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Notes

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Tomas Holecek of Charles' University, Prague, for his incisive comments on an earlier draft.

[Note 1]

In the first 17 interviews, the interviewee was initially asked to recount experiences since November 1989. This set of interviewees tended to spontaneously recount parts of their earlier biography in order to explain their fate and attitudes since the revolution. I therefore conducted the remaining 50 interviews as life-narrative ones, where the interviewee was asked to mark, on a chronological lifeline starting with birth, time periods and events which they saw for whatever reason as being especially significant in their life, and then to describe what happened in these selected times and explain why it was significant.

[Note 2]

Of these 14 interviews, 3 were conducted in the early stage of the project (among the first 17 interviews) and 11 were conducted by the life-narrative method proper – see the previous footnote.

[Note 3]

Only one candidate, a Communist Party appointee, could stand for each constituency, and the balloting was arranged in such a way as to make votes against visible to the officials who were present. Besides, there were no safeguards to restrain the authorities from counting votes against and spoiled papers as votes for.

[Note 4]

It was (still is) possible in the Czech university system to be a full time student in two different faculties at the same time. In all three cases, one of the two degrees was in a scientific-technical subject and the other in the humanities.

[Note 5]

The argument was that the new era would need activist creators of civil society as much as new politicians. See, e.g., Jirina Šiklová (198?), "Šedá zóna a budoucnost disentu",

[Note 6]

The narrator used the verb prokadrovali, which was the popular as well as official term for the activities of character checking and personal profile filing done by personnel officers and other authorities of the communist regime.

[Note 7]

Some of the others, however, would succeed in a comeback in the next elections, in 1996.

[Note 8]

He succeeded soon after the interviews.

[Note 9]

This was one of the points of clear contrast between our dissident and former-communist samples. The former communist functionaries used the term "pragmatic" and its derivatives frequently and always in a taken-for-granted, unreservedly positive sense.

[Note 10]

Please note the difference between this usage of "decent people" and the usage current in St Petersburg dissident bohemia (E. Zdravomyslova in this volume). Bohemian life style and values did not feature in the Czech dissidents' (or indeed the independent artists') narratives.