Abstracts

Memory of Everyday Collaboration with the Communist Regimes (abstracts)

 

- Florin Abraham (Bucharest, National School for Political Studies and Public Administration, Romanian Academy)

To Collaborate and to Punish. Democracy and Transitional Justice in Romania

 

In all ex-communist states the issue of collaboration by citizens with secret services proved to be very sensitive, as it involves the moral identity of individuals and, step by step, that of larger communities. The resolution of the issue of collaboration in countries such as the Czech Republic, Poland, and Romania was based on the German model of BStU. In Romania, there were significant transformations following decisions of the Constitutional Court, which altered the role of CNSAS (2008, 2011).

In this study, we set to examine three main topics. The first of these is an institutional analysis of CNSAS, which is divided into several sub-topics: i) institutional transformations in 1999-2013 from the perspective of democratization through transitional justice; ii) the definitions of varying types of “collaboration” with the Securitate, according to categories of actors and following legislative changes; iii) the impact of the Constitutional Court decisions upon CNSAS’ assessment [?]of evidence concerning the statute [status?] of Securitate “collaborator”.

The second topic involves an analysis of judicial practice with the intention of establishing the criteria on which the status of “Securitate political police collaborator” is based. For a long time Romanian courts did not have a unified, consistent practice in the assessment of people accused of collaboration with the Securitate. The analysis of some cases casts light on legal difficulties related to judging the communist past.

The third main topic refers to the effects of collaboration with the Securitate in public opinion. To this end, some cases will be analyzed in order to emphasize the plural and contradictory character of public perceptions concerning collaboration.  

 

- Barbara Klich-Kluczewska (Krakow, Jagiellonian University)

In Black and With? The Discourse on Polish Post-War Society by the Institute of Polish Remembrance

 

The goal of the paper is to further deeper reflection on the memory of the condition of post-war Polish society in terms of research and publications by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). The Institute was set up in 2000. Over the course of the past twelve years, in addition to research on the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Poland, it has promoted primarily analyses of communist security apparatus and different forms of resistance against communist authorities. The scholarly findings are constantly revised, especially during the public (mainly political) debates, by the opponents of so- called “lustration”.

The article focus mainly on the narrative strategies, e.g. rhetorical practices in the wider context of the general goal of the IPN, which is described as the preservation of memory of the losses which were suffered by the Polish Nation as a result of World War II and the post-war period, patriotic traditions of fighting against occupants, and the efforts of citizens to fight. I address a key question regarding the coherence of the constructed vision of society and its place on the larger map of Polish historical research on the communist era.

 

- Tamara Pavasovic Trost (University of Graz)

Reopening Secrets from the Communist Past: Transformations of Narratives of Collaboration in Post-Yugoslav Countries

 

This paper focuses on the question of how the memory of commemoration with the Communist regime has evolved in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. While the nature of the Communist regime in Yugoslavia – and subsequently both collaboration and resistance – sharply differs from that of the Soviet bloc, memories of Communist crimes and collaboration have similarly undergone a transformation over the past two decades. Following the collapse of the Communist regime and Yugoslavia’s disintegration in the 1990s, questions of Communist crimes and the collaboration of everyday people were publicly reopened by historians, intellectuals, and lay people. After a decade of ethno-nationalistic revisionism, most of the countries of the former Yugoslavia have reverted to a ‘new’ official version of history post-2000. The degree to which they condemn or accept Communist crimes and everyday people’s complicity with these crimes, however, varies widely. The aim of this paper is to methodically explore how the ‘official’ version of history (as documented in government-approved history textbooks) in relation to collaboration has changed over the past 20 years, focusing on its current interpretation in history textbooks in five of the post-Yugoslav states: Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia. I undertake rigorous content analysis of history textbooks from the Communist period, the ‘transition period’ of the 1990s, and current history textbooks, demonstrating the changes in this narrative both over time and across space.

 

- Martin Kovanič (Bratislava, Comenius University)

Institutes of Memory in the Slovak and Czech Republics –What Kind of Memory?

 

The interpretation of historical events affects the ways in which people remember these events and how individuals who were not alive at the time perceive them. Institutes of memory, which are one of the specific post-communist mechanisms of transitional justice, serve the role of detection and remembrance of crimes of the non-democratic regimes that existed in this area in the 20th century. An interesting situation developed in Czechoslovakia, which first adopted a rather strict transitional justice approach, but after the federation split, the two successor states went separate ways, despite the fact that they shared a common communist past. On the one hand, the Czech Republic continued to deal with the non-democratic past, while Slovakia adopted the politics of silence. The purpose of this article is to identify motivations and justifications for the establishment of such institutions in the Slovak Republic (Nation’s Memory Institute) and the Czech Republic (The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes) and examine the ways in which these institutes interpret the crimes of communist regimes and in this sense influence collective memory. Both of these institutes play a different role in the framework of transitional justice in the two countries. In the Czech Republic, only one of the institutions dealt with the criminal past. In Slovakia, the establishment of the Nation’s Institute of Memory can be seen as breaking the silence, as it was first organization to gain access to secret police files and uncover the criminal past. The main finding is the conclusion that the work and products of both institutions can be categorized as manifestations of anti-communism. Both institutions stirred debates regarding their functions and were met with resistance from some political elites.

 

- Raisa Barash (Moscow, Russian Academy of Sciences)

Challenging the Way of the Russian Collective Memory – a Shaky Balance Between Fame and the Shame

 

By 1991 the Soviet concept of history was largely destroyed. For the mass consciousness of the late-soviet period it was clear that the Stalinist period was full of tragic moments and communism itself led to a series of tragedies, especially in domestic policy. Mass consciousness is pervaded by strong doubts regarding the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, which has brought untold suffering to neighboring states. These changes in historical consciousness undermined any faith in communism among the Soviet people and led to the transition from communism to a market-based policy reforms.

However, the decade that has passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union has proven that the most palpable examples of real collective solidarity in Russian society are found in the communist past (first and foremost, the Victory in the Great Patriotic War [victory in World War II?]). Furthermore, in the early years of the twenty-first century the Russian authorities began to problematize attitudes towards the communist past. In 2007, after the Russian-Estonian conflict over the monument of the "Bronze Soldier," many Russians expressed a desire to protect historical memory. While many Russians were aware that Estonians perceived the monument as a symbol of communist occupation, the decision on the part of the Estonian government to move it was nevertheless seen as an insult.

Since then, the authorities (which have used the communist myth as a mechanism of an anti-western social solidarity) launched a campaign aimed at overcoming the so-called "falsification of Russian history". One of the purposes of this campaign was to ban attempts to equate or conflate fascist and communist ideology. The project was criticized by Russian human rights activists, who expressed opposition to the perceived attempt to revive the state ideology. But the idea was popular among the general public.

During the preparations for the 65th anniversary of the victory of the Soviet Army in World War II the anti-Western ideology gained new momentum. In an article entitled "The 65th anniversary of the Great Victory," foreign minister Sergei Lavrov offered a harsh assertion of the equal responsibility of the USSR and the West in the appeasement of Hitler. Furthermore, Lavrov also claimed that it is impossible "to equate the Nazi regime and the dictatorship of Stalin." However, in 2010 V. Putin arrived in Katyn and condemned the execution of Polish officers as a crime of Stalinism. But Russia has not apologized for Katyn.

Despite the fact that the State Duma referred to Stalinism as totalitarianism, the communist past is still carefully guarded in Russia. Russian society is well-informed about the crimes of the communist regime, but it doesn’t expose the communist period in sharply negative assessments.

Anxiety regarding [even mixed with a bit of nostalgia for?] communism in Russian society is still strong because fundamental reasons for a sense of collective pride (victory over Nazi Germany, successes in space exploration, industrialization, successes in the sciences and in sports) are found in the communist past. The New Russia has no examples of such great achievements on which to build a sense of social solidarity. But mass conscious – according to the results of the vox populi – is very careful about passing judgment on Stalin. And the hard work with historical memory in Russia is ongoing.

 

- Krzysztof Brzechczyn (Poznań Branch of IPN / Department of Philosophy, Adam Mickiewicz University), The Problem of the Reliability of “Files” in Discussions on Collaboration with Security Service (SB) in Poland. Some Methodological Remarks

 

Over the course of the last decade in Poland revelations regarding the secret collaboration of some public figures with Security Services (SB) has prompted emotional discussions on the reliability of the archival records stored by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). Analysis of these discussions enables one to draw a distinction between  two opposing views. According to the first, documents stored in the archives of IPN are incomplete and devoid of accurate information. According to the second, documents produced by the repression apparatus of the communist state constitute new type of historical source and contain reliable information.

However, these discussions over the reliability of “files” lack methodological rigor and precision. I consider the reliability of the “files” in the light of Jerzy Topolski’s concept of historical source and characterize the specificity of the documents produced by the repression apparatus of the communist state with the aid of the system of classification of sources proposed by Topolski. In the light of this analysis, the “files” do not constitute a new type of historical source requiring a radical rebuilding of existing classifications and new interpretive methods. However, one precondition of adequate interpretation is acknowledgment of the purpose with which they were created and the functions the played in the communist state. The apparatus of repression collected, selected and stored information on social life from the perspective of its usefulness in the maintenance of political control over society. Ignorance of this specific social praxis (and its different forms: manipulation, disintegration, misinformation, etc.) performed by secret political police is a reason for methodical and heuristic errors committed by historians – the unconscious acceptance of the vision of social life and processes presented in the sources in the construction of historical narrative.

 

- Karina Hoření (Brno, Masaryk University)

Disputes regarding the Institute of Study of Totalitarian Regimes as an Example of the Politicization of the Memory of Communism

 

The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (Prague) is a privileged Czech institution the role of which is to foster research on the archives of the former secret police of Czechoslovakia. Since its foundation in 2009 the Institute has been the subject of disputes and symbolic conflicts about the nature of the communist regime and ways in which to approach it. The most recent example of such a dispute was in spring 2013, when the new board of the Institute was elected by the Senate of the Czech Republic, which at the moment is controlled by leftist parties. New members of the board criticized the work of the Institute for its focus of research on the topic of repression, promoting instead a new focus on everydayness and different manners of cooperating with the regime. Criticism of this new approach was voiced by different interest groups, which claimed that the call for a shift in focus was merely part of a larger attempt to legitimize the Communist Party and its growing political power. This example is paradigmatic of the political memory of the communist past in the Czech Republic and possibly in other CCE countries. It illustrates how the question of everydayness and collaboration in the past can be politicized. The research is based on an analysis of public and medias debate and the discursive ways in which the question of the past is used in to promote varying agendas.  

 

- Ferenc Hammer (Budapest, Eötvös Loránd University)

Imagined Secrets, Invisible Service

 

My research aims to reconstruct some of the key features of the cultural field that defined the work of the secret service in the personal projections, motivations and strategies of the vast majority of society in Hungary, which had minimal or no personal or direct experience with the operations of the secret service in 1960-80. Though with their focus on interior affairs, branches of the secret service had predominantly devoted their general interest to actors and scenes that had represented some sort of security risk, the perceived or rather imagined work of these largely invisible operations by the whole of society was instrumental too in the operations of the state security forces. Perceptions of the secret service – often based on unsubstantiated beliefs and gossip –served latent functions for the secret service, enabling them to reach their goals by nurturing feelings of intimidation, secrecy, and isolation. I draw materials for this study from two sets of sources. Firstly, I assess available original documents and secondary literature regarding the operations of the secret service if it had any explicit goal or intention to cause such latent effects in the society, a process that would be somewhat in line with prevailing contemporary popular visions regarding the authoritarian power and its proverbial effects on society: invisible control, paranoia, brain washing, etc. Secondly, I will conduct interviews with people who were old enough to have personal memories of the era but who had no personal encounter with the secret service themselves. Though I’m fully aware of the methodological obstacles in analyzing recollections today of a period 30 or 50 years ago, with the help of these interviews (and also using personal memoires and secondary literature) I’ll reconstruct some of the defining principles of the operations of the secret service in the eyes of those who had no personal experience with them. My study will contribute  to a more nuanced understanding of a crucial aspect of the operation of the state in the post-1956 period in Socialist Hungary.

 

- Marta Kurkowska-Budzan (Krakow, Jagiellonian University)

“The Doomed Soldiers”. The Institute of National Remembrance and the Symbolic Transformation in Poland

 

The Institute of National Remembrance  (IPN) is a national institution that emerged during and played a considerable role in the transformation in Poland. In addition to the political, sociological and economic changes, the significant dimensions of this process involved changes in the symbolic tissue of social life - a symbolic transformation. After the first period, in which old monuments – the literal and most distinctive tokens of the communist regime – were demolished, the second stage of this process was marked by changes on a deeper level of social notions, including those at the level of knowledge and memory of the past. This is the task that IPN has undertaken and is performing by virtue of the authority of the state, personifying Foucault’s vision of the power/knowledge discourse understood as a whole, within which the language is connected with ideology, knowledge, and social and communicational strategies.

From the multiple fields of IPN’s activity the most widely commented on is everything connected with political vetting, that is, settlement of people’s personal ties to the communist system. IPN’s educational activities also draw public attention, though the objections and protests against it are neither as loud nor as frequent. Most of the IPN’s undertakings enjoy, if not widespread popularity, then at least social acceptance. In other words, the IPN’s educational discourse is even more significant for the symbolic transformation in Poland than the vetting discourse.

The article presents one of the milestones of the symbolic transformation: the case of “doomed soldiers” (the anticommunist armed underground in Poland, 1944 – 1956) represents an example of history rewritten in the public discourse by IPN’s educational activities.

My methodological perspective is a symbolic interactionism, in which Foucault’s terms of “discourse” and “discipline/power” coincide with the concept of  “social world” in George Mead’s sentence: “Social worlds are the universes of discourse”. On the level of practical methods I use Adele Clark’s version of “grounded theory” called “situational analysis”. The research question then is the engagement of the IPN as a “social world” producing a specific discourse about the past and acting in the contemporary social (and political) situation.

I briefly present the IPN’s position in the structures of state authority before moving to an analysis of the texts with which the IPN expresses explicitly and implicitly its vision of its role in the process of the symbolic transformation in Polish state and society. In the second part of the analysis I focus on the roles and positions of the IPN in the social “situation of action” that change the public discourse on the history and meaning of the anticommunist armed underground.

 

- Caterina Preda (Bucharest, University of Bucharest)

Artistic Forms of Collaboration with[in] the Communist Regime in Romania

 

This presentation introduces three understandings of the collaboration of artists with the communist regime in Romania: first, artistic collaboration to establish an artistic project of the regime; second, the individual collaboration of artists with the Secret police; and third, a posteriori collaboration of artists to our understanding of the communist regime by providing another point of view on living under a dictatorship [the last part of this sentence is unclear. Perhaps: “the posteriori collaboration of artists with the aim of influencing our understanding of the communist regime by providing another point of view on living under a dictatorship.”]. While the main focus of this presentation will be on the memory of the everyday experience of communism as it is transmitted by visual artists, I also take into account the collaboration of artists with the communist regime, a topic still highly divisive in Romanian society, in part given the political uses of the archives of the former regime, which were only recently made accessible to the public.

Prior to 1989, artists had to create in accordance with the mandatory ideological principles, thus furthering the consolidation of the myth of the communist society (or multi-laterally developed as it came to be called towards the end of the regime). At the same time, most artists developed “another art” accompanying the official requests to paint/depict according to the mandatory ideology. Some of these artistic productions can help construct a history that differs from the officially sanctioned one, and also from that of the so called “democratic opposition,” which emphasized victimhood and repression, which are not a common memory for all citizens. In this sense, as I suggest in my article, artistic artifacts can supplement traditional sources for political science analyses of the communist past.

The focus of this presentation will be on the Romanian cases using examples from the visual arts that include Ion Grigorescu and his depiction of the secret police “spontaneous organization” of a manifestation of support, or Ion Dumitriu, who documents the life of the Roma, who were and are excluded from official portrayals of communist life. A possible comparative view, including examples from other East European countries, could accompany the Romanian examples.

 

- János Berta (University of Pécs, Hungary)

Is this the Life of an Agent? A Unique Reconstruction of Secret Service Operations in Gábor Zsigmond Papp’s Documentary

 

Over the course of the past decade (looking also at the public discourse), from time to time certain works appear in cinematic art dealing with agents from Hungary's socialist history, collaborators with the system, the possibility of confronting this issue, and the failure to do so. Among the works of varying genres and quality, Gábor Zsigmond Papp's 2004 documentary, The Life of an Agent, is an outstanding piece.

The documentary uses the educational film tapes made in the studio of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. These tapes were made for agents and secret police officers in order to show them the perfect process of collaboration, the equipment, and the typical situations, and also to point out the most common mistakes. The 2004 film suggests that we can assemble a picture of an ideal secret agent’s work and the activities of everyday practice based on the recordings made between 1958 and 1988.

In my presentation I try answer the following questions through an analysis of the film:

• What picture does the documentary paint of agents and secret police officers with the creative use of archive materials? Can we regard this film as a kind of self-representation of the state security forces?

• To the superficial gaze, the film might seem often to trivialize the issue and indicate the ironic guise of intelligence activities, or at least of these educational movies. One might well ask, then, to what extent does the picture painted by the film fit into the public discourse about the agent.

• In addition to dramatizing the archival footage, the documentary also presents a fictional case. In other words the film includes not only an official interpretation of an observation but also a private, ‘everyday’ narrative as well. Does the film (as a whole) present the everyday history and public opinion perception of collaboration?

 

Gabriel Andreescu (Bucharest, National School for Political Studies and Public Administration)

"Resistance through Culture" or "Connivance through Culture." Difficulties of Interpretation; Nuances, Errors, and Manipulations

 

This paper, based on the study of over 300 volumes of Securitate Archives, is an analysis of a debate that has been going on for 23 years: what is the real meaning of the relationship between the cultural elite and the communist regime? Relations that were interpreted by some authors as examples of collaboration were characterized by others as forms of resistance, and by others as connivance..My research shows that these interpretations are too simple to describe the complexity of situations that arose between Romanian intellectuals and agents of the communist regime.
My analysis also highlights that scholars have to deal with numerous falsifications, factual errors and faulty evaluations in the Securitate Archive, and they must also show respect for the totality of materials at their disposal, including auxiliary resources.
This study makes a foray into the complexity of the relationships between some representative Romanian intellectuals and the communist regime, shedding light on a variety of situations. Some authors succumbed to political pressure and signed commitments of cooperation without ever actually supporting the regime, while others, in contrast,  sought refuge in their cultural writings, thus avoiding any political involvement. Some followed the regime obediently until specific circumstances transformed them into dissidents. Others flirted with the regime but refused any political censorship of their work, while others played the role of informer in good faith to gain permission to create "timeless" work of art or culture. Some writers composed creative protests against the regime, etc.
As my findings indicate, the Securitate archives are an essential source for any understanding of the complexity of Romanian life during the communist regime. Without this source, the image of the totalitarian regime and those who endured its repression would be immeasurably poorer.

 

- Matěj Spurný (Prague, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic)

Intellectuals Between Collaboration and Independence. Politics and Everyday Life in the Prague Faculty of Arts in Late Socialism

 

The Prague Faculty of Arts played an important role as an intellectual centre of the reformist 1960s. After 1968, however, political measures forced the Faculty to be obedient and led to its takeover by people whose credentials were not based on expertise or teaching skills, but rather on their willingness to enforce the obedience of others. However, nearly all students and more than a half of the former professors stayed; during the “hard times“ (1970/71), they faced immense pressure and had to undergo humiliating rituals. In the years that followed, power hierarchies confronted people with the necessity of combining different loyalties; at the same time, some of them managed to find particular spaces of intellectual autonomy.

In my paper, I will examine different behavioral strategies that were adopted by university teachers of this particular faculty during the two decades after 1969. The relationships and personal dilemmas, the struggle with the dominant ideological framework, shifts in people’s beliefs and loyalties over the course of the four decades in question reveal a great deal about the different strategies that people (and intellectuals especially) chose while trying to preserve their personal integrity and exploit available opportunities at the same time. I devote particular attention to the different ways of collaborating (or refusing to collaborate) with the secret police. However, cooperation with this particular power structure will be analyzed in the context of other aspects of the political activities and professional and personal lives of specific personalities.

 

- Josip Mihaljević (Zagreb, Croatian Institute of History)

Tito and Intellectuals - Collaboration and Support, 1945-1980

 

This paper analyzes the relationship between intellectuals and the Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito during his 35 years of totalitarian rule. Intellectuals are important in shaping ideologies, and their attitudes towards political leaders are important pillars of the legitimacy of each regime. In socialist Yugoslavia intellectuals also played an important role in preparing the society to accept the new regime. I analyze Tito's speeches, statements and actions that pertained to the intellectual sphere and conclude that Tito had a particular animosity towards intellectuals, primarily due to their free thinking, but that he treated them wisely, skillfully exploiting them to strengthen his own political position and charismatic authority. I also analyze works (in the arts, humanities and sciences), statements and especially personal letters that Yugoslav intellectuals sent to Tito on the basis of which I conclude that the vast majority of intellectuals, including even the most prominent, were highly influenced by Tito's authority and consciously built a cult of his personality. Almost every leading Yugoslav intellectual wrote positively about Tito, and that was important for the regime: domestically to strengthen its authority over the population and internationally to give an impression of the democratic and positive character of the regime. I discuss the motivation behind the apologetic attitude of Yugoslav intellectuals towards Tito and his regime, such as fear on the one hand or conviction on the other. Fear was understandable, since those who dared to criticize the regime faced repressive measures. Perhaps more important is the fact that many intellectuals supported the regime because they sincerely believed in communist ideals and the undisputed charismatic leader. Criticism of Tito's charismatic rule during his lifetime was very rare. It surfaced in the late 1960s and reappeared only after his death, during the last decade of socialist Yugoslavia.

 

 

- Fedor Blaščák (Bratislava, Memory Kontrol)

Marxism – Leninism, Really? An Oral History of Three Academic Communities

 

My paper, based on complex oral historical research that I  conducted in 2009–2010, deals with the micro-history of the three academic communities: sociologists, architects and sculptors. As members of these communities were extraordinarily exposed to ideological pressure and control, their micro-histories provide interesting case studies and models of ideological collaboration, as well as examples of the resistance strategies of its members in the period of late socialism.

I will provide a general description and explanation of the ideological exclusiveness of the respective academic fields (till 1989), followed by analyses of the particular case study of the Academy of fine arts in Bratislava, which was the only university in former Czechoslovakia to adopt a strict personnel policy after 1989, replacing almost 85% of its academic staff in the course of the 1989-1990 school year.

The relevance of the choice of the community of sociologists (originally: “Marxism – Leninism sociology”) is based in part on the non-trivial political engagement of some of its members after 1989: e.g. prof. Juraj Schenk, who served as minister of foreign affairs in 1994–1997, or Iveta Radičová - the spokesman for the Public against Violence [?] movement in early 1990s, later becoming the prime minister of the Slovak government (in 2010-2012).  

In addition to the oral history interviews with former pedagogues and students, I have extensively studied the archival materials related to the formal structure of the given programs of study before and after 1989. The outcome of my research clearly reveals the dominance of the strategy of ideological loyalty, which secured the careers of academic functionaries. However, it also provides case studies and micro stories of ideological resistance, which could be considered as typical – e.g. teaching standard “western” courses on the sociological methodology under the course title “bourgeois tendencies in sociological research”.

 

- Marína Zavacká (Bratislava, Slovak Academy of Sciences)

Finding the Ways (around). Regional-level Party Activists

 

The paper focuses on strategies of cooperative, collaborative and patronage relations centered around regional-level party activists.

According to preliminary research, it was not only “ordinary people” who developed particular collaborative ways of getting along with the requirements demanded (or voiced at least) by the non-differentiated “regime representatives”. On the contrary, many such representatives, especially on the lower end of hierarchy, coming into the contact with the general population on a daily basis, were aware of their own dependency on smooth cooperation within their immediate working or living environment and the unreliability of their own comrades in power, so they preferred to set aside certain party dogmas or loyalties in favor of “ordinary people” in order to support their own positions in local networks through win-win deals. Motivations and manifestations of such behavior varied widely, ranging from dealing respectfully with someone who was officially considered “unworthy” to helping conceal the illegal slaughter of swine from the authorities, channeling party funds to non-party activities, or openly voicing common protest against decisions of “those at the top.” These will be the subject of inquiry.

I also examine perceptions and representations of “power”, which has been alleged to have been one of the enticements to collaboration. How strong and how weak was power? Where did it fall on the scale of people’s perceptions, from despairing assertions of its omnipotence to an insistence on its weakness (statements such as, “It is nonsense to talk about doing something in collaboration with the Party, the Party does not collaborate with anyone, it is here to direct” on the one hand and “In some departments, there are no party members, so we cannot talk about its leading role at all” on the other, statements both of which were made in the 1950s).

The primary source for the research will be the Slovak National Archives collection of minutes of the regional annual Communist party conferences in Slovakia.

 

- Tamás Kende (Budapest)

“But Who is the Party?“ History and Historiography

 

Wer aber ist die Partei?

History and historiography

 

The working title of my project is taken from the title of a poem written by Bertolt Brecht. The purpose of the project is to venture a historical answer to the Brechtian question.

 

“Now the end of the Soviet Union has, inevitably, changed the way all historians see the Russian Revolution, because they are now able - they are, in fact obliged - to see it in a different perspective, like a biographer of a dead, as distinct from a living, subject.”

Eric Hobsbawm, Can We write the History of the Russian Revolution? On History (New York: The New Press, 1997), 241–42.

 

Bertlolt Brecht’s question has never been a relevant one for historians of “Communism” or the Communist Parties. Party histories, histories of the Communist parties have been and still are the histories of party leaders, often changing party ideologies and the histories of party centers. To the Brechtian question about who and what the communist parties were, with their massive memberships in the post1945 period, historians as a rule have failed to give a historical answer. The reason for this lack of historical interest is the almost century-old traditional historiographical approach to the phenomena of Communism and the Communist Parties. In the inherited historical literature and historiographical patterns the party was always and still is depicted monolithically. And in this respect there are no significant differences between the former eschatological official Communist party histories (based on the ill-famed Short Course on the History of the C(b)PSU) or its national mutations and the anti-Communist conspiracy-theoretical works. In both approaches the party is a single hierarchy that was organized and run according to a military-type of discipline. This mythical party image defined and described by the traditional historiographies (both official Communist and anti-Communist ones) operates with an abstraction on and of the Communist Party as an entity that always acted according to a (mythical) plan laid down at least and at last by Lenin in his 1902 “What has to be done?”. According to this abstraction, the party (more precisely parties), with its membership, was a mere executor of a mythical plan to liberate (or enslave) mankind or the oppressed proletarians of at least Eastern Europe, if not of the whole world.

Even if we tentatively accept this abstraction, it is still difficult to answer Brecht’s question: Wer aber ist die Partei? What and who is the party (or parties)? Who had come to form, by 1948, the massive membership of these parties (cc. 1.250.000 people in Hungary in 1948, and the Czechoslovakian Party had over 2 million members by that time)? We are talking about a period when the population of Hungary was around 9 million and only adults were allowed to join the party. What were or could have been the motivations to join the party en masse? Were the rank and file party members mere disciplined executors of the often changing central will(s) (i.e. campaigns)? Obviously these questions relate first of all to the rank and file party members who were never interviewed and only rarely left behind memoires, and who can’t be interviewed retrospectively en masse more than six decades later. Despite these difficulties, the questions raised above are still relevant, especially if we are dealing with a predominantly agrarian region.

“The highest extent of organization” or data pertaining to the question of party membership

This part of the project analyzes the considerable amount of available data on the potential everyday existence of the mythical (disciplined, centralized and always acting according to a military scheme) party as such. In this part I also focus on the activity of the rank and file Communist Party members and their communications with the Party center and the local non-Communist population. In addition to the abovementioned phenomena, the sources regarding the payment of party membership fees and statistics regarding party membership meetings may highlight the “possible” level of devotion, discipline, and “cooperation/collaboration” within the party. Summing up the available sources on the everyday history of “Communism”, I turn once again to the questions of a historiographical nature.

 

- Dobrochna Kałwa (University of Warsaw)

In Search of New Meanings: Autobiographical Strategies of Local Party-Members in Poland – a Case Study

 

Collective memory in Poland has been profoundly transformed since 1989: in a very short period of time former official memory turned to a revisionist one, which in turn has gradually been changing under the influence of the dominant public discourse. One of the significant elements of this process is oblivion about the range and ways of adaptation to, collaboration with, and involvement in institutions of the communist regime. A party-member, a militiaman or an activist of a legal structure became more symbolic figures in the process of rebuilding national identity than active participants in the new memory discourse. The new political and social frames established new anti-communist, pro-democratic collective memories on the one hand, and on the other revisionist and then nostalgic counter-memories. Each of them offers different strategies of reconstruction of autobiographical narratives, compatible with contemporary interest and axiological meanings of individuals, local communities and a society in transition.

The aim of my article is micro-historical analysis of strategies used by former communists or followers of the regime in order to reconstruct their autobiographies according to a new normative and political order. The material of the case study consists of two types of the narratives: oral history interviews with local party members and regime collaborators whom I had interviewed in 2008-2009 and published autobiographical texts. The study refers to the theoretical concept of apocrypha and canons as complementary parts of collective memory. Combined with linguistic and semiotic analysis, it enables one to offer answers to questions about the process of collective oblivion regarding collaboration, the possible role of the followers of the regime in establishing and developing collective memories (both anti-communist and nostalgic), and the manners of interference between different levels of memory discourse in Poland.

 

- Pavla Francová (Charles University in Prague)

The Role of Newspapers in Everyday Collaboration with the Communist Regimes

 

I would like to explore the issue of collaboration from the viewpoint of the media and everyday use of newspapers. In particular, I concentrate on the comparison of the use and reach of the official communist daily newspapers in the former states of the Eastern bloc. For this comparison I will use data from the former German Democratic Republic, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Information numbers in which daily newspapers were printed and the range of their distribution sheds light on the importance of this central instrument of the communist regimes in the different countries.

This comparison and analysis will allow for a more penetrating understanding of the roles of journalists who worked for the state-owned press in Czechoslovakia by offering answers to questions regarding cooperation and collaboration of media professional with the regime.

 

- Agáta Drelová (University of Exeter)

Forgetting “Judas.” Priest Collaboration in Slovak Catholic Memory after 1989
 

This paper investigates the rhetorical strategies employed in remembering everyday cooperation of members of Pacem in Terris (the association for clergy loyal to the communist state) with Communist Party officials. I argue that central to these strategies is integration of the stories of individual collaboration into a larger narrative of human weakness, presenting collaboration with state officials as a sacrifice, and thus shedding, albeit perhaps unwittingly, any possible advantages everyday collaboration with the communist party might have meant for those involved. Drawing on a number of oral history interviews with current Bishops, I explore how they remember their pre-1989 predecessors in office. I focus especially on respondents who, even if not necessarily members of Pacem in Terris themselves, were in regular contact with the “collaborating” Bishops as administrative staff at the Bishopric and had a chance to see their superiors’ everyday dealings with the state officials. Exploring a largely under-researched terrain, this paper is an attempt to offer an alternative way of approaching the study of memory of pre-1989 collaboration in a post-communist church. 

 

- Paweł Sowiński (Warsaw, Polish Academy of Sciences)

Spy in the Underground. Polish Samizdat Stories

 

The communist dictatorship in Poland in its last ten years faced a hard and massive anti-totalitarian movement of which many Poles are very proud today. In particular, books and articles of the press that bypassed censorship were published on a noticeable scale with the involvement of thousands of people. However, as closer examination of some biographies reveals, at least a few people acted both as members of the Polish publishing resistance and as a part of secret service network built by the police to fight the anticommunist opposition.

One story is particularly dark and can serve as an introductory case to the underworld of samizdat dealers and police investigations. Two brothers - Andrzej Górski and Janusz Górski - were famous for their bravery and achievements until their secrets were discovered a few years ago. They represented the Warsaw lower class, as they had only a basic education. One was a strong supporter of Solidarity, and after the introduction of martial law in 1981 he became an underground samizdat printer. The second worked as wheeler and dealer and petty thief, stealing state-owned goods such as paper and stencils. He pretended to help his brother do an illegal print job, but in fact he served as a very dangerous agent of the police.

The case of the Gorski brothers could be put not only into historical but also sociological context, since it caused a sensation in some newspapers. Thus the question arises, how can material from the archives change our memory today and how does history influence circles of friends and colleagues?

 

- Ieva Zake (Rowan University, New Jersey)

The Exempt Nation: Memory of Collaborationism in Contemporary Latvia

 

In this paper I examine the evolution of a concept that I call “the exempt nation,” which allows Latvians to interpret themselves as non-complicit with the totalitarianism of both Soviet and Nazi regimes in Latvia. I argue that there are a number of factors that have played into the formation and proliferation of this idea in Latvian historical memory and public discourse over the last two decades. In the paper, I will discuss each of these factors in detail. Briefly, the first factor is lack of full lustration in Latvia. As demonstrated in my earlier research (“Politicians versus Intellectuals in the Lustration Debates in Transitional Latvia” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 26:3), lustration legislation was essentially blocked by influential intellectuals in the name of protecting Latvian society from unnecessary stress and accusations. The second factor is the nature of the Center for Documentation of the Consequences of Totalitarianism – a governmental institution that houses in closed archives and ultimately controls the shreds of KGB information about particular individuals’ potential collaboration with Soviet authorities. The third factor is that intellectuals, predominately historians, have had privileged access to the materials on collaborationism with the Soviet regime. The so-called Commission of Historians under the auspices of the office of the President of Latvia has been given official power to define the meaning and nature of collaborationism, and this has had important consequences in the public discourse. The fourth factor is the strengthening tendency in public discussions about collaboration to treat Latvians as victims of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes with increasingly strong anti-Semitic undertones. All of these tendencies have contributed to the perception of Latvians as a nation that bears no historical responsibility for the ways in which totalitarianism was realized on the everyday level. In other words, totalitarianism and collaborationism are represented as something that was done to Latvians as opposed to by Latvians. As before, when analyzing the public discourse about collaborationism, I am particularly interested in the role of intellectuals.

 

- Krisztina Slachta (University of Pécs)

Informing as Life-Style. Unofficial Collaborators (IM’s) of the Hungarian and the East-German State Security Working in the Tourism Sector

 

In my paper I would like to investigate the careers of two informants who worked in the tourism sector. One of them was a full-time informant positioned at IBUSZ (the state-owned Hungarian travel agency) and collaborating with the Hungarian State Security Service (BM). The other was an unofficial collaborator and full-time informant of the East-German State Security Service (Stasi). The two men were both employed to observe their colleagues and of course the tourists planning holidays in the bureau or just having their holidays at Lake Balaton or in other East-European countries.

The Hungarian informant officially started to work in Budapest in the centre of IBUSZ; then, from 1961, he was stationed in Vienna in the office of IBUSZ; finally, in 1968, he became vice-president of the newly opened office in Frankfurt. He seized the opportunity to cut off all connections with BM after 16 years of steady collaboration and stayed in West-Germany with his whole family.

The East-German full-time informant was directly employed by the Stasi for cca. 10 years after having been an unofficial collaborator from 1968. His job was to travel around in East-Europe and have 6-week-long camping holidays at Lake Balaton so as to observe GDR-tourists in his area. He spent almost his entire life working directly for the Stasi; his wife became an unofficial collaborator, too, since this made it easier to organize their professional and personal lives.

            The two careers I wish to analyze are not typical at all – not that we could define the “typical” career of informants. Yet there are some interesting points to focus on: how can one spend such a long period of one’s life collaborating with the State Security Service? How can one work as a full-time informant and how can one organize one’s life and the life of one’s family around this kind of job? What is the everyday life of a full-time informant like – what does informing-as-life-style mean?

 

- Marie Černá (Prague, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic)

Remembering Soviet Army Occupation. Czechoslovakia 1968-1991

 

The Warsaw pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 is without any doubts an important milestone in the Czechoslovak history. The same could be said of the departure of Soviet troops in 1990-1991. Both events mobilized and unified (almost) the whole nation against the explicit enemy. Nevertheless, the memory of more than 20 years of the “temporary stay of Soviet forces” is fractured by the complexity of often contradictory images:  reckless invaders devastating our country, backward and uncivilized soldiers invading our civilization, arrogant political and military dominance humiliating our nation. But there is also a memory of mutually satisfactory exchange trading, a memory of culture and economic supremacy over the invaders, related sometimes with condescension, sometimes with compassion.  There is even a memory of unproblematic and fruitful coexistence. These images seem to float in the air and to be ready for various purposes, for example political, in a broad sense. But we can also ask who creates these images and how, and how the memory of Soviet army occupation is structured, especially in the regions and towns where the troops were settled. Various professional and social groups might have had various local experiences with Soviet soldiers.  Czechoslovak soldiers, policemen, local politicians, artists, teachers, children, factory or agriculture managers, bakers, bartenders etc. might have had socially and professionally specific contacts and hence specific experience. Which kind of experience is privileged and which goes unnoticed in the process of creating our collective memory? I am using variety of sources – local chronicles and organs of the press, photography, police reports, municipality documents, and interviews.

 

- Zoltán Novak (Targu Mures, Gheorghe Sincai Institute for Social Studies and the Humanities of the Romanian Academy)

We Serve and Collaborate. Church and State in Romania: the Géza Pálfi Files

 

This paper addresses the following question: what types of collaboration were characteristic of the relations between the Church and State during the 1960s and 1970s in Romania? In our interpretation, collaboration means a set of activities by the clerics (in some cases laics) during which publicly or secretly, in different forms and with varying intensity, they undertook cooperation with state or party agencies or the secret police and helped them achieve their goals. Our case study is based on the files of Pálfi Géza, Catholic priest and university professor, who was the subject of surveillance for over 20 years in at least a dozen Transylvanian locations, thus we focus mainly on the agent type of collaboration. We examine the circumstances under which the representatives of the Transylvanian Roman Catholic Church chose the agent type of collaboration and how they fulfilled this (forced) task.

This paper is a case study, an examination and an analysis of the phenomena and events around the personality and case of Pálfi Géza. Due to the present state of the scholarship on the history of Churches in Romania, we do not wish to draw general conclusions. In the first part of our lecture we will present the general political context in which the Romanian Churches had to subsist during the 1960s and 1970s, followed by a presentation of the Pálfi-case and an analysis of the agent type of collaboration with respect to this issue.