Revolutions change institutions and reshuffle life chances. They are also constituted by a hegemonic moral discourse which condemns the ways and means of life in the past, urging individuals to change their priorities and habits of thought. In the revolutionary discourse, continuity is a brake on progress and a matter of disrepute.
Continuity, however, is central to our sense of self.[Note 1] We constitute ourselves by accounting for our actions as individual subjects whose existence is continuous across roles, situations, and times. Normal functioning requires that we appear to have a past, a life story to tell; that we appear to be able to give short excerpts or more extended versions from our life story as appropriate; and that these versions are sufficiently coherent to make their subject continuous despite changes, and morally adequate despite difficult choices (Linde 1993).
The storied past (Ochberg 1994; Bruner 1987) we intimate in our experiential tales is subject to revision, and the version we tell on any particular occasion is created for that occasion. Like every action, the giving of a self-account is improvised to meet a present need, although it also recollects the past. But, we meet the present need only to the extent that we make credible our existence beyond the boundaries of the immediate situation, as a socially accountable individual subject. We have to make ourselves credibly continuous.
This calls for certain narrative skills. We have to create a sense of shared cultural membership with our audience, by constructing the self-account as fitting for the context of its telling, and by drawing on shared cultural resources. When telling (a version of) our life story, we assemble our individuality out of a medley of social memberships, but at the same time emphasise the social membership, and our reflexive individual stance towards it, which we have a reason to believe is of particular interest to our audience. Furthermore, we have to make our narrative compelling by letting it evoke a recognisable genre and common sense. And last but not the least, we use the self-distancing possibilities of free movement between being interactant, narrator and protagonist, to attend to possible fissures in shared cultural membership and in the continuity of self, as well as to the ways in which the described actions and traits might be reassembled by the audience as a case of stigmatised identity. (Burgos 1989; Bruner 1995; Chambon 1995; Chase 1995; Denzin 1989; Gubrium 1993; Holstein and Gubrium 1997; Gubrium and Holstein 1995; Holstein and Gubrium 1999; Silverman 1993: 114, 200.)
A revolution threatens to stigmatise personal identities. It urges people to change, which means that it requires them to revise their life stories, and to put their membership in the new era on display. No one wants to be a dinosaur. Revised life stories and new-era self-displays may seem contrived and opportunistic to witnesses from the past, however, and no one wants to seem a mere weathercock. In this article, I analyse an exemplar case to highlight some of the narratively skilled ways in which middle-aged Czechs attended to the dinosaur- weathercock dilemma in their life stories.
In 1994-5 I carried out 67 life story interviews during three fieldwork trips to the Czech Republic. The respondents were selected to ensure representation in the sample of insiders to what might be reasonably regarded as historical- player networks. In terms of status prior to the revolution, the 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.
In the great majority of cases, I briefed my interviewees to take a few minutes to reflect back on their lives, and to `select points in time which have had a special significance in your life, for whatever reason'. Then I asked them to explain why they selected those dates, 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.
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 if not its politics - 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 the revolution into it, and a sharp focus on the dilemmas of telling the tale of a continuous self in discontinuous times.
The interview project did not create the dilemma, however. That was manifest everywhere in the ethnographic field, in the frequency with which tales of silly dinosaurs, ready weathervanes and opportunistic turncoats featured in conversations which I could only overhear as well as those in which I could take a part. The revolution and the ways in which it threatened to stigmatise identities was a phenomenon of the ethnographic field. So were the self-accounting skills with which its members were able to attend to the threat. The interviews provided an occasion where at least some of these skills could be put on display.
Mr Danek (pseudonym) was one of 18 respondents in the sample who had a powerful executive position under the communist regime, and one of 9 who retained it after the revolution. He was one of `the old structure' whom many a Czech in the ethnographic field loved to hate for their staying power. Like the rest of this (all-male) sub-sample of 9, he was in the 45-55 age-group; but he was one of only 2 within this group whose business was in agriculture. That involved him in a raging controversy surrounding the property restitution law. As the chairman of a co-operative farm working 5000 acres of top- quality arable land with technology to match, he was opposed to the idea that small family farms would be better. He was doing his best to prevent restitution claims from breaking up his productive giant.
The particular views he expressed are of only a marginal concern in the analysis that follows. I have chosen his interview for a detailed analysis because it was the longest in the sub-sample of 'old structure' people who were now high- powered businessmen and because, intuitively, it seemed similar in its form and structure to many others. My concern in this analysis is mainly with the ways in which he attended to the stigmatising potential of revolutionary discourse in his life narrative, to create an identity that warranted having its vantage point respected. The fact that he was an 'old structure' person battling to save a collective farm from one of the revolution's high-profile policies clearly meant that he had an argument with the hegemonic discourse of revolution to make - resourcefully. That, however, does not necessarily limit the relevance of his performance to other post-communist businessmen. He is an extreme case of a more general and dual tendency. Firstly, the discourse of revolution wants everyone to change, not just the communists, and thus threatens stigmatisation to everyone. And secondly, every life-story interviewee is, in the context of `the interview society' (Atkinson and Silverman 1997), under implicit pressure to communicate a personalised self - a stance that is not simply derivable from public discourse. In a context where there is a clearly dominant public discourse, such as in revolutionary times, arguing with some aspect of it can be a way of meeting the personalisation requirement. It was not only the former communists who, like Danek, told their story and then argued. Narrative resources and their artful use are a shared feature of a culture that cuts across particular arguments or political positions a narrator may wish to advance.
The analysis uses several terms in a restricted technical sense.
A self-account (or life story) constitutes a current identity and an orientation to the future within narratively linked recollections from the past (Kohli 1981). With this in mind, I condense the meaning (Kvale 1995: 190-6) of Danek's 150-minute interview talk to paraphrase it as follows:
I'm a professional manager who's had good success in developing a highly productive modern farm, and now I'm embattled by ill-conceived revolutionary privatisation policies, and by opportunistic people who push their own interests by insinuating that I'm a corrupt power from the communist past. I hope to save the business by turning it into a limited company, in alliance with the major restituent, but so that he does not get an opportunity to buy it outright.
But how was this message constructed to have a chance of being heard as coming from a credible and morally adequate person who was neither a dinosaur nor a turncoat?
We need to look at the structure of narrative contents and forms, which can be laid out as a table of contents.
Danek's talk is a 45-minute life narrative (Parts I-II) followed by a much lengthier argument of an increasingly widening scope (Part III). The life narrative tells how a pharmacist's son became a collective farm chairman. It is mostly fluent and self-restrained in style. The argument has a more variable fluency, in that it is hedged and qualified in its earlier stages, but more self-assured, and less self- restrained, later on; this progression is marked by two stories. Although the argument deploys its own repertoire of rhetorical resources, it also builds on the stance and theme established in the life narrative. In all three parts, the stories are where a lot of the key perspective-defining work is done. The eight stories listed above can be grouped by theme as follows: (a) stories of self-anchoring in the pre-communist middle class (1 and 3); (b) stories of professionalism in the communist times (2 and 4-6); and (c) post-communist continuity stories (7-8).
Danek was a pre-school child when the communists carried out their coup d'état in 1948. His father was `a pharmacist and Charles' University graduate', which meant that he was liable to be branded a bourgeois. That put Danek on the downside of policies which favoured children from working class backgrounds. On finishing his basic schooling, he got a place in grammar school only after his father, who plied his pharmacist trade as a reservist army officer as well as in civilian life, mounted an appeal against the original decision with the help of character references from the military. The same problem and solution occurred four years later, when the school authorities decided not to give a recommendation for university. Danek's father used the fact that he had been promoted to a higher rank during a recent stint in uniform. He went to the local army office and proclaimed that he was resigning his rank, because a general had said at the conferment ceremony that it had been entrusted by the working class. But, he argued, since the school authorities now adjudged that his son could not be recommended for university, he was surely a subversive element who was not trusted by the working class, and the army should not have promoted him to that rank. It was a courageous but shrewd move. Danek was notified three weeks later that he was being recommended for university after all, although for agricultural studies instead of electronics, his first choice.
Danek's wife never got the benefit of full-time education after the age of 14. Her father was branded a kulak, and `there were people here who were determined to make sure that the kulaks who gave their acres to the collective farm also stayed on to labour on them'. No one was able to stop her from getting professional qualifications through evening classes, however. She was a qualified bookkeeper in her collective farm by the time she married Danek.
The discourse of revolution that has dominated public channels since the collapse of communism reverses to some extent the proletarian prejudices of communist theory. It sees middle farmers and the urban middle class as the natural base of civil society and democratic institutions, the healthy social fabric that the communist regime sought to destroy. Respondents who have a tale to tell about having had difficulties with getting a place in selective schooling, on account of their roots in the pre-communist middle class, are able to construct a sense of continuous social membership that is longer than and independent of the communist regime. If they went on to graduate and gain professional or executive positions after that, their career success appears as social survival earned by competence and hard work, not as a reward the communist regime bestowed on its own creatures. It was also due to the helpful existence of people who had the courage to fight for the academically gifted child's right to education, and the ingenuity to do it effectively. That the story naturally fits near the beginning of the life narrative, as a story of leaving protected childhood for the politically marked world outside, gives it extra power within the overall self- account.
When Danek finished telling it, I asked him if he had got Distinction at his school leaving exams. His answer was long and flustered with the upshot that he wasn't sure. The study of electronics probably required good science qualifications, and Danek's achievement of them was the premise on the basis of which his story made sense. Whether or not the premise was true, the point is that he did not expect the question. It was a story of a type often told - to interlocutors who would not question its basic premise, that the communist authorities often denied school places to academically excellent children because they were from good middle class families. The story gets told to affirm shared social membership in the pre- communist middle class via family lineage, and a consequently shared type of experience with the communist authorities. As a Czech of that generation who had chosen to emigrate at a young age, I could be quite rightly expected to affirm that I shared that social membership with the narrator, by taking it for granted that there was no other reason than communist hostility to the bourgeoisie at the heart of the story. All respondents who told this type of story told it without supplying factual details of their academic standing. Following Miller and Glassner (1997), we can regard the type as a cultural story, the cultural story of the Czech middle class of the generation whose childhood coincided with the communist regime's early militant phase.
The function of a cultural story is to construct or affirm a common social membership through an unquestioned relating of a stereotypical plot and characters. It also defines the characteristic contours of a shared social world and required survival skills. Danek's and others' stories of school entry portray a world in which political reliability checks and social character references play an important part in the institutional decisions that apportion life chances to individuals. But, their narrative line - the intervention that secures a school place for the child in the end - depends on the fact that the exact part the vetting plays in the selection process is not rule-governed in any straightforward sense. Selection committees take their decisions on the basis of `complex character evaluation', a negotiation process between possibly quite different interpretations of the evidence. The outcome often depends on whether or not there is a committee member willing to make a point for or against a particular applicant. And, the outcome is not final, because the communist state's institutions and administrative ways provide many possible channels of appeal to persons and offices of political influence. The very fact that the state is politically oppressive, in not guaranteeing the citizen equal rights before the law, has a reverse side: its rules and policies are negotiable in particular applications, and its decision-making processes provide a lot of scope for personal patronage. It's patronage that makes the world go around. On closer reading, the cultural story is about getting a patron put a good word in, and to protect his or her protégé from hostile persons who might be bent on putting their word against his or her own.
In some stories, the patron is a family friend, appearing in the story already ready to put a word in where it matters on the child's behalf. In other stories, like in Danek's, a patron has to be induced to get involved. Danek's story shows an important skill here: the usage of hegemonic political rhetoric to one's own ends. His father got an army bigwig to act, by making a show of being agitated by evidence that another institution took a decision implying that the army misused the trust of the working class. The committees and meetings where the patrons put their good word in also required that they do it in the rhetoric of proletarian interest and communist party resolutions. They could not say they just wanted to do a favour for a friend, and they had to be able to get into those committee rooms in the first place. The cultural story on a closer reading portrays social survival as a matter of self- interested participation in regime discourse and institutional ritual, and in the politics of personal patronage that gave regime decision-making processes their substance. Our narrators belonged to the social milieus of successful participants, for all their stories had the happy ending of university graduation with a good career to follow. Only two of them told stories without such an ending, but these were in both cases about their kulak-background wives, not themselves. Cultural stories, however, are not told to invite critical deconstruction. In this case, they affirm a social membership of a different domain from the one in which people and activities are readily seen as those of communist political institutions (Baker 1997).
Narrators of these middle-class stories usually support their self-anchoring function by extensive characterisations of their fathers. In Danek's case, father's qualities get presented within the opening story itself, which is told at length and with relish, and in which father is the hero. Father got his promotion in the reservist army corps because he was `healthily lazy', that is, he was an ingenious organiser of work. He set up an innovative storage system in his civilian apothecary, which he subsequently implemented in an army garrison apothecary during a call up to uniform. The story also shows him to be a man who passionately cared for his family - he was `so incensed' when his son was denied the recommendation he needed for university entry - but he channelled his anger effectively into action which, though not devoid of risk, pulled political strings successfully. This characterisation anticipates the scientifically minded, pragmatic but dependable manager and devoted family man of Danek's own life narrative.
Finally, Danek prefaced the story by saying that he did not want me to think that he was trying to present himself as a victim of political oppression. He never felt that at the time, he pointed out, and found it distasteful when others now claimed that they did, on the basis of post-revolutionary hindsight. He thus dissociated himself from opportunistic anti- communists, which was a recurrent theme of his, and positioned himself as a reliable witness of the past.
Danek arrived in the locality straight after graduation, having ignored, without any repercussions, a supposedly compulsory posting at an opposite end of the country. His fiancée found his first job. From 1968 to 1991, he worked in a neighbouring co-operative, The Linden Grove (pseudonym), as an economic manager and eventually the chairman. The Linden Grove became the most advanced agricultural producer far and wide during his two decades there, mainly thanks to its chairman from 1968 to 1977. He had been a full time party official who got sidelined there after overplaying his career ambitions in the party corridors.
He was an exacting boss, but straight. I'm making this point because the fact that he used to be a party official might be taken as meaning that he was some kind of devious bastard. But in all the nine years that we worked together, I don't recall a single instance where he did anything wrong. August 1968 [invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces] was a great tragedy to him. He took us to trust and explained what was going on in politics. But on the other hand, he professed the principle that first of all you must attend to your duties and work for the one who pays you. It's my principle too. Without wishing to trivialise things, the proverb `sing the song of those whose bread you eat' seems right to me. One might take the proverb in a pejorative sense, but there is a positive sense to it too, and that's what I always tried to honour. I was in the productive sphere, and never had any moral dilemmas tempting me to do something dishonourable for a bowl of porridge.
Danek was an obvious candidate for The Linden Grove chair by the mid-1980s, but he did not want it. He was an economist, not a political man. Besides, a chairman had a paternalistic role which did not mix well with the economic rationality of which he was a devoted partisan. But the agricultural ministry chief in the district was a friend of Danek's from student days, and he was determined to get him take the job. He gave him a one-week ultimatum that, if he did not accept the post, a well-known never-do-well from the district office would be appointed. His arm was twisted and his colleagues pressurised him into taking it. Thus reluctantly, he became The Linden Grove's chairman. He moved sideways to run his present co- operative one year after the revolution, in the course of a musical chairs game that resulted from political pressure on the communist establishment.
Danek was almost certainly a party member by the time he became a collective farm chairman. He would have made a point of telling me if he hadn't been, because that would have been unusual. He does attend to the potential stigma, however, by giving a prominent place in his narrative to his wonderful boss who had been a party apparatchik, and, according to Danek, played on for high stakes in politics until another setback in 1977. Danek, however, respects him for the kind of manager he was, and that is how he wants to be respected himself. His positive characterisation of his boss turns into an explicit self-characterisation toward the end of the quoted passage, as a professional of the productive sphere with a clear conscience. His reflection on the morals of political conformity (singing the bread-giver's song) advances an argument for being judged by the yardsticks of professional discourse in preference to anti-communist political discourse. His story of how he was forced to become chairman reiterates his identification with professional values, and his self- distancing from political ambition.
The discourse of professionalism is well established across modern societies. It can be drawn on for fluent narratives of career (Chase 1995). The discourse of revolution, however, emphasises the pervasiveness of unjust political processes under the old regime. Narratives of professional career success have to make themselves compelling by some acknowledgement of old-regime political dimensions within the pre-revolutionary professional settings. At the same time, however, they have to advance at least implicitly the argument that the revolutionary discourse exaggerates the pervasiveness and immorality of the political dimensions within the pre- revolutionary professional settings. They show the political dimensions as silly irritants (hassles about the farm's name, bureaucracy's ambivalence towards excellence) manifested by characters who were marginal to the professional setting. And, they introduce characters who were central to the professional setting and the bearers of the political dimension, who were morally sound. `He was a communist, but a straight person and a competent professional' is a recurrent characterisation across the sample. There is a corollary argument to it, which is made explicit less frequently by our respondents: one had to be politically astute to sustain conditions for doing a job well. The stories in which these communist characters appear might be viewed as collective stories (Miller and Glassner 1997), in that they constitute a shared version of the world which challenges a dominant stereotype.
The extended final part of Danek's narrative, his argument, is punctuated by two stories. The first one is a part of his wife's family history. The presence of her family in the locality dates from the time her grandparents came from the Sudeten to buy 50 fertile acres, which made their farm the wealthy one in an otherwise very poor village. As grandma's mother tongue was German, the whole family was regarded as ethnically German by their Czech neighbours. The farm was inherited by Mrs Danek's uncle during the war. He was arrested for alleged collaboration with the German Protectorate when the Soviet army arrived in spring 1945. As his Czechoslovak citizenship was eventually restored to him and the family was not expelled from the country in 1946, the collaboration charges could not have been very serious. Soon after his arrest, however, a mob came to the farm house and put his old mother, his wife and two very young children, `one of them still at her breast', on a horse-drawn cart provided by the Soviet army. They were taken to Mrs Danek's mother's house in the next village, without being allowed to take any possessions with them. The home they thus left was comprehensively cleaned out of its contents.
And I know that, for example, a sewing machine that was looted from the house still is in a family that lives in a village within The Linden Grove area, where I used to work. And here is the irony of fate which I want to relate to you and to document. The grandsons of the very people who were the ring leaders of the looting attack were the leading Civic Forum [the movement started by V. Havel and others in December 1989] activists in The Linden Grove. They are - I don't want to do them injustice, they have it in their genes or something - the sort of people who, whatever the regime and whatever the opportunity, will always be at the head of the mob that does every revolution's ugly work until things settle into some kind of framework. They thought that their time came again, to get something on the cheap. But unfortunately for them, it never got to the extreme where their granddads helped themselves to furniture, including the kitchen furniture that we happen to know is still in service in one family living almost next door to the looted farm house.
Danek found archival documentation concerning the expropriators of 1945 while helping his wife's relatives to make their restitution claim on the 50-acre farm.
The second story was told in the context of an argument that the government was applying the restitution law not simply to restore private ownership, but to force large productive farming units into liquidation. It concerned a legal loophole Danek was using to slow down final pay off to people who terminated their membership in his co-operative and pressed their restitution claims against it. One restituent wanted to get his settlement straight away, and took his case to the agricultural ministry official in the region. He summoned Danek to his office and demanded an immediate settlement of that claim. The legal argument was irrelevant because this was a political matter. Danek should comply if he did not want his co-operative to lose its state subsidies and bank credits.
So we took council and concluded, like true Czechs, that pissing against the wind made no sense. We were where we used to be under the totalitarian regime. It's better not to talk back to the masters, no matter what the law says, better bow down our heads. We gave the restituent three cows and a bull and it's over. The regional director kept his side of the bargain, we got our usual grants and our bank credit. We are moving in familiar waters, only under a different flag.
In these stories, Danek aligned himself with the revolutionary view that continuities with the communist past were a matter of disrepute. At the same time, however, he put the hegemonic revolutionary discourse under an ironic light such as only a detailed witnessing of local realities can cast. In the locality, where a sewing machine in a neighbour's house still testifies to an ethnic cleansing atrocity of 50 years ago, self-proclaimed followers of President Havel's public morals can be perceived as the ethnic looters' return. And, a ministry officials efforts to help implement the new laws of private-ownership democracy look like a remaking of the familiar institutional processes of totalitarian state.
The disreputable continuities are in revolutionary opportunists and in political pressures on economic management; not in the protagonist's own executive career. Just like in the old times, the protagonist and his associates have to be shrewdly pragmatic in the face of political challenges to their professional work.
The continuity stories are positioned in the overall self- account to clinch arguments with the hegemonic revolutionary discourse. The narrator's arguments acknowledge that the old regime had to change, but criticise the new-era phenomena, policies or rhetoric that put his interests and honour under threat. Danek's arguments are against the revolutionary activists who wanted him purged from his chair in The Linden Grove; his current co-operative farm employees and members who seek personal advantage at the farm's expense, and greet his efforts to save it in a spirit of unrelenting envy and suspicion; and the `small is beautiful' tendency in the agricultural policy of post-revolutionary government.
Continuity stories were told by respondents offended by revolutionary excesses as well as by those who thought the revolution had not gone far enough. They located disreputable continuities with the communist times in the narrator's environment - in unreformed Czech characters (opportunistic, driven by envy) and in the practical relations of state power to local communities. In so doing, they helped the narrators to establish the continuities in their own character as comparably virtuous.
Danek's stories are unique to himself in regard to their detailed content. None of our other 66 life narrators told of a father who went to a military office to resign his rank; or of a collective farm chairman who taught the virtues of professional excellence although he was also a communist politician; or of an aunt who suffered an ethnic injustice at the end of the last war. They are, however, by no means unique in regard to their plot, characterisation, and moral. Stories of overcoming political obstacles to educational progress are typical of respondents of 'the buoyant class' (Andrle 1999a) - those who achieved a high position for themselves in the communist state despite suffering an initial handicap in their bourgeois social origin, and who emerged from the collapse of the communist state as members of a new business elite. Stories of communist-era professionalism are typical of the much wider sample of respondents who had any communist-era career success (not necessarily in nomenklatura ranks) to report. Stories about continuous local realities are typical of all the respondents wishing to make an argument about the revolution, criticising either its insufficiency or its excesses.
Danek's stories are typical not only in their plots and characters, but also in the ways in which their telling implies a particular stance vis-à-vis the hegemonic revolutionary discourse. The stories about gaining educational access reiterate the terms in which the hegemonic revolutionary discourse routinely portrays communist practices as discriminatory against certain individuals. In recognition of their incorporation of a currently dominant stereotype, I consider them conceptually similar to Miller and Glassner's cultural stories. The stories about professionalism acknowledge communist political interference in professional settings, but portray it as peripheral rather than central; they thus seek to modify certain important terms in which the revolutionary discourse routinely recalls the communist times. In recognition of their challenge to a currently dominant stereotype, I consider them conceptually similar to Miller and Glassner's collective stories. And finally, the stories about continuous local realities express agreement with the revolutionary proclamation that society needed to change, but portray the revolutionary government's practical actions as ironic failures. They are continuity stories, a phenomenon of post- revolutionary cultures. In regard to stance towards the dominant public discourse, Danek's overall self-account is thus structured as a progression of cultural stories (reiteration) - collective stories (modification) - continuity stories (irony).
Not every former communist career person's self-account in our sample is as argumentative as Danek's, although most are; and not every one includes all the three story types used by Danek, although quite a few do. There is, however, a case for regarding Danek's self-account as a fully developed version of a schema that the majority of former communist persons in the sample used, though some in a sketchier and less complete fashion than others. The schema was in use among the wider sample, too. Well developed examples among the non-communist respondents included, interestingly, the sort of man that was a bane of Danek's life: a former state farm worker who became owner by pressing restitution claims against the managers' buy- out plans.
Not a single one of 67 respondents told their life story as one in which the protagonist had to change or reinvent themselves to meet the demands of revolution. All told their life stories in such a way as to establish credibly and reputably continuous selves, without appearing to oppose, at least not head on, the revolutionary consensus that a break from the communist past was necessary and desirable. (Even former communist ministers volunteered their view that the old regime was unsustainable - see Andrle 1999b.) All took care in their narrative practice (Gubrium and Holstein 1997; 1998; 1999) to construct a revolution-spanning self-identity of neither a dinosaur nor a weathercock. If none told a story of radical self-change, we may hypothesise that, in a culture which has seen five radical changes of political system this century, narratives of a revolution occasioning a radical conversion are liable to be heard as signifying a weathercock. It is also possible that, when a revolution heralds and demands so much change, the `conservative impulse' (Marris 1974) of the self strengthens.
End.