The younger Czech generation: Perfect candidates for populism
11. 10. 2021 / Muriel Blaive, Hynek Pallas
čas čtení
12 minut
Den andra, idag: https://t.co/ws4mE4o9cT
— Hynek Pallas (@hynekpallas) October 8, 2021
This is an English translation of an interview which Hynek Pallas conducted with the French historian Muriel Blaive for the Swedish newspaper Jönköpings-Posten.
Česká verze tohoto rozhovoru je zde:
Historie je politizována a přepisována při každých volbách
7. 10. 2021 / Muriel Blaive, Hynek Pallas
What is your
academic background and title?
I first
graduated from Sciences Po in Paris, so I was exposed to a mixture of
public law, constitutional law, economics, political science,
sociology, and present-day history, all approached within a solid
methodological frame. Then I entered the PhD program at Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where I was exposed to
history, sociology, ethnology, and anthropology, under the same
methodological injunction to uncover the "problem", the
"issue at stake" - it's a French pedagogical obsession that
irritates me sometimes but which I do find very profitable in the
historical discipline. I defended my PhD in 1999 on The
Year 1956 in Czechoslovakia.
How and why
did you end up in the Czech Republic and at USTR. /What attracted you
specifically to the Czech Republic?
In 1989, I was
20 and I was dazzled by the fall of the Berlin Wall. I knew next to
nothing about communist regimes, but I cried with happiness on 9
November. How often in a lifetime can you witness the triumph of the
forces of good over those of evil? It was exhilarating. A week later
came the Velvet Revolution and I was very impressed by a picture I
found in a French magazine of demonstrators sitting on the floor and
offering flowers to idiotic-looking, shoddily-clad, helmeted brutes
holding their shields. I was hooked. East Berlin and Prague still
looked very "communist" in the eyes of a young Westerner,
but they were also indescribably charming, as if time had stood still
for forty years. I read Ludvik Vaculik's Diaries,
Josef Skvorecky's The
Engineer of Human Souls,
and Vaclav Havel's Political
Essays
and my fate was sealed. I started to learn Czech, moved to Prague in
1992, and started the long process of becoming a historian of the
communist period. After Skvorecky published his Double
Murder in a Double Life
(1996), I became seriously interested in the policy of dealing with
the communist past as well. I empathized with Zdena Salivarova and
the many others who were unjustly accused and whose reputation was in
tatters for what only seemed like the petty satisfaction of public
shaming.
But even those
who did spy might not have deserved to be publicly exposed this way.
In 1994 I had discovered the public opinion reports of the secret
police (StB) covering the year 1956, when the authorities were very
concerned the Czechoslovaks might turn against the communist regime
the way the Hungarians did. These reports were illuminating. It
became clear to me then that good and evil were not so clearly
distinct as I had thought. It also became obvious to me that we would
never understand what happened under communism without social
history, a pillar of which precisely was these secret police
archives. Hence my interest for the policy of dealing with the
communist past, for the opening of the secret police archives, and
later for USTR.
Can you
explain what USTR is?
USTR is an
institute of national memory. First, it helps the state lustrate
citizens so that former agents be prevented from holding important
positions in the new administration, and it also helps checking
former resisters' and victims' credentials in order to grant them
financial or honorary compensations. It pays tribute to the victims
and to the heroes. It leads a massive research activity into various
aspects of the communist past, mainly those concerned with resistance
and victimhood, but not only. It publishes part of this production in
its own publishing department and/or makes it available to the public
through its two research journals. It produces crucial pedagogical
material for schoolchildren and teachers on how to approach this
period. It welcomes any member of the public, Czech or otherwise, who
might want to visit it and understand how it works. And finally, it
administers the archives of the secret police, puts them at the
disposal of the public, and it is supposed to digitize them and put
them online, although this last mission has been plagued by multiple
obstacles.
You have
become quite controversial in the Czech debate. Why? What is regarded
as “the problem” in your historical perspective on
Czechoslovakia?
The first
"problem" in the message I have regularly delivered to the
Czech public concerning its past is that I am a foreigner. Czech
society is socially very conservative, quite parochial, not very used
to external intellectual interference, and unwilling to admit that a
foreigner might have something relevant to say. The second problem is
that I am a woman, and I represent a methodology which is diverse,
modern, provocative, and which comes in sharp contrast to the
traditional, overwhelmingly male vision of historiography that was
frozen in its tracks by the communist regime as far as methodology
was concerned. The conflict crystallized precisely around my proposal
to change our methodological perspective and include social, oral,
and everyday life history in our study of the communist past. My
voice was perceived as critical, insofar as I challenged the notion
that people were only ever heroes, victims, or traitors. Instead, I
pointed out that the historical scenario pitting the good people
against the evil communists was seriously disconnected from the
reality of everyday life in a dictatorship. As Vaclav Havel analyzed
it himself, everybody contributed to maintaining the totalitarian
regime.
Interestingly
though, it is only the intellectual elites who act offended by my
reality check as far as history writing is concerned. Ordinary
people, whom I interview for my oral history projects, know very well
what they had to do to survive in a dictatorship and don't try to
deny it, nor do they feel particularly shameful about it. But to come
back to your question, the combination of being a foreigner and a
woman is not just a compound of disadvantages, it is intersectional.
Therefore many people will be outraged by what I have to say just
because of who I am, whereas they would possibly find it more
acceptable if it was stated by a Czech historian, even more so by a
Czech male historian.
In what way
does Czechoslovak history still echo in contemporary society and
politics?
In every way.
Communism, or more precisely what I think of as the "communist
mentality", is everywhere, both in the direct reminders of the
past (people who were personally compromized), and in the very denial
of this past: what can be more "communist" than to rewrite
history, pretend the past did not happen, and endeavour to reinvent
reality?
Is it a
hindrance in some way, are there topics that have become taboo?
What is taboo
is to compare the new democracy with the old communist regime,
insofar as it would lead to acknowledge that the communist regime's
retroactive popularity is real. This popularity is based on palpable
social and economic benefits that were taken for granted at the time:
a place to stay; a job; health insurance; a sufficient pension;
access to culture; access to education for the poorer classes; social
promotion for these same classes; a certain solidarity among the
people; a certain dignity in the consumption culture; a certain
simplicity in the way of life, etc. This all seemed like nothing much
at the time, but was revealed as tangible privileges after the
transition of the 1990s and the economic crisis of 2008, when many
people lost one or several of these privileges. Hence the disrupting
potential of a social, everyday life, and oral history of the
communist period: democracy might not come out on top quite as
clearly as the current elites would hope. Interestingly, this diffuse
nostalgia does not manifest itself in voting for the communist party
anymore, but rather in a widespread feeling of disgust for politics.
Does this
affect for instance the possibility of left-wing parties/ politics?
Yes, the left
has terribly suffered from the downfall of communism, the end of
almost all Marxist illusions, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But this is not specific to the Czech Republic, it is true of all the
Western world as well.
Can you give
an example of a contemporary issue that has been politicized in this
way, where history is an important ingredient?
History is politicized and
rehashed at every election. Countless candidates have surfed on the
anticommunist wave to get elected and demonize their adversaries,
starting with Vaclav Klaus in the 1990s. What really happened in
history and what methodological tools we can deploy to adequately
analyze this past interests of course absolutely no one: the only
point is to discredit the left and the heirs of the liberal and left
dissent, so that self-proclaimed "anti-communists" can get
elected on a conservative platform and finish dismantling the welfare
state inherited from the communist times.
For a Swede,
it seems incomprehensible that a person who has been an agent /
collaborated with the communist regime can be prime minister today.
How is this possible in the Czech Republic? Are voters not interested
in the past?
Voters who are
genuinely interested in the past would certainly not support
self-proclaimed anti-communists because the anti-communists' only
historical agenda is to repeat again and again that the country was
divided between the heroes, the victims, and the traitors. They turn
the communist period into a parody of a dictatorship, as if such a
regime could have held on to power for several generations without
the collaboration and support of millions of Czechs. This denial is
not productive. It is also transparently designed to discredit the
left and the current socially-minded political parties. Meanwhile, as
I explained already, I don't think many people in this country are
under any illusion concerning their own level of past collaboration.
As long as Babis provides them with jobs and guarantees a certain
standard of living, which is incidentally exactly the method by which
the communist regime had survived, his past is not an obstacle to the
voters.
How does the
Czech Republic differ in this from Hungary and Poland, where parties
such as Fidesz and PiS seem to stress “anti-communism” much more?
The Czech
Republic does not differ from Hungary, Poland, or Slovakia. Think of
Vladimir Meciar, Aleksander Kwasniewski or Peter Medgyessy, all three
former communist apparatchiks and/or accused of being agents of the
secret police. You have to understand that "anti-communism"
is only a political pose in any case. In countries where regimes had
settled for more than four decades, all elites were necessarily
educated by the former regime. After the 1989 regime change, which
was very sudden in all countries, where would you find, out of the
blue, judges, policemen, teachers, border guards, soldiers,
economists, lawyers, etc., who had not been educated by the previous
regime and had not grown up with this regime's values, even if they
felt more critical than they ever let show? Even if we assume that
dissidents were the right kind of elites for the new regimes, how
many of them had not emigrated, had not signed some paper or other in
the course of their interaction with the police, were at all
interested in investing themselves in politics, and, even more to the
point, proved competent in their field? Not many, and certainly not
enough to run the new state entirely. You could therefore only hope
that the elites and professional corporations educated under
communism would put their social and professional capital at the
service of the new regime. Many did, but some didn't, and they used a
profitable network, or built one after 1989, to get insanely rich and
rob the new state under the guise of "economic transition."
In any case, anti-communism is a narrative and a political tool
destined to win elections, not an adequate social descriptor.
How can the
Czech Republic address history in order to move forward? Should they?
Does the public need to do this at all, or will coming generations
automatically move on?
It should,
yes. The country is raising generations of children who know next to
nothing about the communist past. Many of them now firmly believe the
anti-communist narrative and have lost track of the difficulty of
living with one's own choices on a day-to-day basis under a
dictatorship. They have become as radical, immature, and believers in
simple (fake) solutions as their elders had once been in favour of
communism. In other words, today's youths are perfect candidates to
surrender to populist narratives. This is not good for democracy.
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