Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall … Is the West the Fairest of Them All?: Czechoslovak Normalization and Its (Dis)Contents

Abstract

Against backdrop of Stalinist show trials, intellectual censorship, and sealed-off borders, Czechs and Slovaks during 1950s watched as was transformed from once familiar to imagined. This shift was a particularly heavy blow for Czechs who, until then, had considered themselves to sit squarely within tradition of West European culture and thought, sharing positive attributes that came with it. Yet Western Europe and its concomitant values had seemingly slipped from their hands and moved irreversibly to side of Iron Curtain. When they looked into their collective mirror, it was and Soviet bloc that they now saw. But Soviet Union, embraced immediately after World War II when it was briefly seen as a centrifuge of progress and political liberation, was increasingly viewed by many Czechoslovakia as a non-European, and indeed decidedly alien, political and social entity. If asked, most Czechs no longer considered Soviet Union and Stalin to be the fairest of them all. Differences between East and both imagined and real, were emphatically symbolized by existence and impermeability of Iron Curtain. Not only did citizens assign symbolic significance to this other Europe, now out of their reach, but so too did newly installed communist governments anxious to deflect sympathies for Within state media, West sometimes became imagined most vivid sense, as, for example, early 1950s when a genuine agricultural crisis coincided with Slansky Stalinist show trial. In press, presumed guilt of trial's defendants was reified as potato beetle plagues let loose on Eastern bloc by These ruinous American beetles, as they were known, were said to have been swept with of clouds and winds of Western imperialists, as well as with help of their terrorist agents sent over. (1) More commonly, any knowledge of West was simply expunged from everyday life. As Heda Kovaly writes her memoir: Once I was listening to news on radio and caught word 'Netherlands.' I pricked up my ears but news item was only that Soviet Folk Dance Collective had enjoyed a great success Amsterdam. That was only bit of news from West that we had had for months. (2) Both silence and caricatures began to dissolve 1960s as West was permitted finally to permeate Iron Curtain. Simultaneously, intense feelings emerged over what that Cold War barrier--both its physical incarnation and its intellectual, political, and economic fallout--had meant to postwar Czechoslovakia. Famously, at 1967 Writers' Congress a castle outside Prague, Czechoslovakia's best-known writers and intellectuals publicly expressed for first time their deep disappointment over postwar socialism and bore witness to this collective bitterness over Czechoslovakia's ejection from West. Here writer Ludvik Vaculik took to podium to lament: in 20 years not one social question [lidska otazka] has been solved--from people's primary needs ... to more subtle needs.... And I fear that neither did we rise on world scene; I feel that our republic has lost its good name. (3) What he meant was that Czechoslovak Socialist Republic had lost its place West--both geographically and culturally. As political and social liberalization now crept into Czechoslovakia, culminating Prague Spring, West, like a long-censured monument to dear and departed, was slowly unveiled again and opened to viewing public. My purpose here is to trace how West, once resuscitated from censure of Stalinist 1950s, was re-imagined various forms and incorporated into project of communism quite surprising ways. (4) My focus is on two periods; first, 1960s and Prague Spring; and second, 1970s and 1980s, known as normalization. …