During 1994-5, I carried out 67 life story interviews in the Czech Republic.[Note 1] Sample selection in that project was guided by the aim of compiling a database of personal testimonies concerning developments since the revolution, by people from contrastive "historical-player" networks. It made sure that, in addition to high functionaries of the fallen communist state as well as its ordinary career employees, and the budding entrepreneurial classes of the new era, the sample included sizeable representation from people who had chosen to risk the consequences of challenging the communist authorities by public acts asserting the individual citizen's spiritual freedom and rights. 17 interviewees belonged to this category, of whom 4 pursued the vocation of creative artist outside the institutional framework of state-sponsored arts, and 13 were members of the dissident circles that made up Charta 77, the internationally renowned face of Czechoslovak dissent. One of the four free-lance artists differed from the other three in that his public performances did have outspoken political content, and he was consequently regarded by Charta 77 leaders as one of their own, although he was not a Charta 77 signatory and came into frequent personal contact with the Chartists only in the last two years of the communist regime, when such contact was becoming less dangerous. In this chapter, the focus is on outspoken dissent rather than on the apolitical independent art scene; that is, on the 13 life narratives by members of Chartist circles, plus the marginal case, the politically outspoken performance artist who refrained from joining the political dissident networks.[Notes 2] Besides the obvious fact of having had the courage to stand up and be counted for moral convictions, what do these people have in common, that can be discerned from a shared pattern in the contents and construction of their self-accounts? What has the life world of the dissident been made of?
I shall seek an answer to these questions by (a) listing the activities of dissidents qua dissidents that have been mentioned in the narratives at least in passing; (b) examining the facts and stance of the accounts of victimisation under the old regime and the reverses of fate brought by the revolution; and (c) examining overall narrative construction and its dominant themes.
The activities that were mentioned in the dissident narratives can be listed as follows.
This involved importation of books and periodicals from émigré and other supporters in the west, and their copying and further distribution. Some of these materials already were in the Czech or Slovak language, and some of the foreign-language ones were translated and reproduced. In addition, a lot of reading matter was printed and distributed from the manuscripts of indigenous authors. The printing technology in use underwent a veritable transformation from typewriters, carbon paper and duplicators in the early 1970s to real printing press and computer publishing in the later years of the 1980s. By that time, some of the dissident circles were capable of printing books in bound volumes, producing dozens of titles in about 200 copies each. The underground publishing and imports by no means involved just political and social science literature. It involved also natural science, philosophy and the humanities, fiction, and poetry.
This involved distributing leaflets advising the population to boycott elections , for example, public commemoration of historical anniversaries that the authorities would prefer the population to forget, the signing of petitions to the authorities, and the supplying of western media with information about such events, which was then broadcast back into the country by Radio Free Europe, BBC World Service and others. These actions often concerned the victimisation of individuals by the authorities, highlighting the ways in which the regime broke its own laws to repress dissent. Charta 77 itself started as a petition in response to a trial of an underground rock group for publishing a record, which took place only months after the government put human rights laws on the statute book, as required by the international agreement it had signed in Helsinki. Subsequent information bulletins issued by Charta 77 often detailed repressive or discriminatory actions the regime took against Charta 77 signatories. In the later 1980s, some leaders of Charta 77 also founded additional organisations, which proclaimed (non-violent) political opposition to be their central purpose.
Individual members of dissident circles clearly had their own outside contacts, people who were not yet trusted with information about the clandestine activities, but who were, for example, avid readers glad to be able to borrow interesting books. They were thus open to personal influence and could be, for example, dissuaded from joining the Communist Party when career considerations tempted them to do so.
The communist regime appeared to have a need to stage occasions of participatory democracy, in which "the working masses" could show their unanimous consent with various government policies or, at a more mundane and practical level, in which they could discuss everyday problems with local managers. This, however, naturally provided also opportunities for individuals to show an independent cast of mind. It was not always necessary to make explicitly political speeches to make an impact. In a context where ritual show of conformity was the general expectation, even an unostentatious show of moral backbone sufficed. At an altogether different level, there were also the public spaces created by officially registered hobby organisations. Thus the screening of a film by an official film club could be followed by a discussion of the film, which could then be "concluded" by a performance artist coming on stage. It usually took the authorities some time (about two years according to the free- lance artist in our dissident sample) to realise exactly what went on in these additions to the film show, which were the real reason why people attended in the first place. The performance artist then found another setting in which he was able to continue his free-lance trade.
Dissidents spent a lot of time writing letters and seeking personal meetings with officials, in an effort to get the authorities to reverse discriminatory decisions. The issues they thus pursued sometimes concerned their own employment, but most often they concerned access to higher education for their children, who were denied the necessary recommendation by the school authorities regardless of academic results. The outcome of these tussles with the bureaucracy tended to be a compromise, where the children eventually got a university place, but not in the subject they most wanted to study and for which they usually had excellent academic qualifications. The ethics of engaging in these personal struggles with the bureaucracy on behalf of one's own children were the subject of some debate in dissident circles, with the view that it was no less honourable than standing up for strangers' rights prevailing. One interviewee indicated that it was his struggles with the authorities for his children's educational rights that drew him back into dissident activism after several years of keeping a low profile.
Dissidents spent and sought to spend a lot of their time in each other's company. They gathered in each other's apartments to attend seminars, which sometimes featured visiting lecturers from abroad, hear the readings of freshly written poems and plays, discuss current affairs and politics, hold business meetings, and have a good time. They went for countryside outings together and organised summer camps for their children. Whole families were involved in these communal activities. And they were naturally there to support victimised friends; outwitting police checks to attend courtroom proceedings, helping to find reasonable jobs for those whose professional careers were terminated, and giving a warm and practical support to those who had just done a time in prison.
The timing of these activities, it should be noted, was not limited to the existence of Charta 77 from late 1976. The circles and their pattern of engagement with the communist regime date back to the mid-1960s. At that time, a de-Stalinisation movement within the regime gathered momentum, which was the stronger for having been delayed. In the universities, students produced magazines in which articles appeared that questioned things, the official dogma of the one-party state not excluded. When some of the students were victimised, others made a point of publicly questioning the legitimacy of the punitive act. A pattern of activities that defined a dissident circle and its engagement with the regime was set. Within the older generation, the people who had been students in the immediate post-war period, and in the heady atmosphere of that time had become enthusiastic Marxists, were now, in the wake of Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation campaign in the Soviet Union, coming into grips with their disillusionment and guilt about the 1950s. Their Marxism turned into an interest in Kafka, phenomenology, and a dialogue with modern Christian theology. Those in that generation who never had been Marxists now got space for public self-expression, too. When a hard-line faction within the Communist Party got defeated in January 1968, the radical elements of both generations supported one another in articulating a radical voice for the Prague Spring. When Warsaw Pact forces invaded the country in August 1968, the wave of public protest, which was yet again especially strong in the universities, brought additional leaders to the fore, who joined the already existing circles of leading activists. Personal networks of anti-regime dissent were thus already in place when the regime clamped down on society with its purge-and-frighten policies it called "normalisation". They were known to the regime's secret police and dissident actions were soon followed by imprisonments. The organisers of Charta 77 included people who had already served time in the "normalisation" regime's prisons.
Being a dissident naturally involved being an object of the communist state's repressive apparatus. Personal experiences of this, however, were not uniform. Individuals varied in the exact extent of their involvement in punishable subversion and in the amount of this that got on police records; but there were numerous other contingencies in play, including the arbitrary variations of treatment the police meted out deliberately to sow the seeds of mutual suspicion among dissidents. One-half of our sample had to experience prison; and all experienced limitations on their professional careers, from a bar on any promotion and travel to conferences to being allowed to find only manual work. Our sample reflected the dissident community in general, in that they were a highly educated lot, all being university graduates, four of them of two separate degree courses.[Note 4] Only one or two in our sample gave the self- account of a professional politician or a revolutionary, someone who has not really had also a serious commitment to a profession outside the political sphere. The rest, with one exception, had aspired to success in a professional line of work, which their commitment to the dissident movement jeopardised. This was something they had to grapple with, and it was not easy.
And so I was thrown out of the institute. OK, I didn't have to go down the pits to dig coal, but my professional position became one where I could not do anything, a life with a lid firmly screwed on. You can live, physically there's nothing wrong, you are not cold or hungry. But you feel life running away, every second. I had nights when I woke in horror, hearing time ticking away, you see. I felt it and heard it, life running away between my fingers. That's the most horrible thing I know, and the only other thing I can compare it with is being in gaol in custody. Not in prison after sentencing, that was not really as bad as the year in custody, there you simply don't live. And this was an identical experience, a horror that is difficult to explain to anyone who has not experienced it. Lost life, and you are experiencing losing it, you see --- it's horrible. Today I'm no longer able to relive it as it was then, but I know that it was horror, one kept waking up in sweat, with a feeling that life was flowing, that it was flowing away. (Int. 940910a)
The accounts of making a living in other lines of work, however, were not by any means negative. Manual jobs had their compensations, in that their work schedules were often less than tight, allowing periods of time for undisturbed reading. And, at least in some cases, dissidents enjoyed solicitous treatment from their foremen, who were respectful of their education and understood the circumstances. Also, it was sometimes possible eventually to find a job that gave intrinsic satisfactions. After his release from prison, the interviewee quoted above eventually found work in which he put his scientific mind into good use as a maintenance worker capable of improvising much needed high-tech equipment for a hospital unit. Cruelly, however, the repressive apparatus eventually put an arbitrary end to that career development as well.
The seven interviewees who suffered imprisonment described their predicaments in ways that testify, yet again, to the somewhat variable and contingent manner in which institutions behaved. Police custody, with its interrogations and uncertainties, was generally worse than serving a sentence. Those who suffered it in the early "normalisation" period had to put up with some brutal treatment, while in the later 1970s and in the 1980s the interrogators were on the whole quite mindful of keeping their methods within legal limits. The exact conditions of serving a prison sentence depended on the prison. One interviewee, who served his sentence in two different prisons, described a contrast between one institution whose management and personnel used their discretion to add to the punitive content of the standing rules while the other refrained from doing that. In some prisons, political prisoners seemed to get strict treatment as a matter of policy, but also the benefit of each other's company, in that they were kept together. Elsewhere, the prison management separated political prisoners from one another and made a point of putting them into the cells of handpicked low life. This was the worst. It was the general indignity of prison regimes and the unspeakably brutal hierarchy and mores of the criminal habitués, which were allowed to rule the roost in some prisons, that our interviewees still recalled with a shudder. The dissidents' way of coping was, as always, to hold the authorities to the letter of their own law, and to utilise all possible channels for making complaints about abuses. In the general grimness of prison life, there were also flickers of good fortune still recalled with warm gratitude: the books that the normalisation regime had banned, which were still in busy circulation among prisoners; or the screw who always made sure that a daily letter to a prisoner from his wife got delivered without a delay.
The revolution offered dissidents high office. Not all took their opportunities for that personal rise, some having already advanced arguments against it.[Note 5] Unsurprisingly, however, many did, including 10 out of the 14 in our sample. The free-lance performance artist included in our sample as a marginal case gave a witness account of the historic moment.
My experience of 1989 was very comical because, when I went to perform [in one of the big rallies], the stairs leading up to the stage were crowded with people who had crowded in for reasons unknown, because they were not in the programme. There were about 15 people in the programme and here there were some 250 or 300 wanting to be seen there. At that moment I realised that it was not just a struggle against communism that was going on here, but also a struggle for becoming part of the new power. I was shocked, because never in my life had I seen so many rulers of the republic at the same time (laughter). Naturally I felt good to have been called upon that stage, and so I made progress from number 300 in the stairs queue right to number 1. There they checked me out [Note 6] and I was allowed on stage, that was my experience of the benefit that power gives to man…
VA: Did you get some further opportunities to get to power, or to become some big TV figure or something?
No. --- What played a role was that, for instance, when the Civic Forum was founded, I was called upon to perform before the speeches, and I actually did not realise that I belonged to the future Civic Forum. I simply did my bit and went to sit among the people in the auditorium. But everyone who took the stage after me remained on stage, they took chairs and sat there, and so the first contingent of the Civic Forum came into being. Then there were even people who arrived late and climbed straight onto the stage to stand there, and at that moment I knew that if I don't get up there and ask for my little chair there to sit on, history would cut me out. But I didn't, because (a) I'd be terribly ashamed to bid for power when I had ignored the opposition, and (b) I was telling myself that there'd be a need for people with a sort of indirect relation to power, without direct responsibility for it, a sort of inner opposition, you see, that suited me because it was in continuity with what I had been doing. (Int. 940716a)
Those who did take the opportunity did not describe their moment of ascent to office in terms of crowding the stairs leading to a stage and making sure of staying onstage. The moment was usually referred to as "I was asked by friends" to help with this or that necessary task. Memorable moments with chairs, however, featured in the narratives of two of our interviewees, both of whom recalled the pithy satisfaction of sitting down in the parliament for the first time, in chairs still bearing the names of the former communist bosses of their home regions. In all cases the ascent meant a break from an active but thoughtful and on the whole evenly paced life style into a heady whirl of long and hectic political workdays with no respite. The break brought a euphoric period of 6 or 12 months, and longer-lasting historic achievements to recall with satisfaction and pride.
It brought traumas, too. Legislators who made 400 important new laws in the first year of government had to make them in awareness of lacking legal expertise let alone time for making sure of their quality. Heads of important government institutions had to do their historic institution building while encountering daily the consequences of their lack of expertise in managing large work collectives and complex organisations. The new public figures were new to being recipients of correspondence in volumes that far exceeded the amounts they could read, consider and answer; to being constantly surrounded by hundreds of expectant strangers; to having to mind the media; and to finding that, even off camera and after office hours, they remained onstage because they had lost the urban human right to anonymity.
All the ascending dissidents in our sample were married men with children. Remarkably perhaps, only one reported that the new life style had a major destabilising effect on his family. He was reproaching himself for forgetting to ask his wife and children for permission before throwing himself into the whirl. That is exactly what some of the others had done, to a good effect. Children complained of absent dads but families remained, on the whole, supportively together in most accounts. The pleasures of friendship, which had been so important in the dissident life style, were put under a strain in many an account, however. Divisive revelations from old-regime police archives, political disagreements and differences of viewpoint on the ethics of ceasing new opportunities took their toll, as did lack of time and, according to one account, the sheer inhibiting power of office on personal conversation.
People from dissent who got elevated into high functions --- they have difficulty when meeting friends; like they don't have things to say to one another. They are different all of a sudden, preoccupied, unable to focus attention on anything other than what is currently in the centre of their interests. I first noticed it when a friend got a high function. --- Then I got into my function, and it affected me just the same. --- He lost his, and it's interesting that he was able quite quickly to find the old ties, and everything sort of settled back with him into how it used to be before. And I still have mine, and it's getting no better. I dread going out. I feel tired and isolated in company. I'm so swallowed up by the work problems, but I can't talk about them really. (Int. 940418b)
Getting office was followed by losing it. Only 3 of our interviewees still had it at the time of the interviews,[Note 7] the rest having lost it either in the 1992 election or through the splitting of Czechoslovakia and the shutdown of her federal institutions in the following year. The experience of coming back to normal life meant, coming to terms with political defeat apart, having to find bearings in a world that changed.
When I finished in the government, I knew that in a way it would be like when I had come back from prison, in that I knew that, with the 6am to midnight workdays, it was its own world…normal life was going on sort of elsewhere. The mass privatisation happened, and when I came back I found that I was a stranger in my own town. I wasn't capable of even buying myself a bread roll because the shop, which I had used for 40 years, all of a sudden was not there (laughter). It took me a while to learn the everyday matters of civilisation (laughter) again. (Int. 940428a)
Revelations from communist police archives caused a lot of trauma during 1990-92. They showed a significant minority of the dissidents, including a number of leading figures, to have been registered as informants. The nature of the trauma was, however, more complicated than having to come to terms with the sense of betrayal brought by the knowledge that a trusted friend had been a police spy. The problem was that no one could be sure how to interpret the information. Many dissidents sensed or knew that it could be possible to get listed by the police as an informant without actually ever giving away any information that might be of any use to the police. In addition, some of the "informant" records dated from the 1960s, when it had been standard police practice to file all dissidents as "candidates for co-operation", and treat them accordingly, before eventually giving up on them and transferring their files definitively into the "enemy person" category. The common knowledge that the Stb had shredded some of its files before leaving its archival legacy was another source of uncertainty as to what to make of the revelations. The "lustration law" of 1991 barred former communist party officials and secret police officers, agents and informants from public office. But what should one make of a case where it barred also a dissident on whom the communist regime inflicted victimisation throughout 1969-89, including a term in prison, because his police record included a moment of at most trivial co- operation in the mid-1960s? Our interviews show divisions of uneasy opinion on these matters, and a preference perhaps for letting them recede into the past. Except, that is, for the interviewee for whom they were still personally acute, because he had been branded under the "lustration law", and was still in the middle of trying to clear his name.[Note 8]
Each life narrative in our dissident sample was of course different from the rest, it was a construction of an individual subject. But they were all told in the knowledge that the telling was occasioned by the narrator's membership in a shared social identity, that of the dissident. That membership was a prominent feature of the constructed self-identity in each case, and the ways in which it was attended to had three characteristics in common.
Firstly, the dissidents identified themselves with being intellectuals rather than politicians or revolutionaries. The boundary case in our sample - the free-lance artist – criticised Charta 77 leaders for being too interested in political power. But all the life narratives in our dissident sample in fact shared with his the dominant regard they gave to the vocation of the intellectual, not excepting the four interviewees whose dissident activities did include a substantial amount of dealing with organisational and political issues. In the dissident life world and lexicon, an intellectual of course does not have just the bland sense of being an educated person who reads good books, and the term is not overlaid with the bashfulness and irony of Anglo-Saxon usage. Being an intellectual means, in addition to a taste for reflection, morally committed engagement with public issues. Intellectuals make history by speaking truths that undermine orthodoxies and awaken societies to the possibilities of progress. It means living by an effort to achieve truthfulness, a value that is generally liable to fall victim to self-interest and self-delusion. It also means a strong preference for observing the moral principles of civilised conduct in mundane affairs. Intellectuals have an uneasy, somewhat suspicious attitude to the meaning of the term "pragmatism", because they sense in its usage a possible intent to cover up a shortsighted disregard for moral principle.[Note 9]
Secondly, the dissidents very much identified themselves with belonging to their dissident circles and the larger community that these circles made up. In this respect, the marginal boundary case (the free-lance artist) differed from the rest. Like most people, he had his network of friends and acquaintances, but it was not clear in his narrative what kind of people they were or what role in his life they played. In the rest of our dissident sample, by contrast, membership in the dissident community meant strong friendship ties with other dissidents and their families, and unquestioned commitment of time and effort to its activities – those oriented to the communal life per se as well as those devoted to the cause. The word "friends" had frequent usage in the narratives, and it was invariably clear from the context that it meant fellow dissidents. Sometimes it meant close personal friends (and no-one in the sample appeared to have close friends outside the dissident circles), and at others it meant the people one recognised as friends because they were members of his or her dissident circle, the community in which one felt free and at ease, at home. The impact of the events of 1989-90 on these communal ties is a keenly considered issue in the dissidents' assessments of the biographical break the events occasioned.
Thirdly, the dissident narratives implicitly or explicitly argued against the currently fashionable axiom that the communist regime was totalitarian to the extent of effectively denying the individual any space for freedom. Their narratives featured characters referred to as "decent (slusny) people" who were neither intellectuals nor friends, and clearly were outsiders to dissident circles, but who showed kindness to prosecuted dissidents and in various ways kept a moral backbone even when it would have been more opportune to bend and look another way. They did not thereby do anything for which the regime prosecuted them, just taking a slight risk of incurring some zealous or cowardly official's displeasure. But their acts are recalled with great warmth in the dissidents' narratives, for they defied the popular tendency to petty opportunism on which the normalisation regime relied for its sustenance.[Note 10] The dissidents saw the current tendency to exaggerate the old regime's repressiveness as an alibism of the petty opportunists.
The Czech dissidents' life world could be characterised by a unification of two theoretical opposites. On the one hand, its intellectualism, with its vision of a world unified by deep- lying but knowable principles, its commitment to the values of personal integrity and social progress, and its aspirations to professional self-realisation, was a cultural practice of the classically modern (rather than late modern or postmodern) type. On the other hand, it was a life style of strong personal and emotional ties to a concrete community; a phenomenon which tends to be theoretically associated with "tradition" rather than "modernity", and the co-existence of which with otherwise patently modern forms of living remains sociologically under-researched. The biographical break of the revolution is therefore for the former dissident largely a matter of the strains of the late-modern cultural shift that contemporary capitalism brings with it, and of the strains that new-era circumstances have put on the communal bonds.
End.