leaders of the Ministry of Interior met with artists so as to discuss questions related to the creative representation of State Security.”67 Delighted with the outcome, all the participants had agreed that there should be more such social gatherings—and, indeed, more followed. The regime congratulated itself on the production of The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman and awarded the serial’s director, Jirˇí Sequens, the title of National Artist for being “a people’s director” because he shunned the sort of overly aesthetic and intellectual product “appropriate only for a narrow segment of

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viewers.”68 Episodes of Major Zeman were rebroadcast on the anniversaries of communist milestones, particularly those related to 1948 and 1968. On the one hand, the serial obviously could not hope to eradicate private memories of the Prague Spring. As Zdeneˇk Jirotka, a purged employee of Czechoslovak Television, wrote to his former employer in 1978, “I don’t know what kinds of letters you receive after such programs, but I strongly recommend that you sometimes go among ordinary people to find out what they think of you and your programs. Why don’t you invite one of the men from SPRING 68 to appear on television and then demolish his arguments about the counterrevolution, etc.? The answer is obvious: You simply don’t have it in you! You fear discussions not only with these politicians but with the whole nation.”69 On the other hand, because The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman was one of the most entertaining serials to cross the Czechoslovak television screen in the 1970s, it was eagerly watched by the public and so created an opportunity for the regime to offer a revised recent history for mass consumption. The last third of the serial—which included the crisis year of 1968 and beyond—was watched by 86–93 percent of television viewers. This represented a slight drop from the 91–93 percent for the first third and the 88–94 percent of the second third, but it was still enormous. Viewer satisfaction for the last ten episodes ran between 4.5 and 7.4 points. At the time, anything above 60 percent was considered a good viewer turnout, and viewer satisfaction rated at 7 points and higher was thought to be better than average. Five points and below, however, meant that the television program would not be rebroadcast.70 So while viewers did not think it to be the best programming they had ever seen, they continued to turn out in high number to watch it: simply put, the majority of Czechoslovak citizens watched Major Zeman. And it was not only Czechs and Slovaks who embraced the dashing Zeman. In East Germany, where the serial premiered in 1976 to accompany the lead-up to the SED Party Congress, Major Zeman was even more popular. More surprising still, archival records show that the serial was also “watched by enemies of the DDR [West Germans, that is] and fully held up in competition with capitalist productions such as the detective serials Van der Valk, Privatdetektiv David Ross, and Tot Eines Touristen.”71 Through the Major Zeman serial, the normalization regime did not need to replace private memories that, as former television employee Jirotka indicated in his letter, lived on although muted by the purge and the silence of reentrants into official life; the normalizers needed only to introduce certain key elements into the public remembrance of the Prague Spring. Major Zeman excelled at this. Antiintellectualism, anti-urbanism, and anti-Westernism were invoked throughout the thirty episodes. The year 1968 was treated as one of mass hysteria, a psychosis produced by the feverish minds of Western- and Zionist-influenced intellectuals.

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The normalizers (embodied in the heroic figure of Major Zeman) positioned themselves as the antithesis of the ‘68ers who had brought nothing but disorder and mayhem to Czechoslovakia and had ridden the waves of mass hysteria to their own advantage. The media offered up images of out-of-control, feminized Prague Spring intellectuals who had swayed other weak-minded individuals and led them like Pied Pipers down the ruinous path toward reform communism: a journey of destruction, barely thwarted by the self-possessed men, now fortunately back in power, who had been forced to call in Soviet forces and thus restore order and calm. While ordinary people had been overcome by mass hysteria, certainly, it was a psychosis not of their own making but induced by reform communism’s overpowering spell and its sorcerers, the intellectuals. This taint of public hysteria, of madness brought under control but never entirely eliminated, lingered throughout normalization.

Memory as Resistance In The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman, Zeman lifts the stone lid to the Bru˚ns’ desecrated sarcophagus and declares, “That’s our job—looking at the dead so we find truth for the living.” But in fact, as the purge bore witness, the “dead” do not need to be deceased; they cease to exist by being made invisible. The dead Bru˚ns are stand-ins for the purged nondead. So while Zeman claims to lift the lid off of the dead to reveal the truth, it is a magician’s trick, a sleight of hand. As scholars of the postwar era have shown us, the battle over historical memory is nothing new. After the atrocities of the Second World War, most countries of Europe were willing to agree on an official, largely undisputed truth about what had happened between 1939 and 1945 (or, for the Germans, 1933 to 1945) in return for the unity that politics and the economy craved. Here, too, memory often became synonymous with silence. Rév rightly notes that “[n]ondemocratic, authoritarian regimes cannot exist without deeply buried secrets, protected by silence that marks off the danger zones.”72 But, as Tony Judt points out, neither could postwar democratic European states exist without their “deeply buried secrets,” which allowed them to get on with rebuilding a war-ravaged continent.73 But while unity—among the successfully vetted—was something the normalization regime desired, this was not 1945; the continent did not lie in tatters. What had been devastated instead were postwar illusions, East and West, about communism. The normalization regime’s new opponents—the political dissidents who would soon organize—were not about to agree to forget (as almost all of them had done in the years after the war) for the sake of a unified, partydetermined normalcy. Throughout late communism, the state and its political

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dissidents thus haggled over memory as if haggling over truth. As Richard Esbenshade writes, “Dissident intellectuals of the ‘68 generation anchored their opposition to the Communist state in the ‘true’ past rescued by memory from state forgetting.”74 Moreover, for many if not most dissidents, 1968 never even evolved into a memory but remained a vital truth; for them, there was no such thing as encasing reform communist political tracts and posters in glass cases for posterity. The politics and intentions of 1968 were still very much alive. The dissident writer thus came to represent (although often in hindsight) the unsullied memory keeper, the “truth-teller for the nation.”75 Resistance to the state was redefined in terms of “memory as resistance,” and it was the memory of the resisters (as well as their truth) that could be said to have triumphed, at least momentarily, in 1989. But as Esbenshade rightly points out about Kundera’s famous statement introduced at the beginning of this chapter (“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”), what is missing here is another crucial variant: that man also struggles against his own memory and his conscious and unconscious distortions of it. “Rejection of the state narrative and assertion of an untainted, ‘primal,’ and collectively remembered past,” writes Esbenshade, “falters when confronted with personal memory, which is alternately unreliable and all too reliable in dredging up a highly compromised past.”76 That is to say, Eastern Europe was (and remains) no less saturated with discomfiting personal memories than with state and national ones. It would therefore be memory, and its concomitant silences, that undermined not only the reigning ideology of normalization but also the philosophy of those who opposed it most vocally—the dissidents.

4 THE QUIET LIFE VERSUS A LIFE IN TRUTH Writing the Script for Normalization

With the absence of postwar idealism to forge political unity, and with the suppression of a reformed communism that might have reshaped ideology and its practical application, the question was, what was communism to be, and for whom, after 1968? The purge had recast late communist society; the official rewriting of the Prague Spring had introduced the necessary paradigms; but what remained was to define everyday life in the years ahead. The question presented itself early on at the Czechoslovak pavilion of the 1970 World Exposition in Japan. The national pavilion, on display halfway across the world, exhibited a significantly different image of normalized Czechoslovakia than did the purges that were then in full swing back home. Czech radio station Rádio Hveˇzda, reporting on the World Expo, noted the historically rich fantasy world on which the national pavilion heavily leaned: “The visitor is immediately engulfed by the pervasive music of Dvorˇák’s ‘New World’ symphony. . . . Religious motifs and Gablonz bijouterie predominate. Small devotional articles are presented as [is] the country’s venerated [jewelry]. A Hussite goblet from [the] 14th century is featured next to glassed cages with fluttering birds, giving the exhibit liveliness and color.”1 It seemed to showcase the very best of Czech precommunist culture—the farther back in time, the better. As if to underscore the point, a young guide to the exhibit, instead of handing out the hammer-and-sickle emblem of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, distributed postcards of the Prague Castle. When asked about the current politics of her country, she answered that she did not have any personal experience with

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the situation since she had left the country two years earlier—in other words, she had left in 1968, probably in the aftermath of the invasion. Vladimír Selecký, a deputy director of Czechoslovak Television, was among those who condemned the exhibit at the 1970 World Expo. He was convinced that “the disorientation and confusion of the past crisis period [was] clearly [present] during the creation of our pavilion.” Although the pavilion was seemingly disconnected from politics, its planning and creation prior to the invasion was sufficient proof for Selecký that the exhibit included, as he said, “coded symbols and allegories” put together by the sorts of people “who in the past years have more than once used state means for expressing their very problematic and subjective feelings and attitudes.” Most troubling, Selecký believed, was what the pavilion said (or did not say) about post-1968 Czechoslovakia: “When a Czechoslovak has seen about a dozen of our ancient relics and another dozen works of our present creative artists, he has to ask: Is this all? Is this to be the Socialist Czechoslovakia?”2 Inadvertently, Selecký had verbalized the regime’s most urgent question. Jaroslav Sodomka, the secretary general of Czechoslovakia’s exhibit at Expo ‘70, dismissed Selecký’s criticism. Sodomka reported that the Czechoslovak pavilion was being widely praised, and “experts spoke highly of the harmony of the architecture and interior decorations of the pavilion, which was also favorably viewed as an oasis of calm and light in comparison with other noisy and garish pavilions.” In addition, the Czechoslovak restaurants at Expo ‘70 “had been among the most popular,” where visitors commended “the quality and large selection of dishes as well as the . . . perfect service.”3 In describing the enticements offered up at the pavilion, Sodomka had inadvertently tapped into the very images with which the normalization regime, too, would barter over the next few years: images of a normalized Czechoslovakia triumphant in its victory over reform communism, offering capitalist-type consumption and the “calm and light” that only a return to normality could bring. While arguing over the Czechoslovak pavilion thousands of miles away in Japan, Selecký had come up with the vital question and Sodomka with the answer.

Postinvasion Consumerism By late 1969, according to one account, First Secretary Gustáv Husák had concluded that once people “have their creature comforts, they won’t want to lose them.”4 In October 1969, he requested financial help from the Soviets but did not use the handout to modernize Czechoslovakia’s antiquated industrial infrastructure. Opting for short-term necessities over long-term needs, he used the

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funds to satisfy consumer demands. In December 1969, the government thus was able to announce to the public an early Christmas present—a permanent price freeze on all basic food stuffs and fuels. As a result of this freeze, which remained largely intact throughout the next twenty years, consumer consumption could, and did, increase; per capita consumption of meat, for example, rose from 68.9 kilograms in 1969 to 81.1 kilograms in 1975.5 In case the message was not yet clear following the announcement of the permanent price freezes, on May 3, 1971, in the lead-up to the Fourteenth Party Congress, where the tone for postpurge normalization was to be set, temporary price cuts were made on a broad range of consumer goods as a way to showcase “the correct line of the new leadership and Central Committee, [and as] evidence of the success achieved . . . in the consolidation of political and economic life.”6 From 1970 to 1978, private consumption on the whole went up by 36.5 percent.7 These gestures, Husák correctly assessed, would improve the “party-people alliance.”8 Even Bil’ak, not one to succumb to the people’s whimsical demands, admitted that in 1948 “we had posters in the shop windows about how socialism [was] going to look, and people were receptive to it. That was a different kind of excitement and a different historical time, and today we can’t put up posters about how socialism is going to look, but today shop windows have to be full of goods so that we can document that we are moving toward socialism [i.e., communism] and that we have socialism here.”9 But the normalization regime was offering more than merely the sort of consumption available to the wealthier pockets of the Soviet Bloc; the trend toward consumption over production had begun in the 1960s and would continue. More important, it was offering the “quiet life,” which was understood as vital to delivering this promise of consumption.

The Quiet Life Political scientists Kieran Williams and Grzegorz Ekiert, when documenting the postinvasion climate in Czechoslovakia, point to the repeated calls for calm and order by the reform leaders in the face of the public’s desire for some sort of collective action against and protest of the invasion. The defining moment came on the eve of Jan Palach’s funeral, which had the potential to unite the nation and propel it toward effective protest; instead, Alexander Dubcˇek went on the radio to plead for calm and order.10 Grzegorz Ekiert argues that Dubcˇek’s and others’ appeals reflect how, despite the Prague Spring, the Czechoslovak Communist Party had never let the reigns of power slip from its hands and had always remained in control, and that ultimately there was no “clear state-society cleavage”

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as had existed in 1956 in Hungary and would again with the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s.11 Certainly, these calls for the quiet life might have been no more than desperate pleas by fearful politicians still wedded to the Communist Party and anxious to avoid the bloodshed of the 1956 Hungarian revolution. But they set the tone and fixed the ideological plane for normalization. Quoting an expert on the Gorbachev period, Soviet historian Susan Reid has observed that “the political order evolving under Khrushchev and Brezhnev was not Stalinism redux but something quite different.”12 One of the key differences between Stalinism and late communism was not only the absence of political idealism in the latter but the concomitant and officially endorsed rejection of political extremism of any sort. Philosopher Slavoj Zˇizˇek, himself a former citizen of late communism in Eastern Europe, has wittily remarked that the very last thing the late communist regimes wanted was for their citizens to act out communism.13 In this, the Soviets showed the way: during the false jollity and vigorous handshakes that had followed the signing of the Moscow Protocol between the Kremlin and the “kidnapped” Dubcˇek-led government delegation, Alexei Kosygin, Soviet adviser to Czechoslovakia, confided to one of the Czech delegates that from now on it would be best for Czechoslovakia to “avoid extremes at both ends of the spectrum.”14 As if taking this advice to heart, upon returning to Prague, Dubcˇek pleaded on the radio with Czechoslovak citizens: “We truly need order. . . . [T]he sooner we succeed in normalizing conditions in the country and the greater support you give us, the sooner we shall be able to take further steps along our post-January road.”15 Dubcˇek’s downfall would be his willingness to be a spokesperson for the postinvasion quiet life, which paved the way for normalization as well as his own ouster from government. Marie Miková, a member of the Central Committee and a lifelong communist who had been sympathetic to the Prague Spring, also was persuaded to vote for the Soviet occupation because of the national call for calm and order. Shortly before the vote to legalize and make permanent the Soviet occupation, the then Czechoslovak president Ludvík Svoboda, a trusted war hero, called her aside, adamant that she vote for the occupation. When she protested and laid out her reasons why, he insisted that “we already told them [the Soviets] all that—that they came uninvited and so on, no one can change that anymore, but they’re now becoming nervous, they’re losing their patience and they need a little peace and quiet.” When Miková asked Svoboda what might happen should the vote not pass, he described a bloodletting of epic proportions: “Pray you won’t have to see that, that would be terrible, I can’t allow that,” Svoboda replied. “You know, I’ve told you more than once how much blood was spilled during the war, what I went through, what I saw, and this I never want to see again.”16 When Miková

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voted for legalizing a permanent Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, she believed she was voting for the necessary calm and order. Just prior to the April 1969 party plenum, at which Dubcˇek would be replaced by Husák, Rudé právo— continuing to pound the same drum—carried headlines such as “Only in a calm atmosphere is it possible to live well,” and “Introduce the necessary calm, certainty, and order.”17 Dubcˇek himself joined in with the chorus, appearing on television on April 3, 1969 (his last television appearance until the 1989 Velvet Revolution) to plead for calm in order to stave off the rumored second military intervention. Zvi Gitelman, writing in the early 1980s, considered the claim that people wanted quiet and calm merely “another cliché of the period.”18 His evidence was a published survey by Slovak pollsters less than a year after the Soviet invasion. In answer to their question, “Husák emphasized the desire of our people to live in a calm atmosphere and their demand that the activities of those people who spread chaos and intensify socialist disintegration should cease. Is this also your view?” Fifty-nine percent agreed that it was their view, and presumably the rest did not.19 But what is lost here is that the official endorsement—indeed, encouragement—of calm and order was expansive in its definition. It meant, for example, not merely acceptance of what was most certainly another descriptive cliché of the time—people’s political apathy—but the state’s active endorsement of it. The call for calm and order, and the way in which it became synonymous with normalization, was not merely programmatic; it was also ideological. Jan Fojtík, sensitive to the post-1968 ideological shift, warned during plans for the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Czechoslovak Communist Party that “the point is not to overdo the celebrations, not to irritate [neotrávit—literally, not poison] people with our programs.”20 Once in the leadership position, Husák continued to sound the themes of calm, order, and quiet. Even before he was the first secretary, when he was still chairman of the Slovak Communist Party in the aftermath of the invasion, Husák had already indicated what normalization was to be about: “[A] normal person wants to live quietly,” he said, and “this party wants to safeguard the quiet life.”21 What is also important here is the assumed agreement between state and society about the pursuance of the quiet life, with neither state nor society planning to be in the political vanguard.

The Newly Purged As challenging as the task of defining late communism was, normalization’s leaders were always able to rely on positioning themselves in opposition to the (irrational) reform communists of 1968 and to proffer their vision of normalization

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as an antidote to the “abnormalcy” of the Prague Spring. In contrast, for the newly born post-1968 dissidents, forging an identity and offering a script for post-1968 would prove much more trying. Part of the problem, at least initially, was that Czechoslovakia’s post-1968 dissidents were largely a creation of the purge. That is to say, many of these new dissidents were former communists from the 1950s, drawn to reform communism during the 1960s and purged for it in the early 1970s. Czech-born Oxford historian Z. A. B. Zeman has observed that very few among his generation, the ‘68ers, voluntarily renounced their positions of power after the invasion. The purge did this for them, taking away high-powered careers that had been built, at least partially, on membership in the Communist Party. The purge, rather than political conscience, compelled them, as Zeman notes, “to stand outside of things without actually standing up for anything specific—before that they had felt themselves to be standing close to political power, but then that power disintegrated.”22 Eva Kantu˚rková, a writer who belonged to this 1968 generation of party-affiliated intelligentsia, has described the swift and traumatic transformation from a privileged to a persecuted generation that played out after the invasion.23 She and her classmates had enjoyed the rewards that communism offered, finishing university “in the midfifties [with] our hands . . . clean, for the revolutionary terror had taken place at a time when we were still too young to take part.” They had grown up in a communist state and yet had had the good fortune to forgo any direct responsibility for Stalinism; consequently, they were at once critical of the regime and loyal to it, “enjoying all the advantages” that communism offered them—“whether we realized it or not.”24 Government officials, however, did realize it, and they fretted over this generation’s critical impulses, born—they argued—of these very advantages. A 1965 internal report claimed that Kantu ˚ rková’s generation was politically handicapped precisely because it had been spared the most formative experiences of its parents’ generation, especially World War II and the “the consequent class war.” The latter, argued the report, had been their parents’ “greatest school of life”—although the report was reserved about what sort of school Stalinism might have been and what lessons were taught there. Unlike their parents’ generation, Kantu ˚ rková’s generation had never had to dream of socialism but instead had lived it, the report explained, and so was more prone to dismiss its achievements and instead focus on problems of “social economics” and “independent thought.”25 This government report, like others of its kind, seemed uneasy with the postwar generation and its unwillingness to accept the Party’s political path without commentary, be it individual or collective. But Kantu ˚ rková and her fellow reform communists, the driving force behind the Prague Spring, saw themselves not as a brash antigovernment opposition but as a “loyal opposition,” who “wouldn’t have dreamed of wishing for . . .[the regime’s] downfall.”26 They worked within

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the framework of the Communist Party and its institutions to try to achieve socialism with a human face, even as they made it their job to criticize it. Seeing themselves as critical insiders rather than any sort of external opposition, the Prague Spring intelligentsia felt not only shocked by the invasion but betrayed by what followed. Yet because of their earlier stance, it would take time for those who had once made up the loyal opposition to begin to re-form as a disloyal opposition. In May 1969, the political scientist and later dissident Milan Sˇimecˇka, wrote, “[T]oday Husák was on television jumping about at a Party meeting in Vysocˇany. He is quite clearly a psychopath. He managed to make statements that were strongly reminiscent of the croaks of a troglodyte from the 1950s. . . . The scum and the dirt rise slowly to the top, impotent men and idiots with complexes shake about on the screen and babble their bullshit. I’m amazed I was once in the same party with those people.”27 But even as he wrote this, Sˇimecˇka had not left the party. It was a year later, on his fortieth birthday, that the party purged him. Similarly, the Brno-based playwright Milan Uhde later wrote about the “mechanisms of ostracization” that had led him, almost unwittingly, down the path toward dissent. Writing about this in a samizdat journal in 1987, Uhde recalled that soon after taking power, General Secretary Husák had announced “that everyone writes their own personnel file and that the determining factor is not what someone did or said earlier but how he acts now.” Despite his previous affinities for reform communism, Uhde accepted this to be the core of normalization’s reality: “I was willing to join in on this consensus,” he writes. “I made my living as a writer. . . . I was prepared to keep quiet in the future about what I did not like in the Czechoslovak political system and to try for my literary creations to fit into the framework of the new state cultural politics.” Despite his willingness, in 1970 he began to hear rumblings that the state cultural agencies were no longer looking favorably upon him and his work. By 1971, a local theater director had asked him to sign his work under a pseudonym, and by 1972, the state theater agency had terminated its prior agreement to renew foreign rights contracts for Uhde’s plays. That same year, a prominent writer known to have good relations with the new apparatchiks of Czech culture invited Uhde over for a chat. He advised Uhde to submit a letter to the Communist Party expressing his willingness to work in literature under the new conditions. Uhde wrote the letter. The same writer next asked him to go speak with the secretariat of the new Writers’ Union, where an official was already expecting him. But Uhde never went, and as his official status consequently declined still further, he gradually found himself among other blacklisted writers who, having no other venue, began to write for samizdat publications. Of the process, he concluded, “[I]f they had only treated me a little bit better, they would have had me.”28

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But Uhde’s path away from the party and the official sphere of which it was in charge was also in part an intellectual journey. Milan Sˇimecˇka, in the aftermath of his own purging from the party, wrote a series of private letters in which he tracked “how those who had shaken off their juvenile belief in Communist utopia and were now shedding the last remnants of Marxist and pseudo-Marxist ideology were continuing to mature, both politically and as people in general.”29 Presumably Milan Sˇimecˇka included himself in their ranks. This is not to say, however, that every reform communist turned into a dissident. Former reform communists tried out and adopted any number of new guises. As one member of this generation, a former adviser to Party First Secretary Novotný and head of the Central Committee’s cultural division, wrote in 1971 about his generation’s post-1968 fallout: “[W]e make up a touching spectrum—from the governing salons of Prague Castle to employees of the city sewage system, intermittent residents of prison cells or else involuntary emigrants.”30 He himself had wound up in the latter category of involuntary emigrants when he left for the West in the aftermath of the invasion. Still others signed up with normalization and returned comfortably to “the governing salons of Prague Castle.” Those who began to take a stand against the new regime or who had been classified by the state as political enemies became “intermittent residents of prison cells.” But the majority of former reform communists got on with their lives, whether they were permitted to keep their jobs, demoted to lesser positions, or even reduced to “employees of the city sewage system.”

Purging Marxism What many of this generation did continue to share, however, was their way of seeing. They had grown up in and continued to inhabit a bifurcated world, a dialectical framework in the spirit of the Marxist philosophy that many had embraced with hopefulness in the aftermath of World War II and that they had been immersed in ever since. And while the Communist Party had disappointed them, its ideology remained for many a familiar construct through which to see even their current circumstances. The paradigm of “us versus them” (with the “them” having been “us” until very recently) was a cross borne, and uneasily abandoned, by many of the Prague Spring intelligentsia. The former dissident and sociologist Jirˇina Sˇiklová has made the point that to remain committed to one’s dissident principles during the 1970s and 1980s required the sort of certitude and conviction only available when seeing the world as black and white, as a fight between good and evil. She sheepishly recalls quoting the words of Czech philosopher and dissident Jan Patocˇka (“Our people have once more become aware that there

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are things for which it is worthwhile to suffer, that the things for which we might have to suffer are those which make life worthwhile”) to her son as she was led away in handcuffs by the secret police in 1981.31 Strongly linked to this view of the world was the concept of sacrifice. In his extensive travels through East Central Europe’s opposition circles, Timothy Garton Ash noted that the philosophies of Václav Havel and fellow Polish dissident leader Adam Michnik shared “the conviction of the value of sacrifice.” Both believed that, in the words of Michnik, “there are causes worth suffering and dying for.”32 Garton Ash sees Christianity’s ethical precepts as feeding into this central idea behind political opposition in Poland but, more surprisingly, also Czechoslovakia after 1968. Again, however, the notion of suffering and dying for a greater good is a deeply Marxist-Leninist idea, one championed by the early postwar communists, who, István Rév reminds us, “gave up, betrayed, imprisoned, then stabbed in the back, executed, and buried each other over and over again; . . . slept with each other’s wives, slept with each other’s husbands, and with the widows of their victims.”33 Everything was done in the name of the party and their sacrifices to it and for it. These men (and some women), founders of postwar communism in East Central Europe, had such a finely honed sense of sacrifice that, as the private confessions of the Stalinist show trial victims on the eve of their hangings pitifully revealed, many continued to believe in the righteousness of their falsified trial and its fatal outcome.34 The purge, if understood for this purpose as a small-scale version of the show trials, also did not necessarily or immediately expel a lifetime of Marxist sympathies and Marxist-Leninist catechisms. Because of these still deeply felt affinities, the last gasps for organized resistance to the invasion and to Husák’s assumption of power centered around last-ditch attempts to reinvigorate socialism. For example, some of the newly purged former communists created a secret organization called the Czechoslovak Citizens’ Socialist Movement, which operated in Prague and Brno. Brno-based members of the Czechoslovak Socialist Party in turn formed the Small Action Program of the Czechoslovak Movement for Democratic Socialism.35 Further oppositional groups included the Revolutionary Socialist Party and the more radical Movement for Revolutionary Youth, headed by the Trotskyite Petr Uhl and disguised as a student futurist group. But in the winter of 1971 to 1972, these fledgling underground organizations were swept clean, many of their members arrested, and some imprisoned. What followed was an extended period of malaise and a private but largely ineffective opposition to normalization. In June 1973, feeling beaten down by normalization despite his earlier optimism, Milan Sˇimecˇka confessed, “It’s the passivity which we have in part voluntarily entered and in part been cast in to; but what is worse for this subjective state is that we have, after careful consideration, voluntarily

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accepted it as the attitude that best corresponds to the period.”36 It was not until 1976, as a result of the government’s trial against the nonconformist underground rock band the Plastic People of the Universe that the passivity that Sˇimecˇka described was finally punctured.

Charter 77 Playwright and philosopher Václav Havel attended the trial and reported on it to his friends. He wrote that it was an event of the kind that at first seemed to be “nothing out of the ordinary, [but] which suddenly illuminate[d] with an unexpected light the time and world in which we live.”37 What had struck Havel especially was the absurdity of a regime frightened by a group of long-haired young men who were doing nothing more than playing music and enjoying themselves. The Plastics, however, were not quite as innocent as all that. The cacophony of their musical output, their open admiration of foreign shock bands such as the Velvet Underground, and their own lyrics suggested more than just some East European version of the Beach Boys out to have fun. The sound of the music and the words sung (or, more often, bellowed) were clearly intended to undermine normalization’s message of a quiet life. One short lyric, repeated over and over, simply asks, “Spring, summer, autumn, winter/ Spring, summer, autumn, winter/ Whose fault is all this anyway?” ( Jaro léto podzim zima: Jaro léto podzim zima/ cˇi je to vina?). Another song, even more succinct in its message, incorporates the popular slogan of East European regimes at the time but finishes it off with a pithy lament: “Peace, peace/ No better than crap paper” (Mír, mír/ jako hajzlpapír). In Czech, it is a perfect rhyme. Czechoslovakia’s most famous dissident movement, Charter 77 (Charta 77), was born of the Plastics’ trial and the solidarity that it helped provoke among the otherwise loosely knit groups of people who had been pushed to the periphery by normalization. On January 6, 1977, Václav Havel, the writer Ludvík Vaculík (author of 1968’s Two Thousand Words manifesto), and the actor Pavel Landovský (who later played the affable pig-owning farmer in the film version of Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being) climbed into a car and set off to deliver the Charter 77 founding proclamation to the Czechoslovak Federal Assembly. Police authorities, warned ahead of time (as had been expected), intercepted the car and arrested all three. Normalization’s leadership insisted that the Charter had to be quashed immediately to guarantee “the much needed quiet necessary to get work done.”38 In the Charter, the country’s postwar political past, present, and future came together. The name Charter 77 was coined by Pavel Kohout, playwright, former

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supporter of the regime, and now dissident. In his 1969 Diary of a Counterrevolutionary, Kohout confessed to the intense joy he had felt on the day of the Communist Party takeover in 1948. The sight of party leader, Klement Gottwald, waving victoriously to the crowds had evoked in him the “hope that once, in desperation, I looked for in God and then in Love.”39 The text of the Charter 77 proclamation was cowritten by Václav Havel and the former Central Committee member Zdeneˇk Mlynárˇ. Like Kohout, Mlynárˇ had been an eager young communist despite his early exposure to Stalinism-in-practice while studying in Moscow. There, he later recollected, he watched his fellow Soviet students treat vodka binges as an opportunity to turn the portrait of Stalin to face the wall, turn the key in the lock, and open “the door to several hours during which duplicity was unnecessary and people whose intoxicated tongues became increasingly tangled still managed to make more and more real sense.”40 Havel, too young in 1948 to have participated in Kohout’s “revolution” and too wealthy to have benefited from party policy that cleared the path for working-class advancement, had proved himself the most immune to postwar political exigencies. He had found his way into politics through his work in the theater, later as a playwright and essayist. When the Charter nominated its first round of spokespersons, the choice was Havel, the elderly philosopher Jan Patocˇka (who would soon die in custody following interrogation), and the former Prague Spring government minister Jirˇ í Hájek.

Politics versus Antipolitics The original founders, signatories, and spokespersons of the Charter were, as is clear, a motley group who had intentionally agreed to put aside political and ideological differences and unite their varied voices under one organizational umbrella. What made the Charter unique was that Marxist and Catholic thinkers stood side by side, as did former victims and perpetrators of Stalinism. But this otherwise admirable formation also defined the Charter’s weaknesses: for such a varied cast to put its name to one single document, the Charter proclamation had to be universal and nonspecific, which meant that when translated into the everyday concerns of ordinary citizens, it was also uninspiring and vague. Thus the Charter proclaimed that its signatories would help ensure that the Czechoslovak government keep its promise of respecting human rights as outlined in the recent Helsinki Accords. Moreover, because the Charter wanted to remain active despite the government’s inevitable repression of it, the founding document went out of its way to declare the group a benign force; it declawed itself

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for the purposes of survival. On paper, at least, it described itself as not being against the government or the program of normalization. For the same reason, the Charter never referred to itself as an organization and insisted that it was “a voluntary, informal, and open association of people of various opinions, faiths, and professions, joined by their desire to defend civic and human rights here and in the world.”41 But the Charter’s efforts to be quasi-legal by squeezing into the interstices of the communist state’s domestic and international laws contributed to its ineffectuality on the ground. While in the West what became known as a philosophy of antipolitics—about which not only Havel but the Hungarian György Konrád wrote—was applauded loudly, living in a politicized state such as normalized Czechoslovakia opened up tensions between politics and a policy of antipolitics. Important, too, was that these tensions had a history. The Czech historian Milan Otáhal (himself a Charter signatory although he has not shied away from critical assessments of the Charter) has pointed out that the debate between politics and antipolitics had begun ten years earlier in the editorial offices of the political-cultural journal Tvárˇ (Countenance), the intellectual must-read of the 1960s.42 It was on these pages that political scientist Emanuel Mandler and playwright Václav Havel went head-to-head over the issue of politics versus antipolitics. Arguing very much against the fashion of the times, Mandler rejected the idea of reforming communism because he considered it unreformable. Instead he called for a gradual and pragmatic approach to political change, which caused him and his supporters to be labeled “realists.” By contrast, Havel and his supporters were called “radicals” because they demanded a broader and more absolute approach to uncovering the past, to moving forward, and to applying ethical truth in private and public life. In practical terms, the difference between these two approaches can be gleaned from an article Mandler wrote for the influential university weekly Student in May 1968, in regard to the question of introducing oppositional parties into the political arena: If we are realistically to consider other political parties, we must do so based on reality and not fiction. Therefore I reject the statement of Professor Goldstücker that an oppositional political party is out of the question because in Czechoslovakia there no longer exists a class-based society (what an argument!). But neither can we make do with Havel’s stand that in a democracy a second party is necessary. Because as of yet we do not live in a democracy. . . . Havel does not ask how we can attain democracy, he is interested in what democracy is. . . . A second political party will come about only when the Communist Party allows

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it. . . . Moreover, the existence of a second political party is no guarantee of democracy in and of itself, it can after all be a party that works in conjunction with the Communist Party.43 Ten years later, these Prague Spring debates between the realists and the radicals were reignited in the Charter.

Havel’s “Living in Truth” Before the Charter went public in January 1977, its foundational document was circulated among friends and acquaintances for signatures. Among those approached were Emanuel Mandler and a fellow 1968 realist, Karel Sˇtindl. Both turned down the opportunity to sign because they objected to the Charter’s content and tone.44 For Mandler, the main issue centered on the Charter’s relationship with the public and its “elitism” vis-à-vis ordinary citizens. Moreover, neither Mandler nor Sˇtindl believed that a society’s moral and ethical crisis could be solved in any way other than politically. They wanted to see realistic solutions, which they understood as being political solutions; for example, they advocated pushing for the state-sponsored rehabilitation of those who had been most seriously affected by the postinvasion purge and trials.45 In disagreeing with the Charter’s content, tone, and purpose, Mandler and Sˇtindl argued that, first and foremost, the majority of citizens were interested in getting their children into university, receiving permission to travel to the Balkans for their holiday, and building a garage for their long-awaited Soviet Bloc–brand car. Few people, that is, were willing to defend the abstract notion of human rights and to lose the privileges of education, leisure, and consumption for doing so. As the historian Otáhal explains, according to Mandler and Sˇtindl, it was the Charter’s “ethical radicalism that would be untenable for the population.”46 If this was so, then the Charter’s political effect would be minimal. The Charter certainly did not intend to exist in a vacuum, nor was it ignorant of these realities. In fact, the Charter document specifically pointed to the association’s genuine willingness to open up a dialogue with the state. The problem was that the regime itself did not wish to engage in any such dialogue. And as long as the Charter could not demonstrate significant support from the public (which, unlike the Solidarity movement in Poland, it never could), the regime did not have to contemplate seriously any such exchange. Backed into a corner by the regime’s rejection of its olive branch and needing to unify and close ranks in the face of the state-sponsored repression against its signatories, the Charter sought to reinvigorate its collective identity. It found this identity in

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the writings of philosopher Jan Patocˇka, a founding member of the Charter and leading phenomenologist, who reconceived of the decision to sign the Charter as constituting a moral act. Following Patocˇka’s tragic death instigated by a series of interrogations by the state security police, Havel took up the gauntlet and elaborated on Patocˇka’s ideas in his famous essay “The Power of the Powerless.” In this essay Havel familiarized readers with the story of a greengrocer under normalization who places a political banner in his shop window, a banner that in all likelihood he received with his usual shipment of carrots and potatoes. By complying with the official request to display this meaningless banner and by never paying attention to the words on the banner—“Workers of the World Unite!”—that he exhibits so unquestioningly, the greengrocer continues to “live within the lie.” To live within the lie was to go through the motions of a ritualized and banal everyday existence under late communism without ever piercing its veneer. Thus, by extension, to live in truth—to live authentically—would mean to free oneself of the daily rituals that the majority of citizens had long since absorbed. Of these insidious rituals incorporated into the everyday lives of ordinary citizens, Havel wrote, “[B]y consenting to them, he [the greengrocer] himself enters the game, he becomes one of its players, he makes it possible for the game to continue being played, for it basically to continue, simply to exist.”47 This was another way of saying that everyone was culpable. Through this antigreengrocer manifesto, as brilliant an exposé of normalization as it was, the elitism of which Mandler had accused the Chartists was seemingly confirmed. Havel’s greengrocer would seem to be a typical person, the ordinary citizen in 1970s Czechoslovakia, and rather than appealing to him, Havel held him up to a measure of unrealistic ideal behavior that few citizens could afford to pursue. Overcome by his own interest in politics as philosophy, Havel called for an existential revolution of which the Charter would presumably be the fulcrum. Heavily influenced not only by Patocˇka, a student of Husserl, but also by Heidegger, living in truth reflects a similar search for authenticity in the face of the modern world, of which Havel considered normalization, understood by him as post-totalitarianism, to be one of the extreme manifestations. Unlike Heidegger’s disgraceful embrace of Nazism, the authenticity of living in truth would lead one not into the arms of an ideological totality but away from it. Living in truth must also have been in some measure a conscious response to the state-endorsed quiet life. Earlier, in his 1975 open letter to General Secretary Husák (“Dear Dr. Husák”), Havel had written: “The entire political practice of the present regime . . . confirms that those concepts which were always crucial for its program—order, calm, consolidation, ‘guiding the nation out of its crisis,’ ‘halting disruption,’ ‘assuaging hot tempers,’ and so on—have finally acquired the same lethal meaning that they have for every regime committed to

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entropy. . . . True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave; would you not say?”48 The almost primal desire to pierce the silence of the mortuary and in so doing bring the public out of its moral turpitude is central to the greengrocer essay. Nevertheless, the conflation of the Charter and living in truth (for the implication, whether intended or not, was that the Charter signatories, unlike the greengrocer, had decided to free themselves of living in the lie by signing on to this singular petition) became particularly troublesome for some. Mandler and others argued that the presumption here, shared by ordinary citizens, was that the dissidents had not consented to normalization while everyone else had. And although ordinary citizens might well be accused by the dissidents of not living in truth, these same citizens were not exactly convinced that truth was on the side of the dissidents either.

Mandler’s Realism Among the Charter’s ranks were not only former communists active during the Stalinist 1950s but also reform communists who had failed the public when it counted most. It had been a Federal Assembly filled with reform communists who ratified, with an overwhelming 94 percent of the vote, the decision for Soviet occupying troops to remain “indefinitely” in Czechoslovakia. “Disoriented citizens” had watched in dismay as Dubcˇek and his fellow reformists had handed over power to hard-line normalizers. The result was that when Husák proceeded to “deliver on a large part of his promises,” particularly consumerist ones, and to pacify the Slovaks by creating a federalized state, normalization was not loudly and categorically rejected, even if for no other reason than that the alternatives looked decidedly slim. As the political situation normalized, ordinary citizens took up Husák’s offer of the quiet life. Mandler wondered, “How can one be angry with the average, ordinary citizen . . . when the representatives of the reform movement left him in the lurch.”49 Mandler further objected that as a result of this emphasis on antipolitics and living in truth, all social actions, including the political, were seen by the Chartists as originating in philosophy. The political was depoliticized, and philosophy and politics became interchangeable. At the same time, however, both philosophy and politics remained in the shadow of Marxism. For evidence, Mandler pointed to Patocˇka’s seminal essay “What Can We Expect from Charter 77?” in which Patocˇka wrote that the Charter “will bring into our lives a new orientation of ideas, which does not stand in contrast to a socialist orientation, which until now had such an exclusive monopoly . . . an orientation based on human rights, on moral elements in political life and in private [life].”50 Coming at it from a somewhat different

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angle, Havel also felt that parliamentary democracies were not necessarily a readymade antidote to the pervasive existential crisis of both East and West. But Mandler’s most persuasive criticism was also the most personal: that the dismissal of political analysis in favor of philosophy, even if well meant, was convenient for many within the dissident ranks. For those born of the communist era and reluctant to renounce its ideology, even after the party had renounced them, the Charter’s emphasis on antipolitics provided “an unexpected possibility to be contemporary dissidents and at the same time to preserve from their communist pasts a basic distaste for parliamentary, bourgeois democracy.”51 It was an inflammatory accusation that was not easily forgotten or ignored. Nor were such doubts exclusive to Mandler; other signatories also worried about the efficacy of antipolitics. In 1978, only a year after the Charter’s creation, one of its key signatories, the mathematician and philosopher Václav Benda, responded to the growing unease by conceiving of a “parallel polis.”

Benda’s “Parallel Polis” The parallel polis was to be a way for signatories and nonsignatories alike to create a parallel culture, a “second culture,” that would function independently alongside the official world of normalization. It would nurture important elements of citizenship (education, creative independence, innovation, charity, economic initiative) that were either absent or censored in official culture. The motivation behind the parallel polis, according to the dissident and fellow philosopher Martin Palousˇ, was to reconcile a certain identity crisis that had appeared soon after the élan of the first year of the Charter’s founding when signatories realized that there would be no dialogue with the regime even though this was one of the Charter’s two main goals.52 The difference in intent between Benda’s parallel polis and Patocˇka’s and Havel’s antipolitics became a central point of difference in all future debates among the signatories. As witnessed by Palousˇ, “the never fully resolved conflict between Patocˇka’s stand—defining itself in contrast to the political sphere, emphasizing the significance of morals for the functioning of human society, the significance of political de-regularization . . . —and Benda’s positive program for a parallel polis, which through its basic existence imagines a political space, trailed the Charter during the whole of its existence.”53 The traditional point of departure, however, continued to be Havel’s antipolitics; the concept of a parallel polis never found a wider audience beyond the rarefied world of dissent and, without a large number of participants, was nearly impossible to implement. Moreover, the question arose of what exactly to implement; as Aviezer Tucker points out, ultimately “Benda’s characterizations of parallel political structures

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were vague.”54 Eventually, most dissidents agreed that the parallel polis could realistically develop only in the spheres of art and literature. But if so, then this was hardly an innovation, for samizdat publishing was already thriving, and the cultural underground’s reigning philosophy, of which the Plastic People of the Universe were an important part, had always been to live as if government repression and Communist Party ideological domination did not exist. If the parallel polis beyond arts and literature was ever realized anywhere, it was not in Czechoslovakia but in neighboring Poland and Hungary, where pockets of independent political, cultural, and economic endeavor developed, often quite successfully, during late communism. The sociologist Gil Eyal, returning to the idea of sacrifice, argues that Benda’s goal went further; that in fact the parallel polis was intended to help Benda’s fellow dissidents escape “the isolation of sacrifice” on which they had staked their claim.55 Havel and others, Eyal points out, rejected the idea of a separate sphere of “dissidents,” a professionalization of protest, and instead insisted that a dissident was anyone—doctor, poet, worker—who was taking responsibility for his actions (as the greengrocer failed to do). But who was to say whether taking responsibility for one’s actions had any effect? “Too many Czechs (and reform communists),” writes Eyal, “could have laid claim to this ideal.” Yet clearly not everyone was a dissident (even as Havel bristled at the term). Some form of special behavior had to be defined, and “their solution was a very old one”: to introduce the notion of a “willingness to sacrifice,” which had already been injected “into dissident discourse” by Jan Patocˇka.56 What emerged from this was the link between dissidents and moral authority—in Eyal’s words, they were understood to be special because they possessed “pastoral power.” But within a year of the Charter’s founding, it had become clear that sacrifice was too precarious a notion upon which to stake their claim for pastoral power. Although the party had lashed out at the Charter at its inception, the regime soon learned that locking up the signatories merely increased their claim to sacrifice, and so instead, in the words of Benda, they used the silent “acts of strangulation in the dark.”57 With the dissidents’ sacrifices thereby seeming less sacrificial, pastoral power, to have any validity, had to be moved out into the open, into the more public space of the parallel polis.

Rezek’s “Living in Conflict” Both Benda, who attempted to improve on Havel’s concept of living in truth, and Mandler, the naysayer of the concept, sought to rethink the relationship between the individual and the state and so concretize the meaning of dissent.

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But in the literature on these debates, Petr Rezek is seldom if ever mentioned. Rezek, a well-reputed Czech philosopher himself, although largely unknown abroad, also took issue with much of Havel’s political philosophy. Although he never signed the Charter, and despite his frequent polemics with Havel, he was taken seriously as both a dissident and a philosopher (he had also been a close pupil of Patocˇka). In a 1987 article titled “The Life of the Dissidents as a ‘Life in Truth’?,” first published in a samizdat issue of the journal Strˇední Evropa (Central Europe), Rezek criticized the Charter but, unlike other critics, he offered an alternative vision of dissent: in his version, the aim was not to live in truth but to “live in conflict.”58 Rezek began by pointing out that living in truth did not in fact make any sense. Did it mean never to lie? And if so, did it mean that someone with a childlike inability to lie lived in truth?. For Rezek, a willingness to search for truth, on the other hand, did make sense. Since searching for truth in any country of the Eastern Bloc automatically brought on danger, then in order to search for truth, one must be willing to be in conflict with power.59 This was real dissent, and it was innately political. The advantage to the approach that Rezek outlined was twofold. First, it meant that not everyone who chose not to live in conflict was automatically, by definition, relegated to live a lie. Second, living in conflict introduced a political aspect to dissident activity rather than merely producing a political result from an antipolitical approach (which is where this tension between politics and antipolitics within the Charter always arose).60 At the same time, Rezek’s life-in-conflict approach did not assume that the outcome had to include suffering (to come into conflict with power might also be fun, he suggested) or that it had to be political in nature (there was no rule on what that conflict had to be about); but the assumption was that this struggle would play out in public life.61 Rezek’s principal aim was to ensure that what was key was not conscience and a fixed set of values but a willingness, because engaging in conflict with power without the willingness to do it was mere victimhood, as opposed to dissent. Rezek seemed to imply, correctly, that some dissidents were in fact victims of power (had had the role of dissident thrust upon them) rather than genuine dissenters. Viewing dissent as the willingness to live in conflict allowed for someone who did not have this will—who was content to live a comfortable and quiet life—to one day be moved to disturb that very same peace in order to preserve it.62 As Rezek seemed to suggest, living in conflict would have offered a more fluid and inclusive approach to normalization’s power hold and ultimately also a better-defined alternative to the rigidity of living in truth. Alexei Yurchak has compared Havel’s notion of living in truth to a similar formulation for late Soviet society wherein the citizen “was a dissimulator who

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acted differently in two different spheres, the ‘official public’ and the ‘hidden intimate.’ ”63 The problem, observes Yurchak, is that all these theories continue to portray late socialism in terms of binaries—perhaps not the ready clichés of the cold war but instead a new set of false presumptions about “ ‘truth’ and ‘falsity,’ ‘reality’ and ‘mask,’ ‘revealing’ and ‘dissimulating.’ ”64 Yurchak, an anthropologist, suggests that language and performance are much more complex and were doubly so during late socialism, and that understanding “ritualized acts and speech acts as constitutive of the person is different from the view of these acts as divided between mask (acting ‘as if ’) and reality, truth and lie.”65 Here Yurchak echoes Rezek, who sees the citizen of late communist Czechoslovakia as intimately tied to a system within which he or she can still act out without laying claim to either truth or lies, both of which have been made meaningless anyway.

Stejskal’s Resignation Faced with the inflexibility, or the perceived inflexibility, of living in truth, most citizens resigned themselves to maneuvering within the more malleable framework of official normalization instead. Havel had summed up this very resignation in his portrayal of the greengrocer, except that Havel’s greengrocer had seemed to lack self-knowledge. More to the point was a character in the last episode of the previously discussed television serial, The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman. The setting for this last episode is 1975: the Prague Spring is fading into memory, and normalization has taken root. Major Zeman, police officer and protagonist, speaks for the last time with his departing colleague, Stejskal. Stejskal had once saved Zeman’s life but had joined with the reform communists in 1968 and, unwilling to recant, is being removed from his position. On this, his last day at work, he summarizes to Zeman his future relationship to the current ruling elite (to which his former friend and partner, Zeman, once again belongs): [Stejskal]: I will have to [deal with you guys] since you’re in power. But I warn you that I don’t know of anything, I don’t want to know about anything, and I want nothing to do with anything. I am now an ordinary, stupid gas pump attendant who doesn’t read the papers, who swears at the television and at football, and otherwise thinks only about tips, girls and beer. So what’s your problem with that, gentlemen? [Zeman]: For God’s sake, Mirek, this can’t now be your lifestyle! What have you come to?66

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The answer to Zeman’s question is clear. Mirek Stejskal has come to a conclusion, one shared by other Czechoslovak citizens. But Stejskal’s summation of “what is to be done” (to borrow from Lenin’s famous tract) was not broadcast to these very same citizens. This concluding script, in which Stejskal confesses to his “normalization strategy,” was shelved and never filmed. In its place, an altogether benign last episode of The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman was aired. Stejskal’s declared policy of resignation had probably hit too close to home.

The Televised Anti-Charter Rally What was broadcast on television, however, was the conflict between Charter 77 and the government. Upon first hearing of Charter 77, Ideology Secretary Vasil Bil’ak cautioned his colleagues that tens of thousands, and perhaps even hundreds of thousands, would sign their names to the document.67 In fact, fewer than two thousand Czech and Slovak citizens signed the Charter from its founding in 1977 until the end of communist rule in 1989. Nevertheless, the party responded as if Bil’ak’s estimates had been correct, and it retaliated with the largest political spectacle to take place during normalization—the AntiCharter Rally. The campaign against Charter 77 began the moment that Havel, Vaculík, and Landovský were intercepted on their way to the Federal Assembly to deliver the group’s proclamation. A widely publicized article appeared immediately in the party daily, Rudé právo, and was later reprinted in large numbers like The Lesson. It was provocatively although rather abstractly titled “The Losers and the Pretenders” (Ztroskotanci a samozvanci). Citizens were rallied to come out in support of this statement against the dissidents, and the leadership congratulated itself over the turnout at a Presidium meeting shortly afterward, where they described the public response to the government’s official statement on the dissidents as positive: “Throughout the whole of the republic a great wave of protest arose from our citizens aimed at the unfriendly approach of the signatories of Charter 77.”68 There was little that was voluntary and spontaneous about this great wave of protest, however, especially since few of the protesters in fact knew what or whom they were protesting. The article in Rudé právo had been intentionally oblique, not wishing to stir up unnecessary interest in the new dissident association, and so it merely alluded to antigovernment gestures perpetrated by enemies from within. At the same time, the party waged a private and more direct war against the Chartists themselves—removing signatories from their jobs and confiscating their telephone lines, driver’s licenses, and car registrations. Interrogations were commonplace.

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Publicly the media portrayed the signatories as petulant children of wealthy families out of touch with the common man, paid agents of Western capitalist countries, and active participants in decadent and unseemly lifestyles. One periodical went so far as to publish nude photographs of Ludvík Vaculík, confiscated by the secret police during a house search, in order to demonstrate the dissidents’ debauchery.69 Newspaper and magazine headlines proclaimed, “They are Led by Class Hatred,” “They’ll Even Join Hands with the Devil,” and “Elitists, Signatories, and Weekend Cottagers.”70 Television came to play a large part in demonizing the Charter and its signatories. Each evening in the month of January 1977 the television screen filled with declarations and docudramas condemning the dissidents. The television nightly news soon became too short to accommodate all the anti-Charter broadcasting and was temporarily expanded.71 But the greatest television event was yet to come. On January 28, 1977, in a live televised broadcast, the nation’s celebrities and popular culture icons filed into Prague’s gilded National Theater on the banks of the Vltava River for what would be known as the Anti-Charter Rally. As these famous faces entered the theater, television cameras swept across the arena, cataloging their attendance, clearly linking these men and women to normalization in the most public manner. In a shrewdly choreographed display, the nation’s entertainers and celebrities were trotted out in opposition to the nation’s dissidents, who hovered over the proceedings—absent yet present—like the dearly departed. Actors, entertainers, comedians, and writers who had agreed to continue to work within the official structures of normalization now were called upon to represent the government’s interests before the public. The regime pitted the official against the unofficial, the sanctioned against the blacklisted, and in many cases, friends or former colleagues against one another. The brilliance of the Anti-Charter Rally was this visual aspect—linking the famous and familiar faces to the infamous and faceless regime. Some of the participants sat sheepishly in their theater seats, visibly embarrassed by the spectacle. Others saw their participation as yet another meaningless gesture of loyalty toward a regime that fiercely demanded it. Certainly the smaller anti-Charter rallies that would take place regionally all over the country over the next few weeks—organized by the secretariats of local artists’ unions— were viewed by many as just that, a necessary evil. Singer Eva Pilarová recalled her participation in one such rally after the head of the official concert agency, Pragokoncert, called everyone together and explained, “You will prepare declarations about how grateful you are that you are permitted to sing publicly.”72 When Pilarová begged off, explaining she had no experience writing such declarations, he told her, “Fine, so you’ll read out the statement.” As she later recalled, “And so I read out the statement. What should I have done? I was grateful that they

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The beleaguered Jan Werich at the Anti-Charter Rally, 28 January 1977. The official caption read, “Today on the 28th of January, renowned representatives of the Czechoslovak cultural front gathered at Prague’s National Theater to proclaim their firm resolve to actively contribute to the socialist development of our society through new creative works. At the gathering are National Artist, actor Jan Werich, and his daughter Jana (on the right) in the audience of the theater.” (Czechoslovak Press Agency; photographed by Jirˇí Karas)

were again letting me go abroad for concerts. Not everyone can be a resister.”73 But while participation in the regional anti-Charter gatherings and rallies perhaps could be shrugged off, this larger televised and voraciously photographed affair could not. The regime was unsparing: the old and beleaguered Jan Werich, half of the Werich and Voskovec comedy duo of the 1930s and 1940s who undermined the Nazi occupation through humor, believed his participation would remain low key. But the television cameras and the next day’s newsprint singled him out. The Anti-Charter Rally was led by committed communists assembled on stage. Among them was the actress Jirˇina Sˇvorcová, head of the now normalized Czech Theater Artists’ Union, who stood at the podium and read out loud the gathering’s declaration of censure against the Charter 77 signatories, which was no less oblique than the earlier article in Rudé právo: “Thus we will hold in contempt those who irresponsibly write high-handed conceits out of self-interest, or who for lowly financial gain . . . choose to extricate themselves and isolate

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ˇ vorcová reading out the proclamation at the Anti-Charter Rally of Czech Actress Jirˇina S artists in the National Theater in Prague, 28 January 1977. (Czechoslovak Press Agency; photographed by Zuzana Humpálová)

themselves from their own people—and even among us here such a group of opportunists and traitors has been found.”74 As a finale, the participants left their theater seats and lined up to sign a document (the Anti-Charter, now understood to be “their” Charter) that promised, as its title proclaimed, “New Creative Works in the Name of Socialism and Peace.” The signatories of the Anti-Charter were by no means all enthusiastic supporters of the regime, but they nevertheless signed despite some recent claims that it was quite possible to avoid doing so.75 A week later, artists working in the field of popular music met at the Theater of Music to perform their own version of the same. Here it was the Czech crooner and East Bloc übercelebrity Karel Gott who addressed the participants and urged them to join the public backlash against the dissidents.76 The potency of the Anti-Charter was in its extensive list of V.I.P.s. Ultimately it did not matter whether the participants were enthusiastic; it mattered only that they were there. The Anti-Charter Rally worked because it was played out on the television screen and because its participants were television celebrities with whom the public identified.

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The Forty Signatories That the public did not by and large identify with the Charter, and that in fact even its own signatories increasingly did not, came to the forefront in 1987, during the tenth anniversary of its founding. In recognition of this milestone (for to have survived a decade despite the punitive intervention of the state was laudatory) but also of the significant changes that were afoot with the ascent of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, the Charter’s leadership issued two key documents. They were intended to redefine, or at least redirect, the Charter’s future. One was addressed to the country’s citizens as a whole and the other to the Charter’s signatories. Literary critic Josef Vohryzek, one of the three Charter spokespersons at the time, in an interview in the underground press insisted that these documents did not suggest some sort of radical coup within the Charter. Charter 77 was remaining loyal to its original conception, he explained, but at the same time “the conditions here have changed and there are far more people now who take part in independent activities or even those who combine work in the [official] structures with independent activities as well.”77 The Charter was hoping to address this significant shift. The first document,“A Word to Our Fellow Citizens,” called on Czechoslovakia’s citizens to live in truth in the most straightforward manner possible: “One frequently hears the question—‘What to do?’ . . . Tomorrow immediately we can all start saying the truth. Not only at home, but in the workplace, during social gatherings, at a variety of meetings.”78 Reminding ordinary citizens that they were the “us” of “us versus them,” the document pointed to commonly heard grievances: “[The Party elite] have their own special advantages, special suppliers, special services, special health care, special and secret salaries. . . . We do not want to provoke envy or jealousy, for these are not good impulses on the path toward democracy. We mention it so as to emphasize how deeply many leading officials have distanced themselves from ordinary citizens.”79 But the Charter was feeling equally uneasy about its relationship with ordinary citizens. In April and May of the same year, it attempted to gauge this relationship by conducting a poll about the public’s knowledge of Charter 77 and its activities. Four hundred and nine evaluations filled out by Charter signatories and other activists were collected, and the results were not inspiring. Three major points emerged from the survey: “People have very little knowledge about the activities of Charter 77 and other dissidents; most Charter 77 signatories are isolated from Charter activities; and many people believe that Charter 77 should concentrate more on its originally declared aim—the defense of human rights—and less on political goals.”80 Thus, not only did many, if not most, signatories feel isolated from the Charter core in Prague, but the persistent question of whether

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the Charter should function as a political or a nonpolitical association was no closer to being resolved. A particularly worrying aspect of the spring 1987 findings was that while the Charter had hoped to gauge the opinion of approximately 1,000 signatories still living in Czechoslovakia, only 133 had bothered to respond to the survey.81 Some signatories had emigrated, but the low response was also due to an increasing sense of alienation among most signatories from the Prague-centered Charter core. This was especially the case among the younger generation, and it became the subject of the other major document issued and distributed by the Charter on its tenth anniversary, “A Letter to the Signatories of Charter 77.” In it, the Charter argued that it was the association’s very diversity of opinion that defined it best and that this diversity, in combination with an intentional lack of a clearly framed political program, had allowed the Charter to rely merely on the “moral quality” of its signatories. “A Letter to the Signatories” went on to explain that concessions were now being made to the growing number of second-generation signatories who were demanding an increased political stand from the Charter. As part of this effort, the Charter would partially reorganize by adding a “collective” of Charter spokespersons (as opposed to the usual number of three who were selected from the older generation at the core of the Charter) as well as a Charter Forum at which relevant questions and issues would be collectively debated.82 But to many, these concessions were insufficient and vague, and came no closer to addressing the ever-increasing resentment felt toward the Charter core. Among the disgruntled were forty Chartists who joined together to compose a public, and biting, response to “A Letter to the Signatories.” In their rather awkwardly titled “A Letter from Forty Signatories of Charter 77 regarding ‘A Letter to the Signatories of Charter 77,’” they introduced themselves as what the original Charter letter had described as the association’s “passive majority.” Evidently offended by the label, they explained that they and others like them had been written off as passive simply because they did not have a way with words, were unable to wield a pen to the same effect as some of Charter’s famous writers, and thus were without a voice. This, they argued, did not by any means define them as passive. In fact, so incensed had they been by the original letter and its implications that, despite their lack of writing talent, they felt compelled to take up the pen and make known their grievances. With pen now firmly in hand, they wrote that “A Letter to the Signatories” had explained that as the Charter core aged, the leadership ranks would need to be replenished with a younger generation but that communication with this generation seemed awkward at best. The Charter was seeking a solution for this in its newly created Club of Charter spokespersons. But the forty signatories insisted that this would not change the basic problem, as they saw it, of a Prague and

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Brno Charter core that intentionally seemed to exclude other lesser signatories. The original letter sent out to Charter members had argued that this Praguebased core had become the decision-making center out of default rather than intention, a habit that turned into custom. But the forty signatories saw something far more intentional behind this “accidental” power structure: But didn’t it by any chance take place differently . . . that this “active core” was formed rather willfully? Did not this “active core” take for itself all the important work (and, admittedly, also the bothersome and often unwelcome work) with such ferocity that it became sort of “self-sufficient,” and as a result of that, there appeared this “passive majority” around it? Were initiatives “from below,” offers from the ranks of this so-called passive majority to partake of activities—most of all from the ranks of the young and the younger generation—really given the proper attention they deserved? And were their offers for co-participation and coresponsibility really fully accepted?83 Because of the way in which this younger generation had been rejected and excluded, explained the forty signatories, they were now far more likely to meet with one another informally. Moreover, these meetings were based less on their identity as Charter signatories than on the special interests they shared or the locales where they lived.84 The forty signatories, who claimed to be useless with the pen, ended on a most devastating note: “Charter 77 has gained a huge respect and influence internationally, but its position among our own young generation does not respond to this same respect and influence.”85 Indeed, the Western media’s attraction to Charter 77 had much to do with their fascination with these core intellectuals, against whom younger signatories now seemed to be rebelling.86 The antipolitics approach of the Charter, by being philosophical rather than political, permitted a wider context of operation—not just within Czechoslovakia, it would seem, but across its borders and beyond the Iron Curtain. Like passive resistance, antipolitics could be applied elsewhere. In some ways, Havel staked his claim in political philosophy based on the recognition that what he had to say about the human condition in late communism was just as relevant in any postmodern, consumer-oriented society—that, on some level, Western societies were just as troublingly post-totalitarian as was Czechoslovakia’s normalization.

Unanswered Questions As the fissures within the Charter began to show, Havel, too, expressed his doubts about the dissident script for normalization. In an essay titled “About the

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Meaning of Charter 77,” he continued to defend the original ethical grounding of the association but also allowed that its resonance within society had proven dim. Havel conceded that “even society does not in any obvious way identify with [the Charter]: the number of signatories does not rise, . . . no public expressions of sympathy for it exist; it seems, if anything, that people stand to the side, that they fear having anything to do with it, maybe even have no interest in it.”87 Havel would continue to speak of ordinary citizens’ fear during late communism as standing in the way of their political opposition, but here, even if briefly, he acknowledged that maybe they “have no interest in it.” Dissident tracts, of which Havel’s are the best known and certainly among the most sophisticated, were largely unwilling to tackle the two questions that remained essential for most citizens: why should the dissidents be trusted as the nation’s ethical guardians, and what, in the aftermath of 1968, was wrong with the regime-endorsed quiet life? To Havel and others, the answers seemed self-evident; but not necessarily to those outside of dissent. Czech sociologist Ivo Mozˇný has argued that by the 1970s most political dissidents were viewed by the general public with suspicion and that this was an attitude not entirely unjustified: “First off, one could find among them too many who had participated in the breakup of one’s traditional world at the beginning of the 1950s. And then, once a person had sort of put the remnants of his life back together, even more of them again in 1968 who through yet a new experiment—transparently motivated first and foremost by a bad conscience from the earlier experiment—destroyed his daily everyday existence: and did so in the name of improving on ideals that had already proved unreliable.”88 This stumbling block, the question of personal pasts intimately tied to the exigencies of the nation’s recent political history, was never addressed sufficiently. Had it been, living in truth might have made more sense. Furthermore, the quiet life, as the following chapters will show, was about much more than consumerism, which in turn made it both more alluring and insidious. The regime connected the quiet life to new notions about socialist “self-realization” and what I call “privatized citizenship.” Husák’s government recognized that television would be the most effective purveyor for this vision of post-1968 communism that had been inadvertently unveiled at the 1970 World Exposition in Japan. Television thus became the golden chariot that the normalizers hoped to harness. They had watched helplessly as it had careened across the political landscape during the Prague Spring, causing both mayhem and awe, revealing a versatility they had not suspected, and now they wanted to take control of its reins and use it to take them to the finish line.

5 BROADCASTING IN THE AGE OF LATE COMMUNISM

The Prague Spring propelled the Communist Party into the media age. Overwhelmed by the rapidity with which television, radio, and print had broken free of state censorship in 1968, taken aback by the force of the visual image in revealing the underbelly of Stalinism and its aftereffects, normalization’s leaders unanimously agreed that they themselves must exploit the media for their cause. This revelation about television’s political potential was repeated, mantralike, throughout the 1970s and well into the 1980s. “Experience from the crisis years has taught us,” reported one such official analysis, “that television, with its potency, persuasiveness, vivid description, and availability, is one of the most powerful instruments of ideological influence on society and on the individual.”1 Even Rudé právo declared that “[a]t the height of the crisis, it became evident that such significant media as radio and television can, within a certain power constellation, hold a greater influence than the classic instruments of power.”2 The year 1968 was a media wakeup call. Television’s reach was expanding farther as the number of households with television sets increased to reach Western, capitalist levels. Czechoslovak state television had first broadcast in 1953. Almost twenty years later, by 1972, 80 percent of Czechoslovak families owned a television set.3 According to a survey reported in a March 1975 issue of Rolnické noviny (Agricultural News), by the mid-1970s, nine out of ten families in Czechoslovakia owned a television set. On average, television reached 65.6 percent of its potential audience, while radio attracted a much smaller 38.6 percent. Two-thirds of collective farmers watched television, the newspaper reported, but only a little more than one-third listened to radio 112

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broadcasts, only 11 percent read newspapers and periodicals, and a mere 7 percent went to the cinema. The same was true of industrial workers, although they read somewhat more newspapers and journals and watched more films (probably in part because they lived closer to cinemas) than agricultural workers.4 These numbers were repeated throughout the bloc. Ellen Mickiewicz, who has written extensively on Soviet television and viewing patterns, concluded in the 1980s that “the ‘new Soviet man’ is now in front of the television set, and so is the rest of the family.”5 She cites a Soviet scholar who observed that “the necessity for families to acquire a television set today is so great that it is seen as an object of the first necessity. Its presence can be classified as an inelastic type of utility.”6 A scenario of increased television exposure and declining readership was quickly becoming the norm—as was already the case in the capitalist West. Milan Kundera, now an émigré writer living in Paris, noted with dismay that even Parisian intellectuals spent dinner parties in animated conversation over the most recent television shows.7 Now the same could be said—at least potentially—of communist Czechoslovakia as well.

Style over Content Initial efforts to begin a serious discussion about television in the age of normalization, however, soon gave way to finger-pointing and head-shaking over the ways in which television had played a crucial part in the Prague Spring. At a 1970 meeting of the Ideological Commission, Jan Zelenka, despite being chairman of state television, seemed incredulous: “[W]e are faced with a really serious question,” he said, “how was it possible that in 1967 . . . communists were everywhere, communists were in all mass media outlets, and how is it that these mass media outlets became the basis for the attack on the party, on socialism, on everything? How come? We’d better have some sort of answer to this.”8 While he claimed (or feigned) not to grasp how this had happened, he was insistent that the party’s earlier inattention to the media was in part responsible: “[B]efore January 1968, the party leadership never appreciated what kind of political apparatus the mass media really is, especially the most modern forms of media, like television, radio, and the press.”9 Not to be outdone, Jan Fojtík also pointed to how political indoctrination simply had disintegrated upon hearing mass media’s siren call: “[I]t took only the intensive influence of the rightist forces in television, film, and magazines and the results of all that work came to naught.”10 The presence of enemies from within, of ideological sabotage perpetrated by fellow communists, was fundamentally disconcerting. Earlier, during his 1959 visit to the United States, Khrushchev had experienced a revelation about television’s

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potential for “entering into dialogue with the entire country.”11 Consequently, he also became concerned about the vulnerability of these same airwaves and called for the introduction of a new security system at all Soviet television studios. But the fear that hostile elements, eager to gain political control, were outside official structures (and merely needed to be barred entry to sites of ideological influence) was fundamentally different from the normalizers’ concerns. Secretary Bil’ak articulated these concerns in his inimical way as early as July 1969 during a political rant to a district meeting of communists in Prešov. He told his audience that they all had narrowly missed the sharp thwack of the guillotine: “[T]elevision, radio and newspapers could have easily made other exhortations, for example ‘Kill the communists! Kill them because they are an encumbrance and stand in the way of the building of some kind of a socialism without communism!’” Bil’ak’s estimate of potential casualties at the hands of the reformist media—much like his later estimate of potential Charter 77 signatories—was deeply exaggerated: “Maybe fifty thousand and maybe a hundred thousand communists and other honest people could have been murdered. . . . Mountains of corpses.”12 Despite the lack of corpses churned up by the ideas of the Prague Spring, the conclusion reached from all sides of normalization’s political spectrum was that, as Fojtík summarized, the Prague Spring proved “that ideological work is not just the concern of marginal discussions and debates but that, without a doubt, it relates to the very sphere of power.”13 And because of its 1968 track record, television was to be at the fulcrum of normalization’s ideological work. But the frenzied hand-wringing over the ways in which television had been penetrated by the reform communists soon translated into bickering over how to proceed. State television, by and large, had been cleansed of the bad seeds and was now on offer to normalization’s culture makers as an empty canvas. On the one hand, Zelenka fully believed in wiping television clean of all Prague Spring remnants and was proud to say that, during the purge, he had dismissed one entire editorial department of sixty persons because there was nothing reformable about a single one of them.14 On the other hand, he was also recognizing that he would have to negotiate between the ideal and the real. To create the sort of highly rated programming that was being demanded of him, he needed to have people with experience in writing, acting, filming, and producing. But there were some in the leadership who failed to appreciate this, Zelenka complained, “whether it’s because they don’t know the whole situation as it is in television, or else because they ignore the complexity of it, exhibit impatience and would get us to the point that would block television’s development and would make positive consolidation for next year impossible.”15 These “radicals,” as Zelenka referred to them, included Secretary Jan Fojtík as well as Jan Kliment, influential cultural critic of Rudé právo.

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Jan Zelenka, head of state television, giving a speech during the Prague celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of Czechoslovak Television, 14 May 1973. A delegation of the party Central Committee is in attendance, headed by secretary Vasil Bil’ak (hunched over, center front). The banner reads, “All Creative Forces for the Engineering of Socialist Man.” (Czechoslovak Press Agency; photographed by Josef Nosek)

In 1972 Zelenka decided to appeal directly to the country’s leader for help. He began his letter to General Secretary Husák by outlining a recent incident—he had been undermined by Fojtík in public, at a meeting of regional secretaries of ideology. Fojtík had announced loudly in front of everyone that recent television programming amounted to “yet another provocation.” In light of television’s notorious involvement in the crisis year of 1968, this was an inflammatory accusation, Zelenka noted to Husák.16 Alongside Fojtík’s efforts to undercut him, Jan Kliment of Rudé právo was using his editorial position at the paper to criticize Zelenka and his management of state television. Just recently, Kliment had used up an entire newspaper column to expound on his irritation over the postponement of the broadcast of an East German television program titled Red Are Our Songs. But, as Zelenka reminded Husák, the postponement had had nothing to do with him whatsoever; it had been ordered directly by the Central Committee, whose members had decided that the program’s presenters’ bearded, unshaven faces and their Western-type trendy clothes were too provocative for the early-evening slot.17

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Zelenka’s appeal to the country’s top political leader was not entirely misplaced because, as the tussle over Red Are Our Songs suggests, television was seen to be so central to government power that decisions about its content and staffing were routinely made by members of the Central Committee and the Presidium.18 But there were problems with these collective interventions; according to Zelenka, they lacked any coherent framework, “any unified line of interpretation of the party’s cultural politics.”19 Indeed, a year earlier, Radio Prague’s “What Would You Like to Know?” had invited listeners to call in with questions about the recent and ideologically important 1971 Fourteenth Party Congress, the first official congress marking the beginning of normalization. The panel included prominent party members, Jan Fojtík among them. When one caller asked about the party’s current attitude toward the cultural intelligentsia, Fojtík smoothly replied, “[A]s long as the cultural front contributes to the advancement of socialist values, the party will play its part and fully support it. Should the cultural front fail to do this, the party will withdraw its support and find effective countermeasures.” More difficult for him to tackle was a question called in by a student from Prague who said that she “wished to know whether every person in Czechoslovakia working in the cultural field is expected to have the same worldview.” The panel’s answer, which soon degenerated into familiar doublespeak, was that “it is not necessary to adopt a Marxist-Leninist view in order to do public cultural work in Czechoslovakia, but that only someone who recognizes the Marxist-Leninist concept of the world can be a true defender of socialism.”20 It is likely that the student from Prague hung up the telephone no more enlightened than when she had rung the show. Zelenka, when communicating privately with Husák, did not need to be quite as oblique. It had become commonplace, he wrote, that one set of opinions on a specific cultural question was formulated among “comrades in the cultural department of the Central Committee and their friends, another by the ministers of culture and their colleagues, another by other influential groups in the cultural front,” with the result that “a creative piece [of television programming] can be lauded to the heavens by one group and dragged into hell by another.”21 Moreover, Zelenka maintained, these extreme judgments were being made on the basis not of artistic merit but of the political profiles of its producers. Such an attitude, he insisted, was fanning the mistaken belief that what was most important for normalization was an unrelenting hunt for former supporters of reform communism. Zelenka felt that that time had passed and more pressing issues must now dominate. He unabashedly reminded the general secretary that the two of them were in agreement on this: “For you and other comrades, the most important thing is the content of the piece, the principle for which it is fighting. But there are other very

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influential groups for whom the content is de facto a secondary consideration, and for whom the most important question is who: who wrote the piece, who directed it, who acted in it, who sewed the costumes for it.” “Here they call it ‘the roll call,’” wrote Zelenka, describing the long list of former television employees now on the blacklist. He quipped that “there are suggestions that we open up a detective agency because—almost as if it’s done on purpose—it seems that whenever we manage to put together something good, it’s always followed by ‘the great unveiling’ of our collaboration with a rightist [reform communist].”22 This was not to say that he was blind to the fact that most competent actors, writers, producers, directors, stage managers, editors, and costume designers had participated in the Prague Spring: “You know that there will always be some actor or another who carried out some mischief in the past.”23 He went on to name a number of those who, despite their past “mischief ” (an interesting term in itself for what was elsewhere officially referred to as right-wing machinations), had asked to return to the mainstream. To test their loyalty, he had assigned them “politically engaged” projects for television, which they completed successfully, only then to be unveiled in the press, which had made it difficult for Zelenka to retain them despite the high quality of their work and their proven willingness to work for normalization. “Which director who worked in television or film before the year 1969,” Zelenka asked Husák, “did not film something foolish?”24 At the same time, Zelenka wanted to be clear: under no circumstances was he arguing for the wholesale political pardon of former reformists such as writers Ivan Klíma, Ludvík Vaculík, and playwright Pavel Kohout. But “the constant witch hunt” against the lesser participants in the Prague Spring was detracting from the more important question at hand: the future shape of communism as it was to be projected onto the television screen.25

Estonian Day The question of television content was equally provocative. In 1972 the Central Committee’s conservative weekly newspaper, Život strany (Party Life), complained that “it seems to be easy to turn a beginning singer into a ‘star’ in our country with the help of the press, radio, television, and concert institutions whereas we are still incapable of spotlighting outstanding workers and the daily activity of the officials.”26 Such a statement suggests just how off the mark the conservative wing of the Communist Party was, for this was a decidedly outdated view of television’s role in promoting what had been the Stalinist ideal of workersuperstar. This was now the 1970s, and the pop singer had trumped the worker in both East and West.

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Zelenka might well have recognized this shift, but television programming had not caught up, a fact that became a point of not just contention but also ridicule. At a meeting of the Ideological Commission, Zelenka admitted to his colleagues (although one wonders why) that he had recently received a sarcastic letter from Vladimír Škutina, a much-admired television personality during the 1960s who had been blacklisted since the invasion. Zelenka proceeded to read aloud excerpts from the letter. Škutina had started off, tongue-in-cheek, by “congratulating” Zelenka on Czechoslovak Television’s recent special event, Estonian Day, an evening of programming in honor of sovietized Estonia. Škutina wrote: “Until [now] I had begun to believe the well-orchestrated and constant propaganda claiming that I had been the worst antisocialist to appear on Czechoslovak Television. But your Thursday evening programming assured me that whoever created and approved that Thursday event far outdid me.” He continued, “Because you were loaded down with other worries and probably did not have the chance to savor this unforgettable treasure, surely you will not be angry if I myself describe this pearl of a program to you.”27 And so it went: Estonian Day began at 7:10 p.m. with the evening news first read out, after which one expert after another faced the cameras, managed to say nothing of any substance, and, at best, explained why in fact he or she had nothing specific to contribute to the discussion. Dr. Milena Balažová, of the publication Sveˇt socialismu (The World of Socialism), followed on the heels of this first group. She explained to television viewers the meaning of internationalism versus nationalism and, as a side note, complained that viewers had “suggested to her that she move to the Soviet Union” (her presence on the television screen was, one presumes, her reply to them). Next came the “star” of the Estonian evening program, a Professor Ivan Hru˚za (whose name—as if on cue—means “horror” or “dread”) from the Higher Education Institute of the Communist Party (Vysoká stranická škola). According to Škutina, Hru˚za managed to use up thirty minutes of screen time conjugating the phrase “Marxism-Leninism.” With more programming like this, Škutina concluded, Czechoslovak Television soon would be begging for the purged, such as himself, to return.28 In a sense, Škutina was right.

Entertainment TV The criticism of early normalization’s television programming was even taken up by the more idealistic older generation of postwar Communist Party members. One citizen viewer belonging to this demographic wrote in to television with suggestions on how to improve the tedious and predictable programming: “I think that in television and radio there should be more live, non-prerecorded,

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and sincere discussions with a real exchange of opinions and less prearranged scenarios (i.e., ‘Yes, you’re so right comrade editor’) and ‘inconspicuously’ readout, fake discussions at workplaces.”29 This lifelong party member, as if entirely oblivious to recent events, warned that the scripted nature of programming was doing nothing to improve the country’s 15 million citizens’ engagement with current politics. In 1975, Vasil Bejda, head of the Central Committee’s propaganda and agitation department, complained on record about “the routine, drab, and unimaginative coverage of domestic and world events by the Czechoslovak media, with the prevalence of commonplace slogans in place of Marxist-Leninist political analysis.”30 But above all, among ordinary citizens, television’s everyday viewers, one sentiment dominated: tedium. In 1975, the head of the Czechoslovak Television’s department of propaganda and documentation admitted that viewers’ letters more often than not described television’s programming as “uninteresting, lacking in objectivity, and dull.”31 Zelenka, then, was not entirely deluded when he lamented to General Secretary Husák, “[W]e are blamed for everything possible:” for criminality being “on the rise, because apparently we show wartime films, in which people are murdered, as well as criminal detective series”; for continued negative feelings toward the Soviet Union “because we offer too few (or too many) programs about the Soviet Union”; and for teenagers’ lack of interest in exercise “because we include too many (or too few) broadcasts of sports competitions,” as well as their overdeveloped interest in popular music, “although we broadcast only 5 percent of the amount that one radio station does—namely Hveˇzda, although this station is lauded for its great political work.”32 Behind all the criticism that television was not living up to expectations lay the unspoken: television’s explosive popularity during the Prague Spring had been based on the very elements that were now off-limits—freewheeling live debates, unscripted interviews, uncensored confessions, and startling political revelations. No longer was television permitted to offer these to its viewers. The mission of orthodox socialist state television was quite different. Media outlets were understood “first and foremost [as] molders of citizens.” “They function,” writes Mickiewicz, referring to the Soviet case although it is equally applicable to the rest of the bloc, “because they have delegated authority from the state to perform the task of socialization according to established norms.”33 In a 1976 television interview, Dr. Milena Balašová, deputy to Zelenka, was asked to comment on letters from disgruntled viewers who had written to Rudé právo to complain about state television programming. The letters maintained that it was tiresome to watch endless images of factories fulfilling their five-year plans and staged public expressions of friendship with the Soviet Union. Balašová, however, refused to assume the role of apologist and made it clear that she had no time for

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such superficial complaints. She fired back at the dissatisfied viewers, warning— rather sinisterly—that they should “in these days ponder what they are writing and whether their views are correct.”34 Balašová insisted that Czechoslovak Television (meaning socialist television) was not supposed to be like Western television, just as socialist society was not supposed to be like capitalist society— as Mickiewicz also points out. But herein lay the problem. Socialist society was becoming more like capitalist society in terms of expectations, and especially consumer expectations. This meant expectations not just about material commodities but also available entertainment. There were areas of the country that had long been able to satisfy the urge for capitalist entertainment: people living close enough to West Germany and Austria could catch television signals from those countries. In fact, until mid-1971, aerials that could receive television signals from neighboring Western countries were readily available. Produced by a cooperative in the Czech city of Pilsen, a site otherwise famous for beer production, they were frequently attached to new high-rise apartment buildings as part of the communal aerial system. At the end of 1971, these television antennas abruptly ceased to be manufactured and disappeared from stores.35 But because of their continued presence on buildings and of what they symbolized and announced so publicly, in mid-1972 in the region of Chomutov, near the northwest border of Czechoslovakia, so-called street committees participated in an anti-aerial campaign. They visited the owners of such antennas and “suggested” to them that they cease reception of Western television programming. While no one was actually ordered to do so, citizens were reminded by the street committees of the unfriendly propaganda to which they were being subjected and that, for politically conscious citizens, domestic programming should be sufficient.36 But even if the government had been able somehow to ban and destroy all such antennas, a yet more volatile piece of technological equipment was in the offing. Throughout late communism, the imminent arrival of satellite television haunted the Czechoslovak Communist Party and thus presumably the whole network of communist and workers’ parties in East-Central and Eastern Europe.37 It is interesting that while impending satellite television provoked serious anxieties, the implications of the similarly threatening video recorder remained long overlooked.38 One reason might have been that satellite television was easier to conceptualize because of the Soviet Bloc’s continuous tussle with Western airwaves. In the early 1970s, regular television signals from West Germany and Austria already were able to cover the areas of Liberec, the western and southern parts of Bohemia, southern Moravia, and Slovakia. But party experts estimated (rather exaggeratedly, it would now seem) that by the end of the 1970s, satellite television would bring coverage to the entire territory of Czechoslovakia.39

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In preparation for this seeming inevitability, Czechoslovak Television kept close tabs on the development of the satellite television industry and simultaneously on the influence that Western television programming was exerting in the border areas where reception was already possible. Czechoslovak Television further solicited help from Prague’s Research Institute for Public Opinion, which tracked the ever- increasing access to and interest in Western-made fare.40 Thus Dr. Balašová was wrong: if exposure to Western programming could not be controlled, then socialist television content needed to be improved dramatically, which meant that viewers’ complaints had to be taken seriously. Moreover, this was an urgent task because as one anonymous letter to television headquarters noted, “I wish that you would all realize that a person, after running around all day, wants to enjoy himself in front of the television set. Except that that entertainment itself is as elusive as an autumn crocus.”41 This letter— which echoed Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s statement that “the Soviet person has the right to relax in front of the television after [a] day’s work”42—also confirmed what other studies suggested, that the majority of viewers who could turn to Western television did not do so for purely ideological reasons. They did not switch over, as cold war assumptions would dictate, to capitalist television for its markedly different interpretation of current world events. Surveys found that in the areas where it was possible, Czech and Slovak citizens switched over to Western television when the domestic screen was filled with “too many programs with a war theme or else too many programs with the theme of building communism,” or if the programs “were too strongly adapted to the demands of the Prague intellectual elite.”43 In other words, it was not only politically infused programs that were considered off-putting by much of the viewing public but also high-brow programming that appealed to minority intellectual appetites.

Looking to the German Democratic Republic Neighboring East Germany faced similar problems. There, unfettered access to West German television was an everyday reality, and the GDR leadership had had to take it seriously because the ubiquitous small screen served as a permanent mirror against which East German viewers judged their own socialist society. Faced with such an undesirable reflection, the East German government had been the first to embrace so-called light entertainment as a genre with which to entice viewers back to their screen and, in a general sense, to an East German set of political, social, and moral values. With this in mind, the Soviets now advised Czechoslovak Television management to consider doing the same, to increase its focus on “light genres” with the purpose of “bringing to television masses of

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viewers, and not remaining satisfied with only winning over the politically and culturally mature type of viewer.”44 The politically and culturally mature type of viewer presumably could kick back with an evening of five-year-plan success stories and Czechoslovak-Soviet Union friendship pageants, but the average citizen could not. Comrade Bogomolov, representative for the Soviet television agency APN, furnished Zelenka with the results of a sociological study of television viewing habits carried out in East Germany in the early 1970s. According to the survey, 60 percent of East German television owners watched only West German television, 20 percent watched West and East German television programming, and 20 percent watched only East German. The abysmal conclusions had provoked the new emphasis on light entertainment. In addition, to bump up the viewing numbers for political news reports, this sort of programming was now scheduled in between action films and television serials that resembled those produced in the West but at the same time were comfortingly identifiable as East German.45 Zelenka followed suit and was able to report to General Secretary Husák that Czechoslovak Television was now learning from the East Germans, as the Soviets had advised. Using similar scheduling tactics, he had managed to increase the number of viewers for the evening news: “We’ve carried out a successful experiment. Before 7:00 p.m. [when the television news goes on], we schedule undemanding, entertaining, and largely music-oriented programs.” Zelenka boasted that as a result, “viewership of Television News rose by at least 5 percent, which means minimally 300,000 people. Similarly, there was as much as a 30 percent increase (that is, 1.5 to 2 million) in viewers of the Television News on Friday and Saturday if what followed was a program that interested a large circle of viewers.”46 Even so, as Zelenka admitted elsewhere, “a portion of viewers still remain indifferent to the television news, and instead are turning on their television sets to watch plays and entertainment programs at about eight o’clock.”47 Zelenka’s task—as challenging as it was—was significantly less complicated than that of his fellow East Germans in charge of television in the GDR. Despite Comrade Bogomolov’s approval of GDR attempts to make its entertainment programming competitive, anthropologist John Borneman writes that in the mid-1980s, the East German government conceded “that the battle of the airwaves was lost.” Its gesture of defeat was the installation of cables in the city of Dresden that made it possible for its inhabitants to watch West German television; Dresden residents could now be like everyone else in the country. Until then, because of the city’s topography, Western airwaves could not penetrate, and Dresden’s inhabitants had been applying for emigration out of the GDR at far higher rates than elsewhere in the country.48 According to Borneman’s observations, East Germans altogether had become chained to their television sets. The

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result was a passive armchair nation that was not entirely unwelcomed by the GDR government. One of his interviewees, a medical doctor who made weekly house calls, “found that most of his countrymen lived stunted lives, bounded by the frontier of the television set.”49 This being the 1980s, their lives, more specifically, were probably bounded by the plotline of the German-dubbed American television serial Dynasty.

Content over Style Zelenka did not have to confront the porousness of Czechoslovakia’s barrier to the West in quite the same manner, but he did have to tackle the immutability of socialist television’s evening news. The format and tone of television news could not be reformed; it was nonnegotiable. It could be buffered from all sides by action films and favorite television shows, but the form and content of television news itself could never change. Despite a promise made at the 1976 Fifteenth Party Congress to improve on the current officious tone of television news, little could be done because the root of the problem was political; debate and discussion, such as they were, had to be limited to opinions within a very narrow spectrum of political affiliations. The result was appalling to watch. At a 1980 meeting of the Ideological Commission, one high-level functionary said plainly what everybody else was thinking: “In print it can be buried, but on television similar news accounts beat into the eyes quantitatively and one gets the impression that our lives are made up of [political] meetings.”50 Television news was fated to remain a series of colorless snapshots of party meetings, resolutions, and the carefully planned cheerfulness of worker collectives. In part because the television news was bound by paralyzing restrictions, efforts to create a formidable yet popular vehicle for voicing normalization’s political, social, and economic imperatives shifted to other television genres. At the Fourteenth Party Congress in 1971, Czechoslovak Television had been instructed to “shape the life of a person in socialist society, his relation to his work and to his life.”51 Already a year earlier, Fojtík had announced that earlier methods of propaganda were now defunct, and a more subtle approach needed to be found: “Let’s say it straight out—that for years a proper regard for political agitation has not existed in our party. Some forms of agitation have become hackneyed. They were not thought out; they did not take into account the psychology of our people. It would be a mistake to try to reintroduce these forms.” Instead he called for the sort of “agit-prop work that effectively influences people’s mindsets, and that is possible only through the use of the modern means of communication.”52 The short-lived but no-nonsense minister of education Hrbek stated

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the issue in the bluntest of terms: “[N]o real normalization is possible if we use only power, pressure, and livelihood, etc. to convince them to say something different or to keep silent and to think something else [privately]—we must penetrate their very insides, and that is where we must present all our arguments.”53 Yet while Soviet dissidents still referred to the television tower in Moscow as the “needle,” to suggest its powers to inject propaganda into television viewers,54 the Soviet authorities had largely abandoned their earlier belief in the “hypodermic effects” model of agit-prop consumption that assumed a direct and uncomplicated transmission of the intended message from television screen to subject.55 Television’s intent might be to produce a particular subject and norms, but it could not be done as straightforwardly as earlier imagined.

Socialist Television Serials In September 1974, a report on television broadcasting was presented to the Communist Party Secretariat by Culture Minister Miroslav Müller and Vasil Bejda, head of the Central Committee’s propaganda and agitation department. The report hinted at what was to become a vital programming genre for normalized television: “It is [state television’s] goal to creatively render the life of a person in socialist society, his relationship to his work and his life, his ethical world, his internal as well as social struggles and conflicts. . . . The most ideologically significant, as well as the most effective and entertaining for viewers, is the dramatic genre.”56 Previously, General Secretary Husák himself had suggested to Zelenka that, in his personal view, dramatic pieces produced for television “must crucially be focused on contemporary themes.” Zelenka fully agreed, adding that the dramatic genre represented television’s unique potential and that film and theater could not compare with television in its ability to confront contemporary issues in a dramatic and riveting form.57 In this they were both right. Writing on television serials in the United States, Ella Taylor makes the case that while “television genres have all been structured . . . by the language of realism,” it was really the “continuing series” in postwar America that proved most effective in “mobiliz[ing] identification with characters who are ‘realistic’ because they are ordinary folks with plausibly familiar lives that go on ‘just like ours,’”58 Television, argues Taylor, “strives to convince us that its words and images reproduce our own experience or that of people like us.”59 In other words, television genres generally, and the continuing series (like The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman) in particular, are notable for their ability not so much to “penetrate the insides” (as Minister of Education Hrbek would have it) but to forge identification between viewer and screen.

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Similarly, the light television genres common to late communism were intended to attract audiences through their contemporary plotlines and familiar everyday conundrums but also to simultaneously instruct audiences about the shape of post-1968 normalization and the part they were expected to play in it. The most popular of them was indeed the multi-episode television serial, a finite soap opera whose script presented contemporary topics relevant to society at the same time that it entertained viewers. But where the socialist serial parted ways with its counterpart in nonsocialist broadcasting was in its loyalty to state, and thereby Communist Party, demands rather than capitalist economic imperatives. Because of this relationship, a particular type of Czech serial officially came to be known as a spolecˇenská objednávka—literally meaning “made to order for society.”60 Each year, state television compiled an “Ideas and Themes Plan” that outlined the programming being planned for future production. Often programs were linked to upcoming socialist anniversaries and celebrations and reflected pressing political needs as currently prioritized by the regime. The entire plan was then presented to the party Central Committee for review. Approved serials were overseen by a deputy to Jan Zelenka, whose job as liaison with the cultural section of the party Central Committee was to maintain the “purity of the material” and inform on the progress of the serials’ production.61 As sociologist Irena Reifová explains in her superb article on Czech television serials, “the serial was understood as potentially the most effective television tool for socializing (viewers) based upon the parameters of the given regime.”62 This conscious use of the television serial or soap opera to shape not only a specific television subject but also a nation or community of viewers is also to be found in the production and deployment of the telenovela. Anthropologist Conrad Phillip Kottak has written that under Brazil’s military rule, telenovelas, soccer, and Carnival became “Brazil’s most reliable cultural unifiers.”63 Globo, the private television channel that produced most of Brazil’s homegrown telenovelas, together with the military government, created and televised a Brazilian style of life, with modernization and upward mobility as its national unifying themes. Kottak insists that for mass culture to be mass culture, it needs to be familiar to those watching it and that telenovelas competently fulfilled this purpose in Brazil. Moreover, because of their built-in familiarity, telenovelas’ appeal cut across regional, social, and economic boundaries, attracting even the country’s intellectuals (although tagged by them as a guilty pleasure and popularly referred to as “my marijuana hour”) despite its profile as low culture.64 Others have similarly made the point that television dramas produced in postcolonial nations share many features but significantly differ in form and style from Anglo soap operas watched in Britain, Australia, and the United States; they are made with

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the intent of both entertaining and shaping “the national community.”65 Here, to borrow from Benedict Anderson, screening rather than reading produces “imagined communities.”66 In this there is a striking similarity with late communist Czechoslovakia and its format and use of serials. Serials, as well as the enthusiasm with which they were received by viewers after 1968, were not, however, entirely new to Czechoslovak television. The first serial to cross the screen was the 1959 Family Bláha (Rodina Bláhová), broadcast live and only once a month; thereafter, another 280 serials were made and broadcast during the communist period.67 The term “serial” was used exclusively by both its producers and viewers despite the sometimes different formats.68 A serial consisting of thirteen episodes, most often with the episode’s conflict being resolved at the end of the hour but sometimes with the viewer left hanging until the next episode, became “almost a rule” during normalization. The serials were never considered daytime viewing, always occurring in prime time, and typically appeared once a week. The logic of this, writes Reifová, is that each serial, with one episode broadcast once a week, covered approximately a quarter of the viewing year, and four serials a year thereby ensured that two never ran at the same time and that there was never a lull or a disjuncture in serial broadcasting.69 The first three Czech television serials, all of which appeared on the screen prior to the Prague Spring, focused on mythologizing the all-important “ordinary person.” While on the one hand this mythology was a fundamental aspect of communist rhetoric, on the other hand, as Reifová points out, it “anticipated the whole ethos of the Prague Spring, the goal of which was not to destroy socialism but to give it a human face.”70 In the 1970s, the genre expanded as the popularity of the television serial proved its political worth. At the 1978 Golden Prague Television Awards, Antonín Dvorˇák, head of Czechoslovak Television’s drama section, heralded the television serial’s form and function, likening it both to Greek drama and to a more developed socialist realism: “Television dramatic art is becoming a remarkable part of [our] national culture . . . and [it] restores the ancient original democratism of art, with its popular character. . . . It [replaces] the one-time popular nature of theatre and film and takes over their role of the ‘mass art’ of the first half of the 20th century.”71

The Family Serial Of all the normalization-era television serials produced, it was the household, or family, serials (domácí seriály) that dominated viewer interest. They were thereby consistently placed at the 8:00 p.m. slot, right after the evening news program—which, as Zelenka had explained to Husák, guaranteed a significant increase in evening news viewers. One communist cultural critic nevertheless

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complained about the family serials’ ethos and the ways in which it came into conflict with socialist values: “Not without reason do we call them family serials: and that’s because more and more they are becoming just some chronicle of one single family, and a family, moreover, that seems to be removed from the surrounding world, a family that exists ‘in and of itself,’ that seems to be unconcerned about almost anything that takes place around it, that lives cozily around its so-called fictitious family hearth, with its home-baked joys and tragedies.”72 To him, the family serial was dangerously turned in on itself when instead, in line with socialist thinking, it should have been shining its light onto the public sphere. The Soviets, who had been quick to advise Zelenka to pursue light entertainment as the bedrock of Czechoslovak television programming, also seemed less sure of the end result. In 1976, when two Soviet television employees were sent by Central Television to Czechoslovakia to watch and select suitable television films for broadcast in the Soviet Union, they reported back that they would return largely empty-handed because the Czechoslovak “television films based on modern issues do not give a sense of the life of the republic” but instead cast attention on the family. Worse still, “the family is always shown isolated from social life, from people’s productive activities, as if the walls of the house are the limits of these peoples’ contacts and interests.”73 It would seem, therefore, that for the Soviets, the Czech television serial was an anomaly. Yet it would prove to be a popular export within the region of East-Central Europe.

The Cult of the Socialist Serial The influence exerted by these television serials was discussed at a 1984 conference of the Union of Czech Dramatic Artists, where Petr Bílek, literary critic for the journal Kmen (Stem), argued that what was projected on the television screen through these serials was successfully translated onto the streets of socialist Czechoslovakia: “Television realism, like everything else in television, has its own specific sociological consequences. At certain social levels, particularly in the countryside, [these serials] create a social system of clothing preferences, of home decoration, and perhaps even influence the behavior of certain age groups.”74 This should not have been surprising: studies in the Soviet Union had revealed that 63 percent of all Soviet citizens claimed not only their views but their moral universe was shaped primarily by television, while some 70 percent of young people chose their profession under the influence of television.75 Actress Jirˇina Švorcová, who had led the charge at the Anti-Charter Rally in Prague’s National Theater, embraced the genre wholeheartedly: “I am convinced,” she wrote, “that those who take part in the creation of television serials should

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no longer write about them but instead sociologists, theoreticians, and generally wise and educated people should take it on as a topic.”76 Sociologist Ivan Tesár did so, remarking in the same volume of populist essays and interviews that “the broadcasting of serials not only focuses millions of viewers’ attention on one theme, but leads them to contemplate and discuss problems that relate to their own lives, their work, family, and even the problems in their own country.”77 Tesár further made it clear that television serials from the West differed from Czechoslovak ones: the former were shaped by commercial pressures, whereas the latter spoke directly to “the real problems of contemporary man, his life and world in which he lives.”78 These communist-era commentators—indeed, enthusiasts—did not seek to mask the manner in which these serials succeeded. Sociologist Reifová points to the effective use of normative characters and their “ ‘regime friendly’ interactions,” which “offered viewers the hypothesis that by imitating these same interactions within the real world, they would prove to be equally successful.” She writes that “the ideological influence of the serials must be sought in their function as guides broadcast to viewers about how they should behave in such a way that would ensure their nonconflictual cohabitation with the politico-social structures.”79 In trying to cover Czechoslovakia’s entire demographic, television serials thereby shifted their lens to cover the full variety of its citizen viewers—from factory workers to farmers to the intelligentsia, from city dwellers to country folk.80 Reifová correctly argues that ultimately the regime was not bothered by whether or not the messages were internalized. The important thing was that even if the viewer watched and remained internally resistant, he or she was still receiving word of “what will be rewarded and what will be punished.”81 Consequently, even those serials that one might claim were not recognizably political in fact were because they projected an atmosphere that was never “indifferent” to the world as envisioned by the regime—despite the absence of any direct reference to the Communist Party or its sloganism. Or, as Reifová explains by paraphrasing Milan Kundera, each serial reproduced a “categorical agreement with being.”82 Moreover, the efficacy of television programming in creating the subject that it desires is, according to Mickiewicz, significantly dependent on the source. Messages received from sources understood as authoritative and credible are less easily discounted.83 This was relevant in post-1968 Czechoslovakia because by this time the party had been largely discredited. Just as in the Soviet Union, news programming was viewed, if at all, with suspicion. Yet the characters of these television serials, their lives and conundrums mulled over in the privacy of living rooms and the public spaces of work, were seen as credible and ultimately more authoritative than the authorities.

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Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, viewers demanded ever more television serials. According to a 1981–87 Czechoslovak Television survey, drama dominated viewer interest, and within this category television serials led the way. A 1988 Czechoslovak Television survey found that 82 percent of television viewers turned on their sets for serials.84 Political and social themes considered stale and unwelcome when pronounced in the clipped voice of the television newscaster or printed in the smudged black ink of the daily press found an eager audience when refracted through the private lives of a group of fictionalized characters and their problems in work, life, and love. Through the television serial, public issues were beamed into viewers’ living rooms as shared private experiences. As one article in the Slovak press enthusiastically exclaimed, “[T]hese serials so much resemble our own everyday lives that we’re no longer sure of what is art and what is journalism.”85 What is also important to recognize is that, unlike North American soap operas, late communist socialist serials were not intended for or received by one specific gender—they were for everyone and watched by everyone. The result was that this cult of the television serial produced a nation that regularly sat down in front of the small screen to watch the latest production at the appointed time. Those few who did not were consequently left out of the loop as conversation about the preceding night’s serial spilled over into the following days. As in the case of Star Trek Trekkies or Monty Python fans, viewers’ speech became peppered with phrases from favorite serials. The best-known of these, uttered by a beloved doctor character, was that “if foolishness could give you wings, then you’d be flying around here like a little pigeon.”86 Vital to the serials’ success was the one way in which the characters’ lives differed from viewers’ everyday lives. Ordinary citizens’ lives, unlike the characters’, seldom took any surprising dips and turns. Reifová recalls that, “school began for everyone regardless at eight in the morning, potatoes arrived at the greengrocer’s on Thursdays and shoe shops received new goods every first Tuesday of the month.”87 The regime micromanaged the days and weeks, planned the years, and promised stability as compensation for dearth. In this atmosphere, the lives of the serials’ characters represented the only potential unknown of the week. But writing a successful socialist television serial was not easy. When these programs succeeded, they were watched by an overwhelming majority of the country’s citizens. The rest of the time, the screen continued to fill with ineffectual, uninteresting, politically clumsy, or downright incoherent and laughable programming. In other words, Estonian Day, in its multitude of forms, never quite disappeared from the screen, which in turn made the successful serials all the more popular.

6 JAROSLAV DIETL Normalization’s Narrator

Jaroslav Dietl, author of A Young Lady for His Excellency, Comrades!, the 1960s theater play that had been banned by the Central Committee’s Ideological Commission,1 excelled at the socialist television serial. In large part, it was his serials broadcast in the 1970s and 1980s that remade television into what Czech literary critic A. J. Liehm described as “the main and the most useful of normalization’s media tools.”2 By transforming the pedantic and officious socialist-speak of the television news into entertaining limited-episode soap operas watched by millions of citizens, Dietl and his work became practically synonymous with normalization. Dietl was not new to television. In 1951, as a university student in the city of Brno, he abandoned his degree in psychology and moved to Prague to enroll in FAMU, the well-regarded film school. Although he finished his course work there, he never took the graduating exam, a gesture intended as protest against the politically motivated dismissal of his favorite FAMU teacher, Milan Kundera. Dietl came from a committed communist family, and Kundera’s dismissal apparently had dented his long-standing faith in the party.3 When Czechoslovak Television went on the air for the first time, Dietl took a position as a writer at its Prague headquarters and was soon intrigued by a new trend in television broadcasting in the West—television plays that stretched out over the course of multiple episodes.4 Although his first efforts were rejected, he soon found both fame and fortune with the broadcast of Three Men in a Country Cottage (Trˇi chlapi v chalupeˇ). The television serial, made up of fifteen black-andwhite episodes and broadcast live in one-month intervals from October 1961 130

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through December 1962,5 centered around one family of three generations of men—a bricklayer, a tractor driver, and a retiree—who live together in a Czech village. The episodes were rehearsed and then broadcast live, which left room for improvisation and references to the latest hockey match results. Viewers responded enthusiastically, so much so that “laundry hampers filled with [their] letters” dotted state television’s offices.6 For the last episode, filmed in Prague, crowds lined the streets, jostling one another to watch the characters’ fictitious wedding party walk through the city. They flocked to Wenceslas Square and then gathered in the Old Town Square not so much to watch a taping of a television serial as to bear witness to a marriage between people they had come to know through the small screen.7 Telegrams of congratulations and gifts arrived at television headquarters before and after the last broadcast, along with bedding and cradles. In addition, many state enterprises joined in on the fun, offering the fictional couple the use of their company retreat for their honeymoon.8 During the 1960s, as his banned play about the failures of the Czechoslovak communist state suggested, Dietl dabbled with the reformist ideas of the Prague Spring. Consequently, he failed the party screening at Prague’s television headquarters, and only through the protection of a friend at the television studios in the mining city of Ostrava was he able to continue his work in television. He spent a year in industrial Ostrava, and continued to write in the same prolific manner that was his trademark—fifteen pages a day, every day. The result of these efforts was his first normalization-era television serial, the 1971 Dispatcher (Dispecˇer), about a middle-aged band leader of a miners’ musical ensemble. Like the artificial Czechoslovakia pictured in the Czechoslovak Pavilion at the 1970 World Exposition in Japan, one suspended in time and space and devoid of politics, private life in Dispatcher does not seem to yield to the exigencies of the outside world but instead erupts in song and the comforting oompah-pah of a Czech brass band.

The Self-Criticism The success of Dispatcher coincided with television chairman Jan Zelenka’s mandate to remake television into the centerpiece of normalization’s political culture, which in turned carved a path back to Prague for Dietl—although he was never again a bona fide employee of television but rather a contract freelancer. Moreover, to assuage television’s numerous critics, Dietl was called upon to do a self-criticism, a public flagellation required of the more visible reentrants into the official public sphere at the beginning of the 1970s. Dr. Balasˇová, Zelenka’s

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deputy, was assigned the task of planning Dietl’s self-criticism. On the one hand, it had to satisfy party conservatives, and on the other, it had to be palatable to Dietl’s enormous fan base. Unlike other scriptwriters, who remained merely names in the credits, Dietl was as big a celebrity as the actors who spoke his lines. Television management therefore agreed that Dietl would carry out his selfcriticism in the form of a staged interview following the highly popular television show Bakalárˇi, a series of televised stories based upon real-life incidents submitted by viewers, on which Dietl was working as one of the writers at the time. Balasˇová, a seasoned party functionary, was careful to discuss the entire script for the self-criticism-cum-interview with the Central Committee’s cultural division at a meeting attended by Miroslav Müller, the minister of culture. At the meeting, a few corrections were made to the script, and then Balasˇová was given the go-ahead. During the carefully scripted interview broadcast on television, Dietl chatted as planned, letting politically engaged remarks drop here and there, such as that he had become so fascinated by the transformation of Czechoslovakia’s villages under socialism (a generous way of describing forced agricultural collectivization during the 1950s) that he was preparing a multiepisode serial on the topic. According to the follow-up report that was submitted after the broadcast, the prearranged form and content of the self-criticism were adhered to throughout.9 Nevertheless, a more detailed report on Dietl’s self-criticism was requested by the hard-liner Oldrˇich Sˇvestka of the Central Committee and then forwarded to Milosˇ Jakesˇ, head of the Control and Auditing Commission, an oversight committee for the purges. In the report, Dietl’s performance was judged, on the contrary, to have been decidedly poor. Rather than clearly berating himself for his past political mistakes, it was reported he had spent the time “complimenting himself on his work on Bakalárˇi, and [explaining] that this work had helped him to realize much faster some mistakes that he had allowed himself in the past, and that he was referring to some work that had reached the television screen in 1968.” According to the report, not only was this rather insufficient for a fullfledged self-criticism but “even his performance sounded decidedly uncommitted (similarly when he announced that he agrees with the current politics of the Party).”10 The report concluded by hinting that Dietl’s political commitment, like his self-criticism, was ambivalent. Now it was Zelenka’s turn to sound like one of the many supplicants who wrote to him daily, baffled by the arbitrariness of government decisions. Zelenka answered the charges by pointing his finger at other popular personalities in the media who had evaded the self-criticism entirely or else had performed one with even less conviction than Dietl. Zelenka concluded in his response, “Why is it that Dietl is singled out and why is it that television is always placed under

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suspicion?”11 But the fact remained that the normalization regime needed both Dietl and television. Thus, despite the outcry from the conservative wing of the party Central Committee, Dietl was already writing, as he had promised his fans during the televised self-criticism, his serial on postwar agricultural collectivization in the Czech countryside. This serial, more than the staged interview, would serve as his official reconciliation with the party.

The Youngest of the Hamr Dynasty In 1975, the first episode of Dietl’s serialized account of forced agricultural collectivization, titled The Youngest of the Hamr Dynasty (Nejmladsˇí z rodu Hamru˚), was broadcast, with new episodes shown twice a week—on Thursdays and Sundays.12 The serial traced the emotional, political, and professional trajectory of Jan, the youngest of the Hamr family, from the end of World War II until 1974. The dense broadcast schedule allowed viewers to immerse themselves in the earnest efforts of Jan Hamr as he forged a socialist system of agricultural production in postwar Czechoslovakia.

The Plot Unlike Jan, who is shown eager to start his life’s journey in the aftermath of war, his mother, Mrs. Hamr, feels that that journey is over before it has begun. The war has ended but sitting with her husband and three sons in their rented cottage, their lives still ruled by the whims of a greedy kulak landlord, barely able to scrape together enough for dinner, she asks, “What was the point of the war and all that suffering if we’re no better off than before?”13 It will be Jan’s task throughout the serial to prove to his mother—and simultaneously to viewers—that the war made sense because it brought communism, and with communism came both equality and prosperity. Mrs. Hamr, initially a committed capitalist, believes that only private ownership can free them from the poor man’s merry-go-round and so urges her husband to join those who are appropriating the empty properties left behind by the recently expelled Sudeten Germans of the Czechoslovak borderlands. On her orders, he goes to claim a so-called Grund, and the family packs up and heads for what is essentially the new frontier. As a new community takes shape in the repopularized outer reaches of the country, political allegiances do too. At first, everyone is suspicious of Pudíl, the village’s lone but decidedly good-humored communist, who takes his ostracism with a great deal of patience, so sure is he of communism’s eventual triumph. It also becomes clear that although their house

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is, as Jan’s mother declares, “large as a castle” and sits on seven hectares of land, life is not as they envisioned it. Jan’s two older brothers escape Mrs. Hamr’s overbearing manner, and it is left to Jan and his mother and father to manage their estate.14 When Jan’s father collapses from the exertion, Jan prematurely becomes the head of the household. With this role come the concerns of any landowning farmer. He is sure he has come up with a novel way to increase production and reduce costs: the community should share both equipment and labor. But instead they laugh at him down at the pub, while Pudíl, the resident communist, pulls Jan aside and tells him that while his ideas are sound, it is how one approaches people with an idea that counts.15 Still, Jan is frustrated by their intransigence, telling them, “You’re all still doing everything as it was done under Maria Theresa’s reign.”16 He opts to attend agricultural school instead. It is 1948, and one day at school he hears that “the government in Prague is falling.” Confused about what is happening, he consults with the village’s wartime partisan, who explains that in Prague they are simply “finishing what we started in the woods.” Jan replies, “But I thought you were there fighting the Germans.” The partisan clarifies, “All that effort just for that wouldn’t have been worth it.”17 With the Communist Party now in power, the reorganization of the country’s agriculture into farming cooperatives, known as JZDs, begins. Jan has become a good interpreter of the local mood and warns, “I can feel that a major battle is about to take place in the village.”18 Indeed, when collectivization’s supporters march through the village singing and waving their hammer-andsickle flags, led by a brass band and tractors, it is Mrs. Hamr who throws herself onto the field to block their path. Jan’s attitude is more forgiving: “It was never ours; the state gave it to us in the first place.”19 Of course, what remains unsaid is that this is true only of the Sudeten borderlands, where land and property that belonged to the expelled Germans was indeed meted out by the state; elsewhere, the state is in the process of expropriating and collectivizing decidedly private property. Jan joins the JZD but is soon called to military duty. When he returns, the JZD, under the direction of the communist partisan, is in complete shambles. His leadership has been heavy-handed at best. When Jan asks him if it would not be better for the villagers to enter into the JZD voluntarily and willingly, the partisan replies that “they” (“the people”) were never of much interest to “us” (the party). The partisan soon afterward shoots himself (over an unrequited love), and Jan becomes the head of the JZD. He succeeds where the partisan did not. The district party secretary, who has been watching Jan for years and, after the death of Jan’s father, has taken on a paternalistic role, tells him, “These projects of ours . . . these really socialist projects—they can’t be implemented in only one

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village.”20 The idea is to create megacollectives. In preparation, the party sends Jan to an agricultural university so that he can one day lead these really socialist projects. Jan thus finds himself in the early 1960s in Prague. When he returns to the village in the mid-1960s, he is a different Jan from the one who left: urbane, worldly, and married to a blonde Prague native, a fellow student from the university. We find him inspecting the fields dressed in a wellcut suit, knee-length wool coat, and trendy tinted glasses, driving his own private car. He has clearly become one of the postwar party elite. His next assignment is to bring a nearby unruly JZD to heel. When he finds its members at a pub during work hours, they jeer at him and refuse to return to work. He asks his mentor and protector, the district party secretary, to have them removed from their posts, but the secretary refuses to honor Jan’s request: “We must work with the people we have. No one will give us new ones.”21 Jan recognizes that he cannot walk away from problems but must tackle them head-on. In the meantime, his wife has decided the very opposite. Stifled by village life, despite her rather touching attempts to furnish their one room in Mrs. Hamr’s two-room cottage as if it were a 1960s mod Prague apartment, she leaves Jan. There are other changes afoot as well: the Prague Spring has begun, and those still opposed to collectivization believe their day has finally come. But Jan does not bother to get worked up over the new politics of the day; he laughs at the antics of the pro-Prague Spring villagers. As Mrs. Hamr lies on her deathbed, Jan tells her, “I have never used a large idea to hurt anyone and now, just because it’s become the fashion, I’m not going to spit at something that I helped build.” He adds, “It hurts that not everything worked out as intended, but mistakes take time to correct.”22 After Mrs. Hamr dies—in Jan’s arms as they proudly survey the JZD lands from a hilltop—Jan is asked by the party to create a JZD conglomerate that will produce in enormous quantities. Jan, sensing that he now has the strength, replies, “Yes, I am ready to try.” The intimation is that Jan (here synonymous with the party) has found salvation through fire (his mother’s death in the case of Jan, and the reassertion of power after the Soviet invasion in the case of the party). In the last episode, which covers the first three years of post-purge normalization, from 1971 to 1974, Jan’s world is a showcase of efficiency and modernity. He is even more fashionably dressed than before, his full head of hair streaked with a dignified gray. He runs meetings parallel with other tasks; he is firm yet mildly impatient with those who come to his office seeking favors. Time is money. The district party secretary, who has been like a father to him, is now also dying, and he reminisces with Jan about how they sought to create “the greatest project of the century” in such a short time. That so many people did not believe them, and in fact despised them for it, still pains him, he tells Jan just before he dies. As if in

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Production shot from The Youngest of the Hamr Dynasty. Jan returns home to his mother’s cottage with his Prague bride. (Czech Television Archives; photographed by Vlasta Gronská)

apology for their misguidedness, when Jan rediscovers his long-lost childhood sweetheart, the once-disgruntled villagers come to his cottage, unasked, and ready it for her visit.

Audience Reaction Success for The Hamr Dynasty was immediate. According to Czechoslovak Television’s viewer research department, the first two episodes were watched by about 75 percent of television viewers, but those numbers jumped sharply after the second episode. Toward the end of the serial, viewership in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia was up to 90 percent and often more.23 This success was confirmed

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by letters from viewers. By June 1975, Czechoslovak Television had already received 515 letters about the serial—most of them “written in superlatives.”24 This sudden influx of letters mattered not only to state television but also to the Communist Party and its Central Committee, to whom Jan Zelenka regularly reported. Increasingly after 1968, television viewers seemed ready and willing to communicate about a range of topics. Each week, citizen viewers sent in letters (both signed and anonymous) to state television, particularly its Prague headquarters. The letters addressed a wide range of topics, including, for example, comparisons between their own experiences and those presented on the screen, complaints about material shortages, and anticommunist polemics. A department was devoted exclusively to reading viewers’ letters and reporting on what they had to say. All the letters were sorted, themed, and summarized into weekly, monthly, and yearly reports, replete with graphs, and sent on to the Central Committee and other high offices of the party. Once read and sorted, most letters were discarded: what remains are some of them that had been passed on to Jan Zelenka, reports on the letters, and excerpted letters from satisfied viewers eager to discuss television’s offerings. These letters—their numbers as well as content—need to be approached with some caution. As Ellen Mickiewicz writes about the Soviet case, studies conducted by the government there revealed that “letter-writers as a group diverged rather markedly from the public.”25 Those who tended to write letters were older people with more time on their hands and Communist Party members, even though in the Soviet Union, as in Czechoslovakia, only about 10 percent of the public was in the party. Yet despite these findings, the letter departments in all media outlets continued to thrive and were encouraged to “continue to collect, code, computerize, summarize, and distribute the material that flows in in huge numbers.”26 Even so, I argue that the letters sent in by viewers about Dietl serials and then compiled into official reports cannot be dismissed automatically. At the very least, they offer a sense of the response, even if only the most positive, to these serials because an overwhelming majority of the country, whether writing letters or not, was similarly sitting transfixed in front of the small screen. As a contemporary of normalization recently confessed, “Dietl belongs to the category of Dumas-like storytellers able to bewitch even those who scorn his work. I will always remember a friend of mine, whom the regime made short shrift of during normalization, but who nevertheless sat down in front of the television screen every week and was sincerely moved by the fortunes and misfortunes of [the character of a] communist official [called] Pláteník in [Dietl’s serial] The District Up North. Moreover, he was not alone: practically all of us watched it.”27 As discussed in the previous chapter, the government’s chief aim was to have its citizens watch these serials—whether they also applauded them mattered far less.

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Indeed, excited over the number of letters received about The Youngest of the Hamr Dynasty, which matched the high viewing volume that had been reported, the correspondence department noted that few viewers had been able to limit themselves to brief texts and instead had explained in great detail which characters and story lines spoke to them and their own life stories. The letters suggested that Dietl’s television serial cut across traditional social divisions; those who wrote in varied significantly in their backgrounds in terms of education, age, profession, and place of residence. The Youngest of the Hamr Dynasty was embraced not only by older viewers, who presumably (if so inclined) could relive their postwar communist idealism—e.g., “My brother and sister were the founding members of their cooperative; I recognized their difficulties and their joys”28—but also by a younger generation. For example, an accountants’ collective, whose members for the most part were drawn from the countryside, admitted that the serial had allowed them to recall those early days of postwar collectivization, but they also noted with delight that their twenty-nine-year-old colleague had declared that “on Thursdays and Sundays she wouldn’t go out on a date even if the maharaja were to show up.”29 It is important to recall that, without video recorders, going on a date on either of those two nights would have meant missing an episode of the Hamr Dynasty. Similarly, a teenager wrote, “I am fourteen years old but this serial has perhaps meant more to me than to some adults.”30 Neither was such fanaticism limited to country dwellers, who either had experienced collectivization themselves or had family members who remembered it. Urban viewers often responded with the same enthusiasm: “Thanks for arranging the serial, thanks to J. Dietl for his humorous, intelligent, and clearly politically engaged work. I am a city person, who in a village only plays the part of a guest, but even so the adventures of the Hamr family were exciting to me.”31 And while this latter viewer was evidently favorably predisposed to the party’s cultural output (approvingly describing the serial as a “clearly politically engaged work”), the Hamr Dynasty seemed to spellbind even the skeptical. As one viewer confessed, “After some initial doubts a decent program emerged from this serial. Admittedly, there are many characters in it who should exist, but more often than not do not exist, but, nevertheless, as the serial continues, the more it pulls you in.”32 Ultimately, the underlying message behind The Hamr Dynasty and Jan’s life journey (which ends in the early years of normalization) was not that communism had triumphed but that the Communist Party—and with it the communists— had learned (or were ready to learn) to communicate with the people. At the start, when Jan is spreading ideas about shared labor and equipment without even realizing that they mimic communist goals, Pudíl, the village’s only real

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communist, tells him that ideas are not enough—it is communicating them to others that makes the difference between failure and success. That is Jan’s real journey: learning and also instructing others on how best to speak to ordinary citizens. The partisan, despite initially being the postwar hero, becomes the villain—one who, being a loyal communist, conveniently annihilates himself— because he is both incapable of and uninterested in communicating effectively with the villagers. It is a decidedly post-1968 message about the need for communication among the Communist Party, the state, and its citizens. The serial’s message was helped significantly by Dietl’s deft touch. Not only were viewers who were automatically susceptible to this story line moved, but in some cases even those who might otherwise have found the glorification of agricultural collectivization repugnant were as well. Such was the case of a couple living in the town of Ústí nad Labem. He, a lifelong communist, wrote, In the serial I often recognized myself, my colleagues; all of us who experienced and overcame similar problems daily. Maybe even those who had stood on the other bank of the river [i.e., anticommunists]—either with their way of thinking or else in their actions—also recognized themselves. And there were more than just a few of them then. But it made me happy to see that the serial was unafraid to present them openly and often even to portray them as courageous. It was also wonderful that it [the party as portrayed in the series] was not even afraid to admit to its own political mistakes. His wife of twenty-six years was, on the other hand, a lifelong noncommunist. But they had watched the Hamr Dynasty together, and—at least as he told it— she had confessed that in spite of herself, she found the serial captivating: During our discussions of the serial, the question came up as to how many so-called tendentiously placed politically oriented scenes there were. I said that in each episode there were only a few. My wife burst out: “What, just a few! There were many, but all of them done very nicely.” And she finished it off really neatly as well: “So now you see that these politics of yours can be served to everyone in a pleasant, popular format. This offers people—nonparty members—more thrills and a sense of identification than some inappropriate chanting of slogans.”33 She, the nonparty member, had grasped both the appeal and intent of Dietl’s first Prague-born televised narration suitable to normalization. This serial proved itself to be no less an expert communicator than its fictional protagonist, Jan. People were so drawn to the Hamr Dynasty and its cast of characters that when Mrs. Hamr “died,” it is said that people from the region regularly came to her

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(empty) grave bearing flowers. More astonishingly still, people voluntarily continued to maintain the empty grave long after the serial had ended.34

The Man at the Town Hall Following the Hamr Dynasty, Czechoslovak Television put out one Dietl serial per year. The next was The Man at the Town Hall (Muzˇ na radnici). Produced and broadcast in 1976, it was an eleven-episode serial about the Communist Party’s current efforts to combat the country’s housing shortage.35 Unlike the earlier Hamr Dynasty, which had looked back on the past, The Man at the Town Hall was singularly concerned with looking forward and in so doing, tearing down the physical past. Set in the fictional town of Kunsˇtát in the very recent past (1971 to 1972), the story line centered on Deputy Frantisˇek Bavor, chairman of the regional National Committee (ONV). The serial was in fact produced “on the occasion of elections to the National Committee,”36 and by focusing on one of these supposed elected committee members, it aimed to convey the postpurge official as capable, down-to-earth, yet commanding and trustworthy. The country’s pressing problems—housing shortages being at the top of the list—thus were shown to be in capable hands. More specifically, The Man at the Town Hall made palatable the idea of leveling old historic town centers to make way for new, architecturally flimsy communist high-rises. In this, Deputy Bavor is the regime’s amiable spokesman. In the first episode, death, rebirth, action, and reaction are all tied together magnificently through the symbolism of architectural destruction and construction. Dietl’s script begins with a description of the town of Kunsˇtát as seen from the air: “Kunsˇtát is a town of about ten thousand people, or just a little more, and the town square looks exactly as it is: inscribed by the Czech burgher before the First World War, the Czech small businessman before the Second World War, and then repaired by the hands of the Czech ‘communist founders’ [budovatelé] of the fifties and sixties of this century.”37 In the filmed version of episode 1, there is no voiceover, but the camera scans first from above and then in an exploratory manner within the town to show us both its old buildings and its bustling streets. The town square is not applauded for its architectural treasures but presented as heaving under the weight of its history, falling apart at the edges, managing only to be patched up by the communists, onto whom this responsibility—this unwanted legacy—has been dumped. As one of the town’s new officials, Deputy Bavor is confronted daily by people and their complaints, all of which are related in one way or another to the town’s deteriorating physical condition and its inadequate infrastructure. Thus his

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former schoolteacher warns Bavor that a drainpipe under which schoolchildren play is dangerously loose. Bavor goes in search of a solution and finds that the person to whom this drainpipe belongs is eager to repair it but is not permitted to do so without first receiving an official building permit. The saleswoman at the grocery store that runs out of milk and rolls too early every morning is also bogged down by other worries: the already cramped (and unmodern) nursery school cannot offer her children a spot. Other government-sponsored building projects have been in the works for years, but the construction sites now lie idle. What can Bavor do? At first the answer seems to be nothing. A friendly citizen of Kunsˇtát explains to him that, like all officials, he is essentially useless. Bavor’s father, a retired bricklayer—a commonsense, salt-of-the-earth worker—also thinks his son is useless and that the vibrancy of communist initiative from earlier decades is long gone. But this inertia is finally overcome through death. In this first episode, just as the viewer becomes familiar with Bavor’s loving wife, she is killed: her moped hits a piece of pipe left lying in the middle of the street near the faulty drainpipe. The message is clear, and Bavor is spurred to action by it. He becomes a renegade intent on overcoming the town’s construction paralysis. He hires a young, ambitious architect, whom he asks to solve Kunsˇtát’s housing crisis. What the young man comes up with is the unusual idea that instead of building the typical, prefabricated high-rise apartment buildings outside town, as is more common, they should be built in the center of town. But it is already full of buildings, Bavor tells him in astonishment. The architect sweeps his hand across the town’s map lying on the table in front of them: they will clear out the town’s historic center—it is rotting anyway, as the viewer well knows by now—and build the cement high-rises there instead. To do so will require demolishing ninety-two houses, an old hotel, the town’s nursery school, four workshops, and everyone’s—including Bavor’s father’s—favorite pub, Na Sˇimalce.38 The pièce de résistance takes place some episodes later when the whole town has a party at Na Sˇimalce, after which they cheerfully take a jackhammer to the old building. In The Man at the Town Hall, the boundary between fact and fiction was so tenuous as to be almost unrecognizable. The serial’s imaginary town of Kunsˇtát was not only based on but frequently based in the real historical town of Beroun.39 While the television audience followed the story of the fictional town of Kunsˇtát, its residents, and their debates over architectural destruction and modern transformation, the very same was taking place in Beroun, which served as the serial’s backdrop. As the story of Kunsˇtát’s rejection of its historical past and its leap into the future—with housing for everyone—progressed, so did Beroun’s. The demolition ball that was Kunsˇtát’s was also Beroun’s. The historical

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Production shot from The Man at the Town Hall. Bavor (left) in heated discussion surrounded by rubble and old, decrepit buildings. (Czech Television Archives; photographed by Vlasta Gronská)

buildings that were dynamited in the fictitious Kunsˇtát were the real buildings belonging to Beroun’s historical center.40 In the last episode of The Man at the Town Hall, the resulting prefabricated high-rise buildings known as paneláky (panel housing)—named for the way they are put together out of premanufactured cement panels placed on top of one another like Lego pieces—stand proudly in the town center. The requisite ceremony is held, at which Kunsˇtát’s party functionaries triumphantly hand over apartment keys to the new tenants: the beneficiaries include a young couple who long to have their privacy; Bavor’s son who, after leaving home an angry young man, has returned with his own family to help build the cement monstrosities of which he is as proud as his grandfather once was of his own bricklaying work; and the young, progressive schoolteacher who helped convince her aging parents

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Production shot from The Man at the Town Hall. Czechoslovak television cameramen on location. (Czech Television Archives; photographed by Vlasta Gronská)

to allow the state to destroy their newly acquired historic house in the town’s center and so make way for the new.

Serial Contradictions The fictionalized story lines of Dietl’s serials, always seamless, reconciled the many contradictions that otherwise popped up like unwanted relatives throughout late communism. But the process of script approval and serial production was less smooth. Irena Reifová, in a case study of one of Dietl’s 1980s serials about a glassblower, writes about how the script, once written, was perpetually passed from one apparatchik to another for revision—a ritual that, according to Dietl’s

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wife, drove him crazy. Reifová speculates that “the script was passed from one to another because to take on the responsibility of a definitive verdict, that the work is finally ideologically error free, could have posed a risk. Few persons from the Czechoslovak Television leadership or the office of the Central Committee were powerful enough that there was no one yet more powerful above them or else willing to point out a mistake and a lack of political consciousness.”41 Dramaturges, who had to be consulted by Dietl, also acted more often than not as censors and overseers rather than persons knowledgeable in their field. It was they who would insist that a certain likable character be seen as belonging to the party or that some socialist success stories be included.42 Once an episode was shot, it was shown in a private screening to Jan Zelenka and other functionaries. When something did not pass muster, a phone call was placed to Dietl, and a request was made for changes. Follow-up meetings then discussed the previous week’s television broadcasts, as well as viewers’ responses. For example, in the case of the serial about a glassblower and his family over the course of the twentieth century, one functionary warned that “viewers’ opinions are being heard about the social standing of the glassblower (that he’s living well, and building himself a house).”43 In other words, he, a worker, was being seen as thriving under precommunist conditions. In defense, a high-level manager at state television noted that “it’s important to differentiate between a textbook on the history of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and an artistic view into a certain time. An artistic work cannot be turned into a didactic work.”44 In 1980, Jan Zelenka revealingly explained the paradoxes that plagued television programming but that a Dietl serial could potentially reconcile. It is worth quoting his hand-wringing at some length: Television is without a doubt a political instrument, and precisely for that reason we must look for all forms that would allow for the widest mass of viewers to be bound to television, for them to have the feeling that television is theirs. . . . At the same time, we must watch that entertainment does not find itself presenting some bourgeois position let alone antisocialist. . . . But at the same time we have to be careful that in the area of entertainment, that all things politic—and hopefully you’ll forgive me for that word—do not stick out from every program like a sore thumb. . . . Nevertheless, we are aware that we cannot introduce nervousness into our viewers with our criticism. On the contrary, we must fill the viewer with the sense that the party is controlling the situation, is managing and knows how to continue.45 A successful serial was able to bring these contradictions to rest, to synthesize the needs of the state with the desires of the viewer and thereby also allay the

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tensions of late communism. It is precisely what both The Hamr Dynasty and The Man at the Town Hall, and particularly their protagonists, had achieved: riveting entertainment, an appealing showcase for socialism, a minimal emphasis on politics, the message that the party and its representatives were alert, listening, and solving—that is, perfect middle managers in the era of Biedermeier-type socialism, all show no substance.

The Politics of the (A)political Nineteen seventy-five had been the year of The Youngest of the Hamr Dynasty; The Man at the Town Hall appeared in 1976; and 1977 saw what would become Jaroslav Dietl’s most popular television serial, A Hospital on the Edge of Town (Nemocnice na kraji meˇsta).46 This serial, centered around the trials and tribulations of a group of doctors, nurses, administrators, and patients in a Czech hospital, was watched, on average, by 88 percent of television viewers.47 Moreover, its success burst through the Iron Curtain; it proved to be equally popular not only in neighboring countries of the Soviet Bloc but also in West Germany. West German viewers were in fact so enthusiastic that in 1981 Czechoslovak Television agreed to a second set of episodes of A Hospital on the Edge of Town, with West German television as the coproducer.48 Such a response in Western Europe to a socialist television serial from the Eastern Bloc of course represented a major publicity coup for the normalization regime.49 In part because of its success in West Germany and thus its assumed translatability within a different political culture, A Hospital on the Edge of Town is often cited as Dietl’s least political work.50 Yet the serial was an unabashed, expertly written celebration of socialist health care—a version that hardly corresponded with the everyday experience of the average citizen faced with an ailment of any sort. To many a Western viewer lacking lived experience in the Eastern Bloc, the world conjured up in A Hospital on the Edge of Town seemed apolitical, but to those familiar with the severe limits of the country’s socialist health-care system, the contrasts between their own reality and Dietl’s fiction were deeply political. An article in the underground samizdat press, signed with the witty pseudonym of T.V. Schauer (that is, “TV Viewer” in German), argued that the point of the serial was “without a doubt to rehabilitate the hearsay and experiences encountered in socialist health care and to renew the broken public trust in doctors.”51 To make his point, Schauer deconstructed an episode in which a false accusation is made against a doctor by one of his patients: “The episode is put together with Dietl’s usual bravado; the author of the complaint is as unsympathetic as possible, and the television viewer further knows that

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the complaint is ridiculous since he saw with his very own ‘television eyes’ the self-sacrificing nature of the whole hospital collective. Despite that—or rather because of that—the viewer will be taught that even such groundless complaints do not end up in the wastepaper basket.”52 Like Jan Hamr in The Hamr Dynasty and Deputy Bavor in The Man at the Town Hall, the warm-hearted hospital staff members in A Hospital on the Edge of Town are great communicators; they have mastered how to address the people and in so doing become heroes, forging ties with the viewing public. In some sense, it was what the normalization leadership hoped to do too—through television and with the help of Jaroslav Dietl. As was witnessed most directly in the case of The Man at the Town Hall—and the concomitant fictional and real destruction of the historic town of Kunsˇtát/ Beroun—Dietl’s television serials did not merely reflect Czechoslovak socialist society; they also helped to create it. In a recent article surrounding the anxious debates over the post-1989 rebroadcast of The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman, one participant noted, “[M]ost serials in the 1970s and 1980s came about based on so-called society’s (read: political) orders . . . From the perspective of the unfortunate influence exerted on people, [Dietl’s] story lines—which contemporary critics often blamed for being sentimental—amounted to a far greater part of the endeavor than all thirty episodes of the Major Zeman serials.”53 That is, the seemingly apolitical had more impact than the overtly political. As this commentator also correctly recalls, communist critics of the day did indeed find much that was wrong with Dietl’s serial output, including his 1979 serial The District Up North (Okres na severu),54 which was arguably Dietl’s most overtly political television serial, produced on the occasion of the Sixteenth Party Congress. Moreover, despite its explicit political kowtowing, it still managed to hold the attention of an average of 81 percent of the viewing public.55 The District Up North narrated the daily life of a district party secretary named Josef Pláteník and, as with all Dietl’s communist protagonists, Pláteník was uniquely sensible and wise, educated by life’s experiences, of the people and belonging to the people, humble and eternally optimistic. The actor who played Pláteník (and who later complained to Zelenka that he was unable to find theater work in Prague after having starred in the serial) once wrote, “I did not create [my character] Josef Pláteník. . . . Our current times did that. . . . In Josef Pláteník we wanted to celebrate the party’s functionaries, real contemporary revolutionaries with an unassuming heroism.”56 Yet despite this template, an editor of the daily newspaper Rudé právo complained that the emphasis in The District Up North was exclusively on the character of Josef Pláteník, with minimal reference to “collective work,” which, the editor continued, was supposed to be the backbone of good party administration.57

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What this editor entirely failed to comprehend was that a Dietl serial succeeded where others failed precisely because of this focus on the individual, on politics understood through intimate emotional ties served up within the narrow context of private, everyday life. Others did grasp this most fundamental aspect of Dietl’s television products, however. Another critic, this one seemingly more in tune with the tenets of normalization, conceded that the two television serials by Dietl that focused specifically on the life of a party official—The District Up North and The Man at the Town Hall—were much needed “at a time when people did not always welcome politics on the television screen, in fact tended to avoid it, or else were often overstuffed with the mechanical repetition of phrases. . . .”58 In other words, it was perfect post-1968 television fodder. But what Dietl’s serials strove for was actually more complex than a mere depoliticization; politics remained pivotal to the story lines but were incorporated into private life and family-centered narratives, thereby leaving the public sphere deflated, unused, and of little consequence. In the aftermath of the Prague Spring and the complications it had given voice to, this was as the Czechoslovak Communist Party would now prefer it, regardless of its gestures toward a participatory and politicized public sphere such as the yearly masquerade known as the May Day parade. Dietl’s ordinary heroes—the protagonists of his television serials—included politicians and nonpoliticians (a district party secretary, a National Committee official, a chairman of an agricultural cooperative, a saleswoman in a grocery store, a doctor, an engineer, a chef), but the difference between the politically affiliated and the unaffiliated was almost imperceptible. In each serial, the emphasis was on the character as a private individual, with concomitant political and social issues redirected as privately formulated problems that could easily and neatly be resolved within the miniaturized world dictated by family, home, and work. What Dietl created best was intimacy, a shared private narrative in which all ordinary citizens’ (as television viewers) could share. In a collection of essays from 1983, one contributor, a sociologist, explained, “[T]he broadcasting of serials not only focuses millions of viewers’ attention on one theme, but leads them to contemplate and discuss problems that relate to their own lives, their work, family, and even the problems in their own country.”59 That is to say, Dietl serials were a safe and effective forum for the discussion of public issues that, if actually allowed to break out into the public sphere, might well become too incendiary. The domestication of politics evidently was not intended to be an exercise in empowerment. The anonymous author of an article in the underground press referred to the phenomenon as the “Dietl vision,” defining it as the glorification of the powerlessness experienced on a daily basis by citizens living in communism. To her mind, there was nothing in the least “nonpolitical” about serials such as

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A Hospital on the Edge of Town: “Was not one of [Dietl’s] intentions,” she wrote, “to show that there’s no point in thinking about some things because we can’t have influence over them anyway?”60 Indeed, viewing these serials today there is something gnawingly suffocating about the world conjured up on the screen. It is filled with a forced optimism that can set one’s teeth on edge. Encounters among family, friends, and coworkers are warm and friendly, models of socialist interpersonal relations, while casual exchanges among strangers—anywhere in the public terrain of the television serials’ setting—are gruff and unpleasant, suspicious and threatening. The intellectual is there to be perpetually ridiculed, while the worker and peasant are valorized.

Privatized Citizenship Dietl’s scripts were known for bringing characters alive through dialogue that sounded genuine, even to the overly sensitive ears of socialist citizens accustomed to being battered by tropes, clichés, and slogans. And because there was so little that was truly entertaining on state television, everyone watched Dietl, and thus it was the viewers that gave his serials their potency. At a 1978 roundtable discussion about which elements made for a good socialist television serial, Jaroslav Dietl maintained that “even the best scriptwriter and the best script have no meaning if millions of viewers don’t watch the result.”61 Dietl, for reasons of vanity rather than politics, in fact held fast to his measurement for success; a television audience of 8 million (out of a total population of 15 million, of whom most but not all had access to television) he considered a failure. Serial success for him meant over 9 million viewers.62 The Rudé právo editor who, mindful of party rhetoric but apparently ignorant of party intent, had protested the emphasis placed on the individual (instead of the collective) in The District Up North, now insisted that socialist popular culture need not be popular: “The point of a television serial is not to grab hold of the viewer no matter what. That in itself could be quite easy. Socialist television should never be interested in trying to gain viewers in this way.”63 As Czechoslovak Television’s general director, Jan Zelenka, knew from firsthand experience, however, grabbing hold of the viewer in fact was not at all easy. Moreover, contrary to what the Rudé právo editor might claim, socialist television had become deeply interested in gaining viewers in this way. Dietl grabbed viewers because of his ability to portray living within the lie— as Václav Havel described the experience of assigning meaning and legitimacy to the regime, if only through the comforting details of everyday life—and to make it seem both intimate and appealing. Dietl transformed the political into

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the nonpolitical. After the trauma of the public politics of 1968, the normalization regime was unwilling to address its audience as public citizens; instead, it employed television to appeal to them as private citizens, as belonging to the larger family of socialist Czechoslovakia. The optimal vehicle for this was the multi-episode television serial about contemporary, everyday life that reproduced social and economic problems on the screen and offered acceptable solutions without having to revert to a genuine public dialogue. In the process, the outlines for a new post-1968 communist citizen were drawn. On the one hand, this “homo normalizacio” of sorts harked back to what anthropologist Ladislav Holy has described as “the little Czech person” (malý cˇeský cˇloveˇk) prevalent in Czech national discourse, “a character so popular that he has acquired his own acronym, MCˇCˇ. The little Czech is not motivated by great ideals. His lifeworld is delineated by his family, work, and close friends, and he approaches everything that lies outside it with caution and mistrust.”64 On the other hand, there is a distinct similarity here with what Lauren Berlant has called the sort of infantile citizenship actively promoted during the 1980s in the United States, the effects of which remain. She asks “what it means that, since ‘‘68,’ the sphere of discipline and definition for proper citizenship in the United States has become progressively more private, more sexual and familial, and more concerned with personal morality.”65 While Berlant probes the ways in which sexuality in the United States is acted out and upon, her formulation of a deformed citizenship is surprisingly apt for normalized Czechoslovakia as well. She points to a collapse of “the political and personal into a world of public intimacy.”66 That is, citizenship is turned inward and played out within the family sphere, and the media ensure that this is seen as the correct place for it, as opposed to the unseemly public sphere. Berlant writes that Reaganism introduced a “conservative ideology [that] convinced a citizenry that the core context of politics should be the sphere of private life.” The result is the “privatization of citizenship.”67 How, under these conditions, is public life, or in this case its communist simulacrum, reformulated? For Berlant, it means that “the intimate public sphere . . . renders citizenship as a condition of social membership produced by personal acts and values, especially acts originating in or directed toward the family sphere.” The national community, the public sphere, is recast as “simultaneously lived private worlds.”68 It is a perversion of Jürgen Habermas’s original formulation of the public sphere, wherein the domestic sphere was a testing ground, a preamble, to the exercise of citizenship eventually brought out from the private into the public. In this truncated version, however, the exercise of citizenship is stymied, cut short, stultified. But the public takes an active part in the process and in believing that with privatized citizenship comes agency.

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The attraction of privatized citizenship during normalization, as written up by Dietl, was helped further by its star-studded cast. A recent commentator on socialist popular culture recalled, “Alienated and estranged secretariats and administrators of totalitarian power were illuminated on television by the light of star actors, and made accessible to the point of a familiar intimacy. In this, its most fantastic period, the Czech television serial thus became a substitute, artificial platform not only for solving viewers’ personal ambitions and desires, but also for simulating some kind of degenerated form of citizens’ lives.”69 Jaroslav Dietl’s dramatic soap operas with a limited run of eleven to thirteen episodes were vehicles for introducing and elaborating on the precepts that, at any given time, the party wished to get across to its citizen viewers. Dietl deftly incorporated them into the story line and had them uttered by characters to whom viewers became deeply attached and with whom they learned to identify. A 1986 samizdat article thus lamented that Dietl “managed to create a whole culture, if we measure it according to what the nation consumes. Even a person who never read a single book, the last tractor driver in Dolní Lhota, watched his serials.”70 The former political dissident Jirˇina Sˇiklová has written, “During its first 20 years—the period of Stalinism—the Communist Party and government literally foisted heroes on us. During its second 20 years, the period known as ‘normalization’ in Czechoslovakia, heroic models were entirely abandoned.”71 But in fact normalization did have its heroes; they were the heroes penned by Jaroslav Dietl, heroes sufficiently appealing that the majority of the public identified with them or, at the very least, watched them. In identifying with these televised protagonists of late communism, to varying extents, wholesale or piecemeal, many viewers also identified with normalization or at least with what was being passed off as normal after 1968. In 1984, Jan Fojtík presented a review of socialist television and radio to the leadership of the Central Committee in which he noted that these made-to-orders “played a constructive role. . . . Prominent in them was the representation of the positive hero of today.”72 Not much differently, a postcommunist article in the Czech press claimed unabashedly, “His serials’ heroes’ fortunes practically guaranteed the atmosphere in the streets [during normalization], and in the morning they were the central theme of debate on public transport.”73

Klíma on Dietl In June 1985, Dietl died unexpectedly of a heart attack while playing tennis with his young son. Ironically, the very health system that he had tried to exalt as humane in A Hospital on the Edge of Town failed him; the paramedics, having

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declared him dead, refused the pleas of his wife to take him away in the ambulance. Instead, his wife and the Dietls’ young children had to sit with his body on the empty tennis courts and wait for the mortuary van to arrive.74 Just a few days before his death, Dietl, an avid tennis player, had played with his good friend, the writer and dissident Ivan Klíma. While Dietl had been one of normalization’s most visible representatives, Klíma was a founding Charter 77 signatory. But like Dietl, Klíma, too, had once belonged to the official world and had been counted among the most prominent of party-affiliated writers. It was in the aftermath of the Prague Spring and the purge that followed that Klíma had found himself standing on the other side of the fence. He continued to write prolifically nevertheless, his work now appearing in the extensive samizdat underground press as well as abroad in translation. After Dietl’s funeral, Klíma submitted an essay about his friend to the respected samizdat journal Obsah (Content). Klíma began the piece by first evoking the unexpected atmosphere of the funeral, which he had attended. He had arrived at the memorial service fifteen minutes early to secure a place to sit. Still, he was surprised that there were still so many empty chairs when he arrived. Indeed, he waited for the crowds to appear, but they never did. He saw no more than five actors and not even one writer there. From the official side, Jan Zelenka at least was present. One of Dietl’s former colleagues in the film industry read out the eulogy, a rambling and confused tribute.75 Klíma speculated that the authorities had intentionally not announced the place and date of Dietl’s funeral, perhaps fearing that the kind of adulation showered on his fictional characters following their serialized deaths might be repeated here. But he also sensed that the regime’s silence suggested significant embarrassment or discomfort: on the one hand, Dietl had been expelled from the party, but on the other, he had received the esteemed communist title of “Meritorious Artist” for his services to the regime.76 Klíma used the rest of the essay to eulogize Dietl himself, but in some ways his efforts repeated the awkwardness of the official funeral. Despite the fact that the essay was written for a samizdat publication, presumably with a readership largely made up of those belonging to the political opposition or else sympathetic to it, Klíma evaded the blatant ethical contradictions that had shaped Dietl’s life. Instead, he wrote, rather innocently, “He only told stories. Usually about ordinary life. But because you can say just so much about ordinary life [in communist Czechoslovakia], in fact especially so about ordinary life, he instead told stories about life as it should be, he told benevolent stories rather than realistic tales.”77 His motivations as a writer, according to Klíma, were similarly idealistic: “He longed for people to behave less cruelly, for them to be less corrupt. He longed for a reformed and helping world. He tried to create such a world not only in his plays but also around himself.”78

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Despite his apparent sympathy for Dietl and his objectives, at the same time Klíma made sure to distance himself from the taint of popular culture and its role in the official sphere. He insisted that he was not fit to judge Dietl’s television work because “I do not own a goggle box nor elsewhere do I watch a television screen, but I know enough to know that he was our most loved author. When his Hospital on the Edge of Town was playing, the streets emptied.”79 While not able to judge the final outcome of his work as shown on television, Klíma felt able to gauge its reception and to further equate Dietl’s skills as a storyteller with those of the French nineteenth-century writer Balzac. As to the question of why the authorities would have allowed someone with the apolitical sensibilities that Klíma attached to Dietl to play such a pivotal role in normalization, Klíma wrote that it was “because those who permitted or forbade such things knew that they had to at least entertain the nation, and someone among them had surprisingly understood that no one could do it as well as Jaroslav Dietl.”80 Klíma’s essay about Dietl provoked a debate that played out on the pages of the same samizdat journal. Klíma’s reluctance to probe difficult questions central to normalization incited resentment among some readers. Even Dietl’s own words seemed to betray Klíma’s best intentions. In one of his last interviews, Dietl apparently stated that writing The District Up North (about the daily life of a district party secretary) “came more easily than all of the other serials. Probably because I am fundamentally a homo politicus, and I’m extremely interested in political goings-on.”81 The debate that followed the publication of Klíma’s essay, although short-lived, opened up the ethical fissures not only in Dietl’s life but also in the lives of those who now wished to condemn him.

The Dietl Debate The first published response to Klíma’s remembrance was by Frantisˇek Pavlícˇek, a former television writer himself as well as a producer and director, who was now a political dissident. His political path, with its dramatic about-face after 1968, was typical of that of many members of the influential wing of Charter 77 centered largely around Prague. In his reply to Klíma’s essay, Pavlícˇek explained that he had known Dietl well, working alongside him as a fellow writer at Czechoslovak Television in the 1950s. In Pavlícˇek’s view, Dietl’s most punishable sin was the enormous part he had played in vulgarizing art during normalization. In producing simplistic television entertainment, Dietl had demeaned the communist ideals about which Pavlícˇek had been enthusiastic all his life. Contrasting his own ideals with Dietl’s aesthetic barbarism, Pavlícˇek explained, “The literary effort to create a televised portrayal of human fate in the manner of an ideological

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simplification of man and his world can lead to nowhere but its vulgarization. I remember a time when our cultural political helmsmen damned the primitiveness of series from the Western media and swore that such an eyesore would not flourish on our shores.”82 The shame, according to Pavlícˇek, seemed to be less in the politics than in the aesthetics. He further explained that he had felt personally humiliated by past rumors claiming that he had collaborated with Dietl on a number of his television serials after 1968. But again, Pavlícˇek’s embarrassment over this gossip was less related to the political implications than to the aesthetic consequences: “I envy Ivan [Klíma] that he was involved [through rumor] with one of Dietl’s best works about [the writer] A. Dumas. Rumor alleged that I was the coauthor of two serials, The Youngest of the Hamr Dynasty and The Man at the Town Hall.” The rumors had further picked up on the link between entertainment and politics, with some claiming Pavlícˇek had been “sent to Ruzyn [prison] once [his] participation in Hamr was discovered,” and others insisting on the opposite—that he was “on the contrary released from prison for [his] good work on The Man at the Town Hall.” Of this, Pavlícˇek wrote, “None of this was true and, thanks to my nitpicky aesthetic tastes, I felt all of these assumptions as a disgrace. But I think that Ivan Klíma did not find all the talk about his dramatic collaboration with Dietl all that pleasant either.”83 Although he never shared in Dietl’s television work, despite the rumors, Pavlícˇek admitted that Dietl had approached him in the early 1970s offering to help him financially by surreptitiously passing on television writing assignments. After the purge, Pavlícˇek had been blacklisted as a writer and was left with limited ways to bring in an income. Because Pavlícˇek’s name obviously could not appear in the television credits, Dietl offered to pass on the work and payment secretly.84 He further outlined for Pavlícˇek an idea he currently had for a serial about communism’s agricultural collectivization that he described as “the development of our agricultural branch in the last twenty years.” Evidently this would become the television serial The Youngest of the Hamr Dynasty, which brought Dietl much acclaim from both the public and the party. Pavlícˇek “ironically turned down his offer.” Dietl’s vulgarization of aesthetics was therefore made even more offensive, wrote Pavlícˇek, by Dietl’s decidedly materialistic motives. After Pavlícˇek turned him down, Dietl still urged him to reconsider. He used two arguments in trying to persuade him. First, he pointed out that it was unreasonable to “go against the grain:” “[Dietl] spoke about how it’s only possible for us to survive this if we concentrate all of our activity on the purely literary side. That at all costs it’s necessary to make our way back into the official literature.” His second argument, as Pavlícˇek wrote, was more cynical still: “Since events took this course, and it’s not

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in our power to change them, he, Jaroslav, as an affirmed realist, sees the motor of future literary activity in the amount of at least one million crowns a year.” Having throughout his essay insisted on the integrity of his own political idealism during the 1950s when he, too, worked in “the arts,” Pavlícˇek now further contrasted that with Dietl’s materialistic cynicism, suggesting that the size of Dietl’s normalization salary satisfied in Dietl “a strong need to prove himself to be above his environment, including in terms of his standard of living.”85 In writing about Dietl and his participation in the political culture of the 1970s and 1980s, Pavlícˇek in turn described the 1950s as filled with idealism. The 1950s, however, were a period of even more dogmatic cultural censorship, further accompanied by harsh punishment for those who did not cooperate with the “cultural political helmsmen.” Pavlícˇek crafted his accusations against Dietl in terms of aesthetic concerns rather than political collaboration perhaps in part to avoid the complex question of what it meant to be an official writer during the Stalinist 1950s in favor with the regime as Pavlícˇek was then. Indeed, his only overt mention of Stalinist-era politics and his own role in it appeared at the start of the essay, where he explained why he now felt moved to respond to Klíma’s overly benevolent account of Dietl’s life and work. “Many years earlier” (one can assume Pavlícˇek is referring here to the 1950s, when he was still active in official circles), he had failed to speak up at a writers’ congress and regretted it still.86 One can presume that on the occasion of Dietl’s death and Klíma’s problematic description of Dietl’s life, Pavlícˇek now had decided to use his voice—the same one that had failed him in the Stalinist 1950s. The second response to be published in the underground journal was somewhat of a surprise. Signing himself as the anonymous “PHA,” this reader of samizdat literature admitted up front that he belonged not to the world of dissent but in fact to “the official structures.” PHA moreover hinted at an intimate knowledge of Czechoslovak Television’s upper echelons of power. Like Pavlícˇek, he began his critique of Klíma’s essay by explaining his reasons for writing to Obsah. First, he had been shocked by the outpouring of conciliatory feelings among antiregime dissidents toward normalization’s favorite official writer, Dietl. Second, he wished to make it clear that not everyone who participated in the official world was as corrupt as Dietl had been and that he and others like him did not wish to be linked with Dietl and the sort of services he had provided for the regime.87 Third, he had personal anecdotes to offer that would demonstrate Dietl’s high level of political collaboration. Responding to Klíma’s statement that “some considered [Dietl’s] plays courageous,” PHA detailed his outrage at this presumption: “And yet Ivan Klíma claims [in his essay] that he doesn’t want to judge! I would gladly meet one person who would find in Dietl’s work something courageous, something polemical about

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the times. He created illustrated stories, approved by a whole array of party top brass. He used to visit them at the Central Committee and they used to attend his editing sessions and screenings.” His contribution to normalization was, PHA believed, far greater than mere television serials because in fact he “manufactured agreement between the nation and the regime, he presented this agreement in pictures, fascinating pictures, that clung to and resonated in people.” These serials further “functioned as artificial history,” which, in the case of The District Up North, was even “replete with political anniversaries and congresses.”88 PHA summed up thus: “Jaroslav Dietl was a person who did more for the communist regime after 1970 than all of the congresses and plenums of the Central Committee put together. He created a substitute world, the kind that the party needed. . . . He created a false world, a false Czech nation, false stories and history. And, from that moment on, the party representatives could say: But I told you that’s how it looks here!”89 PHA’s statement that he was well acquainted with Czechoslovak Television’s internal discussions seemed to have some truth to it; for example, he referred to the Communist Party’s very real concerns in the early 1970s that not enough of the public was watching the television news. Dietl was reemployed in part to overcome this initial resistance among Czechoslovakia’s citizens. As PHA wrote: “I myself experienced there, ‘within the structures,’ how representatives of television as well as the party congratulated themselves on how many more television consumers were added to their troops during each of the serials. . . . They saw in them natural new consumers of television news.” The way it worked, according to PHA, was that Dietl “passed on to his viewers the schemata that the party representatives of television and culture in the Central Committee dictated to him into his notebook (literally!). Schemata, which they could change around in no time whatsoever (and which indeed they frequently changed), to conform to the model, the forms, particularly suited for ordinary people: how to live, how to behave, how to approach politics.”90 Then, to soothe his conscience, Dietl dipped into opposition circles for his social life, including regular tennis dates with the dissident Ivan Klíma. Railing against the privileged position of both Dietl and the dissidents with whom he had freely associated, PHA questioned their claims of moral and political certitude and asked that in the future each Communist Party member like himself be judged by the dissidents on an individual basis, much as each dissident would like to be judged individually, untainted by the dubious political background of some former Charter 77 signatories. The third and final published response (this one hinting that further debate had gone on outside the pages of Obsah) was authored by the dissident and playwright Karel Pecka, who began his essay with the cheering news that Klíma and Pavlícˇek had now reconciled, agreeing to disagree “as gentlemen.”91 With his two

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friends from the dissident world having patched things up between them, Pecka turned his fire on PHA, the anonymous party apparatchik. To hammer home his point, Pecka even titled his essay “Rectitude Is the Dream of the Crooked.” But if anyone could fire the ethical cannon with a clear conscience, it was probably Pecka. Unlike so many other late communist dissidents, Pecka could claim a far longer oppositional resumé. In the 1950s, while Dietl, Klíma, and Pavlícˇek all had been participating in official structures—as PHA was doing now in the 1980s—Pecka, an early critic of the Communist Party, had been digging up uranium as a political prisoner at the Czechoslovak labor camp in the Jachymov uranium mines. Pecka’s attack on PHA began with the confession that, although he believed that the Communist Party’s oppressive policies had been clear from the start to anyone willing to look closely, he was nevertheless able to conjure up sympathy for his friends who had participated in the 1950s official structures because at least their motives had been decent. Although foolishly misled, even politically blind, these men and women had genuinely wished to improve on their world and had seen communism as the tool with which to do it. In contrast, Pecka continued, normalization-era party members like PHA did not have the excuse of idealism—and, one can assume, of the innocence that came with it. Instead, anyone who today possessed “the red calling card” (as party membership was frequently called to imply its use for any serious career advancement) was no more than a cynical operator, serving a government that was even more so. Deriding the middle-management tendencies of normalization-era Communist Party members such as PHA, Pecka concluded that the problem with PHA was that he did not wish to improve the world but “only to manage it.” And yet, what hangs over Pecka’s essay is his apparent exasperation with his friends (with whom he says he sympathizes or whom he certainly claims to forgive) over their revisionist accounts of their past political actions; they confidently continue to believe that the consequences of those past actions have since been canceled out by their participation in dissent, itself often instigated less by their conscience than by the post-1968 purge. Thus, as a side note, Pecka confesses to the frustration he feels at having to listen to his friends as they repeatedly justify their “accidental” involvement with the party during the 1950s, telling Pecka with a straight face, “It was only a fluke that I was lecturing at the university or working at the Teheran embassy, and that you were mining uranium in Jáchymov.”92 It was not a fluke, Pecka appears to want to shout out loud. Thus, although PHA and Pecka are worlds apart, and Pecka has nothing but contempt for PHA, there is a common thread in their criticisms. For their own separate reasons, both reveal irritation with many dissidents’ political hypocrisy and misplaced claims of moral certitude. PHA is offended by Klíma’s willingness to

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overlook Dietl’s collaboration with the normalization regime when Klíma would probably not have had a moment to spare for the likes of PHA. Pecka, who makes it blatantly clear that he has nothing good to say about PHA, is nevertheless irritated by the ease with which many of his friends—now political dissidents but previously elite party functionaries—have wiped clean their political past and its consequences and conflated their post-1968 political opposition (often arrived at by default) with Pecka’s forty years of hard-earned anticommunist dissent. The 1985 Dietl debate, in other words, demonstrated that the dissident world was as susceptible as the official sphere to shifting ethical categories.

The Dietl Vision Dietl wrote one television serial after another in which he put into words and pictures the ritualization of everyday life and the pleasures of pretense as belief. But what makes Dietl’s work even more interesting is the contradictions that surrounded it. The production of ideology through the television serial was meant to use the signs, artifacts, gestures, and speech readily available in normalized Czechoslovakia and construct with them a representation of how real socialism (as communism was officially renamed throughout the bloc after 1968) was to look, how socialist men and women were to behave. Yet, as Jan Zelenka confessed to the Ideological Commission of the Central Committee, the medium of television a priori was riddled with potential contradictions and paradoxes. Television needed to present a bright future without suggesting a bourgeois future; television needed to begin addressing critical problems but without making it seem that the party had lost control of the situation. The person brought in to assemble these real socialist elements without exposing their contradictions and paradoxes more than was necessary was Dietl. He did so and entertained the nation at the same time. But for all of this, Dietl’s own life, when laid open, suggested the sort of ambiguity that he was hired to mask. Moreover, the masking of his own inconsistencies involved a necessary public self-criticism scripted not by him, the master scriptwriter, but instead by the Communist Party, which he had parodied in the reform-minded 1960s. The contradictions suggested in Dietl’s life and work further ignited discussions about ethics and politics in the pages of the underground press. Members of dissent wrote about Dietl’s television creations when he was alive and then about Dietl when he had died. Dietl became a measure of one’s own collaboration and, in comparison, everyone seemed to come out on top: Dietl, with pen in hand, had, if not orchestrated normalization, then certainly made it seem normal and made privatized

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citizenship palatable. But the everyday life portrayed through Dietl’s television serials was as fragile as the idea that the regime was a monolith, that the opposition was a united front without internal conflicts, and that the official and the unofficial lay unmoving, without interacting, in their opposing trenches. Ultimately, the work, life, and death of Jaroslav Dietl point to the ways in which narratives of dissent, collaboration, and collusion were all closely bound together during the 1970s and 1980s.

7 THE SOCIALIST FAMILY AND ITS CARETAKERS

Television was late communism’s ideological soapbox favored by a regime that had slowly but certainly recognized the reality of post-1968. The so-called transmission belts of the early communist period—most notably the unions organized by occupation, generation, and gender role and meant to communicate political messages from government to people—were now deflated, filled with as much vim and vigor as the Central Committee’s octogenarians. Instead, through the rethought medium of television, Jaroslav Dietl, normalization’s narrator, outlined the state-endorsed quiet life and the principle of “privatized citizenship,” which turned the notion of a functioning public sphere upside down and glorified the private. With the public sphere sullied by the Prague Spring, the private sphere became the favored site for acting out citizenship, and the idea of the public was remade as an extension of the private and domesticated. Indeed, if this was the crux of televised drama but also the engine of “real socialism,” then women, traditionally allied with the private sphere, now constituted its lead characters and the family domicile its stage setting.

The Case of Mrs. Karhanová In the early years of postwar communism, official ideology accused women of letting everyday, practical matters get in the way of their contribution to communism’s visionary future. With women’s identities fused to the private sphere at 159

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a time when the project of communism was linked directly to the public sphere, women’s home-and-hearth industriousness was viewed as disruptive at best, subversive at worst. Otto Ulcˇ, who served as a family judge in the Czech city of Pilsen during the 1950s, noted that “one of the foremost tasks of the post-1948 government [was] to eject the wife from the kitchen onto the assembly line.”1 Sociologist Lynne Haney also writes that, in the case of Hungarian women brought into the workforce in the 1950s, “the state’s ideological agenda for women centered on their role as workers over and above all else.” The party put out the message: “[V]iew work [outside the home] as your moral duty, your calling.”2 The late Czech literary historian Vladimír Macura, who argued brilliantly that communist mass culture helped codify the rules of everyday life, pointed to scenes from a popular 1949 play that spoke directly to the irrelevance of the private home and the enclosed family. In one scene, which takes place in a “worker’s apartment” belonging to the Karhan family (composed of Mr. Karhan, Mrs. Karhanová, and their son, Jarka, a budding engineer), traditional women’s roles are severely frowned upon for interfering with the postwar communist revolution that is then under way. While the young Jarka sits at the kitchen table sketching something, Mrs. Karhanová stands over the stove, irritated that her husband is late for his supper: [Mrs. Karhanová]: There’s no trace of him anywhere. When will he finally realize that I’m drying out his dinner in the oven? What does he even think he’s doing? For thirty years he came home for dinner on time, and now he’s suddenly starting up with this. [Jarka]: That’s some kind of complaint! Dad is at a meeting of the Manufacturing Committee, so get that through your head, dammit! [Mrs. Karhanová]: I’ll give you dammit! [Jarka]: Please, mummy, don’t disturb me. I have some urgent work to do. So for once Dad didn’t come home to dinner on time. So what! That’ll be happening more often from now on, so you’ll have to get used to it. The pressing nature of Jarka’s work is later recognized by his father when he finally returns home. His wife remains unable to grasp the irrelevance of domesticity and the private domain and, by extension, of her diminished place in the new world order: [Jarka (He runs in with a piece of paper)]: Dad, take a look at this for me! I’ve been drowning in this for how many days now, and it still just doesn’t seem right. (He hands over his design sketch.)

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[Mr. Karhan (with great interest)]: Ah, that’s an automatic switch for the breakers on a cogwheel, isn’t it? [Jarka (pointing to it with a pencil)]: This rod will probably be here . . . and that lever goes from here to the switch. . .up, down. . . . [Mrs. Karhanová]: Let Dad eat at least! [Mr. Karhan]: Right, but how will it sit here on the switch? [Jarka]: Well, that’s just the thing. . . . [Mrs. Karhanová]: It’ll get cold, Dad! [Mr. Karhan]: Will you leave it alone already—so I’ll eat it cold— so what?3 But by the 1970s, with the regime’s sights now on the private sphere rather than the public, Mrs. Karhanová would have been applauded for acting in this way. Indeed, by the 1970s, she would have been the central character of the play. Joshua Feinstein, in writing on everyday life and film in the GDR, has observed a marked increase during the 1970s and 1980s in the number of films produced in East Germany about women, starring women. The reason for this, he rightly concludes, was that as real socialism shone its light on the everyday, the light was also cast upon women and their spheres of influence.4 The men, representative of the public sphere, consequently were moved out of the spotlight and into the background—irritants, at best, just as Mrs. Karhanová had been in the 1950s.

The Tendentious Private Sphere The 1950s play had condemned Mrs. Karhanová’s absence from, and indeed ignorance of, the public sphere. But it also pitied and dismissed her because the private sphere under Stalinism was seen as dispensable, irrelevant. In the aftermath of 1968, however, the latent potential of the private sphere to wreak havoc but also to mend wounds was fully recognized. In a bizarre yet illustrative tirade at a meeting of the Ideological Commission, Ladislav Sˇtoll—cultural leader, Charles University professor, and mediocre literary critic—warned against the combustibility of family life by divulging his own cringe-inducing, firsthand experiences: [W]e have to talk about the contradictory upbringing within the family and to warn parents about the dangers of such a conflicting education at home. It can end very tragically. Comrades, I know two families—I think I already mentioned it once here before—two families in which the children were brought up in this way and that ended with suicide. The family of a watchmaker and goldsmith had two children, twins, young

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and very talented boys, who decided—and I knew the father very well, for he was my relative and, oh my word, he cursed at the representatives of our society’s leadership, such as [First Secretary] Gottwald and [Prime Minister] Zápotocký in such a horrible manner . . . so horribly that I warned him, I even wrote him a letter—it finally ended in such a way that both boys decided to jump under a train together. Of course, one of them at the last minute hesitated and backed off, but he eventually committed suicide anyway, and the daughter, she tried to poison herself. The conflict was most definitely between family and society. Such can only end in tragedy. I know the case of a doctor’s family, where the son, a young man, also ended up committing suicide. . . . I mean only to warn of this.5 Sˇtoll ended his apocalyptic tale with the suggestion that the hidden dangers associated with this disequilibrium between the private and the public be explained to ordinary citizens: “I don’t know if, for example, it wouldn’t be possible to [put out the warning] via a television serial . . . maybe by Dietl or somebody,” he mused. But the point remained, even when melodramatically presented by Sˇtoll: the private and public could not exist as separate spheres without incendiary results. And since the public, political realm had been compromised during the Prague Spring, the private had to become the site for political healing and for making good on the promise of late communism. Mrs. Karhanová’s kitchen, no longer viewed as the place of insidious frivolity, would be expanded so that it might encompass the socialist family writ large.

Mrs. Karhanová’s New Task The politicization of private life, evident in the case of Mrs. Karhanová, is associated with Stalinism. But in the aftermath of the ideologically rigorous early communism of the 1950s, it is often argued that the state abandoned the private sphere. Padraic Kenney, in his widely read article on gender and resistance in Poland, repositions the communist public sphere as the political realm and the private sphere as the social and explains that “while revolutionary communist regimes generally seek to intervene in all aspects of life and to remake the social . . . , postrevolutionary regimes withdraw from this activism, leaving the private and social sphere alone—and in women’s hands.” The result is a “contract,” wherein “society is to refrain from contesting the political realm, and, in return, the state promises to provide fully for society’s needs.”6 But in fact the normalization

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regime did not leave the private sphere alone; and in addition, it sought to domesticate the public realm. Ironically, what made this possible in part was the success of the 1950s campaigns to get women out of the kitchen. By the 1970s, the private sphere was indeed still identified with women and left “in women’s hands,” but the public sphere of work life outside the home was positively buzzing with women. Moreover, the inefficiency of the centrally planned economy meant that Czechoslovakia was always introducing more workers into the workforce, hoping to make up for the system’s failures.7 That meant women first and, when the market still remained hungry for workers, guest workers, particularly from Vietnam. In 1968, already 46.1 percent of the workplace was occupied by women, and by 1989 that number was up to 48.4 percent, meaning that 94 percent of all women in Czechoslovakia worked outside the home.8 In terms of everyday life it meant that “by the 1970s virtually all Czechoslovak women in their mid-twenties were married with a child and working full time.”9 In other words, as is well documented, women were forced to take on the double burden of work both inside and outside the home. Their traditional work obligations within the home, never challenged ideologically by the communist state, were further exacerbated by commonplace consumer shortages. Czech scholar Hana Havelková has suggested that because of this double burden, women during communism were able to move between the public and private spheres, between work and home, between politics and domestics, in a way that was impossible for men to do.10 Havelková, in rereading this double burden as something positive, as the ability to maneuver skillfully between the public and private spheres, between political and social realms, signals an important contradiction: exhausting work hours were indicative of women’s traditional powerlessness, but they also indicated women’s new centrality in late communism. Petra Hanáková in addition points out that while women were exhausted and stressed, their increased workload “created a sense of omnipotence.”11 Dagmar Herzog makes a similar case for East German women when she argues that their infamous double burden makes little sense within a Western feminist narrative because that narrative does not take into account the ways in which these same women consequently possessed a unique negotiating power vis-à-vis men and the state.12 Jacqui True also contends that while the original promise had been for emancipation via collective labor—that is what had been promised Mrs. Karhanová, regardless of how apathetic she might have been to it—in late communism the regime “increased the prestige of private consumerism and [thereby] the power of women within the family-household given its association with consumption and personal happiness.”13 The power of women grew because of their association with the private and, as True further observes, “this valorization of

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‘the private,’ raised the symbolic status of feminine domesticity.”14 The blurring of public and private, already evident in the postinvasion purge and vetting processes, ensured that women, as both producers and consumers, held the most notable role—even as they continued to be burdened by the weight of traditional gender expectations. Most important, by having the power to bring feminine domesticity to both the workplace and the home hearth, by traveling between the two spheres in such a way as to erase the walls between them, women were charged with getting the derailed communist project back on track after 1968. Too exhausted to participate in politics, they were ideal for supervising the antipolitics of normalization. A 1984 article in the newspaper Práca (Work) outlined what was expected of women: We expect a great deal from women—we want them to be good mothers as well as fully equal contributors in the production process. We want them to stand laughing on the assembly line as well as behind a shop counter. In the service sector, [we] want them to nurse the ill with a pleasant maternal smile and in day-care centers and nurseries to look after the children of other mothers. We want them to exude love for children and young people when they stand on the lecturer’s platform in schools and to carry out many other functions in the same way. . . . It is up to our women employees to exercise their natural qualities of warmth and kindness in their environment, in the workplace, [and] to help channel and improve interhuman relations.15 The decidedly gendered task of improving “interhuman,” social relations after the Prague Spring became the subject of one of Jaroslav Dietl’s best-known television serials.

The Woman behind the Counter In the opening episode of Dietl’s 1977 serial The Woman behind the Counter, the heroine, Anna Holubová, arrives at her new job in a Prague supermarket, the shop’s floors gleaming and its shelves fully stocked.16 As she wanders through the store observing, as yet unknown to her future colleagues, she smiles blissfully. Anna is not new to the profession, however; she has abandoned the prestigious position of manager at another modern supermarket in Prague, moved to this end of the city, and is ready to take on a mere counter job just so that she can break with her past. Her past includes a philandering husband and a bad marriage, and her escape translates into a necessary demotion from manager to counter girl.

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Each of the twelve episodes of The Woman behind the Counter represent a month of Anna’s first year as a divorcée. When asked by her new boss where in the store she would like to work, Anna confesses that her favorite workstation is the delicatessen counter (lahu˚dky)—an area of the supermarket associated with luxury and celebration. The manager is pleased, for, as he says, that is also where the prettiest salesgirls should be. The statement, alas, is a little jarring because Jirˇina Sˇvorcová, the actress who played Anna, was no great beauty. Thus, Anna, the lead character, is a little overweight, with the overdyed raven-black hair then thought to add youth to age and a faint mustache on her upper lip. But it is perhaps these physical characteristics that transform her into every woman, aging gracelessly under the weight of the socialist-induced double burden of work both inside and outside the home. She is certainly no celluloid fantasy, but Anna Holubová is the superwoman of the late communist era because she is able to fit more hours and minutes into the day than seems humanly possible. She is a single mother of a needy seven-year-old son and a difficult teenage daughter; she begins her job behind the delicatessen counter at 5:30 a.m. to be ready for the 6:00 a.m. store opening; she also becomes the “mother” to the entire staff at the supermarket, solving problems where need be, helping out when necessary, and creating order and calm where originally there was none. Anna is tireless despite the burden of her own private problems, and thus she is the ideal woman for normalization. She is a post-1968 socialist heroine. In The Woman behind the Counter, the 1970s Anna, unlike the 1950s Mrs. Karhanová, is not seen as a traitor to the communist cause but as an exemplary socialist citizen. She is not condemned for embracing her traditional gender role but rewarded for it. Her reward is openly on display for all citizen viewers to see: the setting of the television serial is a showcase supermarket in which everything a person might desire in socialist Czechoslovakia exists and is perpetually available. To improve interhuman relations, both at work and at home, is Anna Holubová’s unarticulated but most vital role in the serial. It is amid the symbolic value of the well-stocked delicatessen counter that Anna, the recent divorcée, reemerges like a phoenix from the ashes. Dietl’s serial centers around her recovery from the ravages of a damaging marriage. The healing process necessary to overcome the emotional scars left behind offers echoes of normalization’s similar challenge of healing the wounds opened up by the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion. Although her life at home is a melodrama, Anna quickly makes herself at home behind the counter as well and becomes an integral part of the family that is the “supermarket collective.” During her first day on the job, Anna begins to put everything in order. The deputy manager’s wife rules over the store like a queen bee although she is not even an employee there; it is Anna who gives

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her the what’s what and so smoothes the way for the otherwise affable head manager to send her on her way. In the second episode, Anna tries to help the stuttering salesgirl, Jirˇina, by taking her to a speech specialist. When he explains there is nothing he can do, Anna does not give up but convinces the manager to put Jirˇina in charge of the vegetable department, which so elevates her selfconfidence that a new beauty shines through, despite her speech impediment. In episode 4, when the salesgirl from the meats department is found by her mother in the cellar with the stock boy, it is Anna who tries to help negotiate between them. This heroic tempo seldom slows throughout the twelve episodes of the serial. In the process, Anna is transformed into a curative symbol, a necessary maternal figure to her colleagues, who affectionately call her by the diminutives of Andulka and Anicˇka. Anna’s efficacy as a social glue translated well from screen to living room. One man wrote in to state television headquarters, “The Czech television nation is going crazy; it is living its life through The Woman behind the Counter, which is systematically detracting it [the Czech television nation] from daily work, and which drags fathers home from the pubs to their families.” A couple near Prague wrote in: “It isn’t just sheer entertainment, but it’s a piece of people’s lives today . . . . The serial showed the strengths of a good [workers’] collective.” A collective of women bakers wrote to say, “We are not women behind the counter but women from the ovens, yet Annie and everyone around her belongs to us.”17 One women’s textile collective apparently threatened to go on strike if the plot of Anna’s life did not turn out as they hoped.18 The intensity of viewers’ emotions toward Anna was influenced by the broadcast schedule. After some delays, the first episode was finally aired on December 10, 1977 at 8:00 p.m. The following three episodes were broadcast immediately afterward on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights, also at 8:00 p.m. The fifth episode could be seen on December 22, and the remaining seven episodes were broadcast from December 24 through December 30.19 In her memoir, Jirˇina Sˇvorcová describes how irate she was over this unusual scheduling. She argued with Jan Zelenka because, in her view, the holiday season was when “women have their hands full of work” and so “by nighttime they’ll be so exhausted that they’ll have neither a thought nor a moment left over for television.”20 But despite her serious reservations, such a broadcasting plan also had the advantage that its intensity inspired allegiance and drove conversation over the Christmas holidays.21 Considering Anna’s goal to fix interhuman relations and to carry mothering over from home to work and back again, the serial’s unusual but intensive broadcast schedule was fitting. As much as Anna is intent on rediscovering her womanhood, she is bound by family, her own private family as well as the larger socialist family of her

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Production shot from The Woman behind the Counter. Anna stands behind the counter, surrounded by stocked shelves, contemplating what to do about her difficult colleague. (Czech Television Archives; photographed by Milosˇ Schmiedberger)

supermarket collective. In late communism, women were redefined almost entirely in terms of family. By the 1970s, International Women’s Day on March 8, rigorously celebrated by the party, would have been better described as International Family Day. Even as women received bouquets of flowers like symbolic war medals,22 speeches further bolstered the association of women as healers of the socialist family, both private and public. In 1984, for example, General Secretary Husák praised the “maternal mission of women” and women’s active roles in “the noble family.”23 This is not to say that family had ever fallen off the communist radar. As the family court judge Otto Ulcˇ observed, “[F]or Prague, as for Moscow for that matter, the family—a socialist, progressive one—remained the only natural

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unit, the very center of a child’s upbringing.”24 But the family—in its multiple manifestations—was now seen as the only viable socialist unit.25 Marie Jarosˇová, chairwoman of the official party organ, the Czechoslovak Association of Women, entirely ceased to speak of women’s issues and instead adopted the language of family, which women were charged with repairing. At a 1974 rally, Jarosˇová declared: “It would be wrong . . . for us to wait with our hands in our laps until society sorts out all of our problems. It is up to us to put our hand to the wheel and actively help with all our strength to create a more beautiful and happier life for us and our children.”26 Describing this turn toward family, Hana Havelková writes, “[P]ublic discussions on the social situation of women from the late 1960s were virtually forgotten; social studies focused mainly on the family as a whole.”27 This ideological emphasis on the family unit, understood both as the private family and as the larger socialist family, further intersected with a practical concern that also worked to bolster the centrality of family. Materials prepared for the Presidium in early 1971 already hint at the problem and demonstrate why the party needed to bring family to the forefront of propaganda: “The expression of healthy opinions about marriage and parenthood so far receives insufficient support in political education, in school education, in the propaganda of the mass media, and even in artistic works. In the mass media and in artistic projects there has so far been much focus on the conflictive situations present in life and family as such, but the role of children in the life of a young couple has remained on the sidelines.”28 Like its capitalist neighbors, Czechoslovakia was experiencing a rapidly declining birthrate. The 1971 report for the Presidium points to how the consequent pronatalist policies were simultaneously aligned with the reinforcement of traditional images of family and the place of women within them: “It will be necessary to organize the systematic teaching of women and mothers, particularly young ones, [for them to learn] to appreciate the work of women and the successful upbringing of children. . . . A task such as this should be led by the Czechoslovak Association of Women.”29 In conjunction with stepped-up motherhood propaganda and family-related cash incentives, stricter regulations on abortion were also legislated in the early 1970s. The exception to these policies was the Roma (Gypsy) family. As Veˇra Sokolová has shown, while white Czech and Slovak women were being barred from abortion for the sake of the nation, understood as the extended socialist family, with the same justification, Romani women were being subjected to sterilization, often without their knowledge following a birth.30 The emphasis on government pronatalist policies in the Eastern Bloc during the 1970s and 1980s has been written about elsewhere at great length, but what is ignored is that pronatalism inevitably intersected with and bolstered post1968 ideological conclusions about the private sphere. Not only did the nation

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need to grow statistically, and that made state-sponsored natalist incentives and disincentives imperative, but the consequent policies again served to highlight women, the home, and family in a way that was decidedly unique to late communism. Illustrative of this shift is an official Parenthood Education Campaign poster from the 1970s that showed a beautiful young woman with a baby in her arms. The caption under it read “A Happy Family. The Backbone of the State” (Sˇtastná rodina. Základ státu).31 What is missing in this late communist happy family is any reference, visual or textual, to a man or to male participation. It was a pronatalist poster that implied a socialist-type immaculate conception. It was the woman and her child who were now the backbone of the state. The poster hinted that men’s roles had become increasingly ambivalent and largely undefined. Seen as potentially political beings, rather than tied to the private sphere like women, men were now difficult to place within the vernacular of normalization.

The Engineers’ Odyssey Dietl did, however, try to do so. In 1979, three years after The Woman behind the Counter, he told the story of three young design engineers with ambitions to invent a new textile power loom.32 The Engineers’ Odyssey (Inzˇenýrská Odysea) might be understood as a socialist retelling of The Three Musketeers, but an article in the Cˇ asopis Cˇeskoslovenské Televize (Czechoslovak Television Magazine) went still further and likened it to the Greek fable referenced in the serial’s title, explaining that “Odysseus had to pass through an infinite number of challenges and yet he did not succumb to his adverse fate, brought on by the enmity of the gods. Similarly, our heroes, the young engineers, face problems that belong to this world but consume their strength and creative talents.”33 But despite the comparisons to Greek mythology and the allusions to male heroics in seventeenth-century France, The Engineers’ Odyssey was a recognizably communist tale, employing the canonic language, visual and narrative, of the party. The three engineers are Zbyneˇk, the design genius, who is quiet, introverted, obsessive; Vasˇek, frenetic, fiery, and highly ambitious, the son of a long line of engineers; and Jano, the elegant and clever Slovak. While still studying to be design engineers, they pledge to find work together at the same enterprise and there build a great machine. Upon graduating, all three sign up at the Hlubocˇany Machine Works, a producer of textile machines. But unable to withstand the resistance to change that he encounters there, Vasˇek resigns. He wants to find a place where there is “movement”: “I want to be something!” he laments to his irritated girlfriend.34 Jano, the Slovak, also leaves; fluent in English and Russian, he recognizes that his talents lie elsewhere, and he applies for a much-sought-after

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job with an export enterprise in Prague that sells Czechoslovakia’s machines abroad.35 Only Zbyneˇk, the technical genius, remains in Hlubocˇany, still dreaming of the chance to design a brand-new power loom. It is as they move along their separate paths that the three musketeers make their way around the world, meeting up again not at home but abroad. But Czechoslovakia’s world status as a technological innovator is clearly slipping; the East Germans officially complain to the East Bloc’s Comintern Trade Organization that the machines they bought from the new company where Vasˇek now works are faulty. Similarly, back at the Hlubocˇany Machine Works, the design engineers are encouraged to improve on the old MZ400 loom rather than invent something new. Jano is prospering in the export business, but one of his colleagues is unable to resist the temptations encountered abroad; he is fired after accepting a Jordanian businessman’s bribes. When Zbyneˇk, Jano, and Vasˇek finally reunite, it is not in Prague but at the Milan Trade Fair. In fashionable Milan, they evidently feel the sting of being second-class socialist citizens of the late twentieth century. There Vasˇek confides to his old friends, “Just last night I was saying to myself after negotiations with a self-important Englishman that one day I’ll be here with such a machine that those jerks will get down on their knees in front of it and in answer to their pleas, I’ll say: ‘Noooo, Noooo, for our machines you’ll have to wait a looong, looong time.’”36 (This last sentence Vasˇek pronounces in an English-accented Czech, mimicking the way his would-be capitalist buyers would speak.) Vasˇek’s wish to be taken seriously by his cohorts in the West leads him to return to the Hlubocˇany Machine Works as its new director, and by so doing, reunite the boys (the musketeers) and also reignite their earlier ambitions. Vasˇek explains to his father, “What I want is for us to show the world!”37 When Vasˇek’s deputy insists that the Soviets will always welcome Czechoslovak machines, Vasˇek explains that these days Moscow is filled with Western products, and Western companies are fighting one another for that enormous market: “Of course we’ll get priority, but only up to a point,” he warns.38 But despite this, The Engineers’ Odyssey makes clear to viewers that Czechoslovakia and its representatives are fully equipped to tango with the best of them in the multilingual global market; dialogues are strewn with Anglo-Czechisms (such as “fine-ový ” and “unfair-ový ”) that, even if clumsy, are intended to signal worldliness and linguistic finesse. Viewers became a part of this cosmopolitanism as they listened in on Czech businessmen conducting meetings in any number of languages—interactions that were then subtitled in Czech at the bottom of the television screen. But although the story revolved around privileged, high-status employees of the state, The Engineers’ Odyssey was a traditional communist fable, replete with male heroes employed in the high-end industrial sector of engineering and

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Production shot from The Engineers’ Odyssey. Engineer Zbyneˇk during a tense meeting with a foreign capitalist. (Czech Television Archives; photographed by Prˇiba Mrázová)

working with machines that demanded problem solving, who in their downtime dream of eroticized machinery. It was also a patriotic recounting of late communism that bolstered both national and socialist pride. For here, after all, were Czech and Slovak engineers, factory directors, and export salesmen competing on a First World level, speaking multiple languages, and innovating technology that, for the finale, even the Japanese saw fit to steal. But while Dietl orchestrated a happy ending, the larger story the television serial tells is in fact one of anxiety. The site of traditional communist showmanship—the industrial, machinepumping, men-centered workplace—is losing its foothold. Socialist enterprises have ceased to innovate, and neither West nor East—including Moscow—any

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longer bows and scrapes for Czech engineering ingenuity. The communist world has little to offer, and the capitalist world is passing it by. These are indeed the challenges hinted at in the serial title’s reference to Odysseus and his travails. The anxieties that the serial brings to the surface must have been particularly evident to citizen viewers with some knowledge of foreign languages: the multilingual business transactions that are subtitled in Czech on the television screen are carried out in such error-ridden, thick-accented German, French, and English that what is inadvertently underscored is the regime-imposed inaccessibility of foreign language training and travel outside the Iron Curtain.39 Late communist anxieties were routinely cataloged in gendered narratives. Elena Prokhorova, in examining Brezhnev-era television miniseries, claims that with the failure of reforms initiated during the Soviet Thaw period, the 1970s were marked by a “crisis of national identity”: “Unlike the more traditional image of femininity, Soviet masculinity as cultural construct was built primarily on the foundation of the political utopia, and once the latter started showing signs of decay, masculinity as the icon of Soviet modernity underwent a crisis. . . . [M]en found themselves lost and displaced once the constraints of the state loosened and self-realization in the public sphere lost its heroic overtones.”40 Hungary during this same period was also concerned over a newly matriarchal Hungary. Katherine Verdery notes the prevalent discourse on “the need for Hungarian men to become real men again instead of the wimps that socialism had made them.”41 In China’s post-Mao era, too, public concern over masculinity dominated both intellectual and popular discourse, with an emphasis on the “search for men,” with men “understood as ‘tough,’ ‘rough,’ ‘masculine,’ ‘manly.’ ”42 These shared anxieties about the erasure of masculinity in late communism were of course all linked to doubts about the system itself. Sexual dysfunctionalism was analogous to political dysfunctionalism. But just as important, these anxieties were about where communist citizenship was now located and what that meant to the future of the communist project. Libora Oates-Indruchová explains that “state socialism defined men so strongly as workers and soldiers” that there was no place for them to define their masculinity outside “the official discourse.”43 But communist citizenship had always been associated with masculinity, and thus it was a question of losing the ability to define not only one’s masculinity but also one’s citizenship. The official remembrance of the Prague Spring had employed highly gendered language to rewrite 1968 as a moment of feminized mass hysteria. Heroic struggle was reserved for the victorious normalizers, while the reform communists were branded as feminine. The reform communists thus were remembered as men who had given way to unmanly behavior. It was women instead, as keepers of the private sphere where social relations could again be restored after 1968, who had

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become strong. Andrea Rinke, writing about Frauenfilme in the GDR, notes that these screen heroines of the later communist period were “portrayed as emotionally stronger and morally superior or as having a more advanced social consciousness than their men—by whom they were generally let down.”44

Finding Refuge in the Family Famously, it was during late communism that citizens sought refuge within the family. The Roma, in fact, could be said to have practiced this form of resistance most vigorously against the aggressive and culturally insensitive intrusions of state policy. But it was also the technique of the majority. As Hana Havelková explains, “It was the family, or rather the household, where many people put to use their inventive potential and their desire to do things their own way, without having to observe some official regulations.”45 Like the regime’s policies aimed at improving birthrates, ordinary citizens’ emphasis on home and family life as a form of passive resistance thereby reinforced traditional roles and state priorities rather than provided alternatives. In the vibrant do-it-yourself culture that emerged in answer to the poorly performing state economy, “men practiced male trades and women undertook female ones.”46 For Havelková, this means that “[t]he shift in people’s interest from the public to the private sphere connected with still higher value being placed on the family and this reinforced the role of woman in it.”47 But what is significant is that this emphasis by ordinary citizens upon the family and its caretakers was matched by both the dissident world and the state.48 Eva Kantu˚rková, a prominent writer and political dissident, directly advised women to revert to the clichéd tropes of femininity as a way to resist the political regime. Alena Heitlinger details the strategy: “Instead of seeking emancipation through paid work, Kantu˚rková urged women to rediscover their ‘authentic’ traditional feminine qualities of compassion, love, and tolerance.”49 Through her emphasis on traditional feminine qualities as emancipatory aspects of a woman’s life, Kantu˚rková comes close to sanctioning the regime’s own program that asked women to mend the interhuman relations that had gone awry. The official, state-endorsed shift toward family and the unofficial, private shift toward home life played off each other, at times making it difficult to ascertain where official ideology ended and private protest began. Despite many citizens’ obvious disdain for official rhetoric and their sincere efforts to circumvent the regime’s ideology, their suspicion of public life and their emphasis on private life were mirrored by the normalization leadership’s own. The private domain thus became politicized in a manner that it had not been in the first half of postwar

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communism, thereby clearly marking post-1968 as a new era in postwar communism with new rules and rearranged stakes. What is vital to understand is that this turn toward the domestic, played out in different configurations at home and at work, was not merely a return to private life but also an expression of the quiet life endorsed by the state as a cornerstone of party policy and normalization’s political culture. Traditional roles became a mode of resistance against the state, but they were simultaneously reinforced and encouraged by the state. The irony is that women attained their new centrality by virtue of their seeming powerlessness, of their femininity put to the service of the family and the familial state. As Kantu˚rková’s strategy suggests, to be a women who projected herself outside feminine clichés undercut her seeming potential in late communism—in the eyes of the state, the dissidents, and ordinary citizens. This might in part explain the strident distaste with which feminism (or what was understood as feminism) was viewed by all. Mirek Vodrázˇka, a former dissident and now feminist and activist, has described the mockery—indeed, the belligerence—with which women’s rights were viewed by most dissidents. The philosopher Ladislav Hejdánek, a student of Jan Patocˇka, called feminism “an ideology that doesn’t look after the kids.”50 Havel himself was a walking showcase of antifeminist banalities, seeing feminism as a bastion “for bored housewives and dissatisfied mistresses.”51 Vodrázˇka recalls an ironic private exchange between “two prominent female dissidents” in the late 1970s, at the height of government repression, about whether they should create a Charter for women. Their sarcastic quips, he writes, were motivated by their shared situation: both had husbands who, on the one hand, fought for human rights and, on the other, represented repressive power at home.52 The female dissidents’ obligatory silence, one could argue, both mirrored and reinforced their state-sanctioned role as the natural restorers of interhuman relations. The case of the actress, Jirˇina Sˇvorcová, who played Anna in The Women behind the Counter seems to confirm this contradiction. It was she who led the televised Anti-Charter Rally at Prague’s National Theater. An unabashed Stalinist, she had never veered from the orthodox party line, and when that party line itself changed in the 1960s, she did not change with it but remained loyal to the old guard and its vision. In 1968, Sˇvorcová openly welcomed the Soviet-led invasion, and a decade later, she again did not hesitate to stand up in front of the cameras and lead the charge against the Charter 77 dissidents at the Anti-Charter Rally. But whereas normalization’s male leadership was heralded in the official media for its rational presence of mind when faced with the hysterics of 1968, Sˇvorcová, whose political instincts seemed to duplicate theirs, was embraced far more gingerly.

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The film and television director Otakar Vávra, who had cast Sˇvorcová in the role of Bozˇena Neˇmcová, Czechoslovakia’s nineteenth-century literary heroine, outlined his disappointment with her performance in his memoir: she was able to play “emancipated women,” he wrote, but unable to tap into the “deeper feelings and [into] a woman’s allure.”53 To be called an emancipated woman seldom bodes well, and what is certain is that Sˇvorcová barely benefited from her political loyalties. She was never flooded with theater, film, or television roles. Only in 1977, after having stepped out in front of television cameras to address citizen viewers about the nefarious goings-on of Charter 77 was she rewarded with her starring role, at the end of that same year, in Dietl’s television serial. When Dietl was told to cast her, his frustration centered not only on the actress’s notorious political profile but also on her appearance and age. She was not, as previously noted, particularly attractive, and she was ten years older than Dietl’s thirtynine-year-old fictional creation.54

Power of the Powerless Conventionally, the power of women in late communism is seen as derived from their perceived relationship with consumer goods as well as other aspects of the private, social, nonpolitical sphere. That is, their knowledge about the state of things at home could be fired off as a weapon against the regime. If shortages existed, for example, then women were best situated to demand that the state “fulfill its promises.”55 As Padraic Kenney argues for the case of late communist Poland, this intimacy with all matters consumerist was made more potent still by women’s symbolic relevance as mothers and, even more so, as the “mother-worker.”56 In the case of normalized Czechoslovakia, women were also made powerful by their association with the private sphere, but in a somewhat different way. In the 1950s, women had been sent out of the kitchen and into the workplace; in the 1970s and 1980s, women were deployed to bring the public sphere into the fold of the private, where both the regime and ordinary people now sought to locate late communist citizenship. But perhaps after all it was not so different in Poland and elsewhere in the bloc. Kenney suggests that with martial law in 1980s Poland (just as with the Moscowled invasion of Czechoslovakia and its aftermath in the 1970s and 1980s), “the media featured stories of ordinary people who desired social peace above all as a way of taking care of their families.”57 In other words, the quiet life entered the official vocabulary here, too, during the last decade of communism. Taking the example of the opening of a women’s hospital meant to appease recent political

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tensions, Kenney points to the state’s attempt to make peace by placing women front and center in the communist and national future. The hospital’s cornerstone ceremony, which thousands attended in the city of Łódz´, was punctuated with the proclamation “People’s Poland is the mother of the whole nation.” Kenney explains, “One could not imagine a neater expression of the regime’s attempt to feminize itself after the declaration of martial law.”58 It too had cast its lot with women. The opposition to Western-style feminism was in part due to the perception that women—that is, women in Eastern Europe—were powerful and did not need an ideology thought to be based on the idea of their powerlessness. Moreover, the reinforcement of traditional gender roles by citizens and the state (both obsessed with the curative powers of family, private as well as national in scope) meant that women derived—or believed themselves to be deriving—a unique sense of power. This power was based on their newfound centrality to the latecommunist project (regardless of whether they agreed with that project or not). To (mis)use Havel’s phrase, they embodied the “power of the powerless.” In the words of Petra Hanáková, “a ‘normal’ Czech woman would boast that she manages to be a specialist at work, cooks two big hot meals a day, raises up two kids, is able to find them Western clothes on the black market, to sew for herself a designer-like dress from a Russian version of [a] Western magazine and get up at 4 a.m. every Thursday to stand in line in front of the bookstore to get a new quality book. The logic ‘I’m a woman. I can manage everything’ was prevalent.”59 It was superwoman in the service not only of her family but, inadvertently, also of the larger socialist family. Dietl’s Anna, like so many other women, had been seduced into believing that this was her identity—her exhausting indispensability to her family, large and small. During normalization, then, women were expected by the state to act as the counterweight to political dissent and social chaos: understood as managers of families and households, they were encouraged to produce calm where once there had been restlessness, order where once there had been disturbance, good human relations where once there had been rifts. Women’s status during normalization was derived not from communist ideology about gender equality— an ideology of equality that had never been acted upon seriously—but from the changing needs of the state that now placed women front and center, transforming them into the public caretakers of the larger socialist family, ensuring the quiet life and promoting privatized citizenship wherever they went.

8 SELF-REALIZATION AND THE SOCIALIST WAY OF LIFE

Jaroslav Dietl’s television serial The Engineers’ Odyssey is a fairy-tale fantasy.1 The world described is a rarefied one of international business, top socialist enterprise management, and high-level party functionaries. Here, the East-West borders are fluid, the airport is accessible, and passports are in hand. These engineers do not have to heed reality; when Zbyneˇk parks his car, he does not—like ordinary citizens during normalization—have to take his windshield wipers with him so they will not be stolen because spare parts are impossible to purchase. He is impervious to the everyday inconveniences behind the Iron Curtain. This is most evident in the fact that the three engineers have the kind of unfettered access to the West reserved for the party-loyal elite. And yet, despite their privileged entry into a world denied to others, the experience does not seem to sit well with them. In The Engineers’ Odyssey, the West comes off as ominous, even unseemly. Lucie, the love interest of the Slovak import-export manager Jano, has previously been married to another high-level Czechoslovak state employee. But she returns home alone after a three-year official stint in Canada; her husband, tired of making money for the socialist state’s coffers, has finally defected. There are intimations (she does not want to talk about the traumatic experience abroad) that he would not let her return to Czechoslovakia and that she finally “got away with just her handbag and documents.”2 In contrast to Lucie’s ex-husband, the three socialist engineers represent an alternative, a flattering picture of economic success turbocharged by a different set of priorities than those practiced in capitalism. Jano is content to sell Czechoslovakia’s machines and see little of the profit himself; Zbyneˇk tells the 177

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Japanese, who are excited by his invention, that it is simply not his to sell; Vasˇek, who becomes an ambitious factory director, is not motivated by salary and bonuses but by his overwhelming desire to show “them.” The notion that there exists a qualitative difference between “us” and “them”—a difference that resonates in each international trade fair encounter in the television serial—is a theme linking the thirteen episodes. It is also a theme that helped construct the substantive meaning of late communism. Thus, although the three engineers belong to the elite, they ultimately represent the majority. They carve out what, in the lingo of the regime, will be referred to as “self-realization”: the socialist-only chance to define oneself in ways that are radically different and ultimately more satisfying than those offered by capitalism. The framework for self-realization became the “socialist way of life,” which itself was intimately connected to the notion of family as outlined in the previous chapter. And, as in the case of the engineers, these central offerings of late communism were incommunicable without the presence of the West as an explanatory backdrop.

Traveling West In 1965, Czechoslovak citizens were legally permitted to apply for and receive a passport for travel outside the Soviet Bloc for purposes other than specially approved work assignments or conferences. While some travel restrictions continued and hard currency for travel remained difficult to come by, the chance to travel was largely available, and those who could grasped the opportunity. Thus, for the first time since 1948, Czechs and Slovaks were offered the chance to see the West for themselves. Contrary to what one might expect, it was not Alexander Dubcˇek’s Prague Spring government but the conservative pre-1968 government of Antonín Novotný that permitted these unprecedented levels of travel to the previously unseen and only imagined countries outside the Eastern Bloc. Many of his fellow party apparatchiks at the time warned of the potential political fallout from this state-endorsed traveling fever to the West. At a 1965 meeting of the Central Committee’s Ideological Commission, one member worried that “[a]s the numbers show, visits by our citizens to capitalist states are greatly expanding, and not only visits to relatives and friends but straightforward tourist trips whether in a group tour or as an individual traveler. . . . [A]s a result of the fact that our citizens spend a relatively short time in capitalist countries (2–3 weeks), it might well lead to distorted impressions about life in these states.”3 This concern extended to secondhand interactions as well, the worry being that “since people see the

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best Western films, the best literature, they have an image of Western culture that is a little askew.”4 Askew or not, these vacationing hordes of socialist citizens were fast gaining firsthand knowledge of capitalism, information that not only was spread in private conversation but was used strategically by some within the expanding public dialogue against the government itself. In 1967, for example, one angry reader of the newspaper Lidová demokracie who signed himself Frantisˇek Novák countered an economist’s typically bogus explanations of the faltering national economy by leaning on his recent experiences abroad: “Today every fox terrier can see that our standard of living is decreasing rapidly.” He added that, having visited the West, he also knew “how everything is moving forward there in great strides.” The communist economist, apparently untrained for this sort of combat, responded by devoting an entire newspaper article to Mr. Novák and his letter of complaint. The economist’s counterattack was focused almost exclusively on Mr. Novák, who, he said, claimed to be a construction worker even though his letter was entirely without grammar mistakes. This proved, argued the economist, that Mr. Novák was undoubtedly a member of the intelligentsia out to provoke him.5 But regardless of whether Mr. Novák was indeed what he claimed to be, ordinary citizens were finally getting an unfettered glimpse of the West, which bore little resemblance to the propagandistic version on which a postwar generation had been weaned.

Moving West After the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion, the door to the West closed shut. But the ideological front man Jan Fojtík worried about the continued effects of the “imagined West” even as the real West was no longer accessible. “It was decidedly unpleasant for me,” he announced to his colleagues as early as 1970, when it was brought to my attention recently that in our universities our students look upon Vietnamese students somewhat disparagingly, whereas everything that comes from the West, and all the more whatever comes from America, they admire. At the same time, we face a problem about which we cannot keep silent. Many of our people stayed abroad in the West, and a great number who will graduate from university here long to work in the West. They connect their dreams of making a name for themselves with assumptions about the structures of Western society.6 Fojtík’s concern that the fascination with the West was unlikely to end was well founded. As he himself stated, “[M]any of our people stayed abroad in the West.”

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These citizens, most of them in their twenties, were spending the summer of 1968 traveling in Western Europe or the United States or else taking advantage of the numerous academic exchanges that were on offer to them that year. When Czechoslovakia was suddenly invaded, many decided to stay put. But Fojtík was being disingenuous when he spoke only of those who had stayed abroad. There were also those—far more in fact—who had decided to go abroad only in the aftermath of the invasion. Faced with the bleakness of Soviet occupation, Czechoslovakia witnessed an exodus captured in the film version of Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. There is a scene when the two protagonists, the innocent Tereza and her philandering husband, Tomas, traumatized by the invasion, make their way with thousands of others across the border into the West. They sit patiently among the convoy of cars, loaded down with possessions, that winds its way past passport control. When their turn comes, the border guard perfunctorily glances at their documents and waves them on their way, wishing them well in their future lives.7 In this, the film is correct: Czechoslovakia’s borders remained unofficially open for thirteen months after the invasion as part of an unspoken yet stateendorsed escape route.8 Two-thirds of the exodus consisted of people between the ages of twenty and forty who, typically, were not blue-collar workers but were employed in white-collar professions such as academia, engineering, medicine, and the media.9 In other words, this was also a brain drain, which the regime must well have realized. But even as early as 1968–69, the new normalization leadership was willing to sacrifice practical necessities for social consensus. Once the borders were finally sealed shut, every adult who had left the country was tried in absentia for the “abandonment of the republic,” a romantic-sounding misnomer for a crime that had been made into law in October 1948, a few months after the postwar Communist Party takeover. More colloquially, but with the same undertow of patriotism used in the service of communism, these people were referred to as “runaways.” They had been provided with the opportunity to make their exit, and yet their disappearance made for bad publicity. The regime thus struck a contradictory pose: on the one hand, for the first thirteen months following the invasion, it kept borders relatively permeable to allow people determined enough to leave to do so; on the other hand, the government made repeated efforts to coax back those now abroad, even offering loans for airplane tickets home to Czechoslovakia.10 As early as August 29, 1968, just a week after the invasion, Czechoslovak state agencies abroad were being instructed to make contact with fellow citizens there and pave the way for their legal return home, often by extending their travel permit documents so as to ensure a smooth and unfettered return. This mild-mannered approach changed abruptly in January 1969, when the same Czechoslovak agencies were advised to use assorted means of pressure

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for reluctant returnees, including threats of judicial prosecution and the seizure of their property.11 With approximately seventy thousand Czechoslovak citizens abroad, in May 1969, the government declared an amnesty for everyone who would return by September 15, promising to waive their potential prison sentences.12 From January 1, 1969, to December 31, 1970, a total of 3,723 persons returned.13 A second amnesty was declared in February 1973.14 Moreover, throughout the first years of General Secretary Gustáv Husák’s assumption of power, the regime kept open the possibility of a presidential pardon for those who were considering making their way back home to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic from the West. Neither the act of fleeing nor that of returning was often discussed in the media in political terms, for that would have invoked too many discomfiting memories of the recent Prague Spring. Instead, emigration to the West was officially cast as an economically driven betrayal of socialism and one’s fellow citizens who had remained to fight the good fight; one’s return to Czechoslovakia was described as the emotionally loaded recognition that not all was as it had first appeared on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Not uncommon was the sort of propaganda published in 1971 in Rudé právo, which claimed to excerpt recent “overheard” statements made by émigrés at the going-away party of another émigré who had decided to return to Czechoslovakia. The emphasis was on the returnee’s deeply emotional nostalgia for home, and his now coolheaded regret for having come under the sway of Prague Spring’s mass hysteria. His friends, gathered around him at the party, began to fall apart as the evening progressed: [K Vaník] . . . [F]ind out back at home if I too could return. I didn’t kill anyone; I only went a little crazy in 1968. . . . [A. Nosková] . . . I ask you to please send me a letter about conditions back home, I’d like to see my grandchildren before I die. . . . [J. Sˇvenlák] . . . I left a girl behind in Prague, I didn’t even say good-bye to her. If only I knew if she’s still single. . . . [H. Klauser] . . . [W]hen I recall the volleyball pitch in the forest, the campground, the lads in the weekend cottages . . . then I’d just like to throw in the towel.15 Such emotionally laden and indeed fear-inducing scenarios presented by the official media for loyal citizens’ consumption further served the purpose of shifting the compass of common sense: these excerpted conversations suggested that the émigrés’ flights from Czechoslovakia were the act of madmen, whereas a regime that had ceased to allow its citizens to travel back and forth across the border represented level-headedness.

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As emigration continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s, so did the campaign against it. In a 1985 outline of Czechoslovak Television’s contributions to this campaign (the report was comprehensively titled “The Contribution of Czechoslovak Television in the Fight against Emigration and for the Development of Socialist Patriotism”), negative images of émigrés and emigration were described as being most effective when inserted within seemingly unrelated programs: “[T]o make the reality of life in capitalist countries familiar means incontrovertibly to correct misconceptions and illusions that still linger.”16 Sometimes, however, such propaganda proved counterproductive: a Czech journalist admitted in an article in Tvorba that he had been asked countless times why, if conditions were so bad in the West, workers did not emigrate to Czechoslovakia just as some Czechs had emigrated to the West. The journalist explained that these class-conscious workers chose to stay in the West in order to work on turning their own societies into communist ones.17 In terms of content, the regime’s campaign against émigrés generally worked on two levels. On the one hand, the association of exile with loneliness, fear, disorientation, and rejection was evoked to deter others from attempting such an escape themselves. The alarming consequences of an emigrant’s inability to orient himself within a new environment consisting of a foreign language and unfamiliar cultural cues were, for example, clearly laid out in a novel titled If You Abandon Me, advertised as a narrative “about the fate of those who had tasted the life of an emigrant”; it was later adapted into a radio play and a television drama.18 At the same time, the regime actively linked émigrés’ motivations for leaving Czechoslovakia with avarice; the claim was made that, once abroad, an émigré was rewarded handsomely for “declaring that he doesn’t agree with the political development of his own motherland, that he distances himself from all honest fellow citizens in the republic.”19 Thus, abandonment of the republic came to mean not just a punishable criminal act but, more significantly still, the abandonment of a socialist and collective way of life in favor of personal desires and garish riches. In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, this became a powerfully embedded image by which, consciously and subconsciously, citizens remaining in Czechoslovakia often defined themselves, seeing themselves as honest citizens for having stayed—regardless of whether they had ever entertained the idea of leaving. This paradigm of abandonment—of good, humble socialist citizens being forsaken by their dollar-seeking brethren—was further tied in with recent historical calamities and the consequent victimization of Czechoslovak citizens. Another overheard conversation, this one published in Tribuna (Tribune), took place between two women sitting on Prague’s number 14 tram. One of the two women expressed disapproval and incomprehension over an acquaintance’s decision to

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divorce her husband rather than join him in West Germany (where he had fled after the invasion); the other made clear her approval of the woman’s decision to remain behind in socialist Czechoslovakia, explaining: I too wouldn’t go to him there. . . . What kind of fortune would I be in search of there? What are we missing here . . . versus there? What, so I could spend my time visiting meetings of the Sudeten Germans and applauding them . . . for having killed my dad in 1938? . . . Or so I should live among the Czech crème de la crème who ran away in 1948, or worse, among those who in 1968 confused ordinary people who then had to pay for their mistakes while they themselves are sitting in warmth, cozily counting out their money? The woman beside her, until then a seeming champion of emigration and life in the West, paused and then said, “[A]nd you know what, you’re right.”20

Returning Home Although not everyone was quite as easy to convince as the passenger on Tram 14, the Czechoslovak government did manage to persuade some of its citizens who had emigrated or else stayed abroad in the aftermath of the invasion to return under the auspices of the amnesties. Not surprisingly, those who took up the offer were automatically incorporated into the state-sponsored campaign against emigration. Less expected was the way in which their narratives of life in the West were used to help define the script for life in socialist Czechoslovakia after 1968. These returnees—or “re-emigrants,” as they have been referred to— obviously returned to socialist Czechoslovakia for a variety of reasons. Emigration never failed to test both people and their relationships more severely than expected, and reasons for the return could be as much psychological as economic. The film version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being bears witness to this phenomenon too: Tereza and Tomas, despite having established successful new lives in Geneva, return to communist Czechoslovakia. Many of these returnees were interviewed as they arrived at Prague’s Ruzynˇ Airport and later, once they had had a chance to unpack, on radio programs and television shows. They most often described their return to socialist Czechoslovakia as based on a newfound, firsthand knowledge of the capitalist West and the concomitant collapse of previously held illusions. As one young male returnee instructively told Rádio Hveˇzda, “Well, these were [our] illusions about the West. It was being said in our country that in the West there were better working conditions, that the standard of living was higher than ours; so we thought that we

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would go and seek that better prosperity.”21 His experiences of course did not match his expectations. Predictably, the lack of job security and a sufficient social welfare system in the West was emphasized in the returnees’ often media-savvy or else officially shaped confessions. As one man who had spent five years in Canada explained in answer to a reporter’s question about what it took for a worker to be fired in Canada, “It’s enough, for example, when you tell him [your boss], I can’t keep up or I’m not feeling well . . . that could not happen here at home.” He then described his own experience of receiving a pink slip: “So I open it [the envelope] and there is the pink slip with a note that says, basically, that at the moment there isn’t much work, that when there’s more work, they’ll call me. And what does that mean but, basically, not to rely on that they call you but to start looking for other work!”22 Similarly, stories about the lack of unemployment benefits and the absence of a national health insurance scheme were frequently related to the public through these returnees’ accounts of everyday life in the West. Brˇetislav and Ludmila Janousˇek and their two children, for instance, went as far as to return to Czechoslovakia without being sure of the government’s current position toward returnees. Thus they calculated into their plans the possibility that they might actually have to serve the prison term to which all emigrants had been sentenced. But to them the gamble still had seemed worth it. Mr. Janousˇek explained to television viewers that “we were telling ourselves that even if worst came to worst, if we had to serve the sentence, it still cannot be equal to staying for one’s whole life in such conditions and society as we learned to know [in the United States].”23 For the Janousˇek family, it was the conditions of life in America—rather than the now tightly sealed borders of post-1968 Czechoslovakia—that functioned as a prison from which one longed to escape. In contrast, the social benefits available in Czechoslovakia pointed to security and therefore freedom. Another frequently publicized returnees’ refrain focused on the excessive work tempo forced upon them in capitalism, which, as socialist citizens, they were neither prepared for nor willing to accept. One woman, a nurse by training, took work at a factory in Austria making artificial flowers and was struck by the owner’s (an earlier Czech émigré himself) instructions to one of her colleagues: “Faster, faster, you have to work faster.” Another returnee was quizzed by Czech radio about the “work morale” in Austrian factories. The young man replied, “There one regularly begins at 6:30 a.m. and works until 5:00 p.m. You have to be at your station about 5–10 minutes [beforehand], dressed, waiting by the machine and as soon as the horn goes off, it’s as if a command to attack is sounded, all of the machines start all at once and off we go. There you really have to work.” The young man concluded his account with a frank statement that played directly counter to images of communist industriousness ingrained

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in the political consciousness during the 1950s and 1960s. When asked the leading question “Was it [this tempo] a little unfamiliar after the way you worked here?” the young man replied, “It was, because it’s a fact—let’s face it—that here I made enough money and I practically didn’t do any work.”24 Similarly, a cook from Pardubice, although he successfully had found work as a cook in a hotel in Innsbruck, returned to Czechoslovakia, and “what brought him home was the unbelievably high work tempo that—as is well known—we are not accustomed to in the CˇSSR.”25 What stands out in such statements is the alacrity with which the regime admitted to accepting low work discipline as a pillar of normalized Czechoslovakia. As new experts on comparative lifestyles, as bearers of an authority that had been acquired through real experience, these returnees were presented to the public as well-suited to describe the advantages of communism and to explain indirectly why normalization was preferable to what was on offer further west. A young Slovak man, who had experienced “the unpleasant looks of those Austrians,” summarized the great advantages of life in normalized socialist Czechoslovakia. He was now happy at home because “we need not fear that we will be sacked from work. We can go peacefully to bed in the evening, [since we know] that in the morning we will still have this job, that nobody can take it away from us.”26 Taken together, the returnees’ narrations implied that a much slower pace of work combined with a higher level of job security embodied socialism’s continued promise. While such statements certainly played on the old, familiar themes of capitalism versus communism—of greedy factory bosses urging workers to work beyond their capacity while refusing to share in the resulting financial bounties—the theme of a calm and quiet life, removed from the tumultuousness of both 1968 politics and late-twentieth-century capitalism, was again being played upon. The message was that a socialist way of life was potentially able to challenge and even surpass capitalism not by offering the same or better material commodities (for it could not) but by offering an unmatchable “quality of life.” This less quantifiable measurement of living standards frequently cropped up in the returnees’ public memories of roughing it in the West, implying that life in the Soviet Bloc was more than the sum of work performed for the state and the monetary remuneration received for it.

Quality over Quantity Speaking to reporters on the tarmac of Prague’s airport, one woman who had just returned from the United States explained that while in America clothes might be available and cheap, they were in fact shoddy: “My husband and I always said: at

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home things are relatively expensive, but genuinely of good quality.”27 The implication was that good quality stretched beyond seams and hemlines. The woman who had found clothes to be lacking quality in the United States had also found life outside the workplace to be lacking quality. As she confessed, in America she had never visited a cinema because over there “a person must give up all sorts of amusements and everything else that costs money.”28 Another returnee who was met by a reporter at the airport had the following exchange about the experience of everyday life in the United States: [Returnee]: On the materialistic side—well, experiences vary. For example, if you were to wish to live the same way as you lived in Czechoslovakia, going to the theater, the cinema, out to dinner once in a while, or to some club—clubs, by the way, are a very expensive affair—then you’ll practically have to hand over your whole salary. I’ll give you one example. Let’s take the example of the Podolí swimming pool here in Prague. There you can go—I don’t know how much it costs now, but five years ago it was, I believe, four crowns. . . . [Reporter]: Yes, it still costs four crowns! [Returnee]: It still costs that, great! Thanks for the info, I’ll go there straightaway tomorrow. Because I’ll tell you what, back there [in America] I hardly had any chance to go to any swimming pool, because there public pools don’t exist!29 Another émigré, a talented bicyclist who had left for Sweden, “found out abroad that because of his life’s mistake [of emigrating], he had simply closed off the path to being an active athlete.”30 Having to work around the clock at his job, he had no time or money for training. As a reporter prompted yet another returnee, “But a person is nourished not only by his work . . .?”31 Quality of life, in other words, counted. Another returnee pointed out that “the relations between people in America are on an incredibly low level” and that the dynamic development of society and people that he had expected to find there was entirely lacking; “on the contrary, in America one can say that their circumstances have worsened more in the last thirty years than they have here at home.”32 Thus he had decided to “return at whatever cost,” firmly believing that the normalization regime would understand his mistake because Czechoslovakia was after all a “more spiritually mature nation than America.”33 This last comment, in addition to playing up old European prejudices in the service of communist propaganda, summed up the ways in which Czechoslovakia’s leadership wished to have normalization viewed by its citizens. The returnee, presumably flattering the regime in return for amnesty, pointed to its

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spiritual, rather than its economic, superiority over the United States. This remark was in line with the script that the normalizers gradually drew up for post-1968 communism—a script that was not singularly rooted in a new form of socialist consumerism, as is often thought. Certainly, the promise of subsidized basic foodstuffs and the brief but visible influx of previously unseen products during the early 1970s did much to appease the average citizen. But normalization could not have existed and, one might argue, even thrived, on this alone. Czechoslovakia’s relative prosperity was just that: a prosperity about which one could become enthralled only when it was contrasted with the meager consumer opportunities available in the less industrialized and less economically developed countries of the Soviet Bloc. But the Czechs had never compared themselves with their eastern neighbors and were not going to start doing so now; at the same time, levels of consumption in Czechoslovakia would never be able to match those in the West. Thus the key supplement to this meager socialist consumerism would need to be something of which there was an ever-dwindling supply under capitalism.

Self-Realization The opportunity to live a life not merely—in fact, not at all—defined by work became a common trope of normalization and the silver bullet of late communism. The 1985 report on television’s role in the anti-emigration campaign, discussed above, spelled it out clearly: “In terms of television’s overall influence, when it comes to asserting socialist patriotism, the center of gravity is rooted in the systematic presentation of the priorities of ‘real socialism.’ . . . Television does not describe our reality in terms of a society of plenty, but first and foremost as a system in which a person can fully realize his human essence.”34 During normalization, realizing one’s “human essence” was to take priority over more concrete economic concerns. The terms “self-realization” (seberealizace) and “self-actualization” (sebeaktualizace) became favorite catchwords of the regime; both indicated a person’s chance to develop his or her best self and to indulge in whatever activities that would require. Self-realization and self-actualization were a counterpoint to the sort of life lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain and described so vividly by Czechoslovakia’s returnees. This ideal also intersected with the state’s and individual’s emphasis on family, large and small, discussed in the previous chapter. The private realm and the family unit that framed it were packaged as the vessel for self-realization. Consequently, self-actualization and self-realization were to be practiced not only at home outside work hours but, just as important, within the domesticated workplace during work hours. The Czech economist Otakar Turek argues

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that an entirely new principle steered economic decisions during the 1970s and 1980s, a principle that he refers to as “social comfort” (sociální pohodlí). According to Turek, social comfort and social calm were the two main concerns of the normalization regime, so much so that they directly determined economic decisions. As a result, economic enterprises during normalization acted not as profit-seeking companies but as social institutions.35 As social institutions they tolerated work habits that would have been unacceptable to an economically geared institution: It was estimated that in each workplace 20 percent of employees were “unemployed” and simply collected a salary; during work hours it was permissible both to take care of other business and to partake of celebratory office parties; and if the management was clever, it even negotiated decent wages. Fears that these practices might threaten the enterprise’s competitive skills and perhaps even its existence never entered anyone’s mind. Economic damage produced by a system based on social comfort did not fall on the doorsteps of the originators, but instead was collectivized and affected everyone. The credo of an average person was, on the one hand, “work as in socialism and live as in capitalism,” but because he understood that the two don’t go together, he was thankful even for the first half [of this formula].36 As Turek concludes, “[I]n the workplace it was possible to live well.”37 The Czech sociologist Lenka Kalinová, who also investigated the conditions of the workplace during normalization, adopts a similar notion of social comfort as a way to explain how the limited possibilities to purchase consumer goods widely available in “developed countries” were “partially compensated for by certain social comforts in other areas.” These included “full employment, a tolerance for a low output and quality of work, cheap housing and cheap services, such as health care, transportation, public canteens, cultural services, etc.” As a result, salaries were not a transparent indicator of wealth during normalization: “[Salaries] made up only a part of a family’s income. A large part was also made up of social revenues: pensions and other monetary benefits, free-of-charge services, different forms of appropriation and tax relief. . . . Rewards for work often satisfied social criteria, enterprises provided some social services, such as recreation, cheap meals and even housing, etc.” As Kalinová points out, “during the ’70s and ’80s, the sources for satisfying the needs of citizens changed.”38 So what was behind this array of socialist perquisites by which the 1970s and 1980s became defined, and not only in Czechoslovakia but elsewhere in communist Eastern Europe? On a practical level, it meant that when specific goods and products could not be offered, then services and bonuses of a different kind

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were deployed. But at a more ideological level, Husák’s regime was attempting something far greater: to redefine the meaning of the economic ideal, to persuade Czechoslovakia’s citizens that in the late twentieth century, surrounded by the cacophony of not just capitalism’s rewards but also its tireless demands, selfrealization was to be found not in the West but in the East. It was an ambitious viewpoint but one hatched from necessity rather than political commitment to a set of socialist-inspired ideals.

A Socialist Way of Life Run Amok Not surprisingly, Czechs and Slovaks, faced with the drabness of normalization, were all too willing to embrace their newly articulated right as socialist citizens to self-realize as well as the concomitant state-endorsed workplace inefficiency that would allow for their self-realization. The problem—whether simply unanticipated by the leadership or considered worthwhile for the sake of political consensus—was that although they did not belong to a capitalist system, a large number of Czech and Slovak citizens now chose to self-realize as consumers. As self-realization was sought by an increasing number of citizens through consumption, the differences between the socialist way of life and the frequently mocked capitalist way of life became more and more difficult to identify. In a 1976 letter to Rudé právo, a reader from the town of Liberec made this observation: “You write about a socialist way of life as if it were somehow different from life in capitalist countries. I see no substantial difference in the two. There, just as here, people chase after things, and everyone wants a car, a country cottage, and to live well. . . . I often read about consumer society in the West. Is it that here it’s called a ‘socialist way of life’ and in capitalist countries it’s called a consumer society?”39 The official reply was that while the normalization regime wished to ensure that people could “buy themselves a country cottage, a car, a washing machine, and a refrigerator,” in a socialist way of life these material objects functioned to improve the quality of one’s life. In contrast, in a capitalist consumer society, material objects defined life.40 In other words, as another Rudé právo article titled “To Be Does Not Only Mean to Have” explained, in socialist society material objects were intended as a means for one’s self-actualization and not an end in themselves.41 It was a subtle difference that, much to the chagrin of the party, was lost on many a citizen. If anything, the state-sponsored program of self-realization, coupled with consumer opportunities both within and outside the official grid, created a beast unique to late communism. A 1985 Czechoslovak government assessment of normalization titled, rather ethereally, “The Status and Tendencies Present in the

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Development of Socialist Society’s Consciousness” and written specifically for the Central Committee, attempted to alert the leadership to this beast. The report outlined how socialist petit bourgeois mentalities were colliding with “incorrect opinions from the crisis years [1960s] and from the period of the bourgeois republic [the interwar years],” both of which still “linger in the consciousness of certain people.”42 Normalization, the authors of the report admitted, had exacerbated these already ingrained tendencies toward petit bourgeois behavior so that they not only were surviving but in fact were being “reproduced in new forms.” The ripple effect was yet more nefarious: A high standard of living brought features of a consumerist way of life, which generates specific petit bourgeois thinking in some layers of our society. . . . The thinking of these people in turn produces individualism and weakens the ability of the party to strengthen the efficacy of communal work. Along with this there coexists a tendency to admire the capitalist way of life, which itself is linked with the assumption that only private property opens up the space for human endeavor. . . . These negative phenomena in the consciousness of a part of our people are accompanied by their efforts to disturb the socialist way of life, socialist law, and to become rich through extracurricular nonworkplace methods, etc.43 Offered the chance to self-realize under late communism, too many socialist citizens had decided that consumer goods would be the most pleasurable means of identity formation. The result was a socialist East that differed quantitatively but not qualitatively from the capitalist West. Moreover, while the report first referred to these misdirected self-realizers as “a part of our people,” it later admitted that this state of affairs was descriptive not only of white-collar professionals but also (in fact even more so) of those considered the very backbone of communist society—the workers.

Anna Controls Consumption This brings us back to the protagonist of Jaroslav Dietl’s The Woman behind Counter, Anna Holubová. The television serial was set in a supermodern, superclean, superstocked supermarket, and that Anna chooses to work behind the delicatessen counter is also suggestive. The delicatessen counter is a glass-fronted counter filled with sausages, cheeses, and the Czech party favorite chlebícˇky, circle slices of white baguette crowded with Soviet Bloc delicacies such as salami, ham, mayonnaise-based salads, and hard-boiled eggs. The Woman behind the Counter showcased a smorgasbord of plenty.

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The food, a competing lead character, is fussed over, fiddled with, touched, stacked, caressed, clucked over, and commented on by the women who staff the store. The intentional seductiveness of what is on offer behind these polished glass panels and on the well-dusted shelves was suggested by Dietl’s opening lines at the beginning of the script for each episode: Have you ever seen a supermarket empty of people, a quietly resting supermarket? Five abandoned cash registers like gates into a forbidden paradise guard the entrance. (Music full of suspense begins here.) Shelves with canned goods and syrups, shelves lined with packets of sugar and salt, shelves with refined flour, with unrefined, whole wheat, extra quality, farmer’s and even soy, shelves with Prague bread, Sˇumava bread, with rye and small graham loaves, shelves with baked goods of all kinds—all the shelves filled to maximum height, shelves with bottles of wine and liquors, their labels shining, one outdoing the other, while wire baskets filled with milk bottles create a jagged pyramid, beer is stacked all the way up to the ceiling in metal crates, lemonades and sodas, freezer shelves protect chickens, ducks, Hungarian geese, and turkeys. Other freezer shelves are full of boxes of peas, spinach, carrots, and tomatoes, others have fish . . . and the bloody flanks of beef, ten types of salami . . . pork knees are pale and powerless. . . . While one glass partition over, piled high, are lemons, oranges, and bananas that announce their joie de vivre.44 Dietl called for a voiceover at the beginning of each episode, but the director chose to let the images speak for themselves instead. In the opening credits of each episode, there is merely music (danceable, perky, joyful) while the camera takes care of the rhapsody, with sweeping shots of the store shelves and greengrocers’ crates. The lens—the viewers’ eyes—linger enticingly here and there, loitering amongst the pyramids of fruits, vegetables, the bulging shelves of cognacs, and the hooked bloody flanks of meat. Staff and customers nibble and taste; viewers salivate. Like other television serials, The Woman behind the Counter was produced in cooperation with the government agency that would benefit from its story line— in this case, the state supermarkets. A premiere of select episodes of the television serial was organized for the party elite at the Blaník Cinema in Prague, with Vasil Bil’ak and Jan Fojtík on the guest list. The November 1977 premiere, as the party invitation stated, was co-organized with the general directorship of Podnik Potravin (“Groceries Enterprise”). Whether the enticing shots of bountiful foods were a source of pride or embarrassment for those who attended the premiere is impossible to know.45 But they must have recognized that what was on open

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display behind the counter onscreen was more typically under the counter during normalization, meaning that better or scarcer goods were reserved by shop assistants for family, friends, and customers with something to offer in return. But in Anna’s Prague supermarket consumerist desire was satiated despite the fact that, as someone working on the set later recalled, “each morning they delivered deli foods and no one was allowed to touch anything unless it was written into the script. Cheeses, chlebícˇky, salamis—the only people to carry them out wrapped up in paper were the ‘customers.’”46 These same items were not available in the stores or else had sold out by the afternoon, but Anna’s supermarket remained fully stocked day and night. Yet audiences did not seem to be too bothered by such fantastical representations. On the one hand, they were accustomed to the state media dishing out the hoped-for future of socialism in lieu of the present-day reality; on the other, Czechoslovakia was not Romania, and many goods rarely found in other Eastern Bloc countries were frequently available in Czechoslovakia.47 Moreover, the audience must have gained some pleasure—visual at least—in viewing the ripe produce, the juicy meats, and the imported bottles of liquor. What was as important as the groaning supermarket shelves was the recognition that the women ruled over these gastronomical pleasures. More significantly still, they did not fall victim to its excesses; rather, they were there to control and regulate consumption, to show the way toward the socialist way of life, which could be dangerously mined with capitalistic excesses. In A Woman behind the Counter, Anna, normalization’s working woman, taught viewers how to consume sensibly. The consumption exemplified in the serial was intended to be a marker of the dynamic times. But the Husák-led government was perpetually faced with its selfmade conundrum: having put consumerism and consumption on the negotiating table as a way to secure support for normalization, it could not sustain the tempo of consumerist desire that the endorsement of self-realization had unleashed. Women, by being placed at the forefront of moderating consumerist desire, were yet again being placed at the center of rebuilding and reshaping communism after 1968. Standing guard over consumption (controlling it, ensuring that it fit within the acceptable parameters of a socialist way of life) was, effectively, woman’s third burden in late communism. The ideological portrayal of the 1968 reform communists who had tried to dismantle communism was that of men who had lacked the internal strength to resist the political virus. Consequently infected, hysterical, they could never again be trusted to keep their emotions under control—for reform communism, as discussed earlier, was officially remembered as nothing less than a highly infectious emotional outburst. Normalization’s women, in contrast, were now being entrusted with what their men had failed to do—keep desires in check.

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Production shot from The Woman behind the Counter. Anna and her colleagues from the supermarket take part in a May Day parade. The banner held aloft by the two men reads, “Socialist commerce salutes May Day.” (Czech Television Archives; photographed by Milos ˇ Schmiedberger)

Susan Reid has written that in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev “while attributing to women an ideologically inferior role, [Khrushchev-era “discourses and policies”] simultaneously ascribed to them, in their capacity as consumers and retailers, a particular kind of power and expertise as the state’s agents in reforming the material culture of everyday life.”48 Even more applicable to the case of Anna, Dietl’s exemplary counter girl, Reid observes that “shop assistants were to be not merely purveyors of material goods but of communist values and

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behavioral norms, whereby the corrupting potential of consumption might be mitigated.”49 The shop assistant, that is, represented the most extreme version of women’s third but powerful burden. Anna Holubová, as mother, divorcée, and counter girl, was the model of moderation and control and was applauded for being so. Anna was able to cope with what late communism offered. She was able to temper her own desires, despite some occasional hand-wringing on her part (which merely humanized her). The reward was ever present in the polished chrome and glass delicatessen counter, the marble tiled floor beneath her feet, and the freshly cleaned tongs ready to scoop up the chlebícˇky weighted down by salami, eggs, and Cˇeský camembert. This vision of womanhood that Anna represented was in part defined by fears of her opposite. Reid describes these ever-present fears for the Soviet case as “the nightmare vision of marauding women spilling into the streets armed with infinitely expanding avos’ki [the ubiquitous Eastern Bloc shopping bags made of netted string].”50 This nightmare vision fed off history: in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the 1953 uprising in East Germany, women, bread, and political violence were irrevocably linked.

Chef Svatopluk’s Quandaries If Anna in A Woman behind the Counter taught viewers how to consume sensibly, then Chef Svatopluk in Chef Svatopluk’s Quandaries taught them how to produce effectively. By 1985 it had become clear that normalization’s offer for its people not only to work but to self-realize and, moreover, to do so not only outside work hours but also in the comfort of their increasingly privatized workplaces had largely backfired. The result was a slacker workforce and a public quick to conflate consumption with identity formation. The regime’s anxieties over this were transposed onto Jaroslav Dietl’s very last television serial, titled Chef Svatopluk’s Quandaries (Rozpaky kucharˇe Svatopluka).51 One might say that it was a fictionalized and certainly more surreal version of the Soviet game show, in which the intent was “to instill in the audience the desire to do their jobs better.”52 Let’s Go, Girls, one of the most popular and longest-running of these types of Soviet game shows, had young attractive female engineers and bus drivers, for example, performing tasks and games that showcased their prowess.53 In Dietl’s Chef Svatopluk’s Quandaries, however, the prowess was left to the television audience. This, Dietl’s last serial before his death, centers on the life of a restaurant chef, Svatopluk Kurˇátko, whose primary wish is to put in an honest hard day’s work. But Svatopluk is perpetually hindered from being an industrious worker, a well-meaning, commonsense socialist and the anchor of his restaurant

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collective, by his colleagues who, unlike Svatopluk, seem intent on getting out of their jobs more than they are willing to put in; they drink, steal, waste time, and lie. They self-realize in the most destructive way possible. In each episode, Svatopluk faces yet another challenge at work, and he must decide how to proceed with the crisis at hand. For example, does he turn in the kitchen employee who is stealing supplies, fire the venerated old chef who has turned to drink, or challenge the new manager who hands out favors at the expense of the restaurant enterprise?54 The serial was a surprisingly stark view of the blue-collar work world of socialist Czechoslovakia. The lack of fantasy scenarios, so common to the earlier Engineers’ Odyssey, could be explained by the purpose of this television serial: it was up to the television audience, and not Chef Svatopluk, to decide how to solve his quandaries. Unique to Chef Svatopluk was the serial’s interactive aspect, made possible by a Czech technological innovation called Kinoautomat, first showcased at the 1967 Montreal World Exposition but then largely forgotten until 1985, when it was resuscitated for Chef Svatopluk. The use of the interactive Kinoautomat technology meant that six times during each of the thirteen episodes, the television screen froze as Chef Svatopluk pondered over his latest quandary. In this simulacrum of socialist everyday life, he had to decide how next to proceed: “Do I ignore the restaurant manager’s mismanagement or do I confront him?” Svatopluk asked himself, and then the screen froze as he thought. But the decision on how to proceed was made not by the fictional character of Svatopluk but by the very real viewers, both those in the studio audience and the millions sitting at home on their sofas. Home-viewer votes were taken with the flick of a switch. As the writer and dissident Karel Pecka explained in an article about Chef Svatopluk’s Quandaries published in the underground press, “They [the audience members] can choose between yes and no and they can express their opinion by pressing down on an apparatus with which they are provided. Furthermore, even viewers at home take part in the plebiscite; they flick their lights on or off and, according to the shifts in electricity currents, it is decided how the story should continue within the realm of yes-no.”55 A more recent article recalls that on the evenings when Chef Svatopluk was being broadcast on television, “one merely needed to take a look at our cement housing projects.” Indeed, one time, as yet another gimmick to demonstrate the success of the show, film cameras were installed in one such typical high-rise housing project in Prague “so we could see how citizens are participating in the vote and how the housing project goes dark or else suddenly lights up.”56 As light switches were flicked, electrical currents were measured and phoned in to the television studio, which told the television technicians how viewers had voted—for either option A or option B. After the viewer vote was taken, the episode continued, and the story

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Production shot from Chef Svatopluk’s Quandaries. Chef Svatopluk at work. (Czech ˇálek) Television Archives; photographed by C

line unfolded according to the audience’s majority decision. Before the serial was over, Svatopluk had been chosen as head chef of a newly built luxury hotel; the audience/Svatopluk had presumably made the right decisions. But why the interactive decision making? It was, of course, a way to bring entire families to the television screen, but it seemed also to have a second purpose. By having viewers make decisions for Chef Svatopluk—the sorts of decisions they themselves might easily face in the workplace—the serial sought to teach its audience how to put accountability and responsibility back into the workplace. To some extent, Chef Svatopluk must have aimed to redirect citizen viewers’ approaches to the public workspace and their place within it. Since Jaroslav Dietl was inevitably called upon to turn Communist Party precepts and priorities into entertaining story lines, the 1985 broadcast of Chef Svatopluk’s Quandaries indicated that the party was increasingly concerned about deleterious behavior that had become commonplace.

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Yet the irony was that this retraining in individual initiative was a priori stripped clean of any real initiative. It was absurdist theater at best, for, as the dissident Pecka also pointed out in his samizdat article, the sequence about which the audience was asked to make a decision was then finished off quickly, after which the plot continued as it would have regardless of which way the audience had voted. The difference between options A and B was often a single frame, two at most. In Chef Svatopluk, the audience’s decision making proved to be entirely impotent vis-à-vis the party powers, who, even in this setting, mistrusted the audience’s flickering moment of independent thinking. The serial thus revealed, if anything, just how well art could imitate life—whether in this case intentionally or not.

Resisting Temptation Given the nature of the official culture, those who resisted it as well as the general ethos of normalization were forced to deal in the same currency of consumption. In 1984 Milan Kundera famously wrote of the “tragedy of Central Europe,” in which he wistfully recalled his Central Europe where culture had still mattered. In France, his adopted country, it sometimes no longer seemed to.57 Václav Havel had remained in Prague during normalization, and had come to see that the EastCentral Europe of which Kundera dreamed was long gone, gutted by communist rule. It had taken on the feel of any other late-twentieth-century Western society. Havel consequently referred to normalization as “post-totalitarianism,” describing it as the “historical coming together of a dictatorship and a consumer society.”58 If this was so, then resistance to normalization’s status quo was not merely about protesting political repression, just as the regime’s weapon of choice was not just about offering things to consume. The idea of self-actualization in fact had been a center point of the philosopher Jan Patocˇka’s concerns about the deleterious effects of modernity. D. Christopher Brooks observes that Patocˇka was fully in line with the Frankfurt School of philosophy and its members’ worries over technology’s chipping away at a sort of “prehistorical” authenticity. According to Patocˇka, because of technology (and the modernity it spurned), self-actualization, or what was left of it, could find its expression only in social conflict, particularly war. Here self-actualization became “a revolt against everydayness.”59 Defined in this way, it stood in direct opposition to what the normalization regime understood as every citizen’s right to self-actualize. For the regime, it was the very opposite: to self-actualize meant to immerse oneself in the everydayness, to embrace the quiet life. Social conflict of any sort was to be avoided at all costs—by citizens and by the state.

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When Havel took over some of Patocˇka’s ideas as well as his role as dissent’s philosophical guru, he shifted the emphasis from self-actualization to the problem of self-alienation (the negation of self-actualization). The interconnections between man’s alienation and the problems of a consumer society had been widely discussed in the 1960s. In Paul Berman’s blunt assessment, “My own impression is that Havel became merely one more slightly befuddled left-wing reader of Martin Heidegger. Those philosophical studies of his turned him into a poorer but more level-headed Eastern cousin, so to speak, of Herbert Marcuse and the Western unorthodox Marxists of the 1950s and ’60s, who were likewise the left-wing readers of Heidegger.”60 There is something to be said for Berman’s demystification. Marcuse, the consumer society’s Cassandra, “dreaming of some kind of Marxist alternative,” shared the same impulse as Havel. Both wanted “to show how people get caught in a vast social trap whose ultimate effect is to disfigure the human personality.”61 Put into this context, “to live in truth” (as opposed to living in the regime’s lies) was intended as the purest, most genuine form of self-realization. It was to be a protest that went to the heart of the late communist message. Alas, the intention of living in truth as the only authentic self-realization under communism was lost in the scuffle over ethics and political morality that the catchphrase ignited. And yet it was vital. In the words of one young anonymous contributor to Vokno (Window), the samizdat journal of the cultural underground, his generation consisted largely of “totally idiotic consumers, so-called discothèque cretins, unable to think of anything other than the latest hairdo, and who suit the authorities perfectly, because they are satisfied with getting hold of some knockoff of Western culture in the form of discothèques or Adidas.”62 Dreaming of Adidas and using up time to acquire them (or more likely their knockoffs in this world of ersatz satisfactions and ersatz voting rights) might not be quite how the regime envisioned socialist self-realization, but it was still preferable to Havel’s. But along these same lines, one could argue that the most potent form of dissent therefore proved to be the kind that was not clearly on view and amongst people who did not necessarily sign the Charter. It simply rejected the “opportunities” opened up by normalization. Here were the real children of Herbert Marcuse as they sang by the campfire in 1980s communist Czechoslovakia: “Let Me Live” What have I done to you? / Why do I have to live with you? / I do not feel like staining my hands / With the dust of stinking idle days / I do not feel like stealing / Just to make a silly dream come true / I am happy with a tiny shelter / And a large beer for dinner/ (No one believes I own no car) / I do not want to hear a crooner / Or to wax lyrical over TV

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commercials / Or to spend 300 on shoes / In short, I want to be fit to live / Get stuffed with your Tuzex woolens, / Japanese radios and jogging shoes / Keep your color tellies / And the girls with bras called Nellie’s / By the way, just try to understand / That life should not be daft / Kindness that must be paid for / Bones that get crushed / People toppling over dumbly / How can I stay calm? / I find no pleasure in your sex games, / Your polished Chryslers and your harlots / Incidentally, I can make love better than you / And I am sick all over just living in this stew. / To brag about who knows better. . . . / I have no interest in your arguments / Or in quarterly bonuses and a castle on the lake / I am content with what I can earn myself / And would like to tell you this: / Life is more than prattle / And life is not bread alone / So what’s the matter with you?63 This lyrical rejection of, among other things, the iconic socialist pop star Karel Gott, loaded down with his East Bloc medals and awards, and the hard-currency specialty shop Tuzex, stacked high with Levi’s and Panasonic television sets, was not merely a slap on the wrist of socialist consumers. It was a commentary on how public space had been emptied of meaning in the name of regime-endorsed self-realization and its practices.

Real Socialism Czechoslovakia’s post-1968 leadership recognized that it could not compete with late capitalist consumption in the West. At about this time, the term “real socialism” came into popular usage; in Vasil Bil’ak’s inimitable words, “Real socialism is what we have got here!”64 In place of the kind of consumerism being practiced in the West, the leadership constructed—albeit in a piecemeal fashion—the idea of an alternative socialist lifestyle (referred to officially as a socialist way of life). The idea was to provide the one thing that the West could no longer deliver: the opportunity to self-realize. Normalization might have seemed to be merely another form of socialist consumerism, but in looking beyond the surface, a much larger systemic emphasis on the socialist way of life and its many components emerges. Even if the regime’s efforts to equate socialism with a nonconsumerist self-realization ultimately failed, these attempts should not and cannot be discounted. Normalization’s leaders might not have succeeded in downgrading the preeminence of consumerism in the late twentieth century, but that does not mean they failed to imprint new and competing priorities on late communist culture. Certainly, the majority of citizens grabbed the wrong end of the officially sanctioned stick and proceeded to link their much-touted self-realization with

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the much-maligned Western-style consumption. But in so doing, they were still participating in a new model of communism. They came to understand their rights (and obligations) as citizens as existing not within a political collective but within individualized spaces of self-realization. The result was an entirely new experience of lived socialism in the 1970s and 1980s, the impact of which continues today.

Conclusion

Remembering late communism has not been easy. In part, willful amnesia is the inevitable result of the black line drawn by all revolutions, which, as Orlando Figes writes, “are conceived as a spiritual renewal, a moral resurrection of the people, in which all sins vanish with the old regime and virtues are restored.”1 Thus, bringing up late communism means revisiting the sins of the old regime and consequently of its participants, most of whom are still alive. When in 1997 the film The Unbearable Lightness of Being (based on Milan Kundera’s novel of the same name and starring British actor Daniel Day-Lewis and French actress Juliet Binoche), was broadcast for the first time on Czech television, this Hollywood version of normalization was universally rejected. Describing the response to it, Petr Holub in the Czech cultural weekly Respekt (Respect) noted that the film had been either ignored by critics or else lambasted for the foreign filmmaker’s “naïve idea of what a Czech pub or offices of the Secret Police had looked like.”2 But these very same critics, Holub insisted, had failed to suggest a single domestic production dealing with normalization that might serve as an alternative view: “The fact is . . . . the Hollywood film with all of its mistakes paradoxically holds to the reality more than this domestic fare.”3 What The Unbearable Lightness of Being presented accurately, Holub argued, was the almost inevitable collaboration of most citizens after 1968: “We lost the experiment to reform communism and we all paid for it with our own skin. It is difficult to imagine a better reason for adopting a pliable spine than the presence of the occupation regime, which acquired a large part of its occupied nation as collaborators. If a person did not want to abandon all of life’s possibilities, he had 201

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to choose some form of collaboration—depending on whether it was enough for him to simply hold onto his current position at work or else if he wanted to make a career.” It was this uncomfortable memory of frequent compliance and occasional collaboration that translated into “neither filmmakers nor anyone else want[ing]to return to this chapter of Czech history.”4 Holub concluded that the period of normalization thereby had vanished in national memory, had ceased to exist as a historical reference point of any sort. But what finally did ignite public discussion about late communism was the rebroadcast of normalization’s television serials and the intense debates that surrounded this. One journalist who closely followed the debates argued that whereas “normalization and its ‘mass culture’ are significantly different from one another,” and should not be considered interchangeable, Jaroslav Dietl’s television serials as a mirror for normalization represent an entirely “different kettle of fish.”5 Another commentator similarly recalled how “viewers immersed themselves in the pseudoworld of these television serials, which carried idealized hallmarks of their everyday lives.”6 In part they did so because “like the television heroes in these serials, most citizens of this state were not badly off. Like them, most of the nation also lived with the absurd worries of those times, fulfilled the Five-Year Plan, went to the May Day parades, and voted for members of the National Front . . . [U]nder the conditions available, there was no other way.”7 In other words, evoking the term used by Svetlana Boym in reference to the everyday Soviet experience, Dietl’s serials became Czechoslovakia’s shared “common places.”8 Citizen viewers not only saw their lives in the story lines; they also identified with the state-approved characters played by state-approved actors. The transference of personal dreams onto celluloid plots and caricatures was not just the purview of the West and its post-1968 acceleration of popular culture. As another critic wrote about Czechoslovakia’s normalization, “At the beginning of the 1970s there was born something like a socialist form of television pop culture. To a large extent, the nation became psychologically dependent on television, falling in love with its heroes, singers, actors, and entertainers, onto whom they projected their dreams, aspirations, and moral expectations.”9 From this perspective, at least, borders between East and West had dissolved as the twentieth century careened toward its closing decade. But rebroadcasting the recent past in this manner has been unsettling for some. An editorial in the Czech press condemned the mass culture of normalization when “culture in the larger sense of the word” came to mean the “culture of prefab, concrete apartment blocks, including their shoddy bathroom fixtures, the ersatz materials used, and the cheap track suits that became the standard during the 1970s and 1980s.” This culture was further popularized, the editorial continued, through television serials, and in particular those written by Jaroslav Dietl.10 Remarking

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on protests against the rebroadcast of Dietl’s The Woman behind the Counter, the author of an article in Lidové noviny (People’s News) wrote, “The motives of the protesters are various, but there is one that seems to unite them. It is a strong inner distaste for the kinds of scenes that outlined life in socialism, and that left behind deep imprints even in people born later.”11 Dietl’s reruns thus suggest the discomfort, indeed embarrassment, of home movies long thought forgotten and where much more than the bell-bottom trousers and thick-knotted ties seem out of place.

Recalling Fear Is part of that embarrassment the recollection of a fear that, in retrospect, becomes more difficult to place? Did the rebroadcast of these serials also rerun the memory of fear? Václav Havel early on speculated that ordinary citizens failed to break out of normalization’s official mold, to dissent, because they were afraid. He urged them to shed their fears and step into the more ethically palatable world of living in truth, to find freedom through authenticity. This plea was made on a much larger scale in 1987 when the dissident group Charter 77 decided to focus on picking apart the fear it also presumed to be at the core of ordinary citizens’ experiences during normalization. The result was the Charter document titled “A Word to Fellow Citizens,” which called on the public to begin to act as if they were free: “One frequently hears the question—‘What to do?’ . . . Tomorrow immediately we can all start saying the truth. Not only at home, but in the workplace, during social gatherings, at a variety of meetings.”12 People were asked directly to put aside their most immediate fears: “In a situation in which one is sure of the fairness of their case, everyone can overcome their fear of the authorities, of the police or the state bureaucracy; through their solidarity, everyone can morally support all those who try this but also protect them against gratuitous attacks.”13 But did ordinary citizens feel fear? Was this their central concern? Prague’s Wenceslas Square was the stage for the first large-scale antiregime demonstration, which took place on August 21, 1988, the twentieth anniversary of the 1968 Soviet invasion. A week after this demonstration, the September issue of the then samizdat newspaper Lidové noviny carried an account of the event by the dissident Lenka Procházková, who had participated in the demonstration. Titled “Fear No More!” Procházková’s article described the experience of rediscovering her personal courage and shedding her fear of the regime: “Even today (on Tuesday August 23) I am unable to think of anything else; again and again I project in my head that colorful, many-meter-long banner with the working title of ‘Fear No More!’” As the demonstrators made their way down Kaprová Street, carrying their slogan high, “some people inside the buildings on either

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side closed their curtains, others opened their windows wide and waved, and still others ran outside and joined the parade.”14 Overall, fear became a central topic of discussion over the next few months in the underground press. For example, the editors of another underground journal, Prostor (Space), also expressed themselves on the subject in an article titled, “Enough of Fear,” in which they applauded the jettisoning of a “humiliating fear of the regime . . . that throws us into passivity and a feeling of powerlessness.”15 Yet the same issue of Prostor also carried the most recent installment of an ongoing series of man-on-the-street surveys. Here too, the topic was fear. Ordinary citizens walking along the streets—people of different backgrounds who did not belong to organized dissent or to the party elite—were quizzed by two interviewers about whether they felt any fear in their lives. When the question was offered in this abstract form, the respondents were hard-pressed to guess at what the interviewers meant to suggest. For example, a forty-year-old female office worker—a member of the official trade union, married and with two children—when asked if she felt fear in her life, responded that she felt fear only if she was late to work, since her boss, an otherwise pleasantly uncomplicated fellow, insisted not so much on a work ethic as on strictly upholding work hours so that he could defend himself against any possible criticism from his higher-ups. When prompted to think of another form of fear, she admitted that she had no need to fear being caught in adultery since she was clever at covering it up. When finally asked point blank about the fear of speaking her mind or else supporting those who did, she explained, “For this I am too cowardly. Moreover, I like a comfortable life and so I don’t involve myself in anything. I always stand off to the side. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but then neither do I want to be harmed.”16 Her response was not so different from that of a typical Dietl character. In the same survey, a thirty-five-year-old university-educated scriptwriter, when asked outright by the interviewers whether people were afraid of the regime, answered, “Some, those who are threatened. But there are very few of them. Those who are directly threatened, with imprisonment or such, really add up to very few. The majority don’t care, they’re the satisfied ones, and they’re not afraid.”17 A thirty-six-year-old stoker with two children, who was known for frequently speaking his mind although he had never gone as far as joining official dissent, explained that fear did not play a central role in his life either: “Where can I socially fall lower than this? Therefore, fear from some concrete form of repression is beside the point in my case. They could lock me up, that’s true. But for that I’d have to take a step into the forbidden circle, or rather into the dangerous circle.” When pushed further, he admitted that he had stepped occasionally into that dangerous circle, carrying out antiregime activities that could technically qualify him for prison. As for fear on those occasions, he admitted he had felt

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fear but that it had not been a fear of something specific: it was a fear of “certain uncertainties about the unknown. About an unfamiliar surrounding, with strangers, in a difficult-to-predict situation. Also, and not insignificantly, a fear of oneself. About how I will hold up to this test. If the positions I took on were not merely the result of me playing at being a strong man.”18 In other words, as the stoker explained, as long as one did not step into the dangerous circle, one was not ruled by fear during normalization. Ironically, while the experience of fear felt by political dissidents was not then necessarily shared by ordinary citizens, it was certainly shared by political leaders. It was in the lives of both dissidents and the party elite—although politically and socially worlds apart—that fear figured most prominently. While the dissidents genuinely had much to fear from the regime, the regime itself was perpetually ruled by fear. This most definitely was not the land of forgetting. Memories of the Prague Spring plagued the normalizers, who were as much intertwined with the complicated history of postwar Czechoslovakia as were the dissidents. As the fictional protagonist of the television serial The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman explains in an episode played out in the aftermath of the 1968 invasion, “[I]f we continue to be scared like this, we’ll never put this republic back together. That fear will reside in us.” Yet the regime was never able to put that fear aside. One dissident detailed the forms it took: “Our regime today fears everything, really everything. It is afraid of the living. . . . It is afraid of the dead and even memories of them. They fear funerals and they fear graves. They fear youth, they fear old communists. They fear nonparty members, they fear intellectuals, they fear the working class. They fear scholarship, they fear art, they fear film, theater, books, gramophone records.”19 Such fears were frequently reflected in funerals and graves. The grave of student Jan Palach, who had burned himself alive in protest against the onset of normalization, remained unmarked to avoid his being martyred by sympathetic ‘68ers. Frantisˇek Kriegel, the only politician who had refused to sign the Moscow Protocol following the Soviet invasion, was denied a memorial service when he died in late 1977. But such fears of memory reached back to the 1950s as well: neither First Secretary Klement Gottwald’s nor his wife’s ashes were picked up by family members, and the two were buried beside other prominent but discarded communists in a grave in Prague.

The Banality of Normalization The argument that fear might in fact play a much smaller role among ordinary citizens than Havel had always insisted was taken up by Czech philosopher, Petr Rezek. In his September 1989 essay “A View of Václav Havel from Below,” Rezek

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begins by pointing to Havel’s statement “that the ordinary, consumerist, panel high-rise apartment-dwelling person, who lives as he should, and unwittingly embodies the totalitarian regime’s ideal, does not end up in prison.” The prison inmate is he who “jealously stabbed his wife,” or “who fought for human rights. Both elude the ideal of the herdlike totalitarian citizen.”20 The citizen who does not end up in prison is of course the greengrocer whom Havel described so eloquently in “The Power of the Powerless” and whom he implores to live authentically, to exorcise the banalities of his everyday life constructed during normalization, and in so doing learn to live in truth. He is stymied merely by the fear that, as Havel wrote famously in an open letter to General Secretary Husák, grips the country. Rezek, however, argued that the “fear that Havel sees everywhere belongs to an earlier epoch, and not to this one that he calls post-totalitarian.”21 In Rezek’s view, the simple fact that the greengrocer places the banner in the window display does not automatically indicate “ ‘I’m scared, and that’s why I’m unreservedly servile,’ ” but rather “‘I’m not scared because I’m fulfilling my duties.’”22 If the greengrocer had not put the banner in the window, that would tell us a lot, but his putting it in the window in fact tells us nothing, says Rezek.23 Taking as an example the commonplace request that one attend a Communist Party parade or meeting (which required merely one’s bodily presence, and in fact where anything more was strongly discouraged), what runs through a late communist citizen’s mind, writes Rezek, are “worries, rather than fear, that he will have to explain his absence, maybe even lie, and so he’d rather go to the meeting, just for the peace and quiet.”24 For Rezek, it is the maintenance of one’s quiet life (klid ) that drives the ordinary citizen. Rezek additionally suspected that it was really the greengrocer’s “hobbies, his weekend cottage colony, and his television, with all of their banality and kitsch,” rather than the debate over the window banner, that formed Havel’s definition of inauthenticity, of living a lie.25 Rezek goes further still: “Were we to employ Havel’s criteria for authenticity and were we to try to redo things based on his diagnosis, we would have to wheel the majority of citizens away from the television and other banalities.”26 Rezek finds this proposition entirely unrealistic and, moreover, offensive to the greengrocer’s dignity, for the greengrocer (“the ordinary, consumerist, panel high-rise apartment-dwelling person”) was not entirely blind to any of this.

Havel’s and Dietl’s Greengrocers It is Václav Havel’s distaste for the greengrocer and Jaroslav Dietl’s talent for providing that greengrocer with mass appeal that makes up the culture of

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normalization. It is this juxtaposition, and the anxieties it elicits, that defines post-1968 communism. The greengrocer was normalization’s ordinary citizen, to whom the regime offered not so much capitalist-style consumerism as the means to pursue a more qualitative socialist lifestyle. This lifestyle, on which the regime and its citizens in part colluded, began as a plea for the quiet life in the aftermath of the invasion, promoted the idea of privatized citizenship, and made the family its launching pad. In the process, women were called on to bring their domestic skills to bear on both the public and private realms, making women central to the communist project in a way that was new and further bolstered by ordinary citizens’ own investments in the private sphere as the site of late communist citizenship. Moreover, faced with unmatchable capitalist consumption levels across the Iron Curtain, the regime offered up the socialist way of life and lauded its superiority for reinforcing self-realization in the late twentieth century. Husák’s government was fully willing to perpetuate these cornerstones of normalization even as the social and economic fallout came into view. What mattered most was that the Prague Spring had made public life an eternally inflammatory space. The normalizers, even as they continued to mount impressive May Day parades, cleared the public sphere of any genuine political meaning. Public space was domesticated, privatized. In turn, the family, large and small, real and symbolic, became central to public life. Official culture ceased to promote a nation of eager, publicly active communists; rather, it sought to create a nation of private persons joined in their mutual quest for the good life, which, the regime insisted, could best be had under communism. In this new post-1968 era of privatized citizenship, being public and political was out of fashion from the point of view of both the regime and its citizens. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, previously public critiques of communism were rearticulated and resolved as private concerns among a national community of individual private citizens; it was the conservative vision of a deeply conservative communist regime that had “convinced a citizenry that the core context of politics should be the sphere of private life.”27 This was also Dietl’s ultimate vision, for better or worse. His brilliance lay in his ability to portray “living within the lie” and to make it seem intimate, appealing, and, most important, shared. PHA, the man from within the official structures who felt compelled to add something to the dissidents’ debate following Dietl’s death, insisted, “We are all one television family, joined together by Jaroslav Dietl. The unity of the Party and of the people found in Jaroslav Dietl its creator.”28 Fear, then, as Rezek rightly argued, was not tantamount to the ordinary experience. But the lack of fear did not automatically consign the greengrocer to blissful ignorance either. In the man-on-the-street samizdat survey conducted on the subject of fear in January 1989, a thirty-one-year-old, high school-educated

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man working as a guard was asked whether he sensed that people possessed a substantial fear of the regime. He answered most perceptively: “If we demythologize this ‘regime,’ we’ll find no one there but ourselves. Knowing this is what is so disquieting.”29 If not fear then for those who avoided “dangerous circles,” there was nevertheless a disquiet, an unease, a repressed knowledge that, like actors in a Dietl serial, they too played a role in late communism.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. According to Zdeneˇk Mlynárˇ, who came across this information in official documents while working in the procurator general’s office in the 1960s. See Zdeneˇk Mlynárˇ, Nightfrost in Prague: The End of Humane Socialism, trans. Paul Wilson (New York, 1980), 66. 2. Some readers might find a paradox here: on the one hand, this project is a conscious rethinking of cold war assumptions about late communism in East Central Europe; on the other hand, I use the term “communism”—a descriptor sometimes considered too ideologically loaded. Like most historians of the post-1989 generation, I share Barbara Falk’s hand-wringing over terminology outlined in the introduction to her book The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe. Citizen Intellectuals and Philosopher Kings (Budapest, 2003). While Falk settles on “authoritarian communism,” I decided to keep “communism” to describe the political system in Czechoslovakia and other Eastern Bloc countries from 1948 to 1989. After all, it was the Czechoslovak Communist Party. I would also argue, like Andrew Roberts, that to use the word “socialism” to describe Czechoslovakia’s political system (as opposed to its social system) would be to do a disservice to Western European socialisms and socialists during the same period. For more on this, see Andrew Roberts, “The State of Socialism: A Note on Terminology,” Slavic Review 63, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 349–66. 3. H. Gordon Skilling, Charter 77 and Human Rights in Czechoslovakia (Boston, 1981). 4. Vladimir Kusin, From Dubcˇek to Charter 77: A Study of “Normalisation” in Czechoslovakia, 1968–1978 (New York, 1978). 5. Vladimir Tismaneanu, Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (New York, 1992), 115. 6. Timothy Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity (Cambridge, 1989), 174. 7. Ibid., 244. 8. Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton, 2002). 9. Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power (University Park, PA, 1994). 10. “Nenechat to svý vedení ve štychu . . . ,” Magazín Dnes, 8 August 2002, 27. 11. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism (Oxford, 2000), and Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley, 1997). Also see David Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca, 2003); Jukka Gronow, Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia (Oxford, 2003); and Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, 2001). 12. Václav Havel, “Moc bezmocných,” in O lidskou identitu. Úvahy, fejetony, protesty, polemiky, prohlášení a rozhovory z let 1969–1979, ed. Vilém Precˇan and Alexander Tomský (London, 1984), 64. Also see the English translation in Václav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane (New York, 1990), 31.

209

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NOTES TO PAGES 7–18

13. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC, 1997), 5. 14. Jirˇina Šiklová, “The ‘Gray Zone’ and the Future of Dissent in Czechoslovakia,” Social Research 57, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 347–63. 15. “De mortuis nihil nisi bene . . .?” Obsah, no. 6 (1986): 2. 16. Radio Free Europe Situation Report: Czechoslovakia/10, 14 March 1973, 10. This number was calculated according to the number of television licenses purchased in the country. 17. Roger Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life (New York, 1994), 161. 18. Vladimír Macura, Štastný Veˇk: Symboly, Emblémy a Mýty 1948–1989 (Prague, 1992), 7. CHAPTER 1

1. Heda Margolius Kovály, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968, trans. Franci Epstein and Helen Epstein with the author (New York, 1997), 167. 2. Ibid., 172. 3. Ibid., 174. 4. Ibid., 176. 5. All translations in this book are those of the author unless noted otherwise. Divadelní hra J. Dietla, “Slecˇna pro Jeho Exelenci [sic], soudruzi” (22. schu˚ze vedení ideologické komise dne 7. prosince 1964), NACˇR (National Archive of the Czech Republic, Prague), ÚV KSCˇ (Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party); f. 10/5, sv. 14, aj. 57, bod 1a. All the following quotations from the play are taken from the copy found in the archives of the Central Committee. 6. Z. A. B. Zeman, Prague Spring: A Report on Czechoslovakia 1968 (Baltimore, 1969), 12. 7. “IV. Sjezd Cˇeskoslovenských spisovatelu˚ : Historická událost,” Sveˇdectví (Paris) 8, no. 32 (Fall 1967): 530. Ludvík Vaculík’s speech has also been translated into English: “Document No. 1: Proceedings of the 4th Czechoslovak Writers’ Congress, June 27–29, 1967, and a Follow-up Resolution by the CPCz CC Plenum, September 1967 (Excerpts),” in The Prague Spring 1968: A National Security Archive Documents Reader, ed. Jaromír Navrátil et al., trans. Mark Kramer, Joy Moss, and Ruth Tosek (Budapest, 1998). 8. Z. A. B. Zeman wittily noted of Novotný, “It was too much for the Czechs. They had to suffer personality cult without the personality.” Prague Spring, 22. 9. Pavel Tigrid, a Czech 1948 émigré living in Paris and the publisher of the influential émigré journal Sveˇdectví, was put on trial in absentia. His friend and assistant, a young writer named Jan Beneš still living in Czechoslovakia, was convicted. 10. Frank L. Kaplan, Winter into Spring: The Czechoslovak Press and the Reform Movement 1963–1968 (New York, 1977), 29. 11. Years later, the communist press would recall Ginsberg’s visit with bitterness: “A few years ago Prague was personally visited by Ginsberg, the great hippie and American homosexual poet. . . . His visit and peculiar appearance at that time were the subject of eulogies in several Prague periodicals of that day” Smena, 28 January 1972, OSA (Open Society Archives, Budapest) (translation by Radio Free Europe [RFE]). For more on the effects of Western popular culture in postwar Czechoslovakia, see Paulina Bren, “Looking West: Popular Culture and the Generation Gap in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1969– 1989,” in Representations and Cultural Exchanges across the Atlantic: Europe and the United States 1800–2000, ed. Luisa Passerini (Brussels, 2000). 12. Zeman, Prague Spring, 76. 13. Tad Szulc, Czechoslovakia since World War II (New York, 1971), 194.

NOTES TO PAGES 18–24

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14. Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York, 1996), 25. 15. Alan Levy, So Many Heroes (Sagaponack, NY, 1980), 66. 16. Régis Debray, quoted in Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias, 35. 17. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York, 2005), 410. 18. Problematika soucˇasné mladé generace (Materials for the seventeenth meeting of the Central Committee’s Ideological Commission) 7 October 1965, 1–7, NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/5, sv. 6, aj. 23. 19. Gerd-Rainer Horn, “The Changing Nature of the European Working Class,” in 1968: The World Transformed, ed. Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker (Cambridge, 1998), 357. 20. Jirˇí Hanák, “O mostu inteligence,” Student, 27 March 1968, 1. 21. “Podveˇdomý pocit strachu hru˚zy nelidkosti” (interview with Pavel Dvorˇák), Student, 3 April 1968, 3. 22. Judt, Postwar, 412. 23. Fink, Gassert, and Junker, introduction, 12. 24. Quoted in Jarmila Cysarˇová, Cˇeská televizní publicistika: Sveˇdectví šedesátých let (ÚSD Publication) (Prague, 1993), 42. 25. Ibid., 102. 26. Ibid. The tramping movement consisted of youth who spent their free time in the Czech countryside, carrying only knapsacks and sleeping in the open air. For more on the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s uncomfortable relationship with the independent Czech tramping movement, particularly after the Prague Spring, see Paulina Bren, “Weekend Get-Aways: The Tramp, the Chata, and the Politics of Private Life after the Prague Spring,” in Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, ed. David Crowley and Susan Reid (New York, 2002). 27. Brezhnev was probably more supportive of Novotný than this remark might suggest, but his meetings with other Czechoslovak Party leaders led him to recognize Novotný’s lack of popularity. “Document No. 3: Remarks by Leonid Brezhnev at a Meeting of Top CPCz Officials in Prague, December 9, 1967 (Excerpts),” in Navrátil et al., Prague Spring 1968, 18–19. 28. Zasedání ÚV KSCˇ 3.-5.1.1968, A ÚSD (Archive of the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague), ÚV KSCˇ, f. 01. 29. Quoted in Jan Moravec, “Cˇeskoslovenská krize—Rok 1967,” in Cˇeskoslovensko roku 1968: 1. Díl: Obrodný proces, ed. Václav Kural (Prague, 1993), 24. 30. Censorship was formally abolished at the meeting of the National Assembly on June 25–26, 1968. For more details, see “Informace v podmínkách totality a revolty,” Sveˇdectví (Paris) 11, no. 42 (1971). 31. Quoted in Levy, So Many Heroes, 60. 32. Josef Maxa, A Year Is Eight Months, by Journalist M (New York, 1970), 51. 33. Levy, So Many Heroes, 67. 34. Quoted in Emanuel Pecka, “Chapter 14: Political Culture in the Czech Republic,” in Political Culture in East Central Europe, ed. Fritz Plasser and Andreas Pribersky (Brookfield, VT, 1996), 207. 35. Cysarˇová, Cˇeská televizní publicistika, 108. 36. Zeman, Prague Spring, 19. 37. Ibid., 24. 38. Quoted in Kaplan, Winter into Spring, 109. 39. Quoted ibid. 122. 40. Cysarˇová, Cˇeská televizní publicistika, 109. 41. Ibid., 109.

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NOTES TO PAGES 25–31

42. Quoted ibid., 109. 43. Levy, So Many Heroes, 61. 44. Kieran Williams, The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics 1968– 1970 (Cambridge, 1997), 73. 45. “Document No. 25: ‘Proposal for a Number of Major Political Measures to Facilitate the Process of Mutual Understanding in Relations with the USSR,’ by Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Jirˇí Hájek, April 17, 1968 (Excerpts)” in Navrátil, Prague Spring 1968, 106. 46. According to surveys carried out by the newly reestablished Institute of Public Opinion, in June and July 1968, 86 percent of respondents were in favor of continuing with socialism while only 5 percent preferred capitalism. See Pecka, “Chapter 14,” 206. 47. As told in Williams, Prague Spring, 75–76. 48. Judt, Postwar, 401. 49. Kristin Ross, May ‘68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago, 2002), 206–7. 50. Milan Hauner, “Rudý Rudi v Praze,” Student, 24 April 1968, 1. 51. Ibid., 4. 52. Milan Hauner, “Rudi Dutschke v rekonvalescenci,” Student, 19 June 1968, 4. The students noted that Dutschke was “literally brimming with energy, burning with curiosity, and one could in no way tell that he was having difficulties with his memory or searching for words as the result of a dangerous injury to the brain.” 53. For more on the transnational aspects of the 1968 Czech student movement and the students’ efforts (and failures) to link up with fellow activists of both East and West, see Paulina Bren, “1968 East and West: Visions of Political Change and Student Protest from across the Iron Curtain,” in Transnational Moments of Change: Europe 1945, 1968, 1989, ed. Gerd-Rainer Horn and Padraic Kenney (New York, 2004). 54. Levy, So Many Heroes, 234. 55. Ibid., 224. 56. Ibid., 232. 57. Jirˇí Pelikán, introduction to The Secret Vysocˇany Congress: Proceedings and Documents of the Extraordinary Fourteenth Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, 22 August 1968, ed. Jirˇí Pelikán (New York, 1972), 3. 58. Zuzka Rohanovi and Bedrˇich Rohanovi, Byli jsme prˇi tom: Cˇeští novinárˇi a publicisté vzpomínají na události let 1968–1969, dobu, kterou celý sveˇt znal jako Pražské jaro (Prague, 1993), 70–71. 59. As told in Vladimír Škutina, “The Russians are (Really) Coming,” in The Prague Spring: A Mixed Legacy, ed. Jiri Pehe (New York, 1988), 75. 60. Rohanovi and Rohanovi, Byli jsme prˇi tom, 71–72. 61. Quoted in Levy, So Many Heroes, 295. 62. Quoted in Harry Schwartz, Prague’s 200 Days: The Struggle for Democracy in Czechoslovakia (New York, 1969), 246. 63. Other censorship was more overt. In June 1972, the following directive went out to libraries in the Czech Republic: “In all libraries . . . it is necessary to carry out a screening of the library collection and to eliminate all printed matter with an antistate and politically incorrect ideological content. . . .” Dušan Tomášek, Pozor, Cenzurováno! Aneb ze života soudružky cenzury (Prague, 1994), 154. 64. Ludvík Vaculík, “Chvála cenzury pro ‘Index on Censorship‚’” Obsah, May 1988, 3– 4. 65. Milan Kundera, “Cˇeský údeˇl” in O lidskou identitu, by Václav Havel (Prague, 1990), 191–92. 66. Václav Havel, “Cˇeský údeˇl?” in O lidskou identitu, 195–96.

NOTES TO PAGES 31–38

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67. Ernest Gellner, review of The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring, by Vladimir Kusin, British Journal of Sociology 23, no. 2 (June 1972): 260. 68. Jan Pauer, “Czechoslovakia,” in 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977, ed. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (New York, 2008), 172. 69. Quoted in Ivan Sviták, The Czechoslovak Experiment 1968–1969 (New York, 1971), 233. 70. “Vysílání o prˇípadu J. Palacha od 16. do 25.1.1969,” in Eva Ješutová and Jaroslava Nováková, Normalizace v Cˇeskoslovenském rozhlasu (ÚSD Publication) (Prague, 1998), 121. Unfortunately, there were two other victims of the cause: student Jan Zajíc and worker Evžen Plocek. 71. Zpráva celozávodního výboru KSCˇ o cˇinnosti stranické organizace CˇT Praha za období 1968–1969, January 1970, 10, CˇT APF (Czech Television’s Archive of Written Materials), f. VE 1, a.j. 1407. 72. Quoted in Williams, Prague Spring, 197. 73. Ibid., 253. 74. Jirˇí Pernes, Takoví nám vládli. Komunisticˇtí prezidenti Cˇeskoslovenska a doba, v níž žili (Prague, 2003), 289. 75. Václav Havel, “Letter to Alexander Dubcˇek,” in Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965–1990, ed. and trans. Paul Wilson (New York, 1991), 43. 76. Quoted in Jirˇí Kocian, Jirˇí Pernes, Oldrˇich Tu˚ma et al., Cˇeské pru˚švihy aneb Prohry, krize, skandály a aféry cˇeských deˇjin let 1848–1989 (Brno, 2004), 314. 77. Ibid., 324. 78. Quoted in Pernes, Takoví nám vládli, 285. 79. Ibid., 291. CHAPTER 2

1. Quoted in Jirˇí Pernes, Takoví nám vládli. Komunisticˇtí prezidenti Cˇeskoslovenska a doba, v níž žili (Prague, 2003), 290. 2. According to Kieran Williams, the purge was the Czechs’ and Slovaks’ own idea and not the result of Soviet pressure. He sees proof of this in how systematic the purge actually was, suggesting that it was both devised and controlled domestically. Kieran Williams, The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics, 1968–1970 (Cambridge, 1997), 227. On the other hand, according to Jirˇí Manˇák, in May 1969, a few weeks after taking power, Husák still continued to say no to a purge. The decision to carry out a cleansing was accepted by Husák’s moderate government faction only after pressure from hard-liners such as Bil’ak and Indra and from Soviet advisers such as Kosygin. Jirˇí Manˇák, Cˇistky v Komunistické straneˇ Cˇeskoslovenska 1969–1970 (ÚSD Publication) (Prague, 1997), 28. 3. Manˇák, Cˇistky, 37 n. 62. 4. Záznam pro 2. schu˚ zi ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, “Prˇíloha: Plneˇní realizacˇní smeˇrnice v oblasti tisku, rozhlasu a televize,” 17 June 1970, NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2, bod 0. 5. Quoted in Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2001), 27. 6. Ibid., 27. 7. Ibid., 125–26. 8. Zvi Gitelman, “The Politics of Socialist Restoration in Hungary and Czechoslovakia,” Comparative Politics 13, no. 2 (January 1981): 189. 9. Quoted in Frank L. Kaplan, Winter into Spring: The Czechoslovak Press and the Reform Movement 1963–1968 (New York, 1977), 105. 10. Alexandr Kramer, “Letter to the Editor,” Student, 27 March 1968, 2.

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NOTES TO PAGES 38–44

11. “Informace v podmínkách totality a revolty,” Sveˇdectví (Paris) 11, no. 42 (1971): 206. 12. After the 1971 party congress, the title of the Czechoslovak communist leader was changed from “first secretary” to the Soviet-like “general secretary.” 13. In 1974, when President Ludvík Svoboda stepped down, Husák took over that position as well. This meant that for the first and only time the party apparatus and the state apparatus were in the same hands. Nevertheless, as of 1969, Husák had ensured that power essentially rested with the party apparatus, and thus this coming together of party and state resulted in little significant change. But it does mean that in the case of Czechoslovakia and late communism, one can speak of the party and the state fairly interchangeably. 14. Milan Churanˇ et al., Kdo byl kdo v našich deˇjinách ve 20. století (Prague, 1998), 49. 15. Zasedání ústrˇedního výboru KSCˇ ve dnech 28. brˇezna a 1.-5. dubna 1968. Cˇást II. Stenografický zápis: 21, NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 01, a.j. 121, reprinted in Jitka Vondrová, Jaromír Navrátil, and Jan Moravec, Komunistická strana Cˇeskoslovenska: Pokus o reformu (rˇíjen 1967–kveˇten 1968) (Brno, 1999), 301–2. 16. In 1991, Bil’ak published his memoirs, in which he continued to deny having signed the “invitation letter” for the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion despite evidence to the contrary. An unyielding communist, he also continued to argue into the late 1990s that the communists should have staged an armed defense in November 1989; the only problem, he complained, was that no one had had the courage to do so. Minutes from the very last meeting of the Central Committee show that he was among those who did not have the courage. Churanˇ, Kdo byl kdo, 49. 17. “Projev Vasila Bil’aka na zárˇijovém (1969) plenu ÚV KSCˇ,” Sveˇdectví (Paris) 10, no. 38 (1970): 281. 18. Vladimir Kusin, From Dubcˇek to Charter 77: A Study of ‘Normalisation’ in Czechoslovakia, 1968–1978 (New York, 1978), 142. 19. Quoted ibid., 296. 20. Zpráva o plneˇní Realizacˇ ní smeˇrnice a další úkoly ideologické cˇ innosti strany, projednané na 2. schu˚ zi ideologické komise; “Plneˇní realizacˇ ní smeˇrnice v oblasti tisku, rozhlasu a televize,” 17 June 1970, (Bil’ak), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2. 21. Ibid. 22. OSA, Budapest: Radio Free Europe; Czechoslovakia; Biographies; “Jan Fojtík.” The name of the person who provided this information is not listed, but his description of Fojtík reads as well informed rather than malicious. According to this unnamed source, since Švestka was unsure in which direction the political winds were blowing, he had Fojtík prepare two different speeches for the pivotal December 1967 and January 1968 Central Committee meetings: one speech was “neutral” while the other was slightly critical of First Secretary Novotný. They both proudly boasted about this clever trick in the editorial offices of Rudé právo. 23. As this unnamed coworker further added, Fojtík was clever professionally and personally: he had married into a “well-situated” family, to a woman older than he and neither intelligent nor good-looking. But with his wife came a large villa in Prague. 24. G. Wightman and A. H. Brown, “Changes in the Levels of Membership and Social Composition of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, 1945–73,” Soviet Studies 27, no. 3 (July 1975): 398. 25. Záveˇry prˇedsednictva ÚV KSCˇ ze dne 14. dubna 1970 k dalšímu postupu ve výmeˇneˇ stranických legitimací; “Prˇílohy: Postup prˇi výmeˇneˇ cˇlenských legitimací v základních organizacích silneˇ zasažených pravicovým oportunismem,” 14 April 1970, NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ , f. prˇedsednictvo, a.j. 199. The numbers are from Hans Renner, A History of Czechoslovakia since 1945 (New York, 1989), 98.

NOTES TO PAGES 44–47

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26. Renner, History of Czechoslovakia, 98. 27. Manˇák, Cˇistky v Komunistické straneˇ Cˇeskoslovenska, 25. 28. Schu˚ze PÚV KSCˇ, 6 November 1970, NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 02/1, sv. 143, a.j. 221. 29. Gil Eyal, The Origins of Postcommunist Elites: From Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslovakia (Minneapolis, 2003), xx. 30. Quoted in Renner, History of Czechoslovakia, 101. 31. Radio Free Europe Situation Report: Czechoslovakia/38, 19 December 1979 (the anonymous report was published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). 32. Záznam pro 2. schu˚zi ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 17 June 1970, NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2, bod 0. 33. Recent statistics on the number of party members affected by the purge are quite similar. According to Kieran Williams, 78.3 percent of party members were permitted to retain their membership, 16.9 percent had their membership canceled, and only 4.8 percent were officially expelled from the party. Prague Spring and Its Aftermath, 234. Milan Otáhal bases his statistics on J. Belda’s “Konecˇná fáze obrodného procesu” in Cˇeskoslovensko roku 1968, 2. díl, 99: “On average, as a result of these interviews, a membership card was not handed out to 326,817 members, that is, 21.6 percent of all members; 67,147 were expelled, that is, 4.45 percent; and membership was canceled for 259,670 members, that is, 17.22 percent.” Opozice, Moc, Spolecˇnost 1969–1989: Prˇíspeˇvek k deˇjinám “normalizace” (Prague, 1994), 19 n. 2. Jirˇí Pernes states that 67,000 party members were expelled, 259,000 were not renewed, and 147,000 left of their own accord. Takoví nám vládli, 294. 34. Zpráva celozávodního výboru KSCˇ o cˇinnosti stranické organizace CˇT Praha za období 1968–1969, January 1970, 4, CˇT APF, f. VE 1, a.j. 1407. 35. Ibid., 6. 36. Ibid., 7. 37. Quoted in Jarmila Cysarˇová, Televize a totalitní moc 1969–1975 (ÚSD Publication) (Prague, 1998), 3. Similarly, Minister of Culture Bru˚žek was quoted in an interview in Sveˇt v obrazech, 9 December 1969, as saying that the artists’ unions “harbor naïve ideas about the Messianic role of the intellectuals in society and it is from these ideas that their political attitudes stem.” 38. “Materiály ze spolecˇného zasedání ústrˇedních výboru˚ tvu˚rcˇích svazu˚ veˇdeckých pracovníku˚ a cˇeského svazu umeˇní a kultury, v Praze dne 22. kveˇtna 1969,” Sveˇdectví (Paris) 10, no. 37 (1969): 145– 46 (speech by Jirˇí Krejcˇí). 39. Zpráva o stavu a perspektivách Cˇ eskoslovenské televize: “Situace po nástupu nového vedení Cˇs. televize,” 1970 (?), CˇT APF, f. VE 2, improperly filed—no item number. Here Zelenka listed journalists Kamil Winter, Prˇemysl Janýr, Ivan Cikl, and František Müller. 40. Zelenka related this information at a 1970 Ideological Commission meeting. Zpráva o plneˇní Realizacˇ ní smeˇrnice a další úkoly ideologické cˇ innosti strany, projednané na 2. schu˚ zi ideologické komise, 17 June 1970 (Zelenka), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2. 41. Rozhodnutí ústrˇedního rˇeditele o dokoncˇení politické proveˇrky v Cˇeskoslovenské televizi, 2 September 1970, CˇT APF, unfiled. 42. Jarmila Cysarˇová, Cˇeská televizní publicistika: Sveˇdectví šedesátých let (ÚSD Publication) (Prague, 1993), 111. 43. Rozhodnutí ústrˇedního rˇeditele (see fn. 41); “Prˇíloha: Dotazník.” 44. In December 1970, when Czechoslovak Television was ready to report on its 1970 screenings, it claimed that in the Prague headquarters a total of 475 party members had been screened (75 others had already abandoned their membership voluntarily or else had emigrated out of the country). Of these, only 43.9 percent had managed to retain their party membership. Záveˇrecˇ ná zpráva rˇídící komise o prúbeˇhu a výsledcích pohovoru˚

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NOTES TO PAGES 48–52

k výmeˇneˇ stranických legitimací v Cˇ s. televizi, 7 December 1970, NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. sekretariát, sv. 59, a.j. 106. 45. Záznam pro 2. schu˚zi ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 17 June 1970, (Hrbek) NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2, bod 0. 46. “Vyjádrˇení pro ústrˇedního rˇeditele CˇST, s. Dr Jana Zelenku” (written by M. Kocíková, based on information provided by Hlavní redakce publicistiky a dokumentaristiky), 1973 (exact date of document not given), CˇT APF, Zelenka koresp. 1972, k. 107, ev.j. 737. 47. Quoted in Radio Free Europe Situation Report: Czechoslovakia/13, “1. Cadre Screenings Announced,” 4 April 1973. 48. Five years later, in 1975, Oldrˇich Švestka, a powerful member of the Central Committee, was still rubber-stamping ongoing party membership cancellations and expulsions of Czechoslovak Television employees. See letter from Oldrˇich Švestka at the ÚV KSCˇ to Jan Zelenka at Cˇ s. Television, 19 August 1975, Cˇ T APF, VE 2 f., k. 117, ev. 794. 49. Milan Šimecˇka, The Restoration of Order: The Normalization of Czechoslovakia 1969–1976, trans. A. G. Brian (New York, 1984), 61. 50. Ibid. 51. Letter from František Kyzlík, vedoucí ideol. oddeˇlení, Strˇedocˇeský krajský výbor Komunistické strany Cˇeskoslovenska to Jan Zelenka, rˇeditel, CˇsT on 28 February 1972; copy of statement by the accused director of the television survey, O. Cˇicˇatka (date not visible); copy of statement by Cˇicˇatka’s supervisor, Pachovský, 6 April 1972; final response from Jan Zelenka to František Kyzlík, 31 May 1972, CˇT APF, Zelenka koresp. 1972, k. 107, ev.j. 737: This citation is also valid for the following quotes regarding this inquiry. 52. Záznam pro 2. schu˚zi ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ: “Prˇíloha: Plneˇní realizacˇní smeˇrnice v oblasti tisku, rozhlasu a televize: Cˇeskoslovenská televise,” 17 June 1970, NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2, bod 0. 53. Zpráva o plneˇní Realizacˇ ní smeˇrnice a další úkoly ideologické cˇ innosti strany, projednané na 2. schu˚ zi ideologické komise, 17 June 1970 (Zelenka). NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2. 54. Letter from Libuše Heralová to Minister of Culture Miloslav Bru˚ žek, 10 March 1971, CˇT APF, Zelenka koresp. 1971, k. 107, ev.j. 736. 55. Hodnocení porˇadu HRZP za IV. cˇtvrtletí 1969, 1, CˇT APF, red. f., k. 290, ev.j. 2154. 56. Hodnocení programu˚ vysílaných v meˇsíci cˇervnu 1970, 2, CˇT APF, red. f., k. 290, ev.j. 2156. Although the report does reveal the name of the fellow actor with whom Hornícˇek had this conversation, I am omitting it since it remains unclear whether he divulged the conversation to the authorities. 57. The official term used was neangažovanost—meaning, literally, disengagement or a lack of engagement. 58. Letter from Jan Zelenka to Oldrˇich Švestka, ÚV KSCˇ, 10 June 1974, with letter from Miroslav Hornícˇek to Jan Zelenka as attachment, CˇT APF, Zelenka koresp., VE 2 f., k. 108, ev.j. 739. 59. Peter Novick, The Resistance versus Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France (New York, 1968), 80. 60. Quoted ibid., 82. 61. Herbert R. Lottman, The Purge (New York, 1986), 222. 62. Zápis z 2. schu˚ze ideologické komise, 17 June 1970 (Fojtík), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2. 63. For more on cadre politics, see Vladimíra Hradecká and František Koudelka, Kádrová politika a nomenklatura KSCˇ 1969–1974 (ÚSD Publication)(Prague, 1998). 64. Gitelman, “Politics of Socialist Restoration,” 198.

NOTES TO PAGES 52–57

217

65. Correspondence between Jan Volák and Jan Zelenka, 22 October, 1 November, and 20 November 1974, CˇT APF, VE 2 f., k. 114, ev.j. 782. 66. Rudé právo, 11 January 1975. 67. Záznam pro 2. schu˚zi ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 17 June 1970 (Choleva), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2, bod 0. 68. Renner, History of Czechoslovakia, 110. 69. Quoted in Gitelman, “Politics of Socialist Restoration,” 195. 70. Milan Otáhal, Alena Nosková, and Karel Bomoský, introduction to Sveˇdectví o duchovním útlaku 1969–1970 (Prague, 1993), 17. 71. Ibid. 72. 2. schu˚ze ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ: “Prˇíloha: Zpráva o plneˇní Realizacˇní smeˇrnice a další úkoly ideologické cˇinnosti strany, projednané na 2. schu˚zi ideologické komise,” 17 June 1970, NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2. 73. Rudé právo, 11 September 1970. 74. Záznam pro 3. schu˚zi ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 19 October 1970 (Bil’ak), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 3, bod 0. 75. Some of the first trials were against a group of activists that included the dissident Šabata family in Brno as well the Prague student movement leader Jirˇí Müller, who had passed out flyers to remind people that they had a legal right not to vote in the elections. The regime, of course, wanted the elections to be a convincing manifestation of support for normalization and so ordered everyone to vote. See Jirˇí Vancˇura, “Obcˇan a totalitní stát,” in Procˇ jsme v listopadu vyšli do ulic, ed. Jirˇí Vancˇura (Brno, 1999), 88. 76. Quoted in the Radio Free Europe Background Report: Czechoslovakia/1, “The Cultural Scene in Czechoslovakia: Stirrings of Dissent Behind a Rigid Façade,” 14 January 1974. 77. Jirˇí Hájek, “Bublina co praskla,” Tvorba, 7 February 1973. 78. Czechoslovak Press Agency (CTK), 16 November 1972. 79. Radio Free Europe Background Report: Czechoslovakia/23, “Bilak Speech Reveals Internal Party Differences in the CPCS,” 16 November 1972. 80. Quoted in Otáhal, Nosková, and Bomoský, introduction, 16–17. 81. Záznam pro 2. schu˚zi ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ: “Prˇíloha: Plneˇní realizacˇní smeˇrnice v oblasti tisku, rozhlasu a televize/ Všeobecná charakteristika vývoje v oblasti tisku, rozhlasu a televize,” 17 June 1970, NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2, bod 0. Although it did not name it directly, the June 1970 report was referring to a campaign of recantation put together by journalists themselves called “A Word to Our Own Ranks” (Slova do vlastních rˇad), in which they confessed their shared responsibility in the events of the year before. 82. Pavel Jurácˇek, “Deník,” Iluminace: Cˇasopis pro teorii, historii a estetiku filmu 9, no. 1 (1997): 42 (diary entry for 16 March 1970). 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., 46 (diary entry for 26 June 1970). 85. Šimecˇka, Restoration of Order, 61. 86. Hand-delivered letter from secret police agent Vlastimil Cibulka to Jan Zelenka, 10 August 1971, CˇT APF, Zelenka koresp. 1971, k. 107, ev.j. 736. 87. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York, 1980), 181. 88. Rádio Hveˇzda, 12 February 1972, 1505 hours (“Mikroforum”), OSA. 89. Quoted in the Radio Free Europe Situation Report: Czechoslovakia/30, “The Politics of the Czechoslovak Elections,” 22 November 1971. One of these mistakes was presumably to have permitted too many films from the West to be shown in Czechoslovakia’s cinemas. In a 1972 meeting of the Ideological Commission, Polednˇák’s normalization

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successor, Jirˇí Purš, argued that the growth of antisocialist sentiment in the second half of the 1960s coincided with the rise of films from the West, a trend that began in 1956 and was particularly evident by 1963–64. Záznam z porady ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 8 June 1972 (Purš), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2, bod 0. 90. In 1976, Jirˇí Hájek (not to be confused with the former foreign minister and later Charter 77 member), the editor in chief of Tvorba, the more liberal party cultural weekly, was replaced after he permitted the publication of a short story called “Exile.” “Exile” told the story of a physician who was expelled from the party and consequently lost his job. He pretended that his dismissal was due to a professional and not a political error, even though his daughter was no longer permitted to study medicine and now worked as a salesgirl. Unable to pretend any longer, he finally committed suicide. Although there was much speculation, it was never entirely clear why the otherwise savvy communist Hájek allowed such a realistic and altogether morbid tale about the personal consequences of the purge to appear on the pages of Tvorba. Radio Free Europe Situation Report: Czechoslovakia/23, 2 August 1979. 91. Rádio Praha, 17 August 1973, 1700 hours, OSA. 92. “Rozhovor s Bohumilem Hrabalem,” Tvorba, 8 January 1975. 93. Jurácˇek, “Deník,” 43 (diary entry for 16 March 1970). 94. “Studenti spoluobcˇanu˚m,” Student, 14 March 1968, 2. 95. Jaroslav Cuhra, Trestní represe odpu˚ rcu˚ režimu v letech 1969–1972 (Prague, 1997), 75. Interestingly, the most obvious “counterrevolutionaries”—e.g., members of the 1968 organizations K231 (Association of Former Political Prisoners) and KAN (Association of Independent Nonparty Members), and reformist politicians from the 1968 Prague Spring government—were largely bypassed during the selection of state enemies to be put on trial. Some of this might have had to do with their visibility in the West and the outcry their arrests and trials might have elicited abroad. As Cuhra writes, while there is little information to be found about the effects of public opinion and Western reproach, there is speculation that the preparation of trials against the signatories of the protest document known as “Ten Points” (Deset Bodu˚ ) was halted because of these pressures. This fear might also have played a role in the positive response to a private letter sent by the signatories of Ten Points—among them Václav Havel, Karel Kyncl, Ludvík Vaculík—to General Secretary Husák pleading for the release of one of their colleagues based on his precarious physical and mental condition in prison. This fellow signatory was released shortly after. (Name of the dissident not cited at the request of the archive.) Private letter to Husák from Václav Havel et al., 4 June 1970, NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. G. Husák koresp. 1970s. 96. Otáhal, Opozice, Moc, Spolecˇnost 1969–1989, 19 and 28. For more on the trials in English, see Jiri Pelikan, Socialist Opposition in Eastern Europe: The Czechoslovak Example, trans. Marian Sling, V. Tosek, and R. Tosek (London, 1976), 61–69. 97. Tony Judt, “Justice as Theatre,” Times Literary Supplement, 18 January 1991. 98. Manˇák, Cˇistky v Komunistické straneˇ Cˇeskoslovenska, 79. 99. Renner, History of Czechoslovakia, 98. 100. Ibid., 100. 101. Ibid., 112. 102. Kundera, Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 158–59. CHAPTER 3

1. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Aaron Asher (New York, 1999), 4. 2. IV. Sjezd Svazu cˇeskoslovenských spisovatelu˚ (Protokol), Praha 27.-29.6.1967 (Prague, 1968), 23–26.

NOTES TO PAGES 61–67

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3. Dušan Tomášek, Pozor, Cenzurováno! aneb ze života soudružky cenzury (Prague, 1994), 155. The publishing house in question here was Magnet. As Tomášek also notes, it was common practice to omit the name of the actual party organ from which such orders originated. 4. As related to the author by Dr. Gustav Erhart at the Czech Television Archives on 9 October 1998. The two employees who were in charge of this absurd operation were archival department employees Gustav Erhart, an art historian by training, and Vít Charous, director of the archive. Materials from Zelenka’s office could be destroyed only under their careful watch, meaning that Erhart and Charous had to monitor as the magazines were placed into the industrial-sized processing bins at the paper mill, and only then could they leave. Since they were not permitted to do this themselves, often this meant they waited all day at the mill until their turn came. Naturally, it was during this wait that they perused the magazines, tearing out articles of interest for themselves and their friends. 5. Kundera, Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 158. 6. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York, 1999). 7. Záznam z 1. schu˚ze ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 25 March 1970 (Bil’ak), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 1, bod 0. 8. Ibid. (Kimlík). 9. Záznam pro 2. schu˚zi ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 17 June 1970 (Fojtík), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2, bod 0. 10. Materiály pro 1. schu˚zi ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ: “Uvážit nový název tezí, který by lépe vyjádrˇil jejich obsah,” 25 March 1970 (Fojtík), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 1, bod 2. 11. Záznam z 1. schu˚ze ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 25 March 1970 (Zelenka), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 1, bod 0. 12. Ibid. (Ruml). 13. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; reprint, New York, 2006). 14. Amir Weiner, “Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism,” American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (October 1999): 1123. 15. Quoted in Istvan Rév, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism (Stanford, 2005), 95. 16. Ibid., 96. 17. Záznam pro 3. schu˚zi ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 19 October 1970 (Pezlar), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 3, bod 0. 18. Rév, Retroactive Justice, 142. 19. Záznam pro 3. schu˚zi ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 19 October 1970 (Hrbek), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 3, bod 0. 20. Hans Renner, A History of Czechoslovakia since 1945 (New York, 1989), 102. 21. Komise vlády CˇSFR pro analýzu událostí let 1967–1970; D IV/36: Zápis ze zasedání ústrˇedního výboru Komunistické strany Cˇeskoslovenska 10.—11. prosince 1970 (Poucˇ ení z krizového vývoje ve straneˇ a spolecˇnosti po XIII. Sjezdu KSCˇ), 10–11 December 1970, A ÚSD. 22. Radio Free Europe Research: USSR Foreign Relations, “An Assessment of the Present Soviet Attitude toward the Czechoslovakia Leadership,” 9 February 1971, 4, OSA. 23. Radio Free Europe: Czechoslovakia/7, “The Situation in the Czechoslovak Party after the December Plenum” (Robert W. Dean), 18 February 1971, 6.

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24. Zdeneˇk Javu˚rek, “Ideologická úloha filosofických koncepcí frankfurtské školy a cˇeskoslovenský revizionismus šedesátých let,” Filosofický cˇasopis, no. 1 (January 1973): 114. 25. Rudé právo, 13 December 1969 (translated by RFE). Švorcová, a committed communist to the very end, ceased to be offered roles after 1989. But her political views certainly do seem to have been less malleable than others’, for she did not and still has not abandoned them. 26. Rádio Praha, 3 June 1972, 2100 hours (Ladislav Chmel in “Kultura a Život”), OSA. 27. Ibid. 28. F.J. Kolár, “Franz Kafka—, génius slabosti a odcizení,” Tvorba, 14 June 1972. 29. After the Velvet Revolution, it came to light that throughout normalization the secret police in fact had deployed a special unit specifically for monitoring Czechoslovakia’s Jewish community. 30. Letter to Jan Zelenka, CˇsT Prague headquarters, from Jirˇí Holan, Prague 4, on 19 February 1977, “Dopisy diváku˚ 1976–77,” CˇT APF. f. VE, k. 120, ev.j. 811. 31. Response letter from Ing. Jirˇí Eliáš to Jirˇí Holan, Prague 4, with a copy sent to television presenter S. Knotek, on 23 February 1977, CˇT APF, f. VE, k. 120, ev.j. 811. 32. Letter from Ruth Kleinová, Prague 7, to CˇsT, on 20 February 1977, CˇT APF, f. VE, k. 120, ev.j. 811. 33. Záveˇrecˇ ná zpráva rˇídící komise o prúbeˇhu a výsledcích pohovorú k výmeˇneˇ stranických legitimací v Cˇ s. televizi, 7 December 1970, NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. sekretariát, sv. 59, a.j. 106. 34. In addition, Pelikán was a member of the European Parliament, as a representative for a socialist-oriented Italian political party. 35. Jarmila Cysarˇová, Televize a totalitní moc 1969–1975 (ÚSD Publication) (Prague, 1998), 64. 36. The first exhibition was opened in the northwest Bohemian town of Most in March 1970 and was to travel to another town after fourteen days. Rádio Praha, 22 March 1970, 1205 hours, OSA. The second was opened in the city of Brno. Rádio Praha, 24 September 1971, 0930 hours (RFE translation), OSA. All these exhibits made the rounds of other towns and cities, and many similar exhibits were going on simultaneously from 1969 through the mid-1970s. 37. “Jejich tvárˇ,” Rudé právo, 27 January 1970. 38. Apart from the January 1970 Pilsen exhibit, the émigré theme was also “documented,” for example, in an October 1970 exhibit in West Slovakia titled “The Frustrated Attempt.” Radio Bratislava, 13 October 1970, 1830 hours, OSA. 39. Rádio Praha, 4 September 1970, 1203 hours, OSA. Premier Lubomír Štrougal, although later on considered among the most moderate of the normalizers, was also listed here as one of the prescient few. 40. As stated by Gejza Slapka, member of the Presidium of the Slovak Communist Party, who opened an exhibition of documents on the activities of the counterrevolutionaries on 28 October 1971 in the Slovak capital, Bratislava. Cˇ TK; 28 October 1971, OSA. 41. “Politically committed” literature was not as easy to pull off as it might first have seemed—as countless clumsy films, novels, and television programs proved. The dearth of politically committed art in the early years of normalization was often remedied by staging contemporary Soviet plays as well as Czech and Slovak political plays from the 1950s. The first theatrical attempts at championing normalization achieved feeble results: in 1971–72, the Prague National Theater offered a dramatization of a novel called New Fighters Shall Rise, which had been written by Antonín Zápotocký, Czechoslovakia’s communist president from 1957 to 1963. The play was based on his father,

NOTES TO PAGES 72–82

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a downtrodden peasant. Radio Free Europe Background Report: Czechoslovakia/10, 20 March 1972. 42. Záznam z 1. schu˚ze ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 25 March 1970 (Bil’ak), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 1, bod 0. 43. Play by Vojteˇch Trapl. Radio Free Europe Background Report: Czechoslovakia/7, Antonín Kratochvíl, “The Literary Scene in Czechoslovakia, January—July 1973”; 2 August 1973. 44. Novel by František Kopecký. Radio Free Europe Situation Report: Czechoslovakia/45, 12 December 1973. 45. Reuters, 19 March 1974, OSA. 46. Katarína Hrabovská, “Film z dvoch pohl’adov,” Nové slovo, 21 March 1974, 8. 47. Jan Kliment, “Filmová fraška o frašce politické,” Rudé právo, 2 May 1974. 48. Péter Apor and Oksana Sarkisova, “Introduction: The Futures of the Past” in Past for the Eyes: East European Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums after 1989, ed. Oksana Sarkisova and Péter Apor (Budapest, 2008), ix. 49. Jan Kliment, “Živé, pravdivé sveˇdectví,” Rudé právo, 1 March 1980, 5. 50. Jarmila Cysarˇová, Cˇeskoslovenská televize 1985–1990 (ÚSD Publication) (Prague, 1999), 15–16. 51. Daniel Ru˚žicˇka, Major Zeman—Propaganda nebo krimi? (Prague, 2005), 13. 52. Quoted ibid., 16. 53. Záznam z ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 6 October 1980 (Zelenka), NACˇR, UV KSC, f. 10/10, sv. 2, aj. 10, bod 0/b. 54. Ru˚žicˇka, Major Zeman, 52. 55. Episode 24, “Klauni”: script by Jirˇí Procházka, dir. Jirˇí Sequens, produced by Josef Císarˇ (Barrandov Film Studios for Czechoslovak Television, Editorial Department for the Military, State Security, and Defense), 1978. 56. Ru˚žicˇka, Major Zeman, 64. 57. Exhausted by her demands, the serials’ writers held their ground until Balašová finally gave up. Ibid., 18. 58. Episode 25, “Štvanice”: script by Jirˇí Sequens, dir. Jirˇí Sequens, produced by Josef Císarˇ (Barrandov Film Studios for Czechoslovak Television, Editorial Department for the Military, State Security, and Defense), 1979. 59. Ru˚žicˇka, Major Zeman, 66. 60. Ibid., 67. 61. Episode 26, “Studna”: script by Jirˇí Procházka, dir. Jirˇí Sequens, produced by Josef Císarˇ (Barrandov Film Studios for Czechoslovak Television, Editorial Department for the Military, State Security, and Defense), 1978. 62. Script for “Studna” (rok 1969), CˇT APF. 63. This episode was based on a famous case that remained unsolved, with no one ever sure whether it had been a murder, organized behind the scenes by the secret police, or a suicide. 64. In the original script, as opposed to the filmed version, the line reads: “God knows what would have happened to me if you hadn’t come” (my emphasis). The “you” was intentionally open-ended, referring to either Zeman or the Soviet army or to both. 65. Ru˚žicˇka, Major Zeman, 48. 66. Ibid., 45. 67. Ibid., 46. 68. Quoted ibid., 91. 69. Letter sent by Zdeneˇk Jirotka, writer, to producer Vejvoda and general director Zelenka on 9 August 1978, CˇT APF, Zelenka koresp. 1978, k. 118, ev.j. 796, subfolder koresp. ÚRˇ 1975–78. A letter of this sort was not unusual, but for the author to have signed it

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was. Jirotka’s family immediately claimed that it was counterfeit. To solve the matter, Jan Zelenka sent it for handwriting analysis to the Federal Ministry of Interior, while Jirotka’s family (and especially his daughter, an editor at Czechoslovak Television) scrambled to prove the letter a falsification. 70. Ru˚žicˇka, Major Zeman, 86–87. 71. Ibid., 88. 72. Rév, Retroactive Justice, 328. 73. Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Post-War Europe,” in Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past, ed. Jan-Werner Müller (Cambridge, 2002), 157–83. 74. Richard S. Esbenshade, “Remembering to Forget: Memory, History, National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe,” in “Identifying Histories: Eastern Europe before and after 1989,” special issue, Representations, no. 49 (Winter 1995): 73. 75. Ibid., 74. 76. Ibid., 77. CHAPTER 4

1. Rádio Hveˇzda, 20 June 1970, 0535 hours (RFE translation), OSA. 2. Czechoslovak Television, 11 September 1970, 1900 hours, OSA. 3. CˇTK; 11 September 1970, OSA. 4. Jirˇí Pernes, Takoví nám vládli. Komunisticˇtí prezidenti Cˇeskoslovenska a doba, v níž žili (Prague, 2003), 292. 5. Ibid., 293. 6. Radio Free Europe Situation Report: Czechoslovakia/16, 19 May 1971, 11–12. 7. Hans Renner, A History of Czechoslovakia since 1945 (New York, 1989), 107. 8. Radio Free Europe Situation Report: Czechoslovakia/16, 19 May 1971, 11–12. Husák publicly linked the price reductions with the party’s economic consolidation in his May Day speech. 9. Záznam pro 3. schu˚zi ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 19 October 1970 (Bil’ak), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 3, bod 0. 10. Grzegorz Ekiert, The State against Society: Political Crises and Their Aftermath in East Central Europe (Princeton, 1996), 176. 11. Ibid., 207. 12. Susan E. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 216. 13. Robert S. Boynton, “Enjoy Your Žižek!” Linguafranca 8, no. 7 (October 1998): 44 – 45. 14. Zdeneˇk Mlynárˇ, Nightfrost in Prague: The End of Humane Socialism, trans. Paul Wilson (New York, 1986), 246. 15. Quoted in Kieran Williams, The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics, 1968–1970 (New York, 1997), 146. 16. Quoted in Pernes, Takoví nám vládli, 287. 17. Quoted in Williams, Prague Spring and Its Aftermath, 206. 18. Zvi Gitelman, “The Politics of Socialist Restoration in Hungary and Czechoslovakia,” Comparative Politics 13, no. 2 (January 1981): 201. 19. Ibid. 20. Záznam pro 2. schu˚zi ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 17 June 1970 (Fojtík), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2, bod 0. 21. Quoted in Williams, Prague Spring and Its Aftermath, 175. 22. Viktor Šlajchrt, “Ten kámen úrazu stále míjejí: Se Zbynˇkem Zemanem o historicích, klanech a pameˇti,” Respekt 12, no. 18 (30 April–6 May 2001): 10.

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23. Eva Kanturkova, “Expulsion from Paradise: The Bypassed Generation,” in The Prague Spring: A Mixed Legacy, ed. Jiri Pehe (New York, 1988), 90. 24. Ibid., 88–89. 25. Problematika soucˇasné mladé generace (materials for the seventeenth meeting of the Central Committee’s Ideological Commission) 7 October 1965, NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/5, sv. 6, aj. 23. 26. Kanturkova, “Expulsion from Paradise,” 88–89. 27. Quoted in Vilém Precˇan, “Milan Šimecˇka: A Profile,” in Milan Šimecˇka. Letters from Prison, trans. Gerald Turner (Prague, 2002), 141. 28. Milan Uhde, “Popis jednoho mechanismu,” Obsah, no. 5 (1987). 29. Precˇan, “Milan Šimecˇka,” 141. 30. Václav Pelíšek, “Nástup šedivých,” Sveˇdectví 10, no. 40 (1971): 552. 31. Jirina Siklova, “Courage, Heroism, and the Postmodern Paradox,” Social Research 71, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 135–36. 32. Timothy Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity (Cambridge, 1989), 176. 33. István Rév, Retroactive Justice. Prehistory of Post-Communism (Stanford, 2005), 5. 34. See, for example, the eerie farewell exchange between the falsely accused foreign minister Clementis and his wife, Lída, an opera singer, whose interrogator provided her with a hairdresser, makeup, and a new dress to hide from her soon-to-be-executed husband that she, too, was being held in prison. Eugen Loebl, My Mind on Trial (New York, 1976), 209. 35. Pernes, Takoví nám vládli, 295. 36. Quoted in Precˇan, “Milan Šimecˇka,” 142. 37. Quoted in H. Gordon Skilling, Charter 77 and Human Rights in Czechoslovakia (London, 1981), 13. The quote is from a feuilleton by Václav Havel, titled “The Trial,” about his experiences attending the trial of the Plastic People. It circulated in typescript— as was the case with all unofficial writings. 38. Quoted in Pernes, Takoví nám vládli, 305. 39. Quoted in Peter Hruby, Fools and Heroes: The Changing Role of Communist Intellectuals in Czechoslovakia (New York, 1980), 9. 40. Mlynárˇ, Nightfrost in Prague, 11–12. 41. “Prohlášení Charty 77 z 1. ledna 1977,” in Charta 77 1977–1989. Od morální k demokratické revoluci, ed. Vilém Precˇan (Bratislava, 1990). 42. Milan Otáhal, Opozice, moc, spolecˇnost 1969/1989: Prˇíspeˇvek k deˇjinám “normalizace” (Prague, 1994), 35. 43. Emanuel Mandler, “Se stranou proti straneˇ,” Student, no. 19 (1968): 1. 44. Bohumil Doležal, also a key realist, did sign the Charter. 45. Quoted in Milan Otáhal, “Charta 77. Vznik a význam,” Deˇjiny a soucˇasnost 24, no. 2 (2002): 44. 46. Otáhal, Opozice, moc, spolecˇnost 1969/1989, 40. 47. Václav Havel, “Moc bezmocných,” in O lidskou identitu. Úvahy, fejetony, protesty, polemiky, prohlášení a rozhovory z let 1969–1979, ed. Vilém Precˇan and Alexander Tomský (London, 1984), 64. Also see the English translation in Václav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane (New York, 1990), 31. 48. Václav Havel, “Dear Dr. Husák,” in Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965–1990, ed. Paul Wilson (New York, 1991), 72. 49. Emanuel Mandler, “O hrdinech a o teˇch druhých,” Kritická Prˇíloha (Revolver Revue), no. 8 (July 1997): 220. 50. Quoted ibid., 227. 51. Ibid., 229.

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52. Martin Palouš, “Poznámky ke generacˇním sporu˚m v Charteˇ 77 v druhé polovineˇ osmdesátých let,” in Dveˇ desetiletí prˇed listopadem 89, ed. Emanuel Mandler (Prague, 1993), 37. 53. Ibid., 39. 54. Aviezer Tucker, The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocˇka to Havel (Pittsburgh, 2000), 128. 55. Gil Eyal, The Origins of Postcommunist Elites: From Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslovakia (Minneapolis, 2003), 73. 56. Ibid., 67–68. 57. Quoted ibid., 72. 58. Petr Rezek, Filosofie a politika kýcˇe (Prague, 1990). Some of Rezek’s communistera samizdat essays were published together in this 1990 volume. 59. Ibid., 58. 60. Ibid., 58–59. 61. Ibid., 61. 62. Ibid., 62. 63. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006), 17. 64. Ibid., 17. 65. Ibid., 22. 66. Quoted in Daniel Ru˚žicˇka, Major Zeman—Propaganda nebo krimi? (Prague, 2005), 71. 67. Jirˇ í Penˇás, “Držet lyru a krok,” Respekt, 10–17 February 1997, http://respekt.ihned. cz/c1-36075260-drzet-lyru-a-krok. 68. “Informace o projednávání dopisu˚ ÚV KSCˇ k cˇinnosti charty 77 a ohlasech na zverˇejneˇní cˇlánku v Rudém právu ‘Ztroskotanci a samozvanci’ ” (materials for the Presidium, compiled by the political-organizational division of the Central Committee and based on reports of the regional and city committees of the CPCz), January 7, 1977, 3, NACˇR, Prˇedsednictvo, f. 02/1, sv. 28, a.j. 30. The Presidium’s materials for its discussion about Charter 77 include a separate envelope with a list of the initial signatories. The famous and those with working-class occupations are underlined, hinting at the party’s ever-present fear that dissidents might successfully link up with the working class, as they would later in Poland. Usnesení 29. schu˚ ze prˇedsednictva ÚV KSCˇ ze dne 7. ledna 1977. K neprˇátelskému pamfletu ‘Charta 77,’ NACˇR, Prˇedsednictvo, f. 02/1, sv. 27, a.j. 29, bod 24. 69. Jirˇí Kocian, Jirˇí Pernes, Oldrˇich Tu˚ma a kol., Cˇeské pru˚švihy aneb Prohry, krize skandály a aféry cˇeských deˇjin let 1848–1989 (Prague, 2005), 330. 70. Ibid., 331. For more on the weekend cottage during communism, see Paulina Bren, “Weekend Get-Aways: The Tramp, the Chata, and the Politics of Private Life after the Prague Spring,” in Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, ed. David Crowley and Susan Reid (Oxford, 2002), 123– 40. 71. “Czechoslovak Television against Charter 77,” TOTALITA, http://www.totalita.cz/ norm/norm_06.php (accessed October 8, 2008). 72. Quoted in Penˇás, “Držet lyru a krok.” 73. Ibid. 74. Quoted in ibid. 75. Kocian, Pernes, and Tu˚ma, Cˇeské pru˚švihy, 332. Among the surprise signatories were the revered actors Rudolf Hrušinský and Josef Kemr, who are seldom associated with the endorsement of normalization. 76. Kocian, Pernes, and Tu˚ma, Cˇeské pru˚švihy, 332. 77. “Rozhovor Petra Uhla s mluvcˇím Charty 77 Josefem Vohryzkem,” Infoch X, no. 2 (1987): 12.

NOTES TO PAGES 108–113

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78. “Charta 77/2/87: Slovo ke spoluobcˇanu˚m,” Infoch X, no. 1 (1987): 7. 79. Ibid., 8. 80. Palouš, “Poznámky ke generacˇním sporu˚ m,” 42– 43. 81. Radio Free Europe Situation Report: Czechoslovakia/3, 1 March 1988, 19. 82. Palouš, “Poznámky ke generacˇním sporu˚ m,” 42–3. Actually the collective, known as Fórum Charty, turned out to be quite a failure—ineffective and at the same time hounded by the police. 83. “Dopis 40 signatárˇu˚ Charty 77 ke Slovu k signatárˇu˚m Charty 77,” Infoch X, no. 10 (1987): 9. Polemics surrounding this letter from the forty signatories continued in Infoch, the newsletter for Charter 77 members. 84. For more on how a younger generation in Eastern Europe came together during the mid- to late 1980s, finding different approaches to challenging the regimes in power, see Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton, 2002). For the regime’s version of the programs and agendas of all the opposition groups that existed under communism in Czechoslovakia, see “Prezentace názoru˚ opozicˇních skupin v buržoasní [sic] propagandeˇ” (materials for the meeting of the Ideological Commission), 3 October 1989, NACˇR, uncataloged. 85. “Dopis 40 signatárˇu˚ Charty 77 ke Slovu k signatárˇu˚m Charty 77,” Infoch X, no. 10 (1987): 9. 86. As Aviezer Tucker demonstrates so ably, prior to 1989 interpreters of the Charter and Havel’s writings managed to find whatever it was they were looking for, from democratic socialism to liberal democracy to pacifism to anti-postmodernism. Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence, 4 –5. 87. Václav Havel, “O smyslu Charty 77,” Listy 18, no. 4 (August 1987): 52. 88. Ivo Možný, Procˇ tak snadno . . . Neˇkteré rodinné du˚vody sametové revoluce (Prague, 1991), 22. CHAPTER 5

1. “Ideoveˇ politické úkoly CˇST do roku 1980,” in Kvantifikace potrˇeb Cˇeskoslovenské televize (1973), CˇT APF, f. VE2, a.j. 612. 2. Rudé právo, 29 April 1983. 3. Radio Free Europe Situation Report: Czechoslovakia/10, 14 March 1973, 10 (based on an article in Tribuna, 17 January 1973). This number is calculated according to the number of television licenses purchased in the country. 4. Radio Free Europe Situation Report: Czechoslovakia/20, 21 May 1975. In 1980, Czechoslovak Television’s first channel could be seen in 94.9 percent of the country, and the second channel in 73.5 percent. See Jarmila Cysarˇová, Cˇeskoslovenská televize 1985– 1990 (ÚSD Publication) (Prague, 1999), 20. 5. Ellen Mickiewicz, Split Signals: Television and Politics in the Soviet Union (Oxford, 1988), 210. 6. Quoted ibid., 204. 7. Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” trans. Edmund White, New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984, 38. 8. Záznam z 1. schu˚ze ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 25 March 1970 (Zelenka) NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 1, bod 0. 9. Ibid. 10. Záznam pro 2. schu˚zi ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 17 June 1970 (Fojtík), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2, bod 0. Jan Fojtík’s presentation at this meeting is reprinted in Sveˇdectví o duchovním útlaku 1969–1970, ed. Milan Otáhal, Alena Nosková, and Karel Bolomský (Prague, 1993); and Czechoslovak Television general director Jan Zelenka’s

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presentation at this same meeting is reprinted in the document section of, Televize a totalitní moc 1969–1975, by Jarmila Cysarˇová (ÚSD Publication) (Prague, 1998). 11. As stated by Boris Firsov, head of the Leningrad television studio at this time, in an interview with Kristin Roth-Ey. Kristin Joy Roth-Ey, “Mass Media and the Remaking of Soviet Culture, 1950s-1960s” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2003), 264. 12. Quoted in Vladimir V. Kusin, From Dubcˇek to Charter 77: A Study of ‘Normalisation’ in Czechoslovakia 1968–1978 (Edinburgh, 1978), 100. 13. Zápis z 2. schu˚ze ideologické komise, 17 June 1970 (Fojtík), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2. 14. Záznam pro 2. schu˚zi ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ; “Prˇíloha: Plneˇní realizacˇní smeˇrnice v oblasti tisku, rozhlasu a televize: Cˇeskoslovenská televize,” 17 June 1970, NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2, bod 0. 15. Zpráva o stavu a perspektivách Cˇ eskoslovenské televize; “Situace po nástupu nového vedení Cˇs. Televize,” CˇT APF, f. Ve-2, improperly filed—no item number. 16. Letter from CˇsT general director Jan Zelenka to KSCˇS general secretary Gustav Husák, 27 March 1972,CˇT APF, f. Zelenka koresp. 1972, k. 107, ev.j. 737. 17. Informace pro s. Husáka, 11; CˇT APF, f. Zelenka koresp. 1972, k. 107, ev.j. 737. 18. This most likely was also why Czechoslovak Television management bestowed on the Central Committee leadership gifts such as expensive paintings sent to Vasil Bil’ak and Miloš Jakeš for their jubilees. See Cysarˇová, Televize a totalitní moc 1969– 1975, 57. 19. Informace pro s. Husáka, 6. 20. Radio Free Europe Situation Report: Czechoslovakia/20, “Radio Forum: Questions from the Public,” 9 June 1971. 21. Informace pro s. Husáka, 6. 22. Ibid., 7. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 8. 25. Ibid., 8–9. 26. Život strany, 16 March 1972. 27. The contents of the letter by Škutina were read out by Zelenka at a meeting of the Ideological Commission. Zpráva o plneˇní Realizacˇní smeˇrnice a další úkoly ideologické cˇinnosti strany, projednané na 2. schu˚zi ideologické komise, 17 June 1970 (Zelenka), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ; f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2. 28. Ibid. 29. Letter from Vladimír Kittnar, Prague 1, to CˇsT general director Jan Zelenka, 18 September 1976, “Dopisy diváku˚ 1976–1977,” CˇT APF, f. VE, k. 120, ev.j. 811, sign. Zelenka. 30. Quoted in Radio Free Europe Situation Report: Czechoslovakia/36, 10 September 1975 (the quote was taken from Tvorba, 27 August 1975). 31. Radio Free Europe Situation Report: Czechoslovakia/20, 21 May 1975. 32. Informace pro s. Husáka, 10. 33. Mickiewicz, Split Signals, 27. 34. Czechoslovak Television, 3 January 1976, 1950 hours, OSA. 35. Radio Free Europe Internal Document: “Action against Reception of West German TV in Chomutov Area,” communications file, 1972–74, OSA. 36. Ibid. 37. Záznam ze schu˚ze ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 6 October 1980, (Horˇení), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 2, aj. 10, bod 0/b. 38. Mickiewicz, Split Signals, 12–13. 39. Informace pro s. Husáka, 4.

NOTES TO PAGES 121–126

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40. “Návrh dopisu vedoucímu oddeˇlení propagandy a agitace s. Vasilu Bejdovi [head of the Central Committee department of propaganda and agitation],” from Jan Zelenka, CˇT APF, f. Ve-2, k. 98, ev.j. 674. 41. Anonymous letter (on the theme of the disastrous television serial Matka) sent to Jan Zelenka, received 27 April 1976, “Dopisy diváku˚ 1976–1977,” CˇT APF, f. VE, k. 120, ev.j. 811, sign. Zelenka. 42. Quoted in Roth-Ey, “Mass Media,” 296. 43. Informace pro s. Husáka, 4. 44. Ibid., 3. 45. Ibid., 3. 46. Ibid., 4 –5. 47. Czechoslovak Television, 20 December 1972, 21:15 hours, OSA. The Communist Party’s expectations of how many citizens should be watching the television news seem rather high. According to a 1980 Ideological Commission discussion on the influence of television and radio, from September to May, 60 to 65 percent of people watched the first broadcast of the evening television news, yet this was not considered enough. Záznam ze schu˚ze ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 6 October 1980 (Zelenka), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 2, aj. 10, bod 0/b. 48. John Borneman, After the Wall: East meets West in the New Berlin (New York, 1991), 136–37. 49. Ibid., 135. 50. Záznam ze schu˚ze ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 6 October 1980 (Horˇení), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 2, aj. 10, bod 0/b. 51. Stav a úkoly umeˇlecké a zábavné tvorby Cˇ s. televize, CˇT APF, f. VE 2, k. 117, ev.j. 794. 52. Záznam pro 2. schu˚zi ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 17 June 1970 (Fojtík), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 2, bod 0. 53. Záznam pro 3. schu˚zi ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 19 October 1970 (Hrbek), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 1, a.j. 3, bod 0. 54. Roth-Ey, “Mass Media,” 247. 55. Mickiewicz, Split Signals, 181. 56. Quoted in Cysarˇová, Televize a totalitní moc 1969–1975, 72. 57. Informace pro s. Husáka, 8. 58. Ella Taylor, Prime-Time Families: Television Culture in Postwar America (Berkeley, 1989), 39. 59. Ibid., 38. 60. Cysarˇová, Cˇeskoslovenská televize 1985–1990, 22. 61. Irena Reifová, “Kryty moci a úkryty prˇed mocí. Normalizacˇní a postkomunistický televizní seriál,” in Konsolidace vládnutí a podnikání v Cˇeské Republice a v Evropské Unii II, Sociologie, prognostika a správa, Média, ed. Jakub Koncˇelík, Barbara Köpplová, and Irena Prázová (Prague, 2002), 357. 62. Reifová, “Kryty moci a úkryty prˇed mocí,” 356. 63. Conrad Phillip Kottak, Prime-Time Society: An Anthropological Analysis of Television and Culture (Belmont, CA, 1990), 37. 64. Kottak, Prime-Time Society, 47. 65. Lila Abu-Lughod, “Egyptian Melodrama—Technology of the Modern Subject?” in Media Worlds, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin (Berkeley, 2002), 117. 66. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York, 2006). It is also interesting to note that while for postcolonial states the prevalent theme is modernization, which is situated firmly—as are the television

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serials—within the geography of that particular state, the case of China is quite different. In the 1990s, television drama also became the most popular form of entertainment in China, but because the genre expanded in a globalizing, post–cold war climate, when China was opening itself up at least economically to capitalist ways of life, the assertion of Chinese identity through these serials was played out against the backdrop of a decidedly transnational world. See Sheldon H. Lu, “Soap Opera in China: The Transnational Politics of Visuality, Sexuality, and Masculinity,” in Television: The Critical View, ed. Horace Newcomb (Oxford, 2007), 357. 67. Irena Reifová, “Kulturální studia v postkomunistické situaci,” in Média Dnes: Reflexe Mediality, Médií a Mediálních obsahu˚ , ed. Martin Foret (Olomouc, CR, 2008), 136. 68. Ibid., 354. 69. Reifová, “Kryty moci a úkryty prˇed mocí,” 356. 70. Ibid., 360. 71. Czechoslovak Television, English language service, 23 June 1978 2105 hours, OSA. 72. MRA, “Poucˇení z jednoho seriálu,” Rudé právo, 13 September 1972. 73. GARF (State Archives of the Russian Federation), f. 6903, op. 32, d. 626, 111–12. My tremendous thanks goes to Christine Evans, who sent me this from her own archival research into Soviet television. 74. Desky 10—cyclostyl; Svaz cˇeských dramatických umeˇlcu˚/Televizní sekce: Seminárˇ k hodnocení dramatické tvorby za rok 1983 konaný dne 16. 2. 1984 v Praze (stenografický záznam) (Bílek), FITES (Archive of the Union of Film and Television Workers, Prague). 75. Mickiewicz, Split Signals, 32. 76. Jirˇina Švorcová, in Zdeneˇk Michalec, ed., Tisíc tvárˇí televize (Prague, 1983). 77. Ivan Tesar, in Michalec, Tisíc tvárˇí televize. 78. Ibid. 79. Reifová, “Kryty moci a úkryty prˇed mocí,” 357. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 358. 83. Mickiewicz, Split Signals, 201. 84. Cysarˇová, Cˇeskoslovenská televize 1985–1990, 34. 85. Smena na nedel’u, 15 February 1985. 86. Reifová, “Kryty moci a úkryty prˇed mocí,” 364. 87. Ibid., 363. CHAPTER 6

1. Discussed in chapter 1. 2. A. J. Liehm, “Osudy Cˇeskoslovenské kultury,” in Procˇ jsme v listopadu vyšli do ulic, ed., Jirˇí Vancˇura (Brno, 1999), 106. 3. As told by his widow, Magdalena Dietlová, in the television documentary Prˇedcˇasná úmrtí: Jaroslav Dietl (1929–1985), directed by Petr Lokaj, Televizní studio Ostrava, Czech Television, 2001. 4. Miloš Smetana, Televizní seriál a jeho paradoxy (Prague, 2000), 24. 5. Ibid. Information on the production and broadcast of normalization-era television serials can be surprisingly conflicting. While Smetana (who worked in television during this time) lists a run of fifteen episodes and 1962 as the production year for Three Men in a Country Cottage, the website www.televize.cz, which provides summaries of all Czech television serials, claims that there were eighteen episodes in all (only three of which remain preserved), produced from 1962 to 1963. See “Trˇi chlapi v chalupeˇ: Seriál v prˇímém

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prˇenosu,” www.televize.cz. In addition, it seems that although Dietl came up with the idea and wrote the first seven episodes, other writers took over in later episodes. See “Seriály v Cˇeskoslovenské televizi,” Lidové noviny, 6 January 2001, 28. 6. Smetana, Televizní seriál a jeho paradoxy, 27. 7. Ibid. 8. Gustav Krch, “Vypraveˇcˇ, který prˇipoutal národ k televizi,” Lidové noviny, 7 December 2001. 9. Report to M. Jakeš by J. Krˇívanová, 4 February 1972; attached as enclosure in a letter to Oldrˇich Švestka of the party Central Committee from the Czechoslovak Television general director, Jan Zelenka, 20 February 1974, CˇT APF, f. VE, k. 108; ev.j. 739. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. Specifically, Zelenka wrote, “By the way, I must further express my opinion [and add] that, for instance, the self-criticism of Jirˇí Suchý [a popular Czech comedian/ entertainer], carried out on Czech radio, was of a weaker quality than the self-criticism of Jaroslav Dietl and no one said anything about that.” 12. Nejmladší z rodu Hamru˚ : Zpráva o dopisovém ohlasu na seriál Nejmladší z rodu Hamru˚ ke dni 30. cˇervna 1975, 1–3, CˇT APF, f. Inf, k. 120, c. 811. The eleven episodes were written by Jaroslav Dietl and directed by Evžen Sokolovský. 13. Episode 1, “A Major Decision, June–October 1945.” The following description and analysis of The Youngest of the Hamr Dynasty are based on the televised version rather than the script. 14. Episode 2, “A Major Decision.” 15. Episode 3, “Farmer.” 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Episode 4, “From Stormy Times, November 1951–November 1952.” 20. Episode 7, “Traitors, October 1960–April 1961.” 21. Episode 9, “Divorce, April 1965–March 1967.” 22. Episode 10, “Pressure, March 1967–October 1971.” 23. Nejmladší z rodu Hamru˚ , Zpráva o dopisovém ohlasu na seriál Nejmladší z rodu Hamru˚ ke dni 30. cˇervna 1975: 1–3, CˇT APF, Prague: Fond Inf; karton #120; c. 811. 24. Ibid. The volume of correspondence by viewers to television headquarters would increase significantly throughout the 1970s and 1980s. 25. Ellen Mickiewicz, Split Signals: Television and Politics in the Soviet Union (Oxford, 1988), 194. 26. Ibid., 190. 27. Tereza Brdecˇková, “Poctivá kýcˇarˇina Jaroslava Dietla,” Týden, 18 January 1999. 52. While Václav Havel might have been one of the few who did not watch Dietl’s serials regularly, in prison he was exposed to them—whether he wished to be or not. In an October 4, 1980, letter from prison to his wife, Olga, Havel wrote that on television he had watched “more episodes in that Dietl serial, no longer as idiotic as the episode I mentioned last time, but still typical Dietl with all that that entails. I’d like to write an essay about the phenomenon.” To my knowledge, Havel never got around to writing the essay. See Václav Havel, Letters to Olga, trans. Paul Wilson (Boston, 1990), 117. 28. Nejmladší z rodu Hamru˚ : Zpráva o dopisovém ohlasu na seriál Nejmladší z rodu Hamru˚ ke dni 30. cˇervna 1975 (Fr. Vajner, Litvínov), 8, CˇT APF, Prague: Fond Inf; karton #120; c. 811. 29. Nejmladší z rodu Hamru˚ : Zpráva o dopisovém ohlasu na seriál Nejmladší z rodu Hamru˚ ke dni 30. cˇervna 1975 (BSP všeobecné úcˇtárny, Prˇesné strojírenství, Uherský Brod), 9, CˇT APF, Prague: Fond Inf; karton #120; c. 811.

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30. Nejmladší z rodu Hamru˚ : Zpráva o dopisovém ohlasu na seriál Nejmladší z rodu Hamru˚ ke dni 30. cˇervna 1975 (Jana Sedlmayerová, Lbín), 19, CˇT APF, Prague: Fond Inf; karton #120; c. 811. 31. Nejmladší z rodu Hamru˚ : Zpráva o dopisovém ohlasu na seriál Nejmladší z rodu Hamru˚ ke dni30. cˇervna 1975 (Prof. M. Tmejková, Cˇeské Budeˇjovice), 22, CˇT APF, Prague: Fond Inf; karton #120; c. 811. 32. Nejmladší z rodu Hamru˚: Zpráva o dopisovém ohlasu na seriál Nejmladší z rodu Hamru˚ ke dni 30. cˇervna 1975 (T. Technik, Šumperk), 4, CˇT APF, Prague: Fond Inf; karton #120; c. 811. 33. Nejmladší z rodu Hamru˚ : Zpráva o dopisovém ohlasu na seriál Nejmladší z rodu Hamru˚ ke dni 30. cˇervna 1975 (Karel Skoumal, Ústí nad Labem), 20, CˇT APF, Prague: Fond Inf; karton #120; c. 811. 34. Gustav Krch, “Vypraveˇcˇ, který prˇipoutal národ k televizi,” Lidové noviny, 7 December 2001. 35. According to Czech Television’s information department, the first episode of The Man at the Town Hall was broadcast in September 1976. The director of the serial was Evžen Sokolovský, who also directed The Youngest of the Hamr Dynasty. 36. Muž na radnici: letter from Jaroslav Merunka, vedoucí výroby, Hlavní redakce dramatického vysílání, CˇsT to Ing. J. Niederle, generální rˇeditel, PZO TUZEX, Praha 1 on 4 May 1976 (in a letter asking to use the Tuzex storefront for exterior shots), CˇT APF, f. Inf, k. 66, ev.j. 377. 37. Episode 1, “The Accident,” from the script by Jaroslav Dietl. 38. Episode 5, “Incompetence.” 39. Muž na radnici: “Prˇehled exter. obrazu˚ seriálu První muž na radnici,” CˇT APF, f. Inf, k. 66, ev.j. 377. 40. Architekt Jaroslav Dietl (Prague: Czech Television, 1997) (documentary), CˇT AVF (Czechoslovak Television’s Archive of Visual Materials, Prague). 41. Irena Reifová, “Synové a dcery Jakuba sklárˇe: Dominantní a rezistentní významy televizní populární fikce ve druhé polovineˇ 80. let,” Mediální Studia 1 (2007): 46. 42. Ibid., 48. 43. Quoted ibid., 47. 44. Quoted ibid. 45. Záznam ze schu˚ze ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 6 October 1980 (Zelenka), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 2, aj. 10, bod 0/b. Italics added. 46. Production began in 1976 and the serial was broadcast in 1978; thirteen episodes; written by Jaroslav Dietl and directed by Jaroslav Dudek. 47. Jarmila Cysarˇová, Cˇeskoslovenská televize 1985–1990 (ÚSD Publication) (Prague, 1999), 34. 48. This second round of the serial was coproduced by Czechoslovak Television and West German Television and broadcast in 1981; seven episodes; written by Jaroslav Dietl and directed by Jaroslav Dudek. 49. Jan Kovarˇík, “Velký úspeˇch a ohlas,” Rudé právo, 3 June 1980, 5. 50. Andrew Roberts, “The Politics and Anti-Politics of Nostalgia” East European Politics and Societies 16 (2002): 764 –809. 51. T. V. Schauer, “Vina doktoru˚ Leroye a Strosmajera,” Kritický sborník 3, no. 2 (1983): 80. 52. Ibid., 80. 53. “Vstanou noví Dietlové?” Týden, 18 January 1999, 52. 54. Produced in 1981 by Czechoslovak Television; thirteen episodes; written by Jaroslav Dietl and directed by Evžen Sokolovský. 55. Cysarˇová, Cˇeskoslovenská televize 1985–1990, 34.

NOTES TO PAGES 146–155

231

56. Jaroslav Moucˇka, in Zdeneˇk Michalec, ed., Tisíc tvárˇí televize Prague, 1983). 57. Josef Holý, “Nad televizním seriálum Okres na severu: Co zu˚stává,” Rudé právo, 18 July 1981. 58. Vladimír Procházka, “Promeˇny v díle Jaroslava Dietla,” Rudé právo, 2 July 1987. 59. Ivan Tesár in Michalec, Tisíc tvárˇí televize, 26. 60. KO, “Ješteˇ k vineˇ dokotoru˚ Leroye a Strosmajera,” Kritický sborník 3, no. 3 (1983): 94. 61. “Poslání a cíl televizních seriálu˚ v boji o umeˇlecké ztvárˇení socialistického cˇloveˇka,” Tvorba, 7 June 1978, 6–7. 62. Petr Bednarˇík, “Synové a dcery Jakuba sklárˇe I: zachycení našich deˇjin v televizním seriálu Jaroslava Dietla,” in Pražské sociálneˇ veˇdní studie (Prague, 2006), 4. 63. “Poslání a cíl televizních seriálu˚,” 6–7. 64. Ladislav Holy, The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation: National Identity and the Post-Communist Transformation of Society (Cambridge, 1996), 62. 65. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC, 1997), 177. 66. Ibid., 1. 67. Ibid., 3. 68. Ibid., 5. 69. Jirˇí Penˇás, “Pod kuratelou seriálu,” Respekt, 4 March 1996, 18. 70. PHA, “De mortuis nihil nisi bene . . . ?” Obsah 6 (1986), 1. 71. Jirˇina Šiklová, “Courage, Heroism, and the Postmodern Paradox,” Social Research 71, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 138. 72. Quoted in Reifová, “Synové a dcery Jakuba sklárˇe,” 50. 73. Gustav Krch, “Vypraveˇcˇ, který prˇipoutal národ k televizi,” Lidové noviny, 7 December 2001. 74. Magdalena Dietlová in Prˇedcˇasná úmrtí. 75. What is interesting here is that Klíma’s account does not match the footage of the funeral shown in the documentary Prˇedcˇasná úmrtí. The footage shows full pews, with people even having to stand in the aisles. Also, the Slovak actor L. Chudík, famous for his portrayal of one of the doctors in A Hospital on the Edge of Town, gave the eulogy, which was both personal and heartfelt. 76. Ivan Klíma, “Za Jaroslavem Dietlem,” Obsah 9 (1985): 1–2. 77. Ibid., 3. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid., 1. 80. Klíma, “Za Jaroslavem Dietlem”: 1. 81. “Agitka, která ležela léta v trezoru,” http://www.blesk.cz/Clanek54030.htm (accessed October 6, 2008). 82. František Pavlícˇ ek, “Na okraj jednoho nekrologu,” Obsah 4 (1986): 6. 83. Ibid., 11. 84. This was not an unusual practice between “official writers”—overloaded with financially rewarding assignments—and “blacklisted, purged writers,” now working for the most part in low-paying, manual jobs. There were tales among blacklisted writers of official writers reneging on the agreed-upon financial agreement once the work had been completed. Being blacklisted, the unofficial writer of course had no legal recourse if such a gentlemen’s agreement was broken. 85. Pavlícˇek, “Na okraj jednoho nekrologu,” 12. 86. Ibid., 1. 87. PHA, “De mortuis nihil nisi bene . . . ?” Obsah 6 (1986), 1. 88. The Czech television historian Petr Bednarˇík, in his discussion of one of Dietl’s serials that traced the history of Czechoslovakia through the life of a glassmaker and his

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family, does see signs of Dietl’s efforts to avoid triumphant scenarios for the party. For example, in this particular serial, Dietl left out the year 1946 (when the Communist Party won the national elections) and the pivotal year of 1948, when the party orchestrated a power takeover. Bednarˇík also argues that certain characters inserted into the serial by Dietl served to “point out certain historical aspects that during the time of normalization did not appear too often in the dramatic genre.” See Petr Bednarˇík, “Synové a dcery Jakuba sklárˇe I: zachycení našich deˇjin v televizním seriálu Jaroslava Dietla,” in Pražské sociálneˇ veˇdní studie (Prague, 2006), 14. 89. PHA, “De mortuis nihil nisi bene . . . ?” 2. 90. Ibid., 3. 91. Karel Pecka, “Rovnost je sen hrbatých,” Obsah 9 (1986). 92. Ibid., 7. CHAPTER 7

1. Otto Ulcˇ, The Judge in a Communist State: A View from Within (Columbus, Ohio, 1972), 215. 2. Lynne Haney, “From Proud Worker to Good Mother: Women, the State, and Regime Change in Hungary,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 14, no. 3 (1994): 121. 3. Quoted in and analyzed by Vladimír Macura, “Domov,” in Štastný veˇk: Symboly, emblémy a mýty (Prague, 1992), 35–36. 4. See Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002). 5. Zápis z jednání ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 6 October 1980, (Štoll), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10, sv. 2, a.j. 10. 6. Padraic Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland,” American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999): 402. 7. For detailed statistics on the increased number of employees in the workplace alongside a concomitant labor shortage, see Lenka Kalinová, Sociální vývoj Cˇeskoslovenska 1969–1989 (ÚSD Publication) (Prague, 1998), 22. 8. Jirˇina Šiklová, “Are Women in Central and Eastern Europe Conservative?” in Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, ed. Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller (New York, 1993), 75. 9. Jacqui True, Gender, Globalization, and Postsocialism: The Czech Republic after Communism (New York, 2003), 30. 10. Hana Havelková, “A Few Prefeminist Thoughts,” in Funk and Mueller, Gender Politics and Post-Communism, 68. 11. Petra Hanáková, “The Viscitudes [sic] of Czech Feminism,” 1998, 5, http://www. cddc.vt.edu/feminism/cz.html (accessed April 10, 2006). 12. Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in 20th Century Germany (Princeton, 2005), 188. 13. True, Gender, Globalization, and Postsocialism, 35. 14. Ibid., 38. 15. Práca, 3 March 1984, 1–2, quoted in the Radio Free Europe Situation Report; Czechoslovakia/5, “Women Are Equal—More or Less,” 23 March 1984. 16. Žena za pultem, produced in 1976; broadcast in 1977; twelve episodes; written by Jaroslav Dietl and directed by Jaroslav Dudek. 17. All of these letters were excerpted in the December 1977 monthly report by the Czechoslovak Television Correspondence Department, “Rozbor dopisového ohlasu za prosinec 1977,” CˇT APF, f. Inf., k. 66, ev.j. 377. I have not listed the names of those who wrote the letters (although they are included, as always, in the report) since their letters were excerpted and I did not have access to the full text of each letter.

NOTES TO PAGES 166–170

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18. Based on Penˇás’s recollections, in Jirˇí Penˇás, “Držet lyru a krok,” Respekt, 10–17 February 1997. 19. Šimon Dominik, “The Narrative Structures in Jaroslav Dietl’s Serials” (master’s thesis, Charles University, 2006), 73. 20. Jirˇina Švorcová and Jirˇí Zapletal, Býti Švorcovou: sveˇdectví herecˇky o sobeˇ, lidech i událostech (Prague, 2000), 98. 21. “Rozbor dopisového ohlasu za prosinec,” 1977, CˇT APF: Fond Inf.; karton # 66; ev.j. 377. 22. But even here women were encouraged to sacrifice. In a radio commentary celebrating the 1975 International Women’s Day, both praise and reprimand were offered up to listeners: “[H]ow many crowns it costs our national economy in the loss of working hours on International Women’s Day that men spend in front of the doors of the flower shops and pastry shops. Nevertheless, the celebrations will continue and let’s just admit it—we look forward to them!” Rádio Praha, 5 March 1975, 1830 hours (commentary “Nejen kveˇtiny pro pracující ženy,” by Jitka Pražáková), OSA. 23. Rudé právo, 8 March 1984, as quoted in “Women are Equal—More or Less.” 24. Ulcˇ, The Judge in a Communist State, 239. 25. The Czech sociologist Ivo Možný argues that once the family unit—understood not only as one’s immediate relations but also as networks of people who trusted one another—began to break down, so, too, did communism. See Ivo Možný, Procˇ tak snadno . . . Neˇkteré rodinné du˚vody sametové revoluce (Prague, 1991). 26. Rádio Hveˇzda, 22 February 1974, 1200 hours, OSA, Olga Havlová, the first wife of Václav Havel, believed, like many women, that the Czechoslovak Association of Women was rather quick to tell women what they must give to society without ever supporting them in their demand that society give something in return. Havlová organized a small gathering of women on November 7, 1988, on Wenceslas Square. Before being arrested, they briefly held up placards demanding that the government provide women with sanitary napkins, which were always impossible to find. 27. Hana Havelková, “Women in and after a ‘Classless’ Society,” in Women and Social Class—International Feminist Perspectives (London, 1999), ed. Christine Zmroczek and Pat Mahoney, 75. 28. Informace pro Prˇedsednictvo: “Rozbor vývoje populace s návrhy opatrˇení k jeho zlepšení,” 11 February 1971, 19, 28, NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 02/1, sv. 2, a.j. 2. 29. Ibid. 30. Veˇra Sokolová, “Planned Parenthood behind the Curtain: Population Policy and Sterilization of Romani Women in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1972–1989,” Anthropology of East Europe Review 23, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 79–98. 31. There is a close-up shot of the poster at the very beginning of the 1983 film Když rozvod, tak rozvod (If a Divorce, Then a Divorce It Be) directed by Š. Skalský. In the film, the poster is on the wall of the waiting area outside a divorce judge’s chambers, thus perhaps suggesting that not all is well with the happy family and, by extension, with the state. 32. Thirteen episodes; written by Jaroslav Dietl and directed by Evžen Sokolovský, 1979. 33. Quoted in “Inženýrská Odysea: O uveˇdomeˇlých hrdinech socialistického budování,” Televize.CZ, http://www.televize.cz/scripts/detail.php?id+23868 (accessed April 10, 2007). 34. Episode 2, “Dissenter.” 35. Episode 3, “Orphan.” 36. Episode 5, “Changing of the Guards.” 37. Episode 6, “Power Takeover.” 38. Ibid.

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39. One comical example of badly worded English appears when Jano and his boss, Svacˇina, are approached at a Chicago Trade Fair by two “American businessmen” who ask—in halting English, of course—if Czech textile machines can compare to American ones. With much jocularity, Svacˇina answers that “off the record,” “I think the American ones are worse” (episode 8, “Prototype”). 40. Elena Prokhorova, “The Post-Utopian Body Politic: Masculinity and the Crisis of National Identity in Brezhnev-Era TV Miniseries,” in Gender and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Russian Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo and Andrea Lanoux (DeKalb, IL, 2006), 132–33. 41. Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton, 1997), 80. 42. Sheldon H. Lu, “Soap Opera in China: The Transnational Politics of Visuality, Sexuality, and Masculinity,” in Television: The Critical View, ed. Horace Newcomb (New York, 2007), 358. 43. Libora Oates-Indruchová, “The Void of Acceptable Masculinity during Czech State Socialism: The Case of Radek John’s Memento,” Men and Masculinities, no. 8 (2006): 429. 44. Andrea Rinke, “Models or Misfits? The Role of Screen Heroines in GDR Cinema,” in Triangulated Visions: Women in Recent German Cinema, ed. Ingeborg Majer O’Sickey and Ingeborg von Zadow (Albany, 1998), 216. 45. Hana Havelková, “A Few Prefeminist Thoughts,” 68. 46. Ibid. 47. Havelková, “Women in and after a ‘Classless’ Society,’” 75. 48. As might therefore be expected, in the first years following the 1989 Velvet Revolution, as some women began to organize into groups intended to promote their interests, they continued to rally around these same issues of family life that had defined them as citizens during normalization. See my article “The Status of Women in Post-1989 Czechoslovakia,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Report on Russia & Eastern Europe, 16 July 1992. 49. Alena Heitlinger, “The Impact of the Transition from Communism on the Status of Women in the Czech and Slovak Republics,” in Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, ed. Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller (New York, 1993), 104. 50. Quoted in Vodrážka, “Bomby se znacˇkou Made in Human Rights aneb procˇ je krize Charty 77 prˇítomná i dnes—cˇást III. Nerozkvetlé ženské kveˇty Pražského jara,” Britské listy (10.3.2002) (http://www.blisty.cz/art/10044.html) (accessed January 8, 2005). Vodrážka also points out that the language Havel used to criticize feminists clumsily mirrored the language used by the regime to condemn the Charter: “Havel considered feminism to be the invention of hysterics and jilted lovers (the analogous language of Rudé právo: the Charter is the invention of failed politicians and vain losers) and of bored virgins ([Rudé právo:] of the sons of millionaire families); laughable in its passionate and serious devotion to the cause and its emphasis on helpless womanhood ([Rudé právo:] Charter 77 is touching in its criticisms, which masquerade as the voice of opposition); and it reminds one of the television clucking of communist-type women like [deputy director of Czechoslovak Television] Balašová ([Rudé právo:] is the voice of reactionary and unfriendly powers).” 51. Peggy Watson, “Eastern Europe’s Silent Revolution: Gender,” Sociology 27, no. 3 (August 1993): 477. 52. Vodrážka, “Bomby se znacˇkou Made in Human Rights aneb,” 4. 53. As cited in “Žena pod pultem,” Televize.CZ, http://www.tvmax.cz/scripts/detail. php?id=23887 (accessed October 28, 2007).

NOTES TO PAGES 175–183

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54. Dominik, “The Narrative Structures in Jaroslav Dietl’s Serials,” 72. Also, according to Dominik, Czechoslovak Television at first refused to spend the money to produce The Woman behind the Counter since it did not think the serial was sufficiently political to warrant financing. The go-ahead came when someone decided the serial would provide a good opportunity to cast Jirˇina Švorcová, who “deserved it” for her loyalty to the Communist Party. 55. Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland,” 402. 56. Ibid., 403. 57. Ibid., 422. 58. Ibid., 424. 59. Hanáková, “The Viscitudes [sic] of Czech Feminism.” The few copies of good literature that were published by the state presses always went on sale Thursday morning. CHAPTER 8

1. Discussed in chapter 7. Inženýrská Odysea, 1979; thirteen episodes; written by Jaroslav Dietl and directed by Evžen Sokolovský. 2. Episode 5, “Changing of the Guards.” 3. “Soudobé proudy antikomunismu a náš ideový postup [Prˇíloha IV]” (Thirtythird meeting of the Central Committee’s Ideological Commission), 24 September 1965, NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/5, sv. 16, aj. 70, 100–105. 4. Ibid. 5. “Lidová demokracie,” 24 August 1967 (RFE press clipping), OSA. 6. Záznam pro 2. schu˚zi ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 17 June 1970 (Fojtík), NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ, f. 10/10l, sv. 1, a.j. 2, bod 0. 7. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), dir. Philip Kaufman. 8. Police records show that from August 1968 until 1987, 136,876 people left Czechoslovakia. See Jirˇí Pernes, Takoví nám vládli. Komunisticˇtí prezidenti Cˇeskoslovenska a doba, v níž žili (Prague, 2003), 292. Another number cited (this time for the period from 1968 to 1989) is 106,837. This number seems to be derived from how many people were tried in absentia for leaving the country. Jaroslav Cuhra, Trestní represe odpu˚rcu˚ režimu v letech 1969–1972 (Prague, 1997), 26. 9. Jirˇí Kocian, Jirˇí Pernes, Oldrˇich Tu˚ma et al., Cˇeské pru˚švihy aneb Prohry, krize, skandály a aféry cˇeských deˇjin let 1848–1989 (Prague, 2004), 296. 10. See, for example, Reuters, 19 February 1969 (RFE press clipping), OSA. 11. Kocian, Pernes, Tu˚ma et al., Cˇeské pru˚švihy, 298. 12. Cuhra, Trestní represe odpu˚ rcu˚ režimu v letech 1969–1972, 27. 13. Kocian, Pernes, Tu˚ma et al., Cˇeské pru˚švihy, 299. 14. Marcus Ferrar, “Modest Success Claimed for CSSR Amnesty,” Reuters, 8 July 1973. 15. Miroslav Hájek, “Deveˇt dopisu˚,” Rudé právo, 24 July 1971, 3. 16. Jirˇí Fér, “Podíl Cˇs. televize na boji proti emigraci a prˇi rozvíjení socialistického vlastenectví,” 7 March 1985, CˇT APF, f. VE 2, k. 143, ev.j. 979. The report further noted that “in the emphasis of this theme, television programs for children and youth are particularly important.” 17. Jirˇí Bagar, Tvorba, 21 November 1984, 5. 18. Opustíš-li meˇ, by Lubomír Tachovský, Rádio Praha, June 1970, OSA. The novel was by Zdeneˇk Pluharˇ; and the television drama by D. Štursová. See Rudé právo, 6 March 1979, 5. 19. “Procˇ se Zlatníkovi vrátili z australského ráje: Klokaní skok,” Rudé právo, 27 April 1971, 3. 20. “Kolo deˇjin nezastaví,” Tribuna, 14 April 1976, 9.

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21. Rádio Hveˇzda, 17 September 1970, 2100 hours, OSA (translation by RFE). 22. “Politická Aktualita”—Jarmila Stejskalová Speaks with Returnee Josef Cˇermák, Rádio Hveˇzda, 28 August 1973, 1530 hours, OSA. 23. Czechoslovak Television, 24 July 1972, 1930–2000 hours (translation by RFE). 24. “Draze zaplacené zkušenosti”—Karel Kvalip Talks to Returnee Zdeneˇk Lédl, Rádio Praha, 10 April 1970, 2030 hours, OSA. 25. Jaroslav Horák, “Vrátili se z ‘ráje,’” Tribuna, 1 October 1969, 16. 26. Rádio Hveˇzda in Slovak, 17 September 1970, 2103 hours, OSA (translation by RFE). 27. Rádio Hveˇzda, 24 November 1971, 1730 hours, OSA. 28. Ibid. 29. Richard Podhorský Speaks with Returnee Milan Matulík, Rádio Praha, 17 February 1974, 2200 hours, OSA. 30. Horák, “Vrátili se z ‘ráje,’” 16. 31. Jarmila Stejskalová Speaks with Father and Son Barták, Rádio Hveˇzda, 25 December 1971, 1930 hours, OSA. 32. Ibid., pt. 1. 33. Ibid., pt. 2. 34. Fér, “Podíl Cˇs. televize no boji,” CˇT APF: Fond VE 2, karton # 143, ev.j. 979. 35. Otakar Turek, Podíl ekonomiky na pádu komunismu v Cˇeskoslovensku (Prague, 1995), 67–71. 36. Otakar Turek, “Plánované hospodárˇství,” in Procˇ jsme v listopadu vyšli do ulic, ed. Jirˇí Vancˇura (Brno, 1999), 74. 37. See Turek, Podíl ekonomiky, 75–76, and “Plánované hospodárˇství,” 74. He further argues, as have other economists, that in fact Czechoslovakia’s economy was not in nearly as bad a shape as many had thought. 38. Lenka Kalinová, Sociální vývoj Cˇeskoslovenska 1969–1989 (ÚSD Publication) (Prague, 1998), 20. 39. Jirˇí Svoboda, “Rozhovor se cˇtenárˇem: Jaký zpu˚sob života?” Rudé právo (prˇíloha), 30 October 1976, 2. 40. Ibid. 41. Miloslav Chlupácˇ, “Být neznamená jen mít,” Rudé právo, 21 April 1978, 4 –5. 42. 6. schu˚ze ideologické komise ÚV KSCˇ, 15 October 1985; “Stav a tendence rozvoje socialistického spolecˇenského veˇdomí,” Materiály pro ideologickou komisi ÚV KSCˇ NACˇR, ÚV KSCˇ , uncataloged (pre-1989 catalogue number: IK-63/24), 6 (put forward by L. Novotný). 43. Ibid., 6–7. 44. Script for episode 1, Žena za pultem, Czechoslovak Television (1977), directed by Jaroslav Dudek, written by Jaroslav Dietl, CˇT APF. 45. Letter from Ústrˇední rˇeditel Cˇeskoslovenské televize to Josef Kempný, cˇlen prˇedsednictva a tajemník ÚV KSCˇ, 31 October 1977, CˇT APF, f. VE 2, k. 117, ev.j. 794. 46. Cited in “Žena pod pultem,” Televize.CZ, http://www.tvmax.cz/scripts/detail. php?id=23887 (accessed October 28, 2007). 47. Zdeneˇk Fekar, “Propagandistka za pultem? Hloupost!” Tramvaj Nacˇerno, http:// www.tramvaj.cz/021004_M.htm (accessed October 17, 2007). 48. Susan E. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 220–21. 49. Ibid., 233. 50. Ibid., 242. 51. Rozpaky kucharˇe Svatopluka was produced by Czechoslovak Television in 1984, and broadcast in 1985; written by Jaroslav Dietl and directed by František Filip. The

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title song was sung by the Czech singer Waldemar Matuška, who in 1986 defected to the United States while on tour. Since it was technically difficult to erase the serial’s opening soundtrack, his name was simply eliminated from the credits. 52. Ellen Mickiewicz, Split Signals: Television and Politics in the Soviet Union (Oxford, 1988), 164 –65. 53. Ibid., 165. 54. During the late 1990s, at the same time as the debate was raging in the Czech Republic over whether the normalization crime serial Major Zeman should be permitted to be rebroadcast (or kept under lock and key), Chef Svatopluk’s Quandaries was rebroadcast but without any reference to the context of its production during late communism. It was presented with a panel of celebrities, “experts,” and “businessmen,” commenting in a cocktail-party format on how they thought Svatopluk should proceed in his dilemmas. The hosts of the refurbished rebroadcast were the actor and actress who had originally played Chef Svatopluk and his wife in the serial. 55. Karel Pecka, “Svoboda a zrcadlo,” Obsah, no. 6 (1985). 56. “Rozpaky kucharˇe Svatopluka,” Televize. CZ, http://www.televize.cz/scripts/detail. php?id=23879 (accessed March 27, 2007). 57. Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” trans. Edmund White, New York Review of Books, April 26, 1984. 58. Václav Havel, “Moc bezmocných,” O lidskou identitu: Úvahy, fejetony, protesty, polemiky, prohlášení a rozhovory z let 1969–1979, ed. Vilém Precˇan and Alexander Tomský (London, 1984), 71. The italics are Havel’s. For the English translation, see Václav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane (New York, 1990), 38. In this translation, however, Havel’s italics were eliminated. 59. D. Christopher Brooks, “The Art of the Political: Havel’s Dramatic Literature as Political Theory,” East European Quarterly 39, no. 4 (December 2005): 499. 60. Paul Berman, A Tales of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York, 1996), 226–27. 61. Ibid., 227. 62. Y. P., “Po nás potopa?” Vokno, no. 14 (1988). 63. This song, archived at the Open Society Archives in Budapest, is available only in the English translation by Radio Free Europe. “Stealing” refers to the common practice of stealing bricks and other materials from building sites to construct a private weekend cottage. The “crooner” is a reference to the Czech singer Karel Gott. Tuzex was a special chain of stores where one could buy Western goods but only for Western currency. Since it was illegal to possess Western currency, technically one could shop at Tuzex only if one had relatives abroad who sent Western currency directly to the government-owned Tuzex, where the real money was automatically changed into special vouchers for shopping. Of course, there was a widespread black market for these vouchers, which were sold directly on the street at the entrance to the stores, thus allowing anyone with money to have access to the Tuzex goods. “Kindness that must be paid for” refers to the common practice of bribery for any small service, especially doctors’ visits and medical care. “Polished Chryslers” and “harlots” call to mind the flashy lifestyles of both black marketers and party bosses. 64. Quoted in Hans Renner, A History of Czechoslovakia since 1945 (New York, 1989), 114. CONCLUSION

1. Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution. The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, 1999), 33. 2. Petr Holub, “Tehdy jsme byli mladí,” Respekt, 17 November 1997, 3.

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NOTES TO PAGES 201–208

3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Zbyneˇk Petrácˇek, “Jen houšt’ a veˇtší kapky,” Respekt, 4 April 1994, 3. 6. Jirˇí Penˇás, “Pod kuratelou seriálu,” Respekt, 4 March 1996, 18. 7. Zbyneˇk Petrácˇek, “Jen houšt’ a veˇtší kapky,” Respekt, 4 April 1994, 3. 8. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1994). 9. Jirˇí Penˇás, “Držet lyru a krok,” Respekt, 10–17 February 1997, http://www.respekt. cz/clanek.php?fIDCLANKU=409&fIDROCNIKU=1997 (accessed November 19, 2004). 10. Michal Andeˇl, “Devastace je stále znát,” Lidové noviny, 20 August 2005, 13–14. 11. Petr Fischer, “Kdo se bojí Anny Holubové,” Lidové noviny, 10 August 2002, 10. 12. “Charta 77/2/87: Slovo ke spoluobcˇanu˚m,” Infoch X (newsletter for Charter signatories), no. 1 (1987): 7. 13. Ibid., 8. 14. Lenka Procházková, “Už se nebojte!” Lidové noviny, no. 9 (September 1988): 4. 15. “Dosti strachu,” (editorial), Prostor, no. 12 (January 1989): 4. 16. “Anketa na téma strachu,” Prostor, no. 12 (January 1989): 108. 17. Ibid., 109. 18. Ibid., 112. 19. František Janouch, “O našich nadeˇjích i naší beznadeˇji,” in Ne, nesteˇžuji si. Malá normalizacˇní mozaika (Prague, 1990), 171–72. 20. Quoted in Petr Rezek, Filosofie a politika kýcˇe (Prague, 1990), 94. 21. Ibid., 97. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 100. 24. Ibid., 99 (emphasis in original). 25. Ibid., 100. 26. Ibid. 27. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC, 1997), 3. 28. PHA, “De mortuis nihil nisi bene . . . ?” Obsah, no. 6 (1986): 3. 29. “Anketa na téma strachu,” 109.

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Index

“About the Meaning of Charter 77” (Havel), 110 –111 agricultural collectivization, 132, 134, 153 Anti-Charter Rally, 104 –107, 174, 224 n75 antipolitics, 96, 97, 99–100, 102, 110 anti-Semitism, 69–70, 72, 74, 82. See also Slánský trial Balašová, Milena, 76, 119–120, 121, 131–132 Bejda, Vasil, 119, 124 Benda, Václav, 5, 100 –101 Bil’ak, Vasil, 37, 43, 67– 68, 87, 114, 191, 199, 226 n18 Dubcˇek, relationship to, 39– 40, 67– 68 on “The Lesson,” 63, 72 political formation of, 38– 41 on reentry, 53, 55 Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The (Kundera), 56, 60, 61– 62, 84 Brezhnev, Leonid, 22, 26, 38, 121, 172 censorship, 29–30, 112, 144, 212 n63, 219 nn3 – 4 Charter 77, 4, 5, 63, 69, 70, 94 –101, 108–111, 151, 152, 155, 174, 198. See also antipolitics defining itself, 95 –96, 97–98, 100 –101, 102, 108–111, 225 n82 “A Letter from Forty Signatories . . . ,” 109–110 “A Letter to the Signatories of Charter 77,” 109 regime, relationship with, 94, 95 –96, 101, 104, 224 n68 (see also Anti-Charter Rally) “A Word to Our Fellow Citizens,” 108, 203 Chef Svatopluk’s Quandaries (television serial, Dietl), 194 –197, 237 n54 civil society, 4 –5, 8 Clementis, Vladimír, 2, 23 Communist Party (Czechoslovak). See also Ideological Commission Central Committee, 5, 8, 12, 28, 32, 39, 42, 47, 87, 88, 115, 116, 125, 137, 144, 155, 159, 190, 226 n18 Control and Auditing Commission, 48, 132 leadership, 5, 6, 8, 34, 72, 87, 94, 112, 146, 174, 180, 189, 199, 205, 214 n13, 237 n63 Presidium, 37, 38, 39, 59, 66 – 67, 72, 75, 104, 116, 224 n68 consumption, 77, 86 –87, 97, 99, 108, 110, 111, 120, 163 –165, 175, 182, 185, 187–194, 197–200, 207

“Dear Dr. Husák” (Havel), 98, 206 demonstrations, 233 n26 anniversaries of the Soviet invasion, surrounding the, 33, 203 Hockey World Championships, surrounding the, 32 Strahov student demonstrations (1967), 20, 23, 25 Dietl, Jaroslav, 6, 8, 9, 12, 130 –133, 138–139, 146 –148, 150 –153, 155, 157–158, 159, 162, 171, 175, 191, 202, 206 –208, 231 n75. See also entries for individual television serials dissident debate about, 151–157, 231 n88 Young Lady for His Excellency, Comrades, A (theater play), 12–15, 27, 40 Dietl, works of Chef Svatopluk’s Quandaries (television serial), 194 –197, 237 n54 Dispatcher (television serial), 131 District Up North, The (television serial), 137, 146, 147, 152, 155 Engineers’ Odyssey, The (television serial), 169–172, 177–178, 195 Hospital on the Edge of Town, A (television serial), 145 –146, 150, 152 Man at the Town Hall, The (television serial), 140 –143, 147, 153 Sons and Daughters of Jakub the Glassblower, The (television serial), 143 –144 Three Men in a Country Cottage (television serial), 130 –131 Woman behind the Counter, The (television serial), 10, 164 –167, 169, 174, 176, 190 –194, 203, 235 n54 Youngest of the Hamr Dynasty, The (television serial), 133 –140, 153 Young Lady for His Excellency, Comrades, A (theater play), 12–15, 27, 40 Dispatcher (television serial; Dietl), 131 dissent, 4, 8, 101, 158, 173, 204. See also resistance; Charter 77 antipolitics, 96, 97, 99–100, 102, 110 Hungary, 101 Poland, 5, 88, 93, 97, 101 sacrifice, as related to, 93, 101, 173 dissidents, 5, 8, 70, 83 –84, 90 –92, 101, 105, 108, 151–157, 173, 174, 205, 231 n84 247

248

INDEX

District Up North, The (television serial; Dietl), 137, 146, 147, 152, 155 Dubcˇek, Alexander, 20, 22, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 40, 46, 59, 63, 77, 81, 87–89, 99, 178 Dutschke, Rudi, 26 –27 émigrés, 70 –71, 72, 92, 109, 179–184, 235 n8, 236 n51 reemigrants, 180 –181, 183 –187 Engineers’ Odyssey, The (television serial; Dietl), 169–172, 177–178, 195 Family Blaha (television serial), 126 feminism, 174 –175, 233 n26, 234 n48, 234 n50 Fifteenth Party Congress (1976), 123 Fojtík, Jan, 37, 49, 76, 191, 214 n23 on emigration, 179–180 on ideology, 89, 114, 116, 123 on “The Lesson,” 64 political formation of, 41– 43, 214 n22 on reentry, 51–52 television, views on, 113, 115, 150 Fourteenth Party Congress (1971), 87, 116, 123, 214 n12 Extraordinary Fourteenth Congress (1968), 28 generational politics, 90, 92, 109–110, 198–199 Ginsberg, Allen, 18, 48, 210 n11 Goldstücker, Eduard, 22–23, 61, 96 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 108 Gott, Karel, 56, 107, 199, 237 n63 Gottwald, Klement, 23, 95, 162, 205 Hájek, Jirˇí (normalizer and journalist), 54, 218 n90 Hájek, Jirˇí (reform communist and Prague Spring Foreign Minister), 25, 95 Havel, Václav, 3, 4, 5, 7, 16, 19, 93, 94, 100, 104, 110, 197–198, 203, 205 –206, 229 n27, 234 n50. See also dissent; antipolitics “About the Meaning of Charter 77,” 110 –111 “Dear Dr. Husák,” 98, 206 Dubcˇek, correspondence with, 32–33 greengrocer, the, 7, 98, 103, 206 (see also normalization: fear during) Kundera, polemics with, 30 –31 “living in truth,” 7, 33, 99, 101, 111, 148, 198, 203, 206 Mandler, polemics with, 96 post-totalitarianism, 3, 98, 110, 197, 206 “Power of the Powerless,” 7, 98, 176, 206 Hejdánek, Ladislav, 174 Holub, Miroslav, 57–58 Hornícˇek, Miroslav, 50 –51, 52 Hospital on the Edge of Town, A (television serial; Dietl), 145 –146, 150, 152

Hrabal, Bohumil, 58 Hrbek, Jaromír, 47– 48, 66 – 67, 123 –124 Hungarian Revolution (1956), 15, 88 Husák, Gustáv, 8, 32, 33, 35, 67– 68, 89, 93, 98, 207, 214 n13. See also “Dear Dr. Husák”; Zelenka: correspondence with Husák Bil’ak, relationship to, 40, 54, 67– 68 on consumption, 86, 87, 99, 189 on family, 167 political formation of, 37–38, 39 and purge, 35 –36, 218 n95 on the quiet life, 89, 99 on reentry, 53 –55, 91, 181 Ideological Commission (of the Central Committee) (normalization-era), 40 – 41, 47, 53, 63, 65, 118, 123, 157, 161–162 on memory-making, 64, 66, 75, 162 Ideological Commission (of the Central Committee) (pre-1968), 11, 12, 15 –16, 178 interhuman relations, 164 –166, 173, 174, 176, 186 Jakeš, Miloš, 6, 132, 226 n18 Joke, The (Kundera), 16 Jurácˇek, Pavel, 55, 56, 58 Kádár, János, 37, 53 Kadarism, 52, 53, 66 Kafka, Franz, 22, 76 –77 Liblice conference (1963), 23, 68, 76 Khrushchev, Nikita, 1, 3, 11, 15, 88, 113, 193 Klíma, Ivan, 3, 117, 151–157 Kliment, Jan, 114 –115 Kohout, Pavel, 94 –95, 117 Konrád, György, 5, 96 Kovály, Heda Margolius, 12 Kriegel, František, 40, 69, 205 Kundera, Milan, 3, 61, 113, 130, 197 Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The, 56, 60, 61– 62, 84 “The Czechs’ Lot,” 30 Joke, The, 16 Unbearable Lightness of Being, The (film version), 94, 180, 183, 201 late communism, 34. See also normalization scholarship on, 3 – 4, 6, 88, 103, 175, 209 n2 “The Lesson,” 64, 67– 68, 72, 104 “A Letter from Forty Signatories . . .” (Charter 77), 109–110 “A Letter to the Signatories of Charter 77” (Charter 77), 109 “living in conflict” (Rezek), 102–103 “living in truth” (Havel), 7, 33, 99, 101, 111, 148, 198, 203, 206

INDEX

Man at the Town Hall, The (television serial; Dietl), 140 –143, 147, 153 Mandler, Emanuel, 96, 98 Marxism and dissidents, 92, 93, 95, 99, 198 and reform communism, 26 –27 masculinity, 172–174, 176, 192 memory as dissent, 84, 86 and forgetting, 61– 62, 84, 205 (see also Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in Hungary after 1956, 66 of late communism, 201–203, 208 myth-making and, 65, 83, 208; around intellectuals, 63, 68– 69, 72, 73, 76 –77, 78, 82, 83, 148, 183, 215 n37; around mass hysteria, 72–73, 74, 77, 79–80, 82, 83, 89, 172, 174, 181, 192 official anniversaries, the staging of, 64, 82, 156 (see also demonstrations); 1945 Red Army Liberation, 64, 74; and Eduard Beneš, 64 – 65; founding of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, 66 – 67 the Prague Spring, shaping public memory of, 60, 63, 67, 68, 71–72, 85, 205 (see also “The Lesson”; Prague Spring: private memories of); as exhibits, 71–72, 85 –86, 111, 131, 220 n36; in film, 73, 74; in literature, 72; on television, 73 –81, 103, 135 Mlynárˇ, Zdeneˇk, 38, 95 Mnˇacˇko, Ladislav, 38 Moscow Protocol, 40, 69, 88, 205 Moucˇková, Kamila, 28, 46 Müller, Miroslav, 54, 124, 132

249

Plastic People of the Universe, 53, 94 Polednˇák, Alois, 56 –57 “post-totalitarianism” (Havel), 3, 98, 110, 197, 206 “Power of the Powerless” (Havel), 7, 98, 176, 206 Prague Spring lead up to, 15 –16, 90, 126, 178–179, 217 n89 (see also Kafka; students; Writers’ Congress) private memories of, 55, 58, 60, 63, 65 – 66, 76, 82, 84, 88, 111, 181, 207 private sphere. See private versus public sphere; privatized citizenship private versus public sphere, 7–8, 34, 103, 129, 147, 149, 159–164, 168–169, 172–176, 187, 194, 196, 200, 207 privatized citizenship, 111, 149–150, 157–158, 159, 176, 207 Procházková, Lenka, 203 –204 public sphere. See private versus public sphere; privatized citizenship purge, 5, 35 –37, 44 – 45, 59– 60, 62, 65, 79, 82, 85, 164, 213 n2, 215 n33, 218 n90. See also reentry: self-criticism and dissidents, 90, 93, 97, 151, 156 and post-1968 trials, 59, 217 n75, 218 n95 in postwar France, 51 screenings, 44 – 45, 47, 60, 70 at state television, 46 – 49, 114, 117 quiet life, 77, 83, 86, 87–89, 94, 98–99, 102, 111, 174, 175, 176, 185, 197, 206 –207

natalist rhetoric, 167–169, 173 normalization. See also late communism defining, regime’s attempts to, 3, 29, 33, 63, 85, 87, 89–90, 116 –117, 125, 128, 139, 149, 155, 164, 171, 174, 176, 178, 182, 183, 185 –187, 189, 192, 194, 198–200 fear during, 7, 111, 188, 194, 203 –206, 208 gray zone, and, 8, 92, 104 political culture during, 52, 98–99 Slovakia, in, 45, 99 Novotný, Antonín, 16, 17–18, 20, 22, 23, 42, 69, 76, 92, 178, 210 n8

real socialism, 3, 157, 159, 161, 187 reemigrants, 180 –181, 183 –187 reentry, 58, 60, 114, 118 debate about, 51–52, 53 –55 reentrants, 55 –56, 82, 105, 131 (see also Gott; Hornícˇek) requalification exams for, 52 self-criticism, 56 –58, 60, 131–133, 157 (see also Holub; Hrabal; Polednˇák) resistance, 41, 47, 84, 93, 103, 111, 173 –174, 197–198, 201–202, 211 n26. See also demonstrations; dissent Rezek, Petr, 102, 205 –206 Roma (Gypsies), 168, 173

Palach, Jan, 31–32, 87, 205 panel housing (paneláky), 120, 142, 195, 202 “parallel polis” (Benda), 5, 100 –101 Patocˇka, Jan, 92, 95, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 174, 197–198 Pavlícˇek, František, 152–154, 156 Pecka, Karel, 155 –157, 195, 197 Pelikán, Jirˇí, 21, 45, 70 –71, 220 n34 petit bourgeois tendencies, 63, 75, 157, 190

samizdat, 101, 145, 150, 151–157, 195, 198, 203 –204, 207 self-realization, 111, 178, 187, 189, 190, 194 –195, 197–200, 207 Šik, Ota, 46, 63 Šiklová, Jirˇina, 92, 150 Šimecˇka, Milan, 48, 56, 91–93 Sixteenth Party Congress (1981), 146 Škutina, Vladimír, 29, 118

250

INDEX

Slánský trial, 2, 11–12, 23, 223 n34. See also anti-Semitism; Kovály; Stalinism: Stalinist trials social comfort, 188 socialist way of life, 178, 182, 185, 189, 192–193, 199, 207 Sons and Daughters of Jakub the Glassblower, The (television serial; Dietl), 143 –144 Soviet advising, 11, 15, 22, 27, 25 –26, 28, 32, 38, 40, 67, 88, 121–122, 127, 213 n2. See also “The Lesson” Soviet invasion (1968; Warsaw Pact Invasion), 19, 27, 78, 89, 91, 165, 174, 175, 179–180 “invitation letter,” 67, 72, 214 n16 radio and, 28 Stalinism, 8, 22, 95, 99, 111, 112, 152, 154, 156, 159–162, 163, 184 –185 and de-Stalinization, 1–2, 11, 15, 16 –17, 39, 90 Stalin statue, 1–3 Stalinist trials, 5, 93 (see also Slánský trial) Štoll, Ladislav, 161–162 students, 20 majales, 18 Palach, and, 32 Rudi Dutschke, meetings with, 26 –27, 212 n52 Strahov demonstrations (1967), 20, 23, 25 and youth movement, 18–19, 211 n26 Sudeten Germans, 133 –134, 183 Švestka, Oldrˇich, 42, 43, 51, 67, 72, 132, 216 n48 Svoboda, Ludvík, 88, 214 n13 Švorcová, Jirˇina, 68, 106, 127, 165, 166, 174 –175, 220 n25 television, 225 n4. See also television serials Charter 77, and, 105 in China, 227 n66 evening news, emphasis on, 46, 48, 105, 118, 122–123, 128, 130, 155, 227 n47 Germany, in East, 82, 115, 122–123, 161, 173 Germany, in West, 82, 145 late communism, during, 7, 8, 47, 80, 111, 112–113, 116 –119, 121, 124, 129, 152–153, 159, 182, 187, 206 in 1968, 20 –21, 149 and Palach, 31 Prague Spring, during the, 8, 23, 24 –25, 45, 111, 117, 119 at purge, 45 – 49, 70, 131, 215 n44, 216 n48 and reform communism, 21, 113 signals from abroad, 120 –121 Soviet invasion, during the, 28 in the Soviet Union, 113 –114, 119, 124, 128, 137, 172, 194 television serials, 8, 9, 122, 125 –129, 144, 148, 150, 155, 157, 228 n5. See also entries

for individual television serials. See also Dietl analyses of, 124 –126, 128, 129, 137 audience responses to, 131, 136 –140, 144, 145 –146, 148, 166, 194 –197, 202 family serials, genre of, 126 –127 post-communist rebroadcasts of, 9, 146, 202, 237 n54 Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman, The (television serial), 9, 10, 73 –83, 103 –104, 124, 146, 205 Three Men in a Country Cottage (television serial; Dietl), 130 –131 Two Thousand Words Manifesto (Vaculík), 47, 48, 58, 78 Uhde, Milan, 16, 91 Unbearable Lightness of Being, The (film version), 94, 180, 183, 201 Vaculík, Ludvík, 3, 17, 30, 46, 94, 104, 105, 117 Ax, The, 16 Two Thousand Words Manifesto, 47, 48, 58, 78 Velvet Revolution (1989), 89 Winter, Kamil, 28 Woman behind the Counter, The (television serial; Dietl), 10, 164 –167, 169, 174, 176, 190 –194, 203, 235 n54 women’s double burden, 163, 165 –166, 175, 176, 192, 194, 233 n22. See also feminism “A Word to Our Fellow Citizens” (Charter 77), 108, 203 workers, 19–20, 58–59, 95, 160, 163, 175, 180, 182, 184 –185, 188, 190, 194 –195. See also Chef Svatopluk’s Quandaries World War Two, 12, 15, 17, 19, 22, 36, 37, 38, 39, 44, 51, 52, 64 – 65, 75, 83, 88, 92, 133 Writers’ Congress (1967), 17, 20, 61 Youngest of the Hamr Dynasty, The (television serial; Dietl), 133 –140, 153 Young Lady for His Excellency, Comrades, A (theater play; Dietl), 12–15, 27, 40 Zelenka, Jan, 37, 43, 56, 61– 62, 125, 137, 151, 166 accusations against, 48, 114 –115, 118, 132 appeals to, 50 –51, 52, 69, 221 n69 Husák, correspondence with, 115 –117, 119, 122, 124, 126 on memory-making, 64, 76 normalization’s small screen, views on, 49, 114, 117–118, 131, 138 on reform communism at state television, 46, 113, 117