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Notes

[Note 1]

This communist elite was counterbalanced by 17 respondents who were activists of dissident circles and/or the cultural `underground'. In terms of post-1990 status, the sample included 14 people who were members of government and/or parliament, or deputy ministers or chiefs of important state institutions at least for some time during 1991-5; and 29 business owners, directors and chief executives, and private farmers. The overall sample had 67 respondents.

[Note 2]

The respondents names are pseudonyms. In giving their biographical details, I am stopping short of a level at which the knowledgeable reader could find sufficient evidence for clinching an undeniable claim concerning the respondents' true identities.

[Note 3]

All party members and all holders of professional or executive posts had to declare their attitude to the Warsaw Pact invasion to special commissions. Those who expressed an insufficiently positive stance were expelled.

[Note 4]

He was alluding to archival footage from 1942, shown on TV not long before the interview, of Wenceslas Square packed with a crowd of tens of thousands demonstrating their fervent loyalty to the German Protectorate after the assassination of its governor, R. Heydrich. No evidence was found in the archives that the demonstrators had been forced to be there by the authorities.

[Note 5]

An analogous phenomenon is a marked feature of the Czech post-communist culture. During the fieldwork, I overheard or was co-present in countless conversations where the words "that's how it's done in the [western] world" were uttered in an assertive tone to clinch an argument. The purported knowledge of how something is done in the world is asserted as a short-cut substitute for developing a rational argument about how that thing could or should be done. The pre-emptive short-cut works because the interlocutor does not wish to risk appearing uninformed about or disrespectful to "the west". It is either allowed to clinch the argument, or the interlocutor raises a counter-argument by advancing his or her own knowledge-claim concerning "the [western] world" and its ways of dealing with the issue in hand.

[Note 6]

It is symptomatic perhaps that one of the few interesting new policy departures that weren't aborted was the 1988 legislation on co-operative enterprise, which in effect provided for the issue of business licences to private entrepreneurs. A clue to the secret of how the political establishment managed to agree on this one is given by the dominance of the regime elite's own sons among the first batch of private business licensees. Maybe the production of sons in communist elite families was evenly distributed between rival factions, so that no faction stood to benefit more than the others!

[Note 7]

I discuss the motifs of patronage and protection in two narrative-analytical papers, available on request: `The Buoyant Class: Family Background in the Self-Accounts of Czech Post-Communist Businessmen'; and `Neither a Dinosaur nor a Weathercock: The Construction of a Reputably Continuous Self in Czech Post- Communist Life Stories'.

[Note 8]

It is not clear to what extent his hopes were based on his knowledge of a specific Stb (secret police) project called Wedge (Klín). Commenced in 1987 under General Lorenc's leadership, the project was to isolate the radical wing of the dissident movement by wooing its socialist wing into collaboration with Stb agents who could facilitate contacts with reform-minded communists. Klín never got full politburo approval, but apparently its backers are said to have included one or two politburo members. It is worth noting in this context that the revolution itself was precipitated by an Stb provocation at the students' march on 17 November 1989. The information about Klín comes from a respondent from the ex-dissident sample.