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Czechoslovakia and
Eastern Europe in
the Era of Normalisation,
1969–1989
Edited by
Kevin McDermott · Matthew Stibbe
Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe in the Era
of Normalisation, 1969–1989
 Kevin McDermott • Matthew Stibbe
Editors

Czechoslovakia and
Eastern Europe in the
Era of Normalisation,
1969–1989
Editors
Kevin McDermott Matthew Stibbe
Department of Humanities Department of Humanities
Sheffield Hallam University Sheffield Hallam University
Sheffield, UK Sheffield, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-98270-6    ISBN 978-3-030-98271-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98271-3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
­institutional affiliations.

Cover credit: GLC Pix / Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Kevin McDermott wishes to dedicate this volume to John D. Morison
(1937–2021), who taught him Russian and Czechoslovak history at Leeds
University from 1975–1985 and thereafter remained a close friend
and mentor
 Contents

1 Czechoslovakia
 and Eastern Europe in the Era of
Normalisation  1
Matthew Stibbe and Kevin McDermott

2 Building
 the Normalisation Panorama, 1968–1969 27
James Krapfl

3 The
 Ideological Face of Normalisation: Socialist
Modernity and the ‘Quiet Life’ 53
Michal Pullmann

4 The
 Leadership of the Communist Party of
Czechoslovakia During Normalisation: Stability and
Change 73
Martin Štefek

5 An
 Uncommon Course: Normalisation in Slovakia 97
Adam Hudek

6 The
 Czechoslovak Security Service During Normalisation:
The Appearance of Success121
Kieran Williams

vii
viii Contents

7 Twenty
 Years in Shades of Grey? Everyday Life During
Normalisation Based on Oral History Research145
Miroslav Vaněk

8 Gendering
 Normalisation: Citizenship in Czechoslovakia
During Late Socialism171
Celia Donert

9 Shaping
 ‘Real Socialism’: The Normalised Conception of
Culture195
Jan Mervart

10 The
 ‘City of Shoes’ Under Normalisation: Local Politics
and Socio-Economic Trends in Gottwaldov after 1968215
Vítězslav Sommer

11 Friendship Under Occupation: Soviet-­Czechoslovak

Relations and Everyday Life after the 1968 Invasion239
Rachel Applebaum

12 Normalisation
 Across Borders: Official Cooperation and
Contacts between East Germany and Czechoslovakia,
1969–1980259
Matthew Stibbe

13 Fragile
 Friendship: Polish-Czechoslovak Labour Force
Cooperation in the Normalisation Era291
Ondřej Klípa

14 A
 Different Socialism: Czechoslovak Normalisation and
Yugoslavia313
Ondřej Vojtěchovský and Jan Pelikán

Index337
 Notes on Contributors

Rachel Applebaum is Associate Professor of Russian and East European

History at Tufts University. Her first book, Empire of Friends: Soviet Power
and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia, was published
by Cornell University Press in 2019. She is currently working on a new
book about the rise of Russian as a world language during the Cold War.
Celia Donert is University Lecturer in Central European History at the
University of Cambridge. She is the author of The Rights of the Roma: The
Struggle for Citizenship in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge University
Press, 2017). Her current research explores the history of women’s rights
in Central Europe during the twentieth century.
Adam Hudek is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of History of the
Slovak Academy of Sciences. He is the author of the monograph
Najpolitickejšia veda: slovenská historiografia v rokoch 1948–1968 (The
Most Politicised Science: Slovak Historiography, 1948–1968) (Historický
ústav SAV, 2010), editor-in-chief of Overcoming the Old Borders: Beyond
the Paradigm of Slovak National History (Historický ústav SAV, 2013) and
co-editor of the collective work Czechoslovakism (Routledge, 2021).
Ondřej Klípa is Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and
East European Studies at Charles University, Prague. He is the author of
Majstr a Malgorzata: Polky v továrnách Č SSR (Master and Malgorzata:
Polish Women in the Factories of Communist Czechoslovakia) (Charles
University Press, 2021). His research focuses on state socialism, national-
ism, migration and ethnic minorities.

ix
x Notes on Contributors

James Krapfl is Associate Professor of European History at McGill

University and an affiliated researcher in the Department of Historical
Sociology at Charles University, Prague. His book on Czechoslovakia’s
1989 revolution, Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture, and
Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989–1992 (Cornell University Press,
2013), won the George Blazyca Prize and the Czechoslovak Studies
Association Book Prize. He has published widely on Central European
political culture and intellectual history.
Kevin McDermott is Professor Emeritus of Modern East European
History at Sheffield Hallam University and the author of numerous works
on Czechoslovak, Soviet and Comintern history. He has edited five previ-
ous volumes with Matthew Stibbe, most recently Eastern Europe in 1968:
Responses to the Prague Spring and Warsaw Pact Invasion (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018).
Jan Mervart is a researcher at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian
Regimes, and at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of
Sciences. He has published monographs and articles on the intellectual
and cultural history of Czechoslovakia. He is the co-editor of
Czechoslovakism (Routledge, 2021) and Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of
the Concrete (Brill, 2021). He is a member of the editorial collective of the
journal Contradictions.
Jan Pelikán is a Professor in the Department of South Slavonic and Balkan
Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague. He is the author
of several monographs, including Jugoslávie a pražské jaro (Yugoslavia and
the Prague Spring) (Charles University Press, 2008) and (with Ondřej
Vojtěchovský), V čase odkvétání: Československo a Jugoslávie v období pozd-
ního socialismu, 1969–1989 (The Time of Fading: Czechoslovakia and
Yugoslavia under Late Socialism, 1969–1989) (Charles University
Press, 2021).
Michal Pullmann is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts, Charles
University, Prague. He is the author of a book on Czechoslovak perestroika
and the demise of communism, Konec experimentu: Přestavba a pád komu-
nismu v Č eskoslovensku (End of the Experiment: The Rise and Fall of
Communism in Czechoslovakia (Scriptorium, 2011). His current research
focuses on the social and cultural history of the 1970s and 1980s.
 Notes on Contributors  xi

Vítězslav Sommer is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary

History of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague and lecturer at the
Faculty of Arts, Charles University. His research is concerned primarily
with the history of social sciences and expertise in state socialism and post-­
socialism. Among his publications in English are articles published in
Studies in East European Thought and History of Political Economy.
Martin Štefek is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political
Science, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague. He is the author of
two monographs: Za fasádou jednoty: KSČ a SED po roce 1985 (Behind the
Façade of Unity: KSČ and SED after 1985) (Pavel Mervart, 2014); and
Kádry rozhodují, ovšem: pr ̌edjaří pražské jaro a poc ̌átky normalizace v
prome ̌nách systému ÚV KSČ (Cadres Decide: The Prague Spring and the
Beginnings of Normalisation in the Changes of the Central Committee of
the Communist Party) (Charles University Press, 2019).
Matthew Stibbe is Professor of Modern European History at Sheffield
Hallam University. He has published widely in the field of twentieth-­
century German, Austrian and international history, including five previ-
ous collections of essays on Eastern Europe since 1945, co-edited with
Kevin McDermott. He is currently working on states of emergency in
Germany during the First World War and Weimar periods, and on a histo-
riographical study of the German revolution of 1918–1919.
Miroslav Vaněk is Director of the Institute of Contemporary History of
the Czech Academy of Sciences, and a pioneer of Czech oral history. In
2010 he was elected President of the International Oral History
Association. He is the author or co-author of twenty academic books and
almost two hundred professional articles, including Velvet Revolutions: An
Oral History of Czech Society (Oxford University Press, 2016). He is also a
professor in the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University.
Ondřej Vojtěchovský is Assistant Professor at the Institute of World
History in the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, and a researcher at the
Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, Prague. He is the author
of Z Prahy proti Titovi! Jugoslávská prosove ̌tská emigrace v Č eskoslovensku
(Prague against Tito: Yugoslav Pro-Soviet Emigration to Czechoslovakia)
(Charles University Press, 2012; also published in Croat in 2016), and
(with Jan Pelikán), V čase odkvétání: Československo a Jugoslávie v období
xii Notes on Contributors

pozdního socialismu, 1969–1989 (The Time of Fading: Czechoslovakia and

Yugoslavia under Late Socialism, 1969–1989) (Charles University
Press, 2021).
Kieran Williams is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political
Science at Drake University (Des Moines, Iowa). His biography Václav
Havel was published in 2016 by Reaktion Books and the University of
Chicago Press. With David Danaher he is co-editing a forthcoming collec-
tion, Václav Havel’s Meaning (Karolinum Press, 2022). Previous books
include The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics,
1968–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and (with Dennis
Deletant) Security Intelligence Services in New Democracies (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2000).
 Abbreviations and Glossary of Terms

Action Programme Reformist document adopted by KSČ in April 1968

aktiv Meeting or group of party activists
apparatchik Communist party-state official or bureaucrat
Brezhnev Doctrine Soviet concept of limited sovereignty of communist
parties/states
CC Central Committee (leading organ of communist
parties below Politburo level)
Charter 77 Human rights initiative launched in January 1977
(Czechoslovakia)
chata Summer- or country-house/cottage
(Czechoslovakia)
CIA Central Intelligence Agency (USA)
Comecon Council for Mutual Economic Assistance
Cominform Information Bureau of the Communist and
Workers’ Parties
‘consolidation’ Term used by normalisers in the years 1969–1970
CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Č SM Czechoslovak Union of Youth
Č SSR Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (formal name and
acronym adopted for the communist state in
Czechoslovakia under the July 1960 constitution)
Č SSŽ Czechoslovak Union of Women
FRG Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany)
GDR German Democratic Republic (East Germany)
glasnost Gorbachev’s policy of ‘openness’

xiii
xiv ABBREVIATIONS AND GLOSSARY OF TERMS

‘January’ The spirit and memory of reform following the

appointment of Alexander Dubček as KSČ First
Secretary in January 1968
KGB Committee for State Security (USSR)
Komsomol Communist League of Youth (USSR)
KSČ Communist Party of Czechoslovakia
KSS Communist Party of Slovakia
KV KSČ Regional Committee of the KSČ
‘Moscow Protocol’ Secret agreement between the leaders of the USSR
and Czechoslovakia signed on 26 August 1968
inaugurating normalisation measures
Naše pravda ‘Our Truth’, KSČ daily newspaper in the town of
Gottwaldov (Zlín)
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, Western
military alliance founded in 1949
Neues Deutschland ‘New Germany’, SED daily newspaper
NF National Front (body encompassing all
Czechoslovak political, social and civil organisations)
nomenklatura List of key appointments approved by the
communist party
ONV District National Committee (Czechoslovakia)
‘Operation Danube’ Code-name for the Warsaw Pact military invasion of
Czechoslovakia
OSChD Union of Soviet-Czechoslovak Friendship (USSR)
Ostpolitik West German policy from the late 1960s of
improving relations with the USSR, GDR and other
East European socialist states
OV District Committee (of the KSČ )
People’s Militia Armed wing of the KSČ
perestroika Gorbachev’s policy of ‘reconstruction’
Politburo (or Presidium) Highest decision-making body of communist parties
přestavba Czech equivalent of perestroika
PRP People’s Republic of Poland
PZPR Polish United Workers’ Party
‘real (existing) socialism’ Concept popularised in the Brezhnev years that
denoted a developed, non-conflictual form of
socialism on the road to communism
rezidentura ‘Station’ for foreign undercover operations
RFE Radio Free Europe
ROH Revolutionary Trade Union Movement
(Czechoslovakia)
 ABBREVIATIONS AND GLOSSARY OF TERMS xv

Rudé právo ‘Red Right’, KSČ daily newspaper

samizdat ‘Self-publishing’ in the USSR and Eastern Europe
SČ SP Union of Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship
SDR Association of Collective Farmers (Czechoslovakia)
Secretariat Apparatus for managing the daily affairs of
communist parties
SED Socialist Unity Party of Germany (GDR)
SKJ Yugoslav League of Communists
SNP Slovak National Uprising, August 1944
‘socialist realism’ Soviet artistic style depicting, and often subverting,
existing reality in line with Marxist-Leninist ideology
Solidarnos ́ć ‘Solidarity’, independent (non-communist) Polish
trade union founded in 1980
SPD Social Democratic Party (West Germany)
Stasi East German secret police
StB State Security (Czechoslovakia; federal command)
ŠtB Slovak branch of the StB
Tuzex Foreign currency retail outlets (Czechoslovakia)
UN United Nations
USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union)
VB Public Security (Czechoslovakia)
VONS Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly
Persecuted (Czechoslovakia)
Warsaw Pact Soviet-led military organisation founded in 1955
ZPS State-owned machine tool works in
Gottwaldov (Zlín)
 Leading Czechoslovak and East European
Communists, 1968–1989

Czechoslovakia
Bil’ak, Vasil hard-line normaliser
Č erník, Oldřich reformer; Czechoslovak Prime Minister, 1968–1970
Císař, Č estmír reformer
Dubček, Alexander reformer; KSČ First Secretary, 1968–1969
Hájek, Jiří reformer
Husák, Gustáv normaliser; KSČ First Secretary, 1969–1987;
President of Czechoslovakia, 1975–1989
Indra, Alois hard-line normaliser
Jakeš, Miloš normaliser; KSČ General Secretary, 1987–1989
Kapek, Antonín hard-line normaliser
Kaska, Radko hard-line normaliser, Federal Minister of Interior,
1970–1973
Kempný, Josef normaliser
Kriegel, František reformer
Novotný, Antonín KSČ First Secretary, 1953–1968; President of
Czechoslovakia, 1957–1968
Pelnář, Jan normaliser, Federal Minister of Interior, 1968–1970
Šik, Ota reformer
Smrkovský, Josef reformer
Štrougal, Lubomír normaliser; Czechoslovak Prime Minister, 1970–1988
Svoboda, Ludvík President of Czechoslovakia, 1968–1975
Urbánek, Karel KSČ General Secretary, November-­December 1989

East Germany
Honecker, Erich SED General Secretary, 1971–1989

xvii
xviii LEADING CZECHOSLOVAK AND EAST EUROPEAN COMMUNISTS, 1968–1989

Mielke, Erich Minister of State Security, 1957–1989 and SED

Politburo member, 1971–1989
Ulbricht, Walter SED First Secretary, 1946–1971

Hungary
Kádár, János General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’
Party, 1956–1988

Poland
Gierek, Edward PZPR First Secretary, 1970–1980
Gomułka, Władysław PZPR First Secretary, 1956–1970
Jaruzelski, Wojciech PZPR First Secretary, 1981–1989
Kania, Stanisław PZPR First Secretary, 1980–1981
Milewski, Mirosław Deputy Minister of Interior from 1971, and Minister
of Interior, 1980–1981

Soviet Union
Andropov, Yuri CPSU General Secretary, 1982–1984
Brezhnev, Leonid CPSU General Secretary, 1964–1982
Chernenko, Konstantin CPSU General Secretary, 1984–1985
Gorbachev, Mikhail CPSU General Secretary, 1985–1991
Khrushchev, Nikita CPSU First Secretary, 1953–1964

Yugoslavia
Marković, Ante Croat politician and last Prime Minister of the
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 1989–1991
Tito, Josip Broz Leader of Yugoslav League of Communists,
1939–1980
 A Note on Czech Pronunciation

á long a
c ts as in bits
č ch as in church
ch ch as in loch
ě ye as in year
j always soft y sound
ř unique sound, equivalent to ‘rzh’
š sh as in shoe
ů oo as in doom
ý long ee sound
ž zh as in pleasure

xix
 CHAPTER 1

Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe

in the Era of Normalisation

Matthew Stibbe and Kevin McDermott

In his underground satirical novel The Trial Begins, illegally brought out
to the West in the late 1950s and set in 1952–1953, the dissident Soviet
intellectual Andrei Sinyavsky (pseudonym Abram Tertz) allowed his
unnamed first-person narrator to recount the ordeal of Vladimir Globov,
chief public prosecutor under a by now seriously ailing Stalin. Globov has
many problems. He is due to conduct the trial of a Jewish doctor,
Rabinovich, who is accused of performing unauthorised abortions, but it
turns out that one of Rabinovich’s patients was Globov’s second wife, who
no longer wants to have children with him because she has lost her faith in
the future of socialism. Meanwhile, his son from his first marriage, the his-
tory student Seryozha, is spouting forbidden views about a supposed
‘purer’ form of communism, views that will eventually lead to his arrest as
a supposed agent of the counter-revolution. The point of the story is that
there is no way out for Globov that can be convincingly captured within
the literary culture of socialist realism, no decisions he can make and no

M. Stibbe (*) • K. McDermott

Department of Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
K. McDermott, M. Stibbe (eds.), Czechoslovakia and Eastern
Europe in the Era of Normalisation, 1969–1989,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98271-3_1
2 M. STIBBE AND K. MCDERMOTT

journey of discovery that he could go on that would reveal the rational,

humane core of the Soviet system. Instead, in order to escape his dilem-
mas he takes refuge in the utopian aspects of communism and in the (to
him reassuring, but to the reader utterly grotesque) belief that the end
would justify all means. He tells his son:

Study your history but don’t forget the present day. Think of what we’re
building! Think of what we have achieved already!—well, there you are—in
the final reckoning if you see what I mean—ultimately—our ancestors were
right. What they did was just.1

At his trial, alongside Yuli Daniel, for anti-Soviet agitation and propa-
ganda, held in Moscow in February 1966 after his true identity as Abram
Tertz had been uncovered by the KGB, Sinyavsky insisted that The Trial
Begins was a ‘literary work, not a political document’. As he told the court,
he had used the devise of an imaginary first-person narrator to conjure up
‘the mixture of fear and exaltation’ in the USSR during the short period
between the Doctors’ Plot and Stalin’s death, and again, three years later,
in 1956, not to ‘depict historical reality’ as it actually was.2 Needless to say,
he was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in a prison camp. In
1973 he was granted permission to emigrate to France.3
Sinyavsky’s case is interesting because it tells us something about the
difference between the pre- and post-1968 eras in the Soviet bloc. Before
1968 it was still possible to claim that communism was an ideal worth
fighting for, even though its living present had somehow been perverted
by Stalinism. This, after all, was the view of Globov’s son, Seryozha. In the
epilogue to The Trial Begins, Seryozha is depicted in 1956 alongside
Rabinovich and the unnamed narrator. They are digging a ditch in a camp
in Kolyma in Russia’s Far East, at a time when Khrushchev’s amnesties
‘had virtually emptied the [Gulag] of its inmates’ and ‘only some ten
thousand of us, dangerous criminals, were [still] left’.4 Seryozha’s idealis-
tic, libertarian socialist views indeed make him exceptionally dangerous to
the Soviet state, but on the other hand he is still alive, still living in the
present and still shaping his own reality around his historical and literary
‘finds’. A decade or so later, something of this utopian-artistic spirit was
captured in the Czech writer Ludvík Vaculík’s ‘Two Thousand Words
Manifesto’, published at the height of the Prague Spring. Vaculík still
endorsed socialism as a worthy ‘program’ for the Czechoslovak nation but
 1 CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND EASTERN EUROPE IN THE ERA OF NORMALISATION 3

noted that its headlong pursuit by force rather than democratic consent
had placed power ‘into the hands of the wrong people’.5
After 1968–1969, however, there could no longer be any belief in a
‘purer’ communism. The ‘utopian urge’, and with it the ‘importance of
culture’ to politics, died with the crushing of the Prague Spring in August
1968 and the removal of Alexander Dubček from office in April 1969.6
‘Normalisation’ in Czechoslovakia was intended to trump literary imagi-
nation not with feelings of terror or exaltation in face of ‘The Master’
(Stalin), but with more ‘static, sterile and stable forms’ of repression, as
Václav Havel put it in his famous samizdat essay, ‘The Power of the
Powerless’, written in October 1978.7 In other words, the ‘far-reaching
political change’ that the fictitious Seryozha yearned for was not just post-
poned for another decade or another generation, but cancelled forever—
or rendered ‘utterly unforeseeable’, to use Havel’s words.8 Meanwhile the
present was something to forget, whether through laughter and absurdist
comedy, through regular escape into the virtual capitalist world portrayed
by Western film and television, or through ‘opportunistic’ withdrawal into
the private realm of personal relationships and niche intellectual friend-
ships.9 Unlike the past, the present was not something that could be com-
memorated or condemned as if it were still a real living thing. Quite
simply, it was dead, or if not dead, then, to borrow the words of Timothy
Garton Ash, buried deep ‘under ice’, restricted to almost wholly invisible
activity ‘on the underside’, and capable of being brought to the surface
only ‘if… a real thaw comes’.10 Above all, to cite a metaphor unpicked by
Miroslav Vaněk in his contribution to this volume, the normalisation
period was characterised both at the time and afterwards by the colour
‘grey’, in order to contrast it negatively with the ‘golden’ 1960s and the
‘colourful’ 1990s.
This, at least, was how many dissident East European intellectuals saw
things from their position in the ‘shadow world’ that existed outside of
and in conflict with the official structures.11 It is also how many young
leftists in the West, successors to the ‘1968 generation’, viewed the nor-
malised communist regimes of the 1970s and 1980s. The German writers
Heinz Bude, Bettina Munk and Karin Wieland, for instance, who were
active in the house squatting movement in the Kreuzberg district of West
Berlin from 1980 onwards, remembered of that time:

We were okay with the Wall. It calmed the traffic, formed alcoves, and any-
thing that lay in its shadow that could not be used was left abandoned as
4 M. STIBBE AND K. MCDERMOTT

empty land. As true Berliners we no longer bothered to climb up on the

wooden viewing platforms. We blotted the other side out. Beyond East
Berlin with its long, silent, yellow-lit streets beckoned the gigantic vastness
of the East. [And] when the cold wind that blew over from there was par-
ticularly chilly, we felt as though Siberia was near.12

In the early part of the Cold War, rising German/European politicians like
Willy Brandt had still refused to accept the ‘normality’ of Soviet domina-
tion behind the Iron Curtain, asserting instead that historically and cultur-
ally, ‘Berlin lies on the [River] Spree and not in Siberia’.13 However, this
was worlds apart from the view presented by West Berlin-based author and
‘1968er’ Peter Schneider in his 1982 novel The Wall Jumper (Der
Mauerspringer). In Schneider’s critical take on the political imaginary of
the West, the ‘East’ had become a mere figure of speech, a by-word for a
‘detested social order’, rather than a real place with a pulsating heart: ‘Life
there didn’t differ simply in outward organization; it obeyed another
law’.14 Indeed, it was in the twenty years following the Soviet-led invasion
of Czechoslovakia that the peripheralising view of the communist East as
‘The Other Europe’ or the ‘last colonial empire still in existence’, as the
Prague-born French political scientist Jacques Rupnik argued in a 1988
book of the same title, really began to take hold.15 To reinforce this point,
Rupnik quoted from a much-read piece in the New York Review of Books
written by the exiled Czech author Milan Kundera in 1984. ‘Europe’,
bemoaned Kundera from the relative comfort of his new post-1975 home
in France, ‘has not noticed the disappearance of its [Central European]
cultural home because it no longer perceives its unity as a cultural unity’.16
Yet it may also be worth developing new, less starkly binary perspectives
on the post-1969 Soviet bloc and asking what was happening above the
ice, the place where, according to Vaněk, ‘the remaining 98 per cent of the
population’ who were not intellectuals or dissidents lived. In the cold and
often unstimulating, but nonetheless eminently habitable spaces created
by Eastern Europe’s post-totalitarian communist rulers, we argue, there
was still a present, or rather multiple presents, in the 1970s and early
1980s. Siberia was in fact still thousands of miles away in a cultural as well
as geographical sense. Thus, as Jan Mervart explains in his chapter in the
volume, the many inconsistencies in the ‘normalised’ party’s conception
of Leninist ideas about form and content did create spaces for genuine
artistic creativity and a limited but still palpable degree of pluralism.
Particularly for younger artists who had experienced neither 1950s
 1 CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND EASTERN EUROPE IN THE ERA OF NORMALISATION 5

Stalinism nor 1960s post-Stalinism, Husák’s ‘real existing socialism’ could

seem more like an opportunity than a threat. And although ordinary
Czechs and Slovaks did experience many aspects of everyday life in the
normalisation period as absurd, alienating and lacking in colour, they were
also able to find alternative meanings, multiple shades of grey, and more
rational, if mundane, ways of interacting with the system, as other contri-
butions to the collection demonstrate. Vítězslav Sommer, for example,
shows how dissatisfaction with shortages, corruption and environmental
pollution was communicated and mediated via various party and non-­
party institutions at local level through taking the example of the once
buoyant industrial and shoe-manufacturing town of Gottwaldov (Zlín) in
eastern Moravia. And Celia Donert adds to this by emphasising in her
chapter that the conservative family and gender norms of the last twenty
years of communist rule were not just imposed ‘from above’, but negoti-
ated from below, leading to a continuous redrawing of the dividing line
between the ‘private’ and ‘public’ lives of citizens.
It is the purpose of this volume to uncover these more nuanced mean-
ings and to understand their significance for the practice, experience and
memory of communist rule in Czechoslovakia itself and in the wider
Soviet bloc. By what means, we ask, and with what degree of success was
Czechoslovakia returned to a ‘normal’ communist state in line with Soviet
orthodoxy in the period after 1969? What role was played by the party,
ideology and the security state? How important were Slovak develop-
ments, family and gender issues, cultural production, and everyday life and
popular opinion? How do the chapters on the Nymburk and Gottwaldov
regions by James Krapfl and Sommer illuminate the multi-dimensional
and complex processes of normalisation and ‘auto-normalisation’ beyond
the major cities? And finally what was the significance of Czechoslovakia’s
political relations and cultural exchanges with the USSR, the GDR, Poland
and Yugoslavia?

Cultural and Political Influences from the 1950s

and 1960s and their Forgotten Legacy
for the Husák Regime

The essays contained in the volume offer a more diverse set of interpreta-
tions than conventional Western-centric and teleological narratives of the
gradual re-emergence of civil society after decades spent ‘under the ice’.
6 M. STIBBE AND K. MCDERMOTT

They demonstrate that in the 1970s and early 1980s, alternative national,
regional and global futures for Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe were
still possible to imagine, futures that did not necessarily entail the paths
taken after 1985, let alone after 1989.17 If a model civil society, able to
make a clear break with the communist establishment, did not even exist
by the time that Eastern Europe arrived at the annus mirabilis of 1989, as
Stephen Kotkin has claimed,18 then it becomes even more important to
avoid imposing normative, black and white assumptions when it comes to
analysing social processes and experiences in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Normalisation meant diverse things to diverse sets of people, whether they
were resident within Czechoslovakia’s borders or whether they lived across
those borders. It shaped the lives of hundreds of thousands of party and
state officials and millions of ordinary citizens and brought forth new
forms of accommodation—not all of them springing from ‘uncivil’
motives—as well as dissent and opposition, not all of which was ‘civil’,
pro-Western or liberalising in nature. It certainly closed down prospects
and narrowed horizons for some, but it also opened up fresh possibilities,
including for transnational exchange of ideas and experiences and recipro-
cal cultural contacts, for others.
Our approach is in part influenced by recent histories of Cold War
Eastern Europe that have challenged the idea that the political indepen-
dence and cultural identity of this region was simply ‘crushed’ by the
post-1944/1945 Soviet drive for domination and total subjugation and
only set free again in 1989.19 As studies by Norman Naimark, John
Connelly and Peter Kenez, among others, have shown, even in the late
1940s and early 1950s the Eastern bloc countries were allowed some
space for the development of cultural (if not political) expressions of
autonomy.20 European leaders after the Second World War, including
communist ones, were conscious of their own agency and of the salience
of the question of sovereignty. Already in the 1960s they were ‘globally
engaged’, developing contacts in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East
and South-East Asia in a world order that was being rapidly reshaped by
decolonisation and new forms of anti-imperialism.21 The line they took in
domestic affairs also mattered. In their dealings with the Soviet Union,
they were able to take advantage of particular historical traditions in, and
the unique geopolitical/strategic position of, their respective nations.22
This was more evident still following Stalin’s death in 1953 and the grad-
ual emergence of Khrushchev as his successor. ‘Proletarian international-
ism’ was no longer narrowly defined as love for the Soviet Union as the
 1 CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND EASTERN EUROPE IN THE ERA OF NORMALISATION 7

supposed ‘liberator’ of all nations but could now embrace patriotic (and
not just ‘realist’) forms of socialism in line with nationally-inflected,
pre-1945 histories and traditions. In late 1950s Hungary, for example, the
government of János Kádár, while denouncing the anti-Soviet insurgents
of 1956 as ‘fascists’ and ‘murderers’, allowed the rehabilitation of the
hitherto largely forgotten post-First World War ‘Councils Republic’ under
the ultra-left Bolshevik leader Béla Kun. Within the space of a few short
years, the 133-day ‘red’ reign of terror in Hungary from March to August
1919 went from being a taboo subject, not least for Stalinists who did not
want to dwell on Kun’s execution during the Soviet show trials of the
1930s, to a celebrated event that became firmly rooted in the nation’s
(and not just the Communist Party’s) revolutionary past.23
By the 1960s, according to Maciej Górny, well-developed national his-
toriographies (including of art and literature as well as state institutions)
had come to replace slavish imitations of the Soviet model in other Eastern
bloc countries too.24 At the end of that decade, Czechoslovakia itself had
two communist leaders in a row—Dubček and then Husák—who were
not only from the Slovak half of the country, but were generally sympa-
thetic towards its claims for greater cultural, and to some extent, national
autonomy. Some of this survived into the 1970s and helped to boost sup-
port for the normalisation process as a means of maintaining socialist
political control while meeting legitimate claims for economic and cultural
equality between nations, as Adam Hudek shows in his contribution to
this volume. In order to advance socialist ideas in the post-Stalinist era, it
was deemed necessary to allow nationally-distinct ‘historical narratives,
rhetoric, style, [and] strategies of argumentation’ to (re-)emerge, albeit
while staying broadly within the framework of Marxism-Leninism.25 This
could be seen especially in the production of new textbooks for use in
schools and universities. Other cultural items, including modern film and
literature, popular songs, consumer products, youth tourism and public
understandings of ‘hooliganism’, crossed borders within the Eastern bloc
and allied socialist countries such as Fidel Castro’s Cuba and Ho Chi
Minh’s North Vietnam, and did so in a much more open and extensive
manner in the 1960s when compared to the 1950s. In particular, the traf-
fic was no longer just one way, from Moscow to its satellites; rather, mul-
tilateral forms of cultural exchange and transfer within and beyond the
‘second world’ were now firmly on the agenda.26
In the sphere of Warsaw Pact diplomacy too, as Laurien Crump pro-
poses, the period after 1955, and especially after 1960, witnessed a
8 M. STIBBE AND K. MCDERMOTT

‘paradigm shift’ towards greater pluralism, with the six non-Soviet mem-
bers of that alliance able to act increasingly as respected junior partners
rather than mere puppets.27 Each one was able to develop particular, and
at times maverick, perspectives on issues such as the German question, the
Sino-­Soviet split, the Vietnam war, nuclear non-proliferation, the Arab-
Israeli conflict and (in the case of Romania and to a lesser extent Hungary)
even on the Prague Spring. The year 1968 was clearly something of an
exception, at least as far as the five-nation march into Czechoslovakia is
concerned. Certainly, there was to be no emancipation from Soviet-style
communism for the peoples of Eastern Europe until the late 1980s; before
then, they remained firmly within the Kremlin’s orbit. Nonetheless, as
Rachel Applebaum has shown specifically in the case of Czechoslovakia,
the unequal relations of power between Moscow and other Eastern Bloc
countries did not rule out the development of overlapping and durable
understandings of socialist internationalism and the forging of genuine
friendships at all levels of political, economic and cultural inter-change.28
For instance, the liberalising effects of several years of relatively open travel
arrangements for young people and migrant workers across the
Czechoslovak-Polish border were arguably brought to a head in the early
weeks of the Prague Spring, when students at the University of Warsaw—
protesting against the increasingly authoritarian and anti-Semitic direction
of their own government under the once reforming party leader Władysław
Gomułka—reportedly chanted: ‘Poland awaits her own Dubček!’.29 When
they were beaten up by the Polish security police and members of ‘work-
ers’ militias’, this was seen in many parts of Europe and across the ideo-
logical frontiers of the Cold War as a deliberate attack on efforts to create
a more humane version of socialism.
To take another example, student organisations in Yugoslavia publicly
expressed their outrage that ‘today, in a socialist country, it is possible to
tolerate anti-Semitic attacks’ and to use ‘such undemocratic means’ to
solve ‘internal conflicts’. Poland, they claimed, was now a country where
‘Marxist thought is persecuted’, a reference to the imprisonment of oppo-
sition left-wing intellectuals Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski in par-
ticular.30 Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, had since the mid-1960s
become a beacon of hope, a sign that a mutually-created, free and equal
socialist world beyond the straightjacket of Soviet power politics and mili-
tarism might still be within reach—even for Soviet citizens themselves.31
These transnational hopes did not simply disappear after 1968–1969,
although they did take on new forms. Meanwhile, at a more local level, the
 1 CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND EASTERN EUROPE IN THE ERA OF NORMALISATION 9

border regions between the Č SSR and Poland, and between the Czech
lands and the GDR, were themselves sites of increased social contacts in
the run up to 1968 which, at least indirectly, also threatened exclusively
national or state-bureaucratic visions of communism and its future devel-
opment.32 And at the opposite end of a very long political spectrum, neo-­
Stalinist critics of the Prague Spring inside Czechoslovakia also sought out
connections with like-minded figures and movements not only in their
own country, but across the border with Poland and throughout the
Soviet bloc.33 In other words—and to quote Rachel Applebaum again—
while national frameworks remained important from the mid-1960s
onwards, particularly for oppositional writers and intellectuals and in some
cases even for regime-loyal cultural functionaries, it is important to recog-
nise that East European citizens during the communist era ‘share[d] a
“common world”—a world they built together’.34 This applies regardless
of where they stood politically on issues such as the Prague Spring,
Czechoslovak federalisation, the Brezhnev doctrine or the meaning of
‘socialist internationalism’.
Our aim in this volume is to apply these insights, drawn mainly from
studies of the pre-1969 period, to the far less well understood 1970s and
early 1980s. We wish to challenge, or at least nuance, commonplace
assumptions about the normalisation period, in particular the Garton Ash
metaphor about the political aims of 1968 having simply been ‘frozen into
immobility’ or buried under ‘a thick layer of ice’ before the advent of glas-
nost and perestroika after 1985.35 For the last three-and-a-half decades, this
standard trope has dominated Western historiography to the exclusion of
more sophisticated understandings. As recently as 2018, for instance,
British historian Sir Ian Kershaw, with a direct nod to Garton Ash, wrote
in his masterful account of Europe since 1950:

In Czechoslovakia, far more than was the case in the GDR or Bulgaria (not
to mention Romania), the advent of Gorbachev opened up the gulf between
the regime and wide sectors of the population (above all intellectuals)—a
breach that had never been healed, even if not openly apparent, since the
crushing of the Prague Spring in August 1968… Political stability had been
sustained by ritual conformity of the many, ruthless repression, and surveil-
lance of the dissenting minority. But persecution had failed to silence the
dissidents completely.36
10 M. STIBBE AND K. MCDERMOTT

And in her 2020 biography of Václav Havel’s British playwright friend

Tom Stoppard, literary critic Hermione Lee made the same point in even
starker terms. All we need to know about the ‘puppet’ Husák regime in
the 1970s and early 1980s, she wrote, is that it ‘presided over a society
coloured by fear, apathy and suspicion’, leaving citizens with no other
option but to ‘tr[y] to get on with their lives by keeping their heads
down’.37
The problem with this interpretation, we would argue, does not lie in
what Kershaw, Lee (and others) say about the small number of outright
dissidents, but in what they fail to say about the bulk of ordinary Czechs
and Slovaks for whom ‘ritual conformity’ or ‘keeping their heads down’
could have multiple meanings, depending on shifting personal and politi-
cal priorities and changing local, national and transnational contexts.
Thomas Lindenberger’s notion of ‘Eigen-Sinn’ (self-will), which he
applies to understanding the often obstinately self-interested behaviour of
East German citizens towards the centralised party-state in the GDR, is
also relevant, we maintain, to reading Czechoslovak society after 1953 and
again after 1969. Here too post-Stalinist dictatorial methods had their
limits, and the communist regime typically had to secure its (slender/
transient/fragile) legitimacy through complex forms of negotiation and
persuasion rather than relying on straightforward societal obedience
towards police and governmental authority.38 Politics, in other words, was
not frozen. Indeed, as an alternative to the ‘under the ice’ metaphor, we
would point to some surprising affinities with American society in the
1830s and 1840s, an era when ‘the people’ were already the unignorable
subjects of history but not yet its sovereign creators, its movers and shak-
ers, and also an era in which talk of revolution, or sudden, violent political
change, was rare. Of American citizens at that time, the French aristocrat
and political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

…whatever profession [they] may embrace and whatever species of property

they may possess, one characteristic is common to them all. No one is fully
contented with his present fortune; all are perpetually striving, in a thousand
ways, to improve it. Consider any one of them at any period of his life, and
he will be found engaged with some new project for the purpose of increas-
ing what he has… Violent political passions have but little hold on [them]…
The ardour that they display in small matters calms their zeal for momen-
tous undertakings.39
 1 CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND EASTERN EUROPE IN THE ERA OF NORMALISATION 11

With the one obvious and short-lived exception of the Solidarity move-
ment in Poland in 1980–1981, this description might equally well apply to
East European citizens in the 1970s and early 1980s. Before we pursue
this line of argument any further, however, and before we integrate it into
our broader interpretations of normalisation, it is first essential to appraise
normalisation in its domestic Czechoslovak guise. This can only be done
by looking at the traumatic events of the Prague Spring and Warsaw Pact
invasion of August 1968.

The Prague Spring and Warsaw Pact Invasion,

January–August 1968
The Prague Spring was a bold experiment in the midst of the Cold War to
elaborate a historic ‘Third Way’: a form of democratic socialism distinct
from Western liberal capitalism on the one hand and the rigid norms of
Soviet Marxism-Leninism on the other. It was a peaceful attempt by
Czechoslovak reform communists to democratise, modernise and thus
legitimise the existing system under the potent slogan ‘socialism with a
human face’.40 For leading reformers, the innovations had definite limits—
they represented precisely ‘democratisation’, not a conscious route to a
fully-fledged ‘democracy’. Their architects, after all, were communists, not
liberals. This difficult and contradictory process began in earnest after the
appointment of the forty-six-year-old Slovak Alexander Dubček as First
Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Komunistická
strana Č eskoslovenska—KSČ ) on 5 January 1968 and was brutally cur-
tailed eight months later by Soviet-led Warsaw Pact tanks. Dubček was not
a radical reformer, but he soon became the personification of the Prague
Spring, a ‘heroic’, almost mythologised figure. We do not have sufficient
space here to discuss the origins of the Prague Spring in any detail, but
suffice it to say that five inter-related factors in the crisis of Czechoslovak
communism culminated in the events of 1968: economic stagnation
beginning in 1962–1963 and the piecemeal efforts to overcome it; long-­
standing tensions between Czechs and Slovaks; the over-centralisation of
power; cultural ferment and disaffection among intellectuals and students;
and a widespread moral belief in the rule of law over the rule of fear. These
corrosive issues crystallised in the course of 1967, producing deep and
bitter divisions in the party leadership and society.
12 M. STIBBE AND K. MCDERMOTT

What actually occurred in Czechoslovakia between January and August

1968 that aroused the wrath of Soviet and other East European leaders?
First and foremost was the highly controversial and unprecedented deci-
sion in early March to abolish primary censorship of the mass media.
Almost immediately state-run television, radio and newspapers began to
discuss a host of hitherto taboo subjects, including radical proposals for a
future multi-party system and Soviet involvement in the judicial crimes of
the Stalinist era. By the summer, the Kremlin was accusing the Dubček
leadership of permitting the publication of outright anti-Soviet articles
and cartoons. Several other initiatives tore at the heart of Moscow’s
ingrained conceptions of the socialist order: the founding of non-­
communist, potentially anti-communist, political groupings; the demo-
tion of loyal pro-Soviet party, state and security officials and their
replacement by untested reformers; the likelihood of formal recognition
of the rights of minority factions inside the KSČ , seriously undermining
the Leninist ideological canon of ‘democratic centralism’; the moves to
circumscribe the vast powers of the secret services; the extensive political
and civil rehabilitation of many thousands of victims of Stalinist illegalities;
the mooted military reforms that could subvert the unity and coordina-
tion of the Warsaw Pact; the perceived shift to a more neutral foreign
policy, epitomised by improved links with the (West) German Federal
Republic; the erosion of political trust between the Czechoslovak and
Soviet leaders, notably Dubček and Brezhnev;41 and, not least, the activa-
tion of a spontaneous and unpredictable actor in the form of popular opin-
ion and an embryonic civil society, which threatened to push the reforms
way beyond the limits set by party and governmental authorities. The
crucial dilemma for KSČ reformers was how to democratise public life and
involve citizens in the management of the state without jeopardising the
party’s monopoly of power. It is fair to say that, unsurprisingly, no ade-
quate solution to this conundrum was found during the short eight
months of the Prague Spring.
Ultimately, however, it was the Soviets’ profound geopolitical fears that
underlay their decision to intervene militarily on the night of 20–21
August 1968. For did not the logic of a democratised system and an open
mass media in Czechoslovakia signify the emergence of ‘anti-socialist
counter-revolutionary forces’ both inside and outside the Communist
Party? If so, could Dubček or any successor be relied on to overcome the
‘rightist elements’ and maintain the party’s leading role in the future? If
not, surely Czechoslovakia would be ‘lost’ to socialism and the threat of
 1 CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND EASTERN EUROPE IN THE ERA OF NORMALISATION 13

‘spill-over’ to other East European socialist states, including the USSR

itself, would be palpable? If so, would not the cohesion and unity of the
entire Soviet bloc be plunged into turmoil, the inviolable gains of the
Second World War be forsaken and the historic struggle between ‘social-
ism’ and ‘capitalism’ end in victory for the latter? The stakes were thus
extremely high.
‘Operation Danube’, the codename for the largest deployment of
armed force in Europe since World War II, was militarily competent, but
politically seriously misjudged. The Soviet plan was that the overwhelming
show of strength would rapidly pacify the population, Dubček and other
prominent reformers would be replaced by pro-Moscow ‘healthy forces’,
led by Vasil Bil’ak and Alois Indra, who together with three other hard-­
liners had written the infamous ‘Letter of Invitation’ requesting Soviet
‘fraternal assistance’, and a so-called ‘revolutionary government of work-
ers and peasants’ would be formed to bring Czechoslovakia back into the
communist fold. In the event, the occupation was almost universally con-
demned by both the party and people and met with mass passive resis-
tance. The KSČ Presidium voted seven to four against the machinations of
the Bil’ak-Indra group, who were popularly regarded as traitors, where-
upon the Kremlin had to improvise and transport Dubček and the entire
Czechoslovak party leadership to the USSR to ‘negotiate’ what became
known as the ‘Moscow Protocol’. Under the terms of this enforced secret
agreement signed on 26 August, key aspects of ‘normalisation’ were
adumbrated: functionaries who acted against the leading role of the KSČ
were to be removed; full party control over the media was to be restored
and ‘anti-socialist’ clubs and organisations closed down; the fervently pro-­
reform Extraordinary 14th Party Congress, which had convened clandes-
tinely in Prague on 22 August, was declared null and void; and Warsaw
Pact troops were to remain on Czechoslovak territory until ‘the threat to
socialism’ had been ‘eliminated’.42 The Soviets also made it clear that sev-
eral radical reformers, soon to be dubbed ‘counter-revolutionary right-
ists’, had to be rapidly dismissed from their positions of power. However,
a few concessions were secured. Most significantly, it was accepted that
Dubček and other leading moderate reformers would, temporarily at least,
remain in office to oversee the implementation of the Protocol and initiate
the early phase of normalisation.
In the fluid months after the invasion, Dubček was in a deeply invidious
position. He speculated that once Czechoslovak politics and society had
been ‘consolidated’, largely in line with Soviet expectations, aspects of the
14 M. STIBBE AND K. MCDERMOTT

Prague Spring reforms could be salvaged, and Moscow might be per-

suaded to recall the occupying Warsaw Pact forces. The strategy was not
entirely misguided. As Krapfl and Sommer demonstrate in their contribu-
tions to this volume, from autumn 1968 to well into 1969, political, social
and cultural life remained deeply contested with recalcitrant reformers,
intellectuals, students and many industrial workers fighting a losing battle
against the encroachments of the burgeoning pro-Soviet and ‘realist’ fac-
tions. However, by their prevarications, willingness to jettison like-minded
comrades and acceptance of piecemeal measures reversing virtually all the
post-­January innovations, Dubček and other prominent reformers like
Prime Minister Oldřich Č erník played a crucial role in the post-invasion
‘pacification’ process. In sum, early normalisation was both highly con-
tested and, in its later stages, an unedifying spectacle of reluctant retreat
and compromise which served to disarm, disorient and dismay the vast
bulk of Czechs and Slovaks and thereby blunt popular resistance to the
occupation. ‘Realism’—a growing recognition that Soviet demands had to
be met if worse was not to befall the country—gradually prevailed over
principled defiance.
To be sure, significant acts of opposition such as Jan Palach’s tragic self-­
immolation in January 1969, widespread anti-Soviet protests after
Czechoslovakia symbolically defeated the USSR twice in the world ice
hockey championships in March, and violently suppressed demonstrations
marking the first anniversary of the invasion in August continued to rock
the political establishment. But the unintended outcome of this perceived
‘chaos’ was that many vacillating party reformers and centrists began to
seek a new firm style of leadership, epitomised by the power-hungry Slovak
party leader Gustáv Husák, to extricate the country from the on-going
political and social malaise. In this toxic atmosphere, an anti-Dubček
coalition in the KSČ elite had coalesced by early spring 1969, the coup de
grâce occurring at the Central Committee plenum on 17 April. Here, the
overwhelming majority of delegates abjectly voted to accept Dubček’s res-
ignation and replace him as First Secretary by Husák. The latter’s great
attribute was that he successfully portrayed himself as a ‘pragmatist’, a man
of action, a forceful ‘anti-Stalinist’ who had been persecuted in the 1950s,
had supported many of the reforms of 1968 and hence could bring cohe-
sion to a bitterly divided party and society that yearned for stability after
months of crisis fatigue. He had also become ‘Moscow’s choice’: normali-
sation was about to begin in earnest.
 1 CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND EASTERN EUROPE IN THE ERA OF NORMALISATION 15

Normalisation: Meanings and Interpretations

It is no easy task to define the term ‘normalisation’, not least because it
signified different things to different actors, altered its meaning over time
and begs the perplexing question: what is a ‘normal’ communist system?
That said, conventionally, normalisation (normalizace in Czech; normal-
izácia in Slovak) has been construed as the attempt by hard-line pro-­
Soviet Czechoslovak communists to reconstruct the status quo ante, a
supremely retrograde undertaking designed to wipe the Dubčekite reforms
of 1968 and the ‘spirit of January’ from the two nations’ collective mem-
ory. As several of our contributors make clear, normalisers insisted on the
reinforcement of the party’s leading role in politics and society, the removal
of prominent reformers and oppositionists and by 1970 the purging of the
KSČ as a whole, which saw the exclusion of approximately 327,000 party
members (21.7 per cent);43 the re-imposition of censorship of the media,
culture and academia; and a return to a tightly centralised planned econ-
omy. Another key component of normalisation, as Kieran Williams illus-
trates in his chapter, was strict recentralisation of the party’s authority over
a revamped state security service (StB), enabling it, albeit with ‘superficial
success’, to monitor and harass dissident initiatives such as Charter 77
without reverting to the terroristic methods of the Stalinist period. In
these measures, Husák’s regime closely resembled a ‘normal’ Soviet-type
system as defined by the Kremlin under Brezhnev. In short, the two
decades of normalisation are all too often depicted as a ‘timeless’ unchang-
ing era of politico-cultural stagnation and stultifying repression, resulting
in ritualised conformity and public cynicism, apathy and opportunism.
But this essential truism does not mean that the communist authorities
were totally incapable of generating more productive and strategic
impulses or of satisfying, in part at least, demands for social and material
advancement. It is our contention that the post-1969 Czechoslovak state
was not simply coercive, destructive and immobile. For a start, as Michal
Pullmann emphasises in his contribution, the Husákite normalisers por-
trayed themselves not as ‘triumphant neo-Stalinists’ hell-bent on a return
to the pre-1968 dark days,44 but as quasi-modernisers in search of a ratio-
nal and stable ‘socialist modernity’ in which citizens could hope to realise
a moderately prosperous, rounded ‘quiet life’ rooted in shared values and
norms. Second, regardless of the constant public lies intoned by the nor-
malised bureaucracy, Czechs and Slovaks were not prevented from form-
ing living bonds in and with the existing communist system and shaping
16 M. STIBBE AND K. MCDERMOTT

their own heterogeneous realities around these bonds. And third, politics
at the topmost layers did not ‘freeze’ after 1968–1969 either. Hudek’s
chapter, for instance, shows that the ‘Slovak question’ remained dynamic
and involved continuous negotiation and renegotiation both within
Slovakia itself and in the latter’s relations with the Czech half of the fed-
eration. And at federal level, as Martin Štefek uncovers in his contribution,
even the highest body in the ruling KSČ , the Presidium, was riven by
factional in-fighting, a state of affairs that was also reflected in struggles
that took place lower down the party hierarchy. Neither were the
Czechoslovak state and judicial authorities as united and uniformly vindic-
tive as is commonly perceived, an argument already put forward by Peter
Bugge in his case study of the semi-independent Jazz Section of the
Musicians’ Union, published in 2008.45 Even the modus operandi of the
normalised state security service underwent a certain benign change,
engaging in what a leading dissident called ‘civilised violence’: secret
police officers could still ruin people’s lives, but they now dressed in suits,
called suspects in during working hours and shook their hand after a
‘friendly’ chat over a cup of coffee.46
It should also be recognised that the dominant negative trope of nor-
malised Czechoslovakia privileges the viewpoint of the persecuted, a small
fraction of society composed overwhelmingly of intellectual ‘dissidents’
and disgraced ex-reformers. But were there no beneficiaries of normalisa-
tion? Was there no measure of popular legitimacy? Aside from the
cocooned members of the political, bureaucratic and security elites,
Husák’s regime endeavoured to meet the social and consumer aspirations
of broad sections of the population, not least the industrial working classes,
on whom state ideology notionally rested. ‘Let’s hope the workers don’t
get pissed off’, Prime Minister Lubomír Štrougal is rumoured to have
said.47 To be sure, this prosaic aim was never fully achieved; indeed, stan-
dards of living generally worsened from the late 1970s onwards as infla-
tion, scarcities and economic bottlenecks increasingly took hold,
engendering endemic public discontent and sullen resentment. But, as
argued by several of our contributors—Donert, Pullmann and Vaněk
among others—we should not overlook the impressive array of social wel-
fare legislation and mass housing construction of the 1970s and 1980s,
which undeniably improved the lot of many families, albeit largely inspired
by gender-conservative impulses and political pragmatism. In the words of
one otherwise unsympathetic observer, ‘the size of financial support given
 1 CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND EASTERN EUROPE IN THE ERA OF NORMALISATION 17

from public funds [to children, mothers and families] can be the envy of
every country in the world’.48
Similarly, artificially low prices for basic commodities (notably beer),
public utilities and rents were widely appreciated, even taken for granted,
and the condoning of semi-legal practices such as moonlighting, bartering
and bribery eased the burden of everyday life. The much-vaunted tacit
‘social contract’ between state and society, whereby economic and social
well-being was guaranteed by the former in return for the political acqui-
escence of the latter, and state violence was kept at ‘civilised’ and largely
inconspicuous levels, may be overdrawn, but it doubtless partially accounts
for the almost total lack of overt popular resistance after 1969. In terms of
popular reception of the regime, we must be aware of geographical differ-
ences: on the whole, the process of normalisation was perceived more
positively in Slovakia than in the Czech lands. This is well illustrated in
Hudek’s contribution and confirmed by opinion polls conducted in the
post-communist era which revealed that surprisingly high numbers of
Slovaks looked back favourably on the years 1969–1989, some even
regarding them as the most successful era of the entire twentieth century.49
Another important insight is that a distinction should be drawn between
normalisation as a ‘process’, which relates largely to domestic affairs in
Czechoslovakia and, as Krapfl shows in his chapter, took place at least
partly in the ‘semiotic realm’; and normalisation as a ‘period’, which also
allows us to make comparisons with other East European countries and
seek connections and transfers across borders.50 If we adopt this approach,
we are able to identify normalisation’s asymmetrical, contested and con-
tingent nature. When viewed as a process, a striking conclusion is that
normalisation was not simply designed and enforced ‘from above’ by
party, state and security elites, but was often the product of negotiation
and interaction ‘from below’ involving lower party and state organs, insti-
tutional authorities, social organisations and a range of scientific and tech-
nical experts. To take just two examples: first, as graphically demonstrated
by Krapfl and Sommer in their case studies of Nymburk and Gottwaldov
respectively, the early ‘consolidation’ phase in late 1968 and 1969, which
aimed above all at removing reformists from regional party and state hier-
archies, was implemented by a combination of central and local normalis-
ers, the latter operating in party and government structures, major
enterprises, trade union branches and the press. Second, even at the high-
est echelons of power, as Štefek shows in his contribution, the political and
institutional model of the 1970s and 1980s was ‘neither monolithic, nor
18 M. STIBBE AND K. MCDERMOTT

completely sealed’, and nor was it totally under the control of the Kremlin.
Rather, ‘policies were the outcome of highly intricate balancing acts’
between a variety of interested parties at multiple levels, including the
central KSČ apparatus, regional party structures, ministries, the State
Planning Commission, the management of large factories and the
trade unions.
Taking normalisation as a period, we can identify two main phases, the
first between late 1968 and 1970–1971, often referred to as ‘consolida-
tion’, and the second encompassing the whole of the last two decades of
communist rule. During the first phase, the meaning of the term ‘normali-
sation’ was wide open. The months after the Warsaw Pact invasion and
well into 1969 were times of profound flux, when normalisation was up
for grabs: was it to denote the preservation of moderate reform, or a
return to neo-Stalinism, or something in between? For leading party
reformers and the vast bulk of the population, it signified the restoration
of ‘order’ as a precondition, not for the total elimination of the Prague
Spring innovations and a purge of the KSČ , but for the rapid withdrawal
of foreign troops and the continuation of the post-January 1968 reformist
road, albeit shorn of its most controversial elements. For the normalisers,
on the other hand, the prime goal was to ‘pacify’ the party, ‘stabilise’ soci-
ety and gradually consign the Dubčekite reforms to the dustbin of history.
Although this task was largely achieved by the end of 1970, it was not as
if ‘normalisation’ was ever fully implemented, not least because even emi-
nent normalisers could not agree on what it entailed exactly. Throughout
the 1970s and 1980s, challenges remained, new tactics and strategies
needed to be forged, unforeseen consequences confronted. As such, nor-
malisation must be seen as an on-going venture, subtly evolving over time,
demanding the constant attention of the Czechoslovak (and Soviet) lead-
erships. It was never set in stone.
Finally, in the realm of intra-bloc relations the image of Czechoslovakia
underwent a kind of sea-change between 1968 and the 1970s. During the
Prague Spring and the immediate post-invasion period, Czechoslovakia
was officially regarded as a maverick, a ‘threat’ to socialism, especially in
Warsaw and East Berlin. But by the mid-1970s, Husák’s regime was widely
viewed as one of the most loyal of the USSR’s acolytes. It boasted political
stability, exhibited relatively buoyant levels of economic growth and
enjoyed improved standards of living. In these conditions, economic,
social, cultural and tourist exchanges and partnerships between the states
 1 CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND EASTERN EUROPE IN THE ERA OF NORMALISATION 19

of the Soviet bloc and Czechoslovakia were renewed and transnational ties
were fashioned. It is to these manifold relations that we now turn.

Normalisation: Cross-Border Mentalities

and Transnational Dimensions

Although our prime focus in this volume is on Czechoslovakia, we are also

mindful of the transnational ramifications of normalisation, particularly for
the Č SSR’s nearest neighbours, Poland and the GDR, as well as for the
Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Some of these ramifications can still be felt
more than three decades since the fall of communism. Recently, for
instance, the German politician Petra Köpping, a member of the ruling
Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the 1980s and of the Social Democrats
(SPD) since 2002, has referred to what she describes as the ‘loophole
mentality’ (Schlupfloch-Mentalität) prevalent in her home state of Saxony,
which she traces back to late GDR times:

Our past has turned us into habitual circumventors of state edicts wherever
possible. We will always try to get the maximum out of any given situation.
If there is just one corner of a city centre where there are no signs mandating
the wearing of [face] masks [for health reasons], people will pull down their
masks immediately, no matter how crowded the street is.51

To take another example, in the mid-1970s a joke did the rounds across
the East European bloc to the effect that the Soviet Union was now the
‘only country [in the world to be] surrounded by hostile Communist
nations’.52 This was not a reference to intellectual opposition, however,
and still less to the occasional flashes of national independence shown by
‘liberal’ party leaders such as Edward Gierek in Poland and Kádár in
Hungary, and, at the other extreme, by Nicolae Ceaușescu, the uncom-
promising, ultra-authoritarian communist dictator in Romania. Rather, it
was a nod towards the myriad ways in which ordinary East European citi-
zens sought to thwart, evade and sidestep state authority without chal-
lenging it violently or head on.
In fact, normalisation brought forth a range of different reactions—
both from a variety of social and political actors and from within, without
and beyond Czechoslovakia’s borders. When it comes to Soviet-­
Czechoslovak relations, as Applebaum shows in her chapter in the volume,
it is even possible to identify a deliberate transnational policy at work in
20 M. STIBBE AND K. MCDERMOTT

the mutual desire to normalise and thereby reaffirm cultural interactions

and ties of friendship between the two countries in the aftermath of the
1968 invasion. This was seen positively, by both sides, as a ‘soft power’
alternative to having to maintain large numbers of occupation troops in
the Č SSR on anything other than a ‘temporary’ basis. For instance, a clear
message that military invasion by Warsaw Pact armies and subsequent
commitment to normalisation did not necessarily imply a full-scale reversal
of the cultural policies of the 1960s was already contained in the decision
on 29 August 1968 to have the Dinamo factory in Moscow organise a
festival celebrating the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Slovak National
Uprising against fascist rule in 1944. The importance of international and
inter-personal socialist partnership in making a better, more just, virtuous
and peaceful Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War was
emphasised, as indeed it had been since the early 1960s, as a legitimising
tool. This stood in contrast to the period of ‘high Stalinism’ from 1948 to
1953, when positive mention of the Slovak uprising was all but impossible
and its leaders were denounced as ‘bourgeois nationalists’, enemies of the
Soviet Union and agents of Western intelligence services.53
Equally, as Matthew Stibbe and Ondřej Klípa demonstrate in their con-
tributions, the ruling parties in the GDR and Poland, as well as non-party
technocrats and ordinary citizens from those states, found various ways of
drawing political, economic and (inter-)personal uses from the post-1970
movement of people, goods and technologies across their southern fron-
tiers with the Č SSR. They too saw advantages in clinging on to certain
cultural narratives of World War II which helped to reconcile patriotism
with pro-Soviet socialist internationalism. Other ‘benefits’ of friendly rela-
tions with Czechoslovakia included the transfer of ‘good practice’ in mili-
tary and civil defence preparations against the West, and the exchange of
information about dissident groups and suspicious individuals. These con-
tacts were not only a transnational means of further promoting and sup-
porting the normalisation project pursued by the Husák government.
Rather, with the active, albeit self-interested support of ‘fraternal’ govern-
ments in East Berlin and Warsaw, cross-border ties themselves became
normalised, and indeed part of the standard everyday experience of ordi-
nary Poles, East Germans and Czechoslovaks in the last two decades of
communist rule. In the somewhat different case of Yugoslavia, a socialist
state but not a member of the Warsaw Pact or Soviet bloc, and further-
more a country without a direct border with the Č SSR, Ondr ̌ej
Vojtěchovský and Jan Pelikán argue that contacts between citizens were
 1 CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND EASTERN EUROPE IN THE ERA OF NORMALISATION 21

also important. They were used, unsuccessfully, to demonstrate the sup-

posed advantages of normalisation over 1968-style reform for Czechoslovak
workers, and, perhaps more effectively, to buy the latter off by offering
them a semi-realistic and partially satisfying ‘window to the West’.
None of this means that we should overlook or downplay the domestic
dimensions of normalisation. At many levels, as the contributions in this
volume show, this remains a Czechoslovak story with bleak as well as
lighter sides to it, patches of darkness as well as varying shades of grey.
Certainly, the former should never be ignored. Among the many everyday
problems blighting the lives of ordinary Czechs and Slovaks were the
‘stalled’ economic development and growing ‘national indebtedness’ of
the county, made worse by the ‘lukewarm’ response of the ruling party to
Gorbachev’s perestroika initiatives after 1985–1986;54 the disastrous envi-
ronmental outcomes produced by a regime still following mid-twentieth
century models of central state planning and failing to adapt to new post-­
industrial technologies; the all-pervasive corruption and sense of unfair
rewards for those with political connections; and the existential fears pro-
duced by the sudden (and often now forgotten) escalation in East-West
military tensions and renewed talk of possible nuclear war after
1978–1979.55 That said, our prime aim has been to portray normalisation
in a balanced, non-categorical way which, crucially, gives back agency to
‘ordinary’ Czechs and Slovaks and fully recognises the dynamic, complex
and contradictory essence of the period 1969–1989. In so doing, we have
endeavoured to grant a more prominent voice to the majority of
Czechoslovaks who lived their lives in real time, rather than in the sus-
pended or interrupted historical time imagined in many scholarly portray-
als of Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s.

Notes
1. A. Tertz (i.e. A. Sinyavsky), The Trial Begins, trans. by M. Hayward
(London, 1960), p. 14. First published in the Paris-based, Polish-language
journal Kultura, and in the UK by the literary magazine Encounter.
2. D. White, Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War
(London, 2019), p. 475.
3. Ibid., p. 478. We are also indebted to White’s book for our synopsis of The
Trial Begins.
4. Tertz, The Trial Begins, p. 92.
22 M. STIBBE AND K. MCDERMOTT

5. L. Vaculík, ‘The “Two Thousand Words” Manifesto’, 27 June 1968,

reproduced in J. Navrátil et al. (eds), The Prague Spring 1968: A National
Security Archive Documents Reader (Budapest, 1998), pp. 177–81 (here
p. 177).
6. T. S. Brown, Sixties Europe (Cambridge, 2020), p. 4.
7. V. Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’ (1978), trans. by P. Wilson and
reproduced in V. Havel, Living in Truth: Twenty-Two Essays Published on
the Occasion of the Award of the Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel, edited by
J. Vladislav (London, 1987) [1986], pp. 36–122 (here p. 110).
8. Ibid., p. 113.
9. P. Bren, The Greengrocer and his TV: The Culture of Communism after the
1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca, NY, 2010).
10. T. Garton Ash, ‘Czechoslovakia under Ice’ (February 1984), reproduced
in T. Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe
(London, 1989), pp. 55–63 (here p. 63).
11. J. Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe,
and Czech Culture under Communism (Cambridge, MA, 2012), esp.
pp. 72–114.
12. H. Bude, B. Munk and K. Wieland, Aufprall: Roman (Munich,
2020), p. 14.
13. W. Brandt, ‘Berlin liegt an der Spree und nicht in Sibirien’, Schleswig-­
Holsteinische Tagespost, 26 September 1952. Cited in W. Schmidt, Kalter
Krieg, Koexistenz und kleine Schritte: Willy Brandt und die Deutschlandpolitik
1948–1963 (Wiesbaden, 2001), p. 141, n. 374.
14. P. Schneider, The Wall Jumper, trans. by L. Hafrey and with an introduc-
tion by I. McEwan (London, 2005) [1982], pp. 12–13.
15. J. Rupnik, The Other Europe, revised ed. (London, 1989) [1988], p. xi.
16. Ibid., p. 7. See also M. Kundera, ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’, The
New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984, pp. 33–8 (here p. 36).
17. This is also the argument made by J. Mark, B. C. Iacob, T. Rupprecht and
L. Spaskovska, 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe (Cambridge, 2019).
18. S. Kotkin (with J. T. Gross), Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the
Communist Establishment (New York, 2009), p. 7.
19. A. Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956
(London, 2012).
20. N. M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of
Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA, 1995); J. Connelly, ‘Students,
Workers, and Social Change: The Limits of Czech Stalinism’, Slavic
Review, vol. 56, no. 2 (1997), pp. 307–35; idem., The Captive University:
The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education
1945–1956 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000); P. Kenez, Hungary from the Nazis to
1 CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND EASTERN EUROPE IN THE ERA OF NORMALISATION 23

the Soviets: The Establishment of the Communist Regime in Hungary,

1944–1948 (Cambridge, 2006).
21. Mark et al., 1989: A Global History, pp. 27 and passim.
22. See also Naimark’s latest book, Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar
Struggle for Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA, 2019), here esp. pp. 267–72.
23. Brown, Sixties Europe, p. 153. See also P. Apor, Fabricating Authenticity in
Soviet Hungary: The Afterlife of the First Hungarian Soviet Republic in the
Age of State Socialism (London, 2014).
24. M. Górny, The Nation Should Come First: Marxism and Historiography in
East Central Europe (Frankfurt/Main and New York, 2013).
25. Ibid., p. 19.
26. See in particular the various contributions to A. E. Gorsuch and D. P. Koenker
(eds), The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World
(Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 2013). On the cross-border transmis-
sion of discourses on ‘hooliganism’ and how to manage it in social and
policing terms, see also M. Kotalík, Rowdytum im Staatssozialismus: Ein
Feindbild aus der Sowjetunion (Berlin, 2019).
27. L. Crump, The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered: International Relations in
Eastern Europe, 1955–69 (London and New York, 2015), p. 3.
28. R. Applebaum, Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism
in Cold War Czechoslovakia (Ithaca, NY, 2019).
29. T. Kemp-Welch, ‘“To Hell with Sovereignty!”: Poland and the Prague
Spring’, in K. McDermott and M. Stibbe (eds), Eastern Europe in 1968:
Responses to the Prague Spring and Warsaw Pact Invasion (London, 2018),
pp. 125–45 (here p. 128).
30. Brown, Sixties Europe, p. 110.
31. See also R. Applebaum, ‘A Test of Friendship: Soviet-Czechoslovak
Tourism and the Prague Spring’, in Gorsuch and Koenker (eds), The
Socialist Sixties, pp. 213–32 (here esp. pp. 226–7).
32. D. Janák and Z. Jirásek, ‘Tschechisch-polnische Wirtschaftsbeziehungen
im Grenzgebiet in den Jahren 1945 bis 1989’, in H. Schultz (ed.), Grenzen
im Ostblock und ihre Überwindung (Berlin, 2001), pp. 185–98 (here
p. 196); M. Stibbe, ‘Ideological Offensive: The East German Leadership,
the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of August 1968’, in
McDermott and Stibbe (eds), Eastern Europe in 1968, pp. 97–123 (here
pp. 106–8).
33. K. McDermott and V. Sommer, ‘The “Anti-Prague Spring”: Neo-­Stalinist
and Ultra-Leftist Extremism in Czechoslovakia, 1968–1970’, in
McDermott and Stibbe (eds), Eastern Europe in 1968, pp. 45–69.
34. Applebaum, Empire of Friends, p. 198.
35. Garton Ash, ‘Czechoslovakia under Ice’, p. 57.
36. I. Kershaw, Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950–2017 (London, 2018), p. 328.
24 M. STIBBE AND K. MCDERMOTT

37. H. Lee, Tom Stoppard: A Life (London, 2020), p. 326.

38. T. Lindenberger, ‘Die Diktatur der Grenzen: Zur Einleitung’, in
T. Lindenberger (ed.), Herrschaft und Eigen-Sinn in der Diktatur: Studien
zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte der DDR (Cologne, 1999), pp. 13–44 (here esp.
pp. 21–6). See also K. McDermott, Communist Czechoslovakia, 1945–1989:
A Political and Social History (Basingstoke, 2015), pp. 93–4.
39. A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 Vols. (1835–1840), abridged
single-volume edition with an introduction by P. Renshaw (Ware, Herts.,
1998), pp. 323–4.
40. The classic English-language works on the Prague Spring are G. Golan,
Reform Rule in Czechoslovakia: The Dubc ̌ek Era, 1968–1969 (Cambridge,
1973); H. G. Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution (Princeton,
NJ, 1976); K. Dawisha, The Kremlin and the Prague Spring (Berkeley, CA,
1984); and K. Williams, The Prague Spring and its Aftermath: Czechoslovak
Politics, 1968–1970 (Cambridge, 1997). More recent studies include
M. M. Stolarik (ed.), The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of
Czechoslovakia, 1968: Forty Years Later (Mundelein, IL, 2010); G. Bischof
et al. (eds), The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968 (Lanham, MD, 2010); and J. Pazderka (ed.), The
Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968: The Russian Perspective (Lanham,
MD, 2019).
41. On ‘trust’, see Williams, The Prague Spring, pp. 35–8 and 110–11.
42. Both the ‘Letter’ and the ‘Moscow Protocol’ are reproduced in Navrátil
et al. (eds), The Prague Spring 1968, pp. 324–5 and 477–80.
43. J. Maňák, Č istky v Komunistické strane ̌ Č eskoslovenska 1969–1970 (Prague,
1997), p. 118; and Williams, The Prague Spring, p. 234.
44. ‘Triumphant neo-Stalinism’ is the characterisation of the normalised
regime put forward by some post-communist Czech historians. See
J. Mervart, ‘Rozdílnost pohledů na československou normalizaci’, in
K. Č inátl, J. Mervart and J. Najbert (eds), Podoby c ̌esko-slovenské normal-
izace: de ̌jiny v diskuzi (Prague, 2017), pp. 40–78 (here p. 43).
45. P. Bugge, ‘Normalization and the Limits of the Law: The Case of the
Czech Jazz Section’, East European Politics and Societies, vol. 22, no. 2
(2008), pp. 282–318.
46. M. Šimečka, The Restoration of Order: The Normalization of Czechoslovakia,
1969–1976 (London, 1984), pp. 72–9; and L. Vaculík, A Cup of Coffee
with My Interrogator (London, 1987).
47. Cited in J. Pánek and O. Tůma et al., A History of the Czech Lands (Prague,
2009), p. 573.
48. V. V. Kusin, From Dubc ̌ek to Charter 77: A Study of ‘Normalisation’ in
Czechoslovakia, 1968–1978 (Edinburgh, 1978), p. 244.
1 CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND EASTERN EUROPE IN THE ERA OF NORMALISATION 25

49. J. Marušiak, ‘The Normalisation Regime and its Impact on Slovak

Domestic Policy after 1970’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 60, no. 10 (2008),
pp. 1805–25 (here pp. 1815 and 1822).
50. We are indebted to Celia Donert for the idea of normalisation as a process
and period.
51. ‘Vielleicht waren wir zu liberal’, interview with the Saxon Health Minister
Petra Köpping in Die Zeit, no. 54, 23 December 2020, p. 5.
52. Cited in Y. Mieczkowski, Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s
(Lexington, KY, 2005), p. 299.
53. Górny, The Nation Should Come First, pp. 44–5.
54. Kershaw, Roller-Coaster, pp. 328–9.
55. Ibid., pp. 307–12. See also E. Conze, M. Klimke and J. Varon (eds),
Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear, and the Cold War of the 1980s (Cambridge,
2017); and Bolton, Worlds of Dissent, pp. 124–5.
 CHAPTER 2

Building the Normalisation Panorama,

1968–1969

James Krapfl

In The Power of the Powerless, Václav Havel’s famous assessment of global

political culture in the 1970s, the dissident playwright emphasised the
significance of panoramas: those systems of signs embedded in the social
landscape that indicate what behaviour is considered normal. Though
Havel insisted that such panoramas are universal, he was especially con-
cerned to illustrate the concept with evidence from his own environment,
from Czechoslovakia. Havel explained how ordinary citizens, like a green-
grocer, could be influenced by the panorama and contribute to its repro-
duction, for example by placing the sign ‘Workers of the world, unite!’
among his onions and carrots. The sign’s significance, Havel observed, lay
less in its text than its subtext, which could be rendered as ‘I, the green-
grocer XY, am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient’. The ‘low
foundations of power’—individuals’ acquiescence in their own degrada-
tion—hid behind the high-sounding façade of ideology.1 This was the
essence of normalisation.

J. Krapfl (*)
McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

Switzerland AG 2022
K. McDermott, M. Stibbe (eds.), Czechoslovakia and Eastern
Europe in the Era of Normalisation, 1969–1989,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98271-3_2
28 J. KRAPFL

We know this to be its essence because we can chart how individuals

across Czechoslovakia, overwhelmingly united in opposition to the
Warsaw Pact invasion of 21 August 1968, gradually over the subsequent
fifteen months made compromise after compromise that ultimately led a
critical mass, publicly or tacitly, to deny the support they had expressed
in August for the reform programme the invasion was intended to sup-
press, and instead to profess love for the Soviet invaders and loyalty to
the quisling regime installed in April 1969. We can document the pro-
cess of ‘auto-­normalisation’ by which individuals rejected a social con-
tract they had started to co-author in favour of one dictated to them. It
is a sordid story, one that most participants might prefer to forget, yet it
is important to retrieve since the same essential process repeats itself in
other times and places. As Havel suggested, it is part of the modern
condition.
This chapter charts the process of normalisation in Czechoslovakia
from August 1968 to November 1969, by which time the panorama’s
edifice was largely constructed. I refract the story through the prism of a
single district—that of Nymburk in central Bohemia (Map 2.1). Other
than the fact that Milovice, site of the Soviet army’s main base, was located
there, the region was unexceptional, making it a good example of the type
of place where most Czechs lived.2 My window to daily life is the district’s
weekly newspaper, Nymbursko, published, like all district newspapers in
communist Czechoslovakia, jointly by the district committee (OV) of the
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ ) and the District National
Committee (ONV), an organ of local government. Despite the formal
restoration of censorship in September 1968, most district newspapers
continued to publish diverse opinions and report objectively on local
political debates, and Nymbursko was no exception.3 With some 10,000
readers, the newspaper reported regularly on a colourful spectrum of civic
activity and provided a platform for the pluralistic expression of critical
opinions.4 This state of affairs resulted in a purge of the editorial staff in
June 1969, though even afterwards evidence of heterodox views can be
found. Whatever censorship may have influenced the newspaper’s content,
moreover, it is for our purposes a lesser evil than the self-censorship that
inevitably structures memoirs, oral testimony and other ex post facto
accounts. Only evidence from the period can allow us to trace changes in
mentality and behaviour in 1968–1969 systematically and reasonably
 2 BUILDING THE NORMALISATION PANORAMA, 1968–1969 29

Map 2.1 The Nymburk District, east of Prague

reliably, though allowances must of course be made for what the

sources omit.
This chapter reconstructs the evolution of political practices and
mentalities among citizens and officials of the Nymburk district from
the immediate aftermath of the August 1968 invasion, when Alexander
Dubček resumed his position as First Secretary of the KSČ and pro-
claimed the goal of ‘normalisation’, to November 1969, by which point
the panorama of Gustav Husák’s normalisation, which Havel would
later analyse, was essentially complete. The chapter complements Kieran
Williams’ classic study of the onset of normalisation ‘from above’ by
examining the process ‘from below’.5 By investigating a setting typical
of where most greengrocers and their customers lived, we can appreci-
ate how Havel’s panorama was constructed, how participation in it was
tantamount to ‘living a lie’ and how ‘life in truth’ was necessarily
subversive.
30 J. KRAPFL

Dubcě k’s Normalisation

A Panorama of Patriotic Unity

‘Normalisation’ did not mean the same thing in the wake of the August
invasion that it came to mean a year later, and for which it remains irrepa-
rably known. When Dubček spoke of ‘normalising conditions’ in his radio
address of 27 August, he meant restoration of ‘order’ as a precondition for
the withdrawal of foreign troops and ‘further steps along our post-January
road’.6 The term’s meaning in subsequent weeks was variable. At the
beginning of September, the Nymburk ONV’s regulatory commission
concluded from a survey of the district’s most important economic enter-
prises that local life had already been normalised. At the same time, the
ONV council adopted a plan for a still-to-be-completed normalisation,
focusing on maintaining supply chains, preserving order, securing the har-
vest, assessing damage and removing graffiti that might insult Warsaw Pact
troops or their leaders. The ONV chairman urged municipal national
committees to organise public meetings to explain the plan, recommend-
ing that they stress a line of reasoning that would justify all subsequent
versions of normalisation: ‘there is no alternative’. At the time, this meant
there was no choice but to follow the ‘Moscow Protocol’, by which
Czechoslovaks would compromise on some but not all Prague Spring
reforms in exchange for foreign troops’ departure.7
It was possible to believe such normalisation could be achieved because
of the Czechoslovak population’s overpowering unity and discipline,
which found expression in support for the country’s reinstated leadership.
Above all this meant Dubček and Ludvík Svoboda, the country’s presi-
dent, who had been guarantors of the Spring and for whom workers and
students from September to November volunteered labour on otherwise
free Saturdays.8 Individuals and collectives also donated earnings to the
‘Fund of the Republic’, a grassroots initiative conceived in the tense days
of late July to help revitalise the Czechoslovak economy.9 Such gestures
partially satisfied citizens’ desire to do something constructive, while their
public nature alongside ubiquitous graffiti and window decorations sup-
porting the reformers, reinforced the sense of unity.10 It was a positive
panorama, which like its later, negative counterpart normalised a certain
pattern of social behaviour and public expression. By all accounts, partici-
pants experienced it as edifying.
 2 BUILDING THE NORMALISATION PANORAMA, 1968–1969 31

Williams emphasises that trust placed in leaders like Dubček and

Svoboda was conditional, and rhetoric from the Nymburk district pro-
vides abundant confirmation.11 ‘We trust our constitutional authorities’,
wrote the district committee of the National Front (NF), ‘that in their
coming activities they will adopt positions that will allow our life to develop
in the spirit of the path begun in January’.12 ‘We are with you’ read the
inscription on widely distributed photographs of Dubček, Svoboda,
National Assembly chairman Josef Smrkovský and Prime Minister Oldřich
Č erník; ‘be with us’.13 Reflecting its awareness of the bargain, when the
OV KSČ presidium announced that it would have to re-emphasise the
party’s constitutionally guaranteed leading role in state and society, it did
so almost apologetically, insisting that the party still intended to fulfil its
reformist April Action Programme.14 While Nymbursko adopted a more
circumspect tone, in contrast with its pre-invasion radicalism, its editors
emphasised that they saw mild self-censorship as just a temporary compro-
mise necessary to secure the reform course.15 František Klíma, the OV
KSČ ’s leading secretary, and many ordinary citizens agreed that ‘people in
other socialist states misunderstood what was happening’.16 Officials sug-
gested, and citizens hoped, that by cooperating with new restrictions ‘nor-
malisation’—meaning the departure of occupying armies—would come
quickly.17 Indeed, from September only Soviet troops remained.
In many respects, district life persisted on the reform course. Throughout
the autumn local organisations continued to adopt and implement their
own action programmes, as they had begun doing over the summer.18
New associations were founded, from the Club of Rural Youth to branches
of the new Czech Women’s League; scouts, whose organisation had been
restored in the Spring, now obtained a meeting space.19 Rehabilitations
continued of those imprisoned, dismissed from their jobs or expelled from
the party under Stalinism.20 Citizens continued articulating visions of an
ideal society. Teachers in Kounice, for example, promised President
Svoboda that they would educate children ‘for a new society, for a humane,
democratically socialist society, for a society of people with straight backs
and honest faces’. ‘We want to teach them truth’, they added, ‘to know
truth and to live in truth’.21
While the panorama bespoke united support for Czechoslovakia’s
reformist course and opposition to Soviet occupation, there were dissent-
ers. Communists who had opposed the reform movement before 21
August had largely lain low in subsequent weeks in the face of
32 J. KRAPFL

overwhelming popular resistance to the invasion, but in the autumn they

began to regroup. At the OV KSČ presidium’s behest, ‘old communists’—
members who had been active before the war—gathered on 20 September.
It was the first of several meetings of what by early 1969 would become a
distinctly conservative pressure group.22 Already in September, when the
OV KSČ promised to try to preserve ‘everything good from the post-­
January development’, it implied that not everything had been positive,
and this space for doubt grew as the year faded.23 At an aktiv for the dis-
trict’s communist functionaries in October, the Central Committee (CC)
member Jan Piller ‘opened new possibilities for expression for many peo-
ple’ when he declared that, while the party would in no case depart from
its post-January policies, there had been mistakes.24 The rise of this critical
discourse underscored divisions within the party and suggested that the
thesis of international misunderstanding was losing ground, raising the
question of what Czechoslovak citizens and their leaders might have done
differently before August. Most criticism was levelled at tactics rather than
the reform movement’s aims, which remained sacrosanct, but the door
was now open to revision.
The fiftieth anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s founding, on 28 October,
was the high-water mark of post-invasion unity. Nymburk’s district and
municipal NF and KSČ committees, together with the national commit-
tees, held a joint ceremony where Klíma reviewed the past half-century,
praising Tomáš G. Masaryk’s contributions while insisting that ‘we must
be realists’ and identifying a successor of the country that had invaded
three decades previously (West Germany) as a greater danger than the one
that had invaded two months before.25 This celebration was overshad-
owed, however, by well-attended events throughout the district that
showcased popular creativity and patriotism. In several municipalities
parades preceded the planting of Trees of the Republic, poetry recitals,
speeches and dances.26 Surviving Legionaries were honoured in Pečky and
Sány.27 Tears glistened in listeners’ eyes at a concert in Ratenice, where
photographs of Dubček and Svoboda were displayed.28 Donations poured
into the Fund of the Republic.29 The anniversary provided an opportunity
for citizens to express wishes for the republic’s next fifty years, such as
‘economic prosperity, truth and freedom’; ‘genuine independence’; and
‘socialism that is not just a dream’.30 No opponent dared challenge this
enthusiastic mobilisation of symbols. The 51st anniversary of the Great
October Socialist Revolution, which inaugurated the ‘Month of
Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship’ on 7 November, paled in comparison.31
 2 BUILDING THE NORMALISATION PANORAMA, 1968–1969 33

Divisions Become Clear

The divisions that began to appear in September became alarmingly appar-
ent following a plenary meeting of the CC KSČ from 14 to 17 November.
The plenum adopted a resolution that, while promising to continue on
the reform path, officially declared that not all post-January developments
had been positive.32 This was a victory for Central Committee conserva-
tives, succoured by none other than Leonid Brezhnev, who personally
dictated the resolution’s allowable parameters.33 The document prioritised
restoration of party unity and the reassertion of the party’s leading role,
alongside friendship with the USSR and other socialist countries.
̌
Vasil Bilak’s visit to Pečky on 29 November was a revelation of divisive-
ness. The party committee in the town’s biggest factory invited the arch-­
conservative CC secretary to report on the November plenum, and
roughly 400 party members welcomed him with tumultuous applause.
̌ acknowledged that ‘January’ had had to happen because of preced-
Bilak
ing ‘deformations’, but he listed failure after failure in the way the process
had unfolded. He declared it necessary to unite ‘healthy forces’ in the
party but insisted this did not mean a return to pre-January policies. The
assembled communists gave him a standing ovation.34 This was the first
serious expression of local opposition to the reform programme, and con-
servatives grew in confidence as a result. It was in this climate of growing
tension that the OV KSČ presidium discussed the November CC plenum
on 4 December. The presidium decided to call a flurry of consultations,
including a meeting of party groupings within the district committees of
other NF members, a gathering of ‘old communists’, precinct aktivy and
an ideological conference.35
Indicative of the concerted effort that Central Committee conserva-
tives were making to reorient public opinion, the CC secretary Jozef
Lenárt visited Nymburk on 5 December. He expounded on the November
resolution, appealed for party unity and deflected attention from politics
to the economy.36 Previously that autumn, acute economic difficulties had
been attributed to the invasion and its aftermath. Now, Lenárt suggested
that the economy was ailing because of Spring reforms, and his visit her-
alded a rhetorical shift towards quotidian concerns. Normalisation strate-
gies in September had regularly emphasised the need for ‘calm and order’
(klid a pořádek); now one increasingly heard of the need for ‘peace to
work’ (klid k práci). When the trope first entered public discourse in
December 1968, some still used it to mean ‘peace to work without fears
34 J. KRAPFL

for January’, but it introduced the idea of exchange: what would people
be willing to sacrifice for peace?37
Alongside these developments, the Soviet Union became a more sig-
nificant local actor. From the shelter of their bases, Soviet agents and
Czechoslovak sympathisers began disseminating a Czech-language bulle-
tin, Zprávy (‘News’), which in violation of Czechoslovak law spread disin-
formation and rumours discrediting reformist politicians. Citizens
complained at public meetings, in letters to functionaries and on the pages
of Nymbursko, but the Soviets would let nothing be done.38 A delegation
from Nymburk’s sister district—Mytishchi in the Moscow region—visited
on 12 December to honour the 25th anniversary of the Czechoslovak-­
Soviet Friendship Treaty.39 The district branch of the Czechoslovak-Soviet
Friendship League (SČ SP), which had emerged from hibernation to col-
laborate with the OV KSČ , OV NF and Soviet army for the October
Revolution commemorations, became more active as well.40
Though the panorama of unity was shaken by these developments, it
was not yet shattered. Donations kept flowing to the Fund of the Republic,
while exhibits and gestures of public service in honour of the fiftieth anni-
versary continued until the end of 1968.41 Special fanfare greeted the
founding of local branches of the new Association of Collective Farmers
(SDR), with its auxiliary association for previously marginalised indepen-
dent farmers.42 ‘January’ remained a sacred referent, which could be
invoked to legitimise accomplished or potential courses of action, whereas
the alternative referent that oppositionists offered—socialism as built
between 1948 and 1968—evidently did not hold the same appeal (though
no one argued against it either).43

Tense Desultoriness
The first months of 1969 fostered feelings of aimlessness. Despite Dubček’s
public assurances on 4 January that Smrkovský’s impending demotion
from National Assembly chairman to vice-chairman of the new Federal
Assembly did not signal a departure from the reformist course, that is how
conservatives in fact interpreted this consequence of Czechoslovakia’s 1
January federalisation.44 In Nymburk, the OV KSČ formed a commission
to evaluate the district’s post-January development, and plenary discus-
sion of its report on 27–28 January ‘provided many occasions for an open
exchange of opinions’. In over forty interventions from the floor, commit-
tee members expressed opposing views on relations with the USSR, on
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12Jan55; LP4928.
MOMENT OF DECISION. SEE All Star Theatre, no. 184.
MOMENT OF GLORY. Screen Associates, 1952. 3 reels, sd., b&w,
16mm. © Screen Associates, Inc.; 2Sep52; LP1906.
MOMENT OF TRIUMPH. SEE Schlitz Playhouse of Stars.
MOMENT OF VENGEANCE. SEE Schlitz Playhouse of Stars.
MOMENTS IN MUSIC. Loew’s, 1950. Produced in cooperation
with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 10 min.,
sd., b&w, 35mm. © Loew’s Inc.; 8Jun50 (in notice: 1949);
LP196.
MOMENTUM. SEE Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
MONACO. SEE The Count of Monte Cristo.
MONARCH BUTTERFLY STORY. William Andrew Anderson in
affiliation with Andre Film Features. Released by Encyclopaedia
Britannica Films, 1950. 11 min., sd., color, 16mm. © William
Andrew Anderson; 8Feb51 (in notice: 1950); MP1348.
MONASTERIO SETS A TRAP. SEE Zorro, no. 7.
MONEY FROM HOME. Paramount Pictures Corp. 100 min., sd.,
color, 35mm. A three-dimensional film. Technicolor. Based on
the story of the same title by Damon Runyon. © Hal B. Wallis,
Joseph H. Hazen; 1Feb54 (in notice: 1953); LP3957.
THE MONEY GUN. SEE The Rifleman, no. 6265.
MONEY HAS WINGS. SEE Sky King, no. 50.
MONEY IN THE BANK. Ace Pictures, Inc., 1950. 2 reels, sd., b&w,
16mm. © General Television Enterprises, Inc.; 15Apr50 (in
notice: 1949); LP68.
MONEY ISN’T EVERYTHING. SEE

El Dinero No Es la Vida.
Here Comes Donald.

THE MONEY MAN. SEE Buckskin.

MONEY ON MY BACK. Imperial Pictures. Released by United
Artists Corp. 94 min., sd., b&w, 35mm. © Imperial Pictures, Inc.;
14May57; LP8687.
MONEY TALKS. Lindsley Parsons Productions, 1952. 3 reels, sd.,
b&w, 16mm. © Lindsley Parsons Productions, Inc.; 24Jun52;
LP1809.
MONEY TO BURN. SEE

Adventures of Superman.
Man Against Crime, Oct. 18, 1953.

MONEY TRUCKS. TFC-86-1:20. Chevrolet Motor Division. Made

by Campbell-Ewald Co. 80 sec. Appl. author: Campbell-Ewald
Co., employer for hire of Frederick L. Lounsberry, author of
script. © Campbell-Ewald Co.; 19Aug57; MU6387.
MONEY, WOMEN AND GUNS. Universal Pictures Co. Released by
Universal International. 9 reels, sd., Eastman color, 35mm.
CinemaScope. © Universal Pictures Co., Inc.; 19Oct58; LP13945.
THE MONKEY AND THE ORGAN GRINDER. Coronet
Instructional Films. 11 min., sd., b&w, 16mm. © Coronet
Instructional Films, a division of Esquire, Inc.; 25Apr55;
MP6023.
MONKEY BUSINESS. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp., 1952. 97
min., sd., b&w, 35mm. © Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp.;
5Sep52; LP2142.
MONKEY ISLAND. Universal International, 1951. 1 reel, sd., b&w,
35mm. (Variety View Series, no. 196) © Universal Pictures Co.,
Inc.; 25Sep51; MP1655.
THE MONKEY MYSTERY. SEE Adventures of Superman.
MONKEY SHINES. Universal Pictures Co. 1 reel, sd., b&w, 35mm.
(Variety View) A Universal International picture. © Universal
Pictures Co., Inc.; 4Aug55; MP6377.
THE MONKEY WHO WOULD BE KING. Encyclopaedia
Britannica Films. 11 min., sd., color, 16mm. © Encyclopaedia
Britannica Films, Inc.; 22May57; MP8390.
MONKEYS ARE THE CRAZIEST. Universal Pictures Co. 1 reel, sd.,
b&w, 35mm. (Variety View) A Universal International picture. ©
Universal Pictures Co., Inc.; 22Dec56; LP7937.
THE MONKEY’S UNCLE. SEE Buckskin.
THE MONOLITH MONSTERS. Universal Pictures Co. 77 min., sd.,
b&w, 35mm. A Universal International picture. © Universal
Pictures Co., Inc.; 6Oct57; LP9129.
THE MONONGAHELA, AMERICA’S BUSIEST RIVER. March of
Time, 1952. 29 min., sd., b&w, 16mm. © Time, Inc.; 26Nov52;
MP3350.
MONOPOLY. SEE Gunsmoke.
MONSIEUR FRANCOIS. SEE The Adventures of Jim Bowie, no.
16.
MONSOON. F. G. Films, London, and Film Group, Hollywood.
Released in the U. S. by United Artists Corp., 1953. 79 min., sd.,
color, 35mm. Technicolor. Based on the play Romeo et Jeanette,
by Jean Anouilh. © F. G. (Films) Ltd., and the Film Group, Inc.;
30Jan53 (in notice: 1952); LP2518.
THE MONSTER. SEE

Face of Fire.
Lassie.
So This Is Hollywood.
MONSTER FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR. Palo Alto Productions.
Released by Lippert Pictures. 64 min., sd., b&w, 35mm. © Palo
Alto Productions, Inc.; 7Sep54; LP3955.
THE MONSTER OF LOCH MACGORA. SEE Soldiers of Fortune.
MONSTER ON THE CAMPUS. Universal Pictures Co. Released by
Universal International. 76 min., sd., b&w, 35mm. © Universal
Pictures Co., Inc.; 25Oct58; LP13325.
THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD. Gramercy
Pictures. Released by United Artists Corp. 83 min., sd., b&w,
35mm. Based on a story by David Duncan. © Gramercy Pictures,
Inc.; 11Jun57; LP8606.
THE MONSTER TREND. SEE The George Burns Show, no. 7.
MONSTERS OF THE DEEP. SEE Disneyland. 1954-1955, no. 13.
EL MONSTRUO DE LA SOMBRA. Producciones Cub-Mex,
Mexico. Released by Clasa-Mohme; in the U. S. by Importadora.
92 min., sd., b&w, 35mm. Based on the original work by Felix B.
Caignet. Appl. author: Producciones Delmar, S.A. ©
Importadora, Inc.; 1Jul56 (in notice: 1955); LP10690.
MONTANA. Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc., 1950. 76 min., sd.,
color, 35mm. Based on a story by Ernest Haycox. © Warner
Bros. Pictures, Inc.; 28Jan50 (in notice: 1949); LP2928.
MONTANA AND THE SKY. Montana Aeronautics Commission,
1952. Produced by Film Originals. 17 min., sd., b&w, 16mm. ©
George Oliver Smith and Helen Stanfield Smith, d.b.a. Film
Originals; 7Apr52; MP2259.
MONTANA BELLE. RKO Radio Pictures, 1951. 81 min., sd., color,
35mm. © RKO Radio Pictures, Inc.; 31Dec51; LP1763.
THE MONTANA DATE. SEE The Eve Arden Show.
MONTANA DESPERADO. Monogram Pictures Corp., 1951. 51
min., sd., b&w, 35mm. © Monogram Pictures Corp.; 24Jun51;
LP1000.
MONTANA INCIDENT. Monogram Pictures Corp., 1952. 54 min.,
sd., b&w, 35mm. © Monogram Pictures Corp.; 17Aug52; LP1869.
MONTANA SNOW. Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. Made by
Campbell-Ewald Co. 95 sec. Appl. author: Campbell-Ewald Co.,
employer for hire of M. M. Steffee, author of script. © Campbell-
Ewald Co.; 13Dec57; MU6423.
MONTANA TERRITORY. Columbia Pictures Corp., 1952. 64 min.,
sd., color, 35mm. © Columbia Pictures Corp.; 15May52; LP1702.
MONTE CARLO. SEE Oh Susanna.
MONTE CARLO NITE. Molter Advertising Co. 14 min., sd., b&w,
35mm. Appl. states prev. reg. as Monte Carlo. NM: revision. ©
Molter Advertising Co., Carl Molter, owner; 15Oct59; MP9804.
MONTE CARLO PROJECT. Chevrolet Motor Division. Made by
Campbell-Ewald Co. 90 sec. Revised edition. Appl. author: John
H. Coleman. © Campbell-Ewald Co.; 14Dec55; MU5995.
MONTE CARLO PROJECT. Chevrolet Motor Division. Made by
Campbell-Ewald Co. 3 motion pictures (15 sec., 1 min., 90 sec.)
Appl. author: Robert R. Sawyer. © Campbell-Ewald Co.;
14Dec55; MU5992-5994.
THE MONTE CARLO STORY. Tan Films, Zug, Switz. Released in
the U. S. by United Artists Corp. 99 min., sd., color, 35mm. A
Titanus production. Technirama & Technicolor. Adapted from an
original story by Marcello Girosi & Dino Risi. © Tan Films, S. A.;
29Mar57 (in notice: 1956); LP9146.
MONTEZUMA’S CAVE. SEE 26 Men.
THE MONTH. SEE The Calendar, no. 3.
MONTICELLO HERE WE COME. Cinema Service Corp. © 1950.
77 min., sd., b&w, 35mm. © Cinema Service Corp.; 13Oct50;
LU2977.
THE MONTY BRITTON STORY. SEE Wagon Train.
THE MOODS. Attwood Productions. Released by United Artists,
1950. 1 reel, sd., b&w, 35mm. (Song of America Series) ©
Attwood Productions, Inc.; 15Sep50 (in notice: 1949); LP368.
THE MOON. International Screen Organization, 1953. 11 min., sd.,
b&w, 16mm. (Astronomy Films, no. 2) © Mabel Sibley; 20Apr53;
 MP3472.
MOON. SEE

Gunsmoke.
Telescopic Observation. Vol. 1: The Moon.

THE MOON AND HOW IT AFFECTS US. Coronet Instructional

Films. 11 min., sd., b&w, 16mm. © Coronet Instructional Films, a
division of Esquire, Inc.; 3Jul58; MP9413.
THE MOON IS BLUE. Holmby Productions. Released by United
Artists Corp. 10 reels, sd., b&w, 35mm. Based on the play of the
same title by F. Hugh Herbert. © Holmby Productions, Inc.;
22Jun53; LP2782.
THE MOON MAN. SEE I’m the Law, no. 15.
MOONBEAM. SEE Rayito de Luna.
MOONFLEET. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Released by Loew’s. 87
min., sd., color, 35mm. CinemaScope. Eastman color. Based on
the novel by J. Meade Falkner. © Loew’s Incorporated; 9May55;
LP4774.
MOONLIGHT MELODIES. (Sing and Be Happy Series) Universal
Pictures Co., Inc., 1949. 10 min., sd., b&w, 35mm. © Universal
Pictures Co., Inc.; 31Jan49; MP4991.
MOONLIGHT SCHOOL. E. I. du Pont de Nemours. Made by Vibar
Productions. 3 reels, sd., b&w, 16mm. (The Cavalcade of
America) Appl. author: Vibar Prods., Inc., employer for hire. ©
E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.; 18May54; MP5053.
MOONLIGHT WITNESS. E. I. du Pont de Nemours. Made by
Flying A Productions. 3 reels, sd., b&w, 16mm. (The Cavalcade of
America) © E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Co.; 2Nov54;
MP5398.
THE MOONLIGHTER. J. B. Productions. Released by Warner
Bros. Pictures. 77 min., sd., b&w, 35mm. A three-dimensional
film. Natural Vision. © J. B. Productions, Inc.; 18Sep53; LP2911.
MOONSHINE IN MANHATTAN. SEE The D. A.’s Man.
MOORE VS. JOHNSTON. SEE Famous Fights, no. 26.
THE MOOR’S REVENGE. SEE Have Gun—Will Travel.
MOOSE COUNTRY. Universal Pictures Co. 1 reel, sd., color,
35mm. (Universal International Color Parade) © Universal
Pictures Co., Inc.; 21Mar55; MP5753.
MOOSE ON THE LOOSE. SEE Heckle and Jeckle the Talking
Magpies in Moose on the Loose.
MOOTI, CHILD OF NEW INDIA. Atlantis Productions. 15 min.,
sd., color, 16mm. © Atlantis Productions, Inc.; 1Jun55; MP8686.
MORE ABOUT THE SILLY SYMPHONIES. SEE Disneyland. 1956-
1957, no. 32.
MORE BEEF AT LESS COST. Chas. Pfizer & Co. Made by Star
Informational Films. 10 min., sd., color, 16mm. Eastman color.
© Chas. Pfizer & Co., Inc.; 11Sep56; MP8209.
MORE DATES FOR KAY. Coronet, 1952. 11 min., sd., b&w, 16mm.
© David A. Smart; 10Apr52; MP2303.
MORE DEADLY. SEE M-Squad.
MORE POWER TO YOU. Continental Motors Corp. Made by
Norman Wright Productions. 33 min., sd., color, 16mm.
Kodachrome. © Continental Motors Corp.; 15Apr54; MP5351.
MORE PROFITS WITH TRILAFON. Schering Corp. 15 min., sd.,
color, 16mm. © Schering Corp.; 8Oct59; MU6797.
MORE THAN KIN. SEE

Celebrity Playhouse, no. 23.

Restless Gun.

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE. CBS Radio, a division of

Columbia Broadcasting System, 1952. Produced by United
Productions of America. 2 reels, sd., color, 16mm. © United
Productions of America; 28May52; MP2487.
MORE TO ENJOY. Tractor & Implement Division. Made by Jam
Handy Organization. 33 ft., color, 16mm. Eastman color. ©
 Tractor & Implement Division, Ford Motor Co.; 14Nov55;
MU5981.
THE MORGAN MURDER CASE. SEE The Line-Up, no. 7.
MORIR PARA VIVIR. Producciones Cub-Mex, Mexico. Released
by Clasa-Mohme; in the U. S. by Importadora. 78 min., sd., b&w,
35mm. Appl. author: Producciones Delmar, S.A. © Importadora,
Inc.; 15Jan56 (in notice: 1954); LP11062.
THE MORMONS’ GRINDSTONE. SEE Death Valley Days, no. 353.
MORNING CALL. Astral Motion Pictures, Eng. Released in the U.
S. by Republic Pictures Corp. 75 min., sd., b&w, 35mm. ©
Winwell Productions, Ltd.; 31Dec57; LP10341.
MORNING DEPARTURE. SEE Operation Disaster.
MORNING GLORIA. SEE Here Comes Donald.
MORNING LIGHT. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp. 1 reel, sd.,
b&w, 35mm. (Mel Allen’s Sport Show) © Twentieth Century-Fox
Film Corp.; 6Oct53; MP4028.
MOROCCAN OUTPOST. SEE The March of Time, vol. 17, no. 4.
MOROCCO MARCHES ON. Telenews Productions. Released by
McGraw-Hill Book Co. 13 min., sd., b&w, 16mm. © Robert W.
Schofield & Associates, Inc.; 4Jun56; MP7383.
MOROCCO TODAY. Telenews Productions. Released by McGraw-
Hill Book Co. 27 min., sd., b&w, 16mm. © Robert W. Schofield &
Associates, Inc.; 4Jun56; MP7382.
MORRIS, THE MIDGET MOOSE. Walt Disney Productions.
Distributed by RKO Radio Pictures, 1950. 8 min., sd., color,
35mm. © Walt Disney Productions; 29Mar50; LP601.
THE MORRISTOWN STORY. SEE Hawkeye and the Last of the
Mohicans.
MORTON BUYS IRON DEER: GRACIE THINKS GEORGE
NEEDS GLASSES. SEE The George Burns and Gracie Allen
Show, no. 53.
MORTONS EXCHANGE HOUSES WITH THE GIBSONS FROM
NEW YORK. SEE The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, no.
92.
THE MOSCONI STORY. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Released by
Loew’s, 1953. 10 min., sd., b&w, 35mm. (Pete Smith Specialty) ©
Loew’s Incorporated; 18Feb53 (in notice: 1952); LP2370.
THE MOSLEMS AND THE WEST—CRISIS IN IRAN. SEE The
March of Time, vol. 17, no. 5.
THE MOSLEMS AND THE WEST—MOROCCAN OUTPOST. SEE
The March of Time, vol. 17, no. 4.
MOSS ROSE. SEE Big Town, no. 18.
THE MOSSBACH COLLECTION. SEE Lilli Palmer Presents the
Quality Theatre.
THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME. SEE Run for the Sun.
THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN ALIVE. SEE Tales of Wells Fargo.
THE MOST GLAMOROUS PROFESSOR. SEE Meet Mr. McNutley.
THE MOST IMPORTANT CONNECTION. Jam Handy
Organization, Inc., for the Chevrolet Division, General Motors
Corp. © 1950. 10 min., sd., b&w, 35mm. © The Jam Handy
Organization, Inc.; title & descr., 18May50; 9 prints, 22May50;
MU5142.
MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED. Chevrolet Motor Division. Made by
Jam Handy Organization. 15 min., b&w, 35mm. © Chevrolet
Motor Division of General Motors Corp.; 6May54; MU5709.
THE MOTH AND THE FLAME. SEE Panic, no. 56-17.
THE MOTHER. SEE Lassie.
MOTHER CAT AND HER BABY SKUNKS. Encyclopaedia
Britannica Films. 11 min., sd., color, 16mm. © Encyclopaedia
Britannica Films, Inc.; 26May58; MP8939.
THE MOTHER CHURCH IN ACTION. Christian Science Board of
Directors of the Mother Church. 105 min., color, 35mm. ©
 Christian Science Board of Directors of the Mother Church, First
Church of Christ, Scientist, Boston, Mass.; 5Mar59; MU6662.
MOTHER DEER AND HER TWINS. Encyclopaedia Britannica
Films. 10 min., sd., color, 16mm. © Encyclopaedia Britannica
Films, Inc.; 17Feb59; MP9627.
MOTHER DIDN’T TELL ME. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp.,
1950. 88 min., sd., b&w, 35mm. Based on Mary Bard’s book,
“The Doctor Wears Three Faces.” © Twentieth Century-Fox Film
Corp.; 21Feb50; LP70.
MOTHER DODD COMES TO TOWN. SEE So This Is Hollywood.
MOTHER DUCK’S SURPRISE. Released by Young America Films,
1950. 1 reel, sd., b&w, 16mm. © Paul Burnford; 6Sep50; MP471.
MOTHER GOES TO SCHOOL. SEE Father Knows Best, no. 106.
MOTHER GOOSE RHYMES: BACKGROUND FOR READING
AND EXPRESSION. Coronet Instructional Films. 11 min., sd.,
b&w, 16mm. © Coronet Instructional Films, a division of
Esquire, Inc.; 1Dec57; MP8766.
MOTHER GOOSE’S BIRTHDAY PARTY. SEE Mighty Mouse in
Mother Goose’s Birthday Party.
MOTHER HEN’S FAMILY: THE WONDER OF BIRTH. Coronet
Instructional Films. 11 min., sd., b&w, 16mm. © John Smart;
5Nov53; MP4099.
MOTHER LOVE: THE BABY’S GREATEST NEED. Rene A. Spitz,
1951. 20 min., si., b&w, 16mm. Produced by the Psychoanalytic
Researchproject on problems of infancy. © Rene A. Spitz, M. D.;
10Dec51; MP2315.
MOTHER O’BRIEN. SEE Crossroads.
MOTHER O’HARA’S MARRIAGE. SEE The Adventures of Rin-
Tin-Tin, no. 118.
MOTHER RABBIT’S FAMILY. Encyclopaedia Britannica Films. 11
min., sd., b&w, 16mm. With film guide. © Encyclopaedia
Britannica Films, Inc.; 16Jan57; MP8141.
MOTHER TAKES A HOLIDAY. Whirlpool Corp. [1953] Produced
by Jam Handy Corp. 4 reels, color, 16mm. © The Jam Handy
Organization, Inc.; 19Jan53; MU5504.
MOTHER WAS A BOOKMAKER. Screen Associates, 1952. 3 reels,
sd., b&w, 16mm. (Electric Theatre) A Screen Televideo release. ©
Screen Associates, Inc.; 5Jun52; LP1781.
MOTHER WAS A CHAMP. Paramount Pictures Corp. 1 reel, sd.,
b&w, 35mm. (Grantland Rice Sportlight) © Paramount Pictures
Corp.; 6Nov53; MP5083.
THE MOTHERS. SEE Mr. Adams and Eve.
MOTHER’S DAY. SEE Big Town, no. 52.
MOTIVATING THE CLASS. Audio Productions for McGraw-Hill
Book Co., 1951. 19 min., sd., b&w, 16mm. (Education Psychology
Series, no. 2) © McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc.; 12Jan51 (in notice:
1950); MP1304.
THE MOTIVE. SEE Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
MOTIVE FOR MURDER. SEE Calling Scotland Yard. The Ripper
Strikes.
THE MOTIVE GOES ROUND AND ROUND. Revue Productions. 3
reels, sd., b&w, 16mm. © Revue Productions, Inc.; 31Dec53;
LP3442.
MOTOR BOAT. Pabst Brewing Co. Made by Warwick & Legler. 50
sec., sd., b&w, 16mm. © Pabst Brewing Co.; 2Jun54; MP4880.
MOTOR MANIA. Walt Disney Productions. Distributed by RKO
Radio Pictures, 1950. 1 reel, sd., color, 35mm. (Goofy Cartoon) ©
Walt Disney Productions; 28Feb50; LP235.
MOTOR PATROL. Lippert Productions, Inc., 1950. 66 min., sd.,
b&w, 35mm. © Lippert Productions, Inc.; 15Jun50; LP160.
MOTOR SCOOTERS. SEE Father Knows Best, no. 3.
THE MOTORCYCLE CASE. SEE The Line-Up.
MOTORCYCLE GANG. Golden State Productions. Released by
American International Pictures. 78 min., sd., b&w, 35mm. ©
 Golden State Productions; 10Oct57; LP11250.
MOTORS ON PARADE. Jam Handy Organization for Delco
Products, General Motors Corp. © 1950. 26 min., sd., b&w,
35mm. © The Jam Handy Organization, Inc.; 23Oct50; MU5168.
MOULIN ROUGE. Romulus Films, London. Released in the U. S.
by United Artists Corp. 118 min., sd., color, 35mm. Technicolor.
Based on the novel of the same title by Pierre La Mure. © Moulin
Productions, Inc.; 10Feb53 (in notice: 1952); LP3785.
MOUNT BEACON. SEE Poem: Mount Beacon.
MOUNT RAINIER. Elmer Rowe Nelson. Released by Instructional
Films, 1952. 1 reel, sd., color, 16mm. © Elmer Rowe Nelson (in
notice: Elmer Rowe Nelson Productions); 29Jul52; MP3035.
MOUNT VERNON IN VIRGINIA. Mount Vernon Ladies’
Association of the Union. Made by Affiliated Film Producers.
Released by McGraw-Hill Book Co. 22 min., sd., b&w, 16mm. ©
Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union; 1Feb51 (in
notice: 1950); MP4326.
THE MOUNTAIN. Paramount Pictures Corp. 105 min., sd., color,
35mm. VistaVision. Technicolor. Based on the novel by Henri
Troyat. © Paramount Pictures Corp.; 1Oct56; LP7207.
THE MOUNTAIN ANGEL. SEE Crossroads.
MOUNTAIN BAR TELEVISION COMMERCIAL MB1-54. Brown &
Haley. Made by Five Star Productions. 1 reel, sd., b&w, 16mm.
Appl. author: Honig-Cooper Co. © Brown & Haley; 2Sep54;
MU5771.
MOUNTAIN BAR TELEVISION COMMERCIAL MB2-54. Brown &
Haley. Made by Five Star Productions. 1 reel, sd., b&w, 16mm.
Appl. author: Honig-Cooper Co. © Brown & Haley; 2Sep54;
MU5769.
MOUNTAIN BAR TELEVISION COMMERCIAL MB3-54. Brown &
Haley. Made by Five Star Productions. 1 reel, sd., b&w, 16mm.
Appl. author: Honig-Cooper Co. © Brown & Haley; 2Sep54;
MU5770.
MOUNTAIN BAR TELEVISION COMMERCIAL NO. MB4-54.
Brown & Haley. Made by Five Star Productions. 1 reel, sd., b&w,
16mm. Appl. author: Honig-Cooper Co. © Brown & Haley;
26Aug54; MU5765.
MOUNTAIN BAR TELEVISION COMMERCIAL NO. MB5-54.
Brown & Haley. Made by Five Star Productions. 1 reel, sd., b&w,
16mm. Appl. author: Honig-Cooper Co. © Brown & Haley;
26Aug54; MU5766.
MOUNTAIN BAR TELEVISION COMMERCIAL NO. MB6-54.
Brown & Haley. Made by Five Star Productions. 1 reel, sd., b&w,
16mm. Appl. author: Honig-Cooper Co. © Brown & Haley;
26Aug54; MU5767.
MOUNTAIN CINDERELLA. SEE Bobo the Hobo and his Traveling
Troupe in Mountain Cinderella.
MOUNTAIN CLIMBER. Interstate Bakeries Corp. Made by Walter
Lantz Productions. 20 sec., sd., b&w, 16mm. © Walter Lantz
Productions, Inc.; 1Nov57; LP11947.
MOUNTAIN CLIMBERS. SEE Happy Pause Frolics.
MOUNTAIN FARMERS: SWITZERLAND. United World Films,
1949. Produced by Louis de Rochemont Associates. 20 min., sd.,
b&w, 16mm. (The Earth and Its Peoples) © United World Films,
Inc.; 1Jan49; MP2505.
MOUNTAIN FLIGHT. SEE Whirlybirds, no. 6.
MOUNTAIN MAN. E. I. du Pont de Nemours. Made by S. H. A. Co.
3 reels, sd., b&w, 16mm. (The Cavalcade of America) © E. I. du
Pont de Nemours and Co.; 28Sep54; MP5238.
THE MOUNTAIN MOVERS. National Film Board of Canada,
Ottawa. Released in the U. S. by RKO-Pathe. 10 min., sd., b&w,
35mm. (Screenliner) © RKO-Pathe, Inc.; 19Feb53; MP3999.
THE MOUNTAIN OF FIRE. SEE Jet Jackson, The Flying
Commando, no. 34.
MOUNTAIN STREAM. Irving Louis Pressman. Released by
Tabletopper Productions. 9 min., sd., color, 16mm. Eastman
color. © Irving Louis Pressman; 21Nov56; MP7925.
MOUNTAIN WATERS. Martin Moyer Productions. 16 min., sd.,
Kodachrome, 16mm. © Martin Moyer Productions (Martin
Moyer); 7Jul58; MU6487.
MOUNTAINS ARE MY KINGDOM. SEE Sierra.
THE MOUNTAINS THAT MOVED. SEE Telephone Time.
MOUNTIES AT BAY. SEE Gunfighters of the Northwest, no. 6.
MOUSE AND GARDEN. SEE Little Roquefort in Mouse and
Garden.
THE MOUSE AND THE LION. Universal Pictures Co. 6 min., sd.,
color, 35mm. (Walter Lantz Foolish Fable Cartune) A Universal
International picture. Technicolor. © Universal International;
26Jun53; MP3790.
A MOUSE DIVIDED. Warner Bros. Cartoons, 1953. 7 min., sd.,
color, 35mm. (Merrie Melodies Cartoon) © The Vitaphone Corp.;
29Jan53 (in notice: 1951); MP3181.
A MOUSE DIVIDED. Warner Bros. Cartoons. 7 min., sd., color,
35mm. (Merrie Melodies Cartoon) Technicolor. © Vitaphone
Corp.; 15Nov51; MP5310.
MOUSE FOR SALE. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Released by Loew’s. 7
min., sd., color, 35mm. (Tom and Jerry Cartoon) Technicolor. ©
Loew’s Incorporated; 21Apr55 (in notice: 1953); LP4730.
MOUSE MEETS BIRD. SEE Little Roquefort in Mouse Meets Bird.
MOUSE MENACE. SEE Little Roquefort in Mouse Menace.
MOUSE-TAKEN IDENTITY. Warner Bros. Pictures. 7 min., sd.,
Technicolor, 35mm. (Merrie Melodies; Sylvester-Hippety
Hopper) © Vitaphone Corp.; 16Nov57; MP9292.
THE MOUSE THAT ROARED. Open Road Films, London.
Released in the U. S. by Columbia Pictures Corp. 85 min., sd.,
Eastman color by Pathe, 35mm. From the novel by Leonard
Wibberley. © Open Road Films, Ltd.; 28Jul59; LP15054.
MOUSE TRAPEZE. Paramount Pictures Corp. 1 reel, sd., color,
35mm. (Herman and Katnip Cartoon) © Paramount Pictures
Corp.; 5Aug55; LP5333.
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