The Buoyant Class: Bourgeois Family Lineage in the Life Stories of Czech Business Élite Persons

Introduction

In 1994-5, I carried out 67 life story interviews in the Czech Republic. My purpose was to compile a qualitative database for enquiry into the duality of great history and little history (Simecka 1992; Fialova 1996) in a society undergoing a post-communist transition. Great history consists of accounts of affairs of state and social developments structured around concepts like civil society, political culture and market economy. Little history is grounded in accounts of events and changes that individuals articulate as their own experience. The concept is similar to what some Anglo-American qualitative sociologists call `lived experience' (Denzin 1991), but more strongly oriented to the awareness of living in history that members of a culture display in their everyday interactions. This awareness can be expected to feature prominently in a post-revolutionary society, and indeed to be culturally encoded in the Czech society, which has seen a substantial change in political institutions at least once in the life time of every twentieth-century generation. Little history has a tendency to relativise great history and imbue it with potential irony. However, the exact relationship between the two histories - the degree to which they corroborate or challenge one another - is an empirical question relating to particular place and time.

The focus of this article [Note 1] is on the new business classes created by post-communist privatisation policies, and in particular on their family lineage. After showing the pattern of élite circulation that is evident within the sample, the article explores the information the life narrators chose to give on their family lineage going back to the first republic (1918-38) - the capitalist democracy that preceded German occupation (1939-45) and the communist era (1946-89). It shows the existence of a `buoyant class' in Czech society - families of the first republic's upper and upper-middle strata that were expropriated and persecuted by the communist regime, but whose sons subsequently succeeded in managerial careers to the extent of joining the upper nomenklatura of the communist state. The article summarises an exemplar `buoyant class' story to explore how this was possible in an avowedly militant communist regime, and how narrative self- anchoring (Denzin 1989:18) in a bourgeois lineage can function, in the current socio-political context, to avert the potential stigma of communist- era career success.

Method

In selecting interviewees, I was guided by the aim of achieving a sample with a good (though not exclusive) representation from insiders to historical-player networks - those having a close involvement with the demise of the communist state as well as those taking a part in the post- communist privatising economy. This meant old and new élites, but also non-élite categories such as owners of smaller businesses and restituted farms. I selected most respondents from lists compiled with the help of my prior personal contacts (whom I did not interview) and by the snowball method. For restituent farmers, I had a landowners' association membership list acquired by a helpful interviewee. A "snowball" of insiders of the last communist government started with a yellow-pages search for a company that a respondent had mentioned in passing during her interview, as being run by a former communist government man. (For these insiders' view of the old regime see Andrle 2000a.) The overall response rate was high, with only five approaches failing to yield an interview.

Table 1 (in the next section) shows that, in terms of pre-1989 status, the eventual sample included 18 members of the high communist nomenklatura, and also 17 activists of the dissident movement; the remaining 32 represented less extreme categories of engagement with the old regime. In terms of status at the time of the interviews, the sample included 29 respondents who were actively engaged with post-communist privatisation as business owners, directors and chief executives, and restituent farmers. The élite profile brought with it a demographic bias towards middle-aged males. Only 12 respondents were born after 1960, and only 16 were female.

While all 67 respondents were asked to describe what changed and what didn't in their own experience since 1989, 52 interviews had a clear life story format. I started these interviews by asking the respondents to take a few minutes to write down on a time line the years in which events occurred `that have had a special significance in your life, for whatever reason'. Then I asked them to explain why they selected those years, and to describe in detail what happened. The briefing also invited the interviewees to describe their own experiences in preference to stating general opinions; and it outlined, with a repeated emphasis on procedures safeguarding anonymity, my plans for using the recordings. My strategy in the opening part of each interview was to encourage the respondent in finding his or her own narrative voice and story line, if such encouragement was needed. When the life story got to the present time, I had a list of questions to ask about developments since 1989, if they were not already answered. The typical interview lasted one hour, but the overall sample ranged from half an hour to over four hours.

Although the interviewees had a free hand in constructing the life stories they told, they were also constrained by the interview frame that was already in place as a result of the telephone conversation in which I had approached them and got their agreement to be interviewed. They knew that I was a British sociologist, but also a native Czech who had emigrated; that I wanted to write about Czech society for anglophone readership; and that I approached them because they had been powerful executives under the communist regime, or dissidents, or because they currently owned a business, or because they were neither politicians nor businessmen - because they had a social identity that defined a certain kind of participant in the revolutionary change. I was interested in the revolution - its social realities and personal adaptations - and I would have never been able to ask them for any interview had the revolution not occurred, for the iron curtain would still have been in place. Long before an interviewee uttered the opening statement of her or his life story, the interview frame put a political dimension into it. It in effect required the interviewee to tell his or her story in a way which defined a morally defensible position vis-ŕ-vis the dominant public discourse of revolution, in which the great history's break with the past threatened to stigmatise one or another aspect of one's personal tale.[Note 2]

Over the past twenty years, sociological use of life story interviews has followed a general trend in the broader discipline, in that realist approaches to data, which assume them to be representative of social reality with a greater or lesser accuracy, have come under challenge from constructivist approaches, which regard the data primarily as artful communicative acts in themselves. The realist approach gleans from life stories witness reports of social practices and representations of ideologies and attitudes typifying the subject's membership in a social group (Shaw 1930; Terkel 1972; Bertaux and Bertaux-Wiame 1981; Bertaux-Wiame 1981; Roos 1987; Bertaux and Thompson 1997). The constructivist approach highlights the interpretative biographical work that life narrators do as they select recollections out of a medley of possibilities and relate them in more or less coherent story lines (Holstein and Gubrium 2000; Gubrium and Holstein 1995; Fischer-Rosenthal 1995; Kohli 1986, 1981; McCall 1985; Meir and Raz 1996; Rosenthal 1993; Linde 1993; Stanley 1991).

The constructivist approach could be perhaps divided further. Some analysts focus their attention primarily on the interactional process that produced the narrative, the practical context of its telling (Holstein and Gubrium 2000; Gubrium and Holstein 1995; Chambon 1995; Catani 1981). Others focus mainly on the internal coherence of the life story, its gestalt- defining thematic structure and emplotment (Rosenthal 1993; Helling 1988; Schütze 1983; Burgos 1989) and its narrative genre (Bruner 1995, 1987; Denzin 1989). An in-depth exploration of this emerging subdivision is a topic for another article, concerning as it does the important issue of whether a life story (and its subject) is an ephemeral product of interactional pragmatics, or whether it reflects a self that has some continuity across particular roles and situations.

These divisions, however, need not split the field into doctrinal orthodoxies, as is evident in its most recent reviews (Miller 1999; Chamberlayn, Bornat and Wengraf 2000). Most biographical researchers are interested in the contents of their data as well as their forms. Calls for methods that occupy a middle ground between realism (or `naturalism') and constructivism (Gubrium 1993; Gubrium and Holstein 1997) may be difficult to heed successfully at all times, because an analytic choice has to be made to give a particular enquiry a clear primary focus. It is, however, possible to rescue realist enquiries from naďvety and constructivist enquiries from sterility by showing some narrative context in the former and some witness contents in the latter. It is equally feasible to apply different analytic choices in successive enquiries into the same data set.

In dealing with the sub-sample of élite businessmen who had been élite communist managers, I followed up a constructivist choice of primary focus elsewhere (Andrle 2000b). The present article is realist in its primary focus, in that it presents evidence on social mobility and discusses social practices that are evident in an exemplar `buoyant class' story. However, it also explores the part that information on pre-communist family lineage can play in the narrative construction of post-communist moral adequacy.

Post-revolutionary fates and the buoyant class

Table 1 shows the pattern of movement in social position that the change of political regimes occasioned among our respondents. The revolution predictably removed the high communist state functionaries in the sample from `high politics' (top row) and brought former dissidents in, at least for a while (third row);[Note 3] and it turned state-enterprise managers into businessmen (second row).

I have classified the business sub-sample (Table 1 column 3) into three categories: `large', `small but prosperous', and `small and struggling'. The businesses classified as `large' have assets extending well beyond merely making a good living for their owners and their families. This could be ascertained independently of what the respondents said about them. Firms that were household names quoted on the stock-exchange were a clear case in point; so were farms whose land holdings were such as to make them the dominant institution in their district. In addition, I included three respondents in this élite category although they were neither stock- exchange quoted nor extensively landed, because they owned whole chains of diverse businesses with visible operations and tangible assets. The rest of the business respondents were either `small but prosperous' or `small and struggling', depending on their own descriptions of their business development. Table 2 compares the former communist managers and functionaries with the rest of the business sub-sample, in terms of their distribution among the three categories.

Table 2 corroborates what has been generally well known and widely commented upon both within the country and internationally (Mateju and Reháková 1993; Clark and Soulsby 1996). The terms of the `velvet revolution' included a decision `not to be like them' (nebudeme jako oni), meaning that the new democracy would not replicate the communist revolution in its discrimination against the formerly privileged classes. Former communist careerists would have the same rights as any other citizen, including the new rights of economic entrepreneurship.[Note 4] Furthermore, the procedures for economic privatisation that were put into place enabled former communist managers to benefit not only from their technical expertise and general drive, which they often genuinely had, but also from their skills in cultivating and using personal connections, which had been always crucial to managerial success in communist economies (e.g., Andrle 1976). The exact ways in which our ex-communist business respondents converted their old positions into new success were various, but the central importance of informal social networks came across strongly in all their biographical self-accounts. Thus Mr Ambroz,[Note 5] one of the respondents who was in the high communist nomenklatura before the revolution and in the business élite since (Table 2, row 1, column 1) answered when I asked if the network of his work contacts changed after the revolution:

No. Interestingly, it didn't change at all [VA: hmm], you see. The contacts I had in the economic sphere, the various deputies or directors…who all had some expertise, or who took decisions, so that you needed personal contact with them to make things happen, that network didn't change. [VA: uhuh.] Basically I now use the same lot of telephone numbers as I did before the revolution… (940715a lines 961-74.)

This continuity in Ambrož's networks and the buoyancy of his post- revolutionary fortunes (he estimated his standard of living to have increased five-fold since the revolution) might have been expected of the `velvet revolution'.

The previous revolution, however, the Communist coup d'état of 1948, has not been known for being `velvet'. Unlike neighbouring Hungary and Poland, Czechoslovakia was an industrialised country with a large working class and a large Communist Party dating from 1922, which was always staunchly loyal to Moscow and Stalin. It welcomed the post-war settlement that delivered the country to the Soviet sphere of influence, and never demurred at the theory that dictatorship of the proletariat was historically necessary for further progress. That meant not only terror against potential political opponents and nationalisation of productive assets, but also explicit and pervasive policies of discrimination against the former bourgeoisie. Working class was the privileged category, and it was numerous and on the whole well educated, so that it was able to supply plenty of `cadres' for executive posts. The first three leaders of the communist regime, Gottwald (1948-53), Zapotocky (1953-7) and Novotny (1957-68) were robustly working-class in the social and cultural preferences they liked to put on public display. Recruitment to educational places and career posts involved questionnaires, curricular vitae and personnel office characterisations in which class origin was an inevitable item of information. Selection procedures institutionalised `complex character evaluation' (komplexni kadrove hodnoceni) in which it had to be taken into account. And, unlike in Hungary and Poland, where there were uprisings in 1956, after which the communist regime put on a more liberal hue, `class politics' remained prominent in the Czechoslovak communist rhetoric well into the 1960s, and it regained this prominence after the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968 quashed the Prague Spring.

On the basis of these historical observations, one might expect children of the first-republic upper and upper-middle classes to be relatively rare among the senior executives of the communist economy. On the other hand, the life stories told by some of our respondents who had been raised by lower-class parents (950413b; 950425b) show the latters' reluctance in letting their children stay in academic education any longer than was necessary for apprenticeship into a skilled manual occupation. Right until 1989, Czechoslovakia had a wage structure that was second to none in its overall egalitarian `flatness', and in the relative advantage it gave to skilled manual workers over white-collar employees. Only senior industrial executives and an assortment of small élite groups enjoyed substantially higher than average rewards. Material incentives for academically talented working-class children to stay on in education were not strong. This put a limit on the communist authorities' ability to sustain positive discrimination in favour of working-class children as a high priority educational practice (Connelly 1997).

Tables 3-5 in fact show first-republic bourgeois family lineage to be the dominant type in the life stories of today's business élite in our sample. Table 3 compares ancestors' pre-1939 social position with the respondents' own position at the time of their interview. Since the respondents were free to construct their life story and pre-1939 family lineage was not among the questions I asked after they finished telling it, information relevant to pre- 1939 lineage was given only by 26 respondents. Table 3 shows a marked continuity across the 60-year span, in that, for example, the respondents who were either in charge of large business or in high political functions (column 1) turned out to have had their first-republic ancestry mainly in the upper and middle classes (top two rows). And, none of the respondents reporting ancestry in the top two rows appeared to be among the respondents who suffered a downfall as a result of the communist state's collapse, or faced difficult problems such as looming business failure (column 4). Those reporting lower-class ancestry (bottom two rows) were, by contrast, a mixture in terms of their current fortunes.

If we focus on the business sub-sample, we see that it had a higher propensity to report the social position of first-republic ancestry than the overall sample. 26 of the overall sample of 67 reported it - that is 39 per cent. Of the business sub-sample of 29, 16 did - that is 55 per cent. Table 4 shows that, in addition, the propensity was particularly high among the élite business persons in our sample; 9 out of 11 described the social position of their ancestors in the first republic. The owners of businesses that were small and struggling were by contrast unforthcoming in this respect - only 2 out of 7 included the information in their life stories. The table also shows that the business élite respondents had the classiest pre- communist lineage to report.

To complete the picture of continuity in the upper stratum of business owners and executives, Table 5 shows specifically the first- republic lineage reported by the nine respondents counted in the top left cell of Table 2, that is, those who had been high communist executives before becoming a capitalist business élite. Seven out of the nine turn out to be in the top two rows, as `the buoyant class' whose family lineage has been in the privileged social minority before, during, and after the communist era.

Four of these `buoyant class' respondents, including the two with an upper-class first-republic lineage, were friends in frequent contact with one another. Ambroz, whom we have already encountered reporting no change in his list of useful telephone numbers, was an industrialist sitting behind the same directorial desk as before the revolution. His family had owned several factories since 1870, lost them to the nationalisation in 1948, and his father spent a time in prison during the 1950s. Barta was the other respondent counted in the top row of Table 5. We will consider his story in more detail below. Boucek was now a stock broker and property developer, after being a high functionary in the old regime's science and education sector. His parents had a substantial farm (statek) before it was collectivised, in the same part of the country as Ambroz's ancestral factories and Barta's ancestral country estate. Brezina hailed from elsewhere, but his parents, too, had property to lose to the state in 1948. He now had a range of businesses including a specialist import company, having been a senior executive of the communist foreign trade monopoly. Ambroz gave me the names and telephone numbers of the other three at the end of his interview. (He did not give me contacts on his `buoyant class' friends because I expressed a special interest in his own bourgeois lineage during his interview, which I did not.) The `buoyant class' respondents who were not in Ambroz's `snowball' were chief executives of large management consultancies and investment funds, and of a large former collective farm. Before the revolution they were, respectively, an international trade organisation executive, a government economic reform adviser, and collective farm chairman. All three had fathers who had been graduate professionals during the first republic.

Barta's story of upper-class continuity

At the time of his interview, Barta was chief executive of one of the country's more important investment funds and, by that token, board member of many firms in which his investment fund was a substantial shareholder. As with all the business élite respondents, the interview took place in his office. He took his time over the timeline, selecting 17 significant years as an aide-mémoire for his life story, which he then told, in a fluent if somewhat bland, self-restrained style, in 30 minutes. This narrative part of the interview was followed by a 40-minute argumentative part, in which he developed his views on various topics in answer to my questions concerning his post-1989 experiences. During this second part, he referred back to his life narrative on several occasions, supplying it with further detail. This is how his life story began:

1948 was a turning point, because my family was basically dispossessed by nationalisation. Because, I'd been born to a family that had been closely involved with Czech financial capital, the first- republic finances, I might say. My paternal granddad, AA, was a founder of the XX Bank, and one of its board directors. He was one of the people who, together with BB, conceptualised the financial policy of the new-born Czech state. My maternal granddad was also an XX Bank director. So, we lived (pause) my paternal granddad had bought a part of a country estate from YY, in ZZ, after the land reform of 1922.[Note 6] That was our family residence. Well, and in 1948 nationalisation was carried out, and it brought problems to my family, which lasted basically all my life, until 1989-90. [VA: Ehm.] In 1951 came another moment which I consider important, because father was arrested and we were evicted from the house on the country estate, which had remained in our possession when the rest of the country estate had been nationalised. We were moved to Prague.… (940726a lines 14-52)

The family lived in reduced circumstances, sharing an apartment with Barta's grandparents. Father was released from prison after a year, the charges against him having been dropped. Although he was a lawyer, he learned an electrician's trade and worked manually for over 10 years. Barta had difficulties getting into a secondary school on account of his social origin, but these had been somehow overcome. After his maturita exam, however, he took a job as a garage mechanic for a year, because he `had to become closer to the working class' before he could gain a place in the university. Not that he minded manual work. Throughout his undergraduate years, and for a period after that, he did a lot of moonlighting as a labourer, to support a life style which required a car for frequent hunting trips to a forest that used to belong to the family. Soon after Barta started his degree course, his father left the electrician trade for a lawyer post in the Prague branch of a foreign-owned firm. After his graduation, Barta commenced his career in the industrial headquarters that would remain his employer for more than twenty years.

In 1968 his parents and his brother emigrated, and after they were convicted for the crime in absentia a year later, he faced a difficult period during which he achieved several important things. Firstly, he avoided military service by getting a final exemption on health grounds, with the help of an understanding hospital consultant. Military service would have meant two years' loss of earnings, which he could not afford. Secondly, he got tenure of the apartment his parents had vacated, although `at the cost of some financial sacrifice'. Thirdly, he became friends with a secret police agent, the Stb (the state security police) having their interest in him prompted by the fact that he alone chose to stay while the rest of his immediate family emigrated; but this did not lead to any troublesome embroilment. Fourthly, he managed to buy back from the state his mother's half-share in a house situated in a country beauty spot near Prague, which the state had confiscated as a penalty for her emigration. Barta's main employment was not paying much at that early stage of his career but, as we already know, he was an energetic moonlighter. And finally, despite his moonlighting needs, he got his employer's confidence and protection.

I enjoyed the support of some people, e.g. my employer, who kind of protected me from the regime's hostility, so I was able to work normally in lower positions. (940726a: lines 215-22)

He was promoted to senior executive ranks by the end of the 1970s. Soon after that, he got his first permission to travel abroad to see his mother in western Europe, which visit he was able to repeat every year from then on. In the mid-1980s he got permission to visit his brother in Canada. By that time his function in the industrial directorate was very senior.

Several weeks after the communist regime's collapse he was invited, as a capable manager who had the additional advantage of not being a Communist Party member, to join the new government at a deputy-minister level. He had the foresight to tell his minister, a long time before the `lustration law' demanding the vetting of state functionaries was even mooted, that there was a likelihood of there being a record that might be misconstrued in the Stb archives, relating to his contacts with an Stb person in 1969. The minister arranged to check the records, but gratifyingly no incriminating file was found. Barta directed the privatisation of an increasing portfolio of industries in his years in government office. After that, he joined the privatised economy by moving to his present post. Like his paternal grandfather at the First Republic's birth, Barta took part in the post-communist republic's economic formation. He also restituted some of his grandparental property, including the 400 hectare estate with a chateau that his family had to leave 40 years earlier. This is how he summarised the difference that the demise of communism made to his life:

As for my life, it changed fundamentally, because I am in fact the only one (long pause) out of my family, to have restored the discontinuity where my family which, prior to 1948, belonged, if not to the very top élite (long pause) to those who took part in managing the state, or its finances; to those who had an exceptional, prominent social position...The next thing is, what our children who will take over from us will make of it. Our time is obviously running short. (940726a: lines 1317-45)

In Barta's life story, upper-class family lineage going back to the formation of the first republic is the gestalt-defining main theme. Even though, like Ambroz and indeed the majority of respondents, he was concerned to show that he was qualified and competent in his work, and generally not lacking in virtue, Barta tended to link his good qualities with his upbringing. On taking his government post, he knew that there could be no half measures in regard to commitment and hard work, because he remembered being told about his granddad's long days in the XX Bank. While doing that job, he approached the managers whose state enterprises he was liquidating with understanding and respect because:

I always keep a principle that they made a point of teaching me at home. They said, when you are ascending, always greet respectfully the people (coming from the opposite direction) you will be meeting. Keep in touch with them all, because you will be meeting them again when you are descending. (940726a: lines 937-943)

This metaphorical principle of good social-mobility manners is, I later learned, a paraphrase of a popular ditty. Barta could have prefaced it by "as they say round here"; but, in keeping with his general emphasis on his family upbringing, he introduced it as a principle `they made a point of teaching me at home'. When he came to the point in his life story where he was allowed to make his first trip to the west to see his émigré mother, he referred back to his lifetime of regular sojourns in the forest, where his willingness to do hard forestry work as well as game hunting won him the trust of the forestry manager and others. They took him on clandestine fishing trips to the other side of the border with a neighbouring western state that ran through their forest - an exhilarating proof of the power of local knowledge in the face of the laws and the military installations that kept a supposedly impenetrable iron curtain in place. This triumph of skill, courage and trust was also a part of his family lineage, set as it was in a forest that the family had owned, and enacted by loyal people it had employed. It is a social survival story, a moral tale where the bad communist regime came and went and a good bourgeois family came back to its own.

The problem solving Barta had to do after his parents' emigration is its central plot. It shows him as a skilful and determined operator. He took care not to let the state take the remaining family properties, at a time when private real estate ownership generally meant so much hassle that it was not unusual for owners to prefer getting rid of it. He got together the money he needed despite a low starting salary, avoided military service, got on good terms with the Stb, and with his superiors at work. Henceforth, his competence and hard work earned him ascension into senior management, with its corollary privileges such as western travel. It would not be difficult for sceptical or hostile ears to hear these successes as the makings of an immoral tale. The wheeler-dealings and Stb friend apart, there was the fact that his career ascension began in the early 1970s. He was a beneficiary of the `normalisation' purges of 1969-71, which suddenly created a lot of vacancies in executive ranks. Unlike the purged people, he must have declared his disagreement with the Prague Spring and his agreement with the Warsaw Pact invasion to a normalisation commission. The `normalisation' regime of the 1970s revived a class rhetoric to an extent, but it discriminated primarily against Prague Spring activists and others who refused to declare their consent with the invasion. Two of our respondents who used to be communist government ministers bore a clear testimony to that (Andrle 2000a). Bourgeois class origin became relatively unimportant. Barta's family's emigration complicated matters for him, but neither they nor he had been active in the Prague Spring.

In developing a story line that anchored his identity in his upper- class lineage, he drew on the dominant public discourse of the revolution, which lamented the damage the fallen communist regime had done to the Czech social fabric. In terms of this discourse, capitalism and its propertied classes were the solid backbone of civil society. It augured well for post- communist transition if it turned out that its business élite included men and women of bourgeois family lineage, whom the dictatorship of the proletariat failed to suppress or uproot. A British sociologist could be expected to appreciate that.[Note 7] We may also view the functioning of the bourgeois social identity in terms of Sacksian membership categorisation devices (Baker 1997). It defines a social membership through categories of a different domain than the domain of political terms associated with totalitarianism and communist regime. Hence, it encourages the listener to perceive the protagonist's actions in non-political terms.

It is not our business to pass moral judgement on Barta. Any difficulties with finding appropriate criteria apart, a life story simply does not present enough facts for fair judgement. There are umpteen possible scenarios in which his normalisation-time ascendancy was due to actions which did not lack scruple and did not any harm. Our interest is in the ways in which the life narrator attended to that inescapable social task, the creation (or presentation) of a morally adequate self. Barta did it by anchoring himself in a social continuity that transcends changes of political regime, and thus neutralises the potential stigmatisation that a revolution can bring to men and women with old-regime pasts.

Barta was the only one who made his lineage the main gestalt- defining theme. The others' self-accounts were steeped primarily in a discourse of professional competence, where the prime strategy was fourfold. Firstly, to describe pre-communist career progression in terms emphasising their relevance to the expertise now needed by a capitalist manager. Secondly, to make a fast distinction between the regime's silly- political and technical-economic spheres, and to place one's own career squarely in the latter. Thirdly, to advance arguments that, contrary to western preconceptions, the technical-economic sphere was well developed, at least in one's own field. And finally, to characterise oneself as a hard worker, positive thinker, quick learner and an optimist. They all mentioned, however, their bourgeois family lineage and the class-political obstacles they had to overcome in their educational progress, in the strategically placed opening stages of their narrative. They wanted me to bear their social origin in mind as I listened to their account of communist-time career progress, so that I could hear it as occurring despite the political regime. Like Barta, they anchored their selves in their bourgeois lineage, alluding to the possibility that the kind of classy social survival story told by Barta might have been told by them, too.

Conclusion

It would be premature to conclude that the class struggle proclaimed by the Czechoslovak version of the dictatorship of the proletariat was all bark and no bite where the old bourgeoisie's children were concerned. A large sample of manual and low-paid workers might have shown up what the sample in this study could not: victims of the bite - children of pre-communist middle class to whose prospects the policies of class discrimination did do a lasting damage. We can conclude, however, that there is a `buoyant class' in Czech society that escaped the bite: bourgeois children who re-emerged to power and privilege under communism, to become major beneficiaries of the current capitalist restoration. The Czech communist regime did not deny buoyancy to the buoyant class any more effectively than the more liberal version of communism in neighbouring Hungary (Andorka 1992). The power of family lineage in limiting downward social mobility (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Bertaux and Thompson 1997) did not disappear under `the dictatorship of the proletariat'. It would be a folly, however, to assume that its mechanisms are universal. While educational propensities clearly play an important part across different societies, the contents and forms of effective cultural capital must be also specific to historic time and place.

The central plot of Barta's story, the problem solving he did when he was in a vulnerable position after his parents' emigration, had its happy outcome in getting `protection' from `the regime's hostility'. The arts of finding patrons that could give protection were a theme that was widely recurrent across the sample. They were featured in the stories respondents from middle-class backgrounds told about getting their place in selective schools (Andrle 2000b); and giving protection featured very strongly in communist government insiders' accounts of their time in office (Andrle 2000a). Securing (and giving) protection was possibly the central social practice in the little history of the communist times. Its ways and means are worthy of further study, for it is not at all clear that they are adequately captured by existing theories of patron-client relations (Bayer 1999).

Another point for further research concerns Barta's father's year in jail and the family's eviction from their house. Ambroz opened his story with the same pair of events, as did also another respondent, who actually gave details of his arrested father's "voluntary" agreement to concede a family-owned building to the state (940409b: lines 105-41). Did desirable properties that the nationalisation decrees had left in personal ownership become bargaining chips that could buy an early release from jail for the head of the family, and perhaps a promise of a viable future for his children?

The way in which our buoyant class respondents enlisted their first- republic bourgeois lineage in their self-presentation shows the buoyant class to be a self-confident component of the new business élite. Its consciousness of bourgeois pedigree, with its effortless sense of legitimacy afforded by the currently dominant ideology, may herald a class structuration trend running counter to the (allegedly) increasing social fluidity in the late modern West.

End.

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