Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe in the Era of Normalisation, 1969–1989 PDF Download

Author: Kevin McDermott
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030982718
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
This edited collection represents the first comprehensive volume in English on the crucial, but under-explored, late period in the history of East European communism. Focusing on developments in Czechoslovakia from the crushing of the Prague Spring in August 1968 to the ‘Velvet Revolution’ of November 1989, the book examines a broad range of political, social and cultural issues, while also analysing external perceptions and relations. It explores the concept of ‘normalisation’ in historical context and brings together British, American, Czech and Slovak experts, each with their own archival research and particular interpretations. Overall, the anthology aims to assess the means by which the Prague Spring reforms were repealed and how Czechoslovakia was returned to a ‘normal’ communist state in line with Soviet orthodoxy. Key themes include the Communist Party and ideology; State Security; Slovak developments; ‘auto-normalisation’; women and gender; cultural and intellectual currents; everyday life and popular opinion; and Czechoslovakia’s political and cultural relationship with the USSR, the GDR, Poland and Yugoslavia. The volume sheds light on the process of decay of the Czechoslovak communist regime and the reasons for its ultimate collapse in 1989.

Author: Kevin McDermott
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783030982720
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"The post-1968 'normalisation' era in Czechoslovakia is usually dismissed as 'grey', yet, until Gorbachev, it represented the Soviet-sanctioned archetype for 'real socialism'. This superb collection, with its unprecedented range of analysis and themes, disperses the grey to reveal vibrant complexity and in so doing fills a real gap in the historiography." -Nigel Swain, Lecturer, University of Liverpool, UK This edited collection represents the first comprehensive volume in English on the crucial, but under-explored, late period in the history of East European communism. Focusing on developments in Czechoslovakia from the crushing of the Prague Spring in August 1968 to the 'Velvet Revolution' of November 1989, the book examines a broad range of political, social and cultural issues, while also analysing external perceptions and relations. It explores the concept of 'normalisation' in historical context and brings together British, American, Czech and Slovak experts, each with their own archival research and particular interpretations. Overall, the anthology aims to assess the means by which the Prague Spring reforms were repealed and how Czechoslovakia was returned to a 'normal' communist state in line with Soviet orthodoxy. Key themes include the Communist Party and ideology; State Security; Slovak developments; 'auto-normalisation'; women and gender; cultural and intellectual currents; everyday life and popular opinion; and Czechoslovakia's political and cultural relationship with the USSR, the GDR, Poland and Yugoslavia. The volume sheds light on the process of decay of the Czechoslovak communist regime and the reasons for its ultimate collapse in 1989. Kevin McDermott is Professor Emeritus of Modern East European History at Sheffield Hallam University. Matthew Stibbe is Professor of Modern European History at Sheffield Hallam University. They have jointly edited five previous volumes of essays on post-1945 Eastern Europe.

Author: Gwyn Prins
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719034459
Category : Europe, Eastern
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
A compilation of scholarly studies addressing the nature and causes of the 1989 revolutions in Eastern European countries. Including a preface by the Czechoslovakian president, Vaclav Havel, contributors include such well-known figures as John Kenneth Galbraith.

Author: Mark A. Drumbl
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192667246
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Informers are generally reviled. After all, 'snitches get stitches.' Informers who report to repressive regimes are particularly disdained. While informers may themselves be victims enlisted by the state, their actions cause other individuals to suffer significant harm. Informers, then, are central to the proliferation of endemic human rights abuses. Yet, little is known about exactly why ordinary people end up informing on--at times betraying--other people to state authorities. Through a case-study of Communist Czechoslovakia (1945-1989) that draws from secret police archives, oral histories, and a broad gamut of secondary sources, this book unearths what fuels informers to speak to the secret police in repressive times and considers how transitional justice should approach informers once repression ends. This book unravels the complex drivers behind informing and the dynamics of societal reactions to informing. It explores the agency of both informers and secret police officers. By presenting informers up close, and the relationships between informers and secret police officers in high resolution, this book centres the role of emotions in informer motivations and underscores the value of dignity and reconciliation in transitional reconstruction. This book also leverages research from informing in repressive states to better understand informing in so-called liberal democratic states, which, after all, also rely on informers to maintain law and preserve order.

Author: Rosamund Johnston
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503638707
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
In socialist Eastern Europe, radio simultaneously produced state power and created the conditions for it to be challenged. As the dominant form of media in Czechoslovakia from 1945 until 1969, radio constituted a site of negotiation between Communist officials, broadcast journalists, and audiences. Listeners' feedback, captured in thousands of pieces of fan mail, shows how a non-democratic society established, stabilized, and reproduced itself. In Red Tape, historian Rosamund Johnston explores the dynamic between radio reporters and the listeners who liked and trusted them while recognizing that they produced both propaganda and entertainment. Red Tape rethinks Stalinism in Czechoslovakia—one of the states in which it was at its staunchest for longest—by showing how, even then, meaningful, multi-directional communication occurred between audiences and state-controlled media. It finds de-Stalinization's first traces not in secret speeches never intended for the ears of "ordinary" listeners, but instead in earlier, changing forms of radio address. And it traces the origins of the Prague Spring's discursive climate to the censored and monitored environment of the newsroom, long before the seismic year of 1968. Bringing together European history, media studies, cultural history, and sound studies, Red Tape shows how Czechs and Slovaks used radio technologies and institutions to negotiate questions of citizenship and rights.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004689192
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
This volume is a unique publication as it examines the Marxist attitudes in East Central European historiography and archaeology for the first time, with an emphasis on the co-existence of Marxist and other methodologies between the 1950s and 1970s in the local historiographies in question. Its approach is to distinguish between pseudo-Marxism as an ideological tool on the one hand, and Marxism in the form of historical materialism as a way to interpret the medieval world on the other. Contributors are: Florin Curta, Piotr Guzowski, Adam Hudek, Tereza Johanidesová, Jitka Komendová, Jiří Macháček, Andrzej Marzec, Martin Nodl, Attila Pók, David Radek, Tadeusz Paweł Rutkowski, Iurie Stamati, Rafał Stobiecki, Gábor Thoroczkay, Przemysław Wiszewski, Piotr Węcowski, Martin Wihoda, and Dušan Zupka.

Author: Rick Fawn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135287309
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Czechoslovakia has captured the nation's imagination throughout the twentieth century. The Allied betrayal of the country to Nazi Germany in 1938 was to demonstrate the appalling consequences of naive appeasement of aggression. The wholesale reform of Soviet communism in the Prague Spring of 1968 won western support, and sympathy when it was crushed by Warsaw Pact tanks. The fierce communist regime thereafter was brought down almost magically in 1989. Czechoslovakia added to the international political vocabulary the term, 'Velvet Revolution', and the velvet metaphor has characterised much of the country's path-breaking postcommunist transformation and its peaceful break-up in 1993. In separate chapters on history, politics, economics, foreign relations and the new Czech identity, this book not only applauds the successes of the Czech Republic since 1993, but also uncovers the frayed edges of the velvet nation.

Author: Fred H. Eidlin
Publisher: Fred Eidlin
ISBN: 9780914710684
Category : Czechoslovakia
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This volume is a valuable addition to the literature related to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. The author focusses his analysis on the facotrs that determined the post-invasion "normalization" primarily in terms of the Czechoslovak response to the invasion which imparted a specific character to the aftermath of the action of the Warsaw Pact.

Author: Thomas K. Murphy
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476631778
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
During the Cold War, the West--especially in the popular media--tended to view communism as a monolithic phenomenon, with little variation throughout the Eastern Bloc. Yet culture and geography contributed to social diversity among and within communist systems. Drawing on interviews with approximately 100 Czechs and Slovaks, the author provides new perspectives on day-to-day life in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Their recollections paint a more complex picture of the life on the other side of the Iron Curtain, from the Sputnik era reforms of the early 1960s, through the tumult of the 1968 Prague Spring and the subsequent Soviet invasion, to the Velvet Revolution, the collapse of the communist regime and the formation of democratic Czechoslovakia in 1989.

Author: Ján Rozner
Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
ISBN: 8024656337
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
Seven Days to the Funeral is the fictionalised memoir of Ján Rozner, a leading Slovak journalist, critic, dramaturg, and translator. Rozner and his wife Zora Jesenská were champions of the Prague Spring and were blacklisted after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. When Jesenská died in 1972, her funeral became a political event and attendees faced recriminations. A painstaking account of the week after his wife’s death, Seven Days to the Funeral is a historical record of the devastating impact of the period after the invasion. Rozner wrote with brutal honesty not only about himself, his emotions and past experience but about key figures in Slovak culture, providing a fascinating cultural history of Slovakia from 1945 to 1972. It is also a moving love story of an unlikely couple. When this compelling work of autofiction was posthumously published in 2009 it catapulted the author, who had died in exile and been almost forgotten in Slovakia, to posthumous literary fame.