Blaive , Muriel Perceptions of Society in Communist Europe: Regime Archives and Popular Opinion (review)

Abstract

SEER, 98, 4, OCTOBER 2020 790 transforming dialogue with their own past. Unfortunately, the book itself contains no illustrations. Blacker’s study deserves much credit for its exploration of the poetics of urban memory. However, a corresponding aspect, namely the politics of remembrance in East-Central Europe, has been outlined only superficially, and the study lacks a systematic comparison of the chosen cities from this perspective. This might be the reason why, despite rich empirical evidence, it misses the opportunity to make an important conceptual point about recurring — and profoundly political — efforts to re-imagine cosmopolitan sociability in East-CentralEuropean urban milieus. These criticisms notwithstanding, this is a fascinating book for anyone interested in the region, its post-war urban milieus and its memory cultures, with several excellent chapters useful for teaching. Centre for Languages and Literature E. Narvselius Lund University Blaive, Muriel (ed.). Perceptions of Society in Communist Europe: Regime Archives and Popular Opinion. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2019. xi + 248 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £85.00. ‘In the socialist bloc’, wrote the Romanian Communist Belu Zilber, ‘people and things exist only through their files. All our existence is in the hands of him who possesses files and is constituted by him who constitutes them’. This stark claim, quoted in Katherine Verdery’s Secrets and Truths (Budapest, 2014), gets at the exceptionally sensitive nature of archives in countries once in the Soviet fold. They are not just repositories of official records; they are the quintessential reification of knowledge as power. Their potential to be a source of controversy in the post-Communist era is remarkably persistent, but they can also be put to less sensationalist use as a window onto the relations between the authors of the files and the people they documented. The theme unifying the contributions to this collection is that Communist regimes did care about popular opinion and sought ways to gauge and accommodate it without the benefit of methods available in open societies. Some polling was conducted, as I discovered when doing research on the ‘normalization’ period after 1968 in Czechoslovakia and found in the archives stacks of Gallup-style surveys on a wide range of topics. For the most part, however, those in power had to estimate the public mood by less quantified means, such as the secret police and their informers, in an environment in which there was a strong incentive to dissemble and elites feared the people as much as the people feared elites (as noted by Sonia Combe in her chapter on ‘loyal dissidents’ in East Germany). REVIEWS 791 Most of the chapters use succinct case studies to build up larger claims about regime dynamics, especially to reveal the various forms of negotiation that operated at all levels and to bring ‘the agency of ordinary social actors to the fore’ (p. 9). Adrian Grama recounts the fate of one trade union representative in a Romanian factory, squeezed between the Communist Party (with its Leninist disdain for self-management and strikes) and the workforce demanding better conditions. Marián Lóži argues that the show trials of hated local officials in 1950s Czechoslovakia were in part a move by national leaders to appease a disaffected public. Machteld Venken and Rosamund Johnston view television and radio programming in the context of needing to satisfy public appetites and expectations. Shawn Clybor’s superb chapter on the fate of a satirical musical, Scandal in the Picture Gallery, shows how its creators, E. F. Burián and Václav Jelínek, became entangled in a web of complex relations and manoeuvres between factions of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Jill Massino tracks the practice of writing letters to Romania’s leaders as a form of complaining that was allowed and even encouraged in order to identify and isolate bad actors or defects in the system before they became unmanageable, or just to allow people to feel they had an outlet for their grievances. These and the other contributions to the book exemplify the ways in which the archives can be used creatively and judiciously, while avoiding the pitfalls of how the past is remembered in popular culture (as Veronika Pehe shows in her brilliant concluding...