Communist Literature the Soviet Occupation of Czechos

Dobrota Pucherová Trauma and Memory of Soviet Occupation in Slovak (Post-)Communist Literature Abstract: Based on a discursive analysis of poetry and fiction, this chapter analyses trends in Slovak communist and (post)-communist trauma narratives within the frame of postcolonial and trauma theory. Relying on intuitions by theorists such as Mbembe and Caruth, it suggests that assumptions of narrative psychology such as structured narratives and closure may not always be applicable to (post)-communist narratives in which issues of seduction, complicity, betrayal and irrational impulses complicate the meaning of collective traumas and the ways nations come to terms with them. Postmodern approaches that blur the line between history and fiction, including the outright rejection of the possibility of recovering history, and anti-realist modes such as the absurd and meta-fiction, seem to have a refreshing, anti-ideological effect upon post- communist historiography, de-centring history to recognize the nation as essentially hybrid and ambivalent. The Soviet Occupation of Czechoslovakia: Communism as Colonialism ‘It was an intervention followed by an occupation’.1 With these words, in May 1990, the last communist president of Czechoslovakia, Gustáv Husák, described the Warsaw Pact Army invasion of Czechoslovakia of August 1968, when five hundred thousand Soviet, Polish, Hungarian, and Bulgarian soldiers, led by the USSR, invaded the country in response to reforms of the Czechoslovak communist regime known as the ‘Prague Spring’ that attempted to democratize the political system. The invasion was a deep shock for unsuspecting citizens and led to protests in which 108 civilians died and another 500 were seriously wounded; by the end of 1969, one hundred thousand people emigrated from the country. The invasion was officially presented as a friendly protection of the Czechoslovak citizens against ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Husák’s use of the word ‘occupation’ after Velvet Revolution of 1989 was the first official attempt at historical revisionism. To obscure his own responsibility for the events that followed, he added a few rhetorical questions: ‘Who will decode the colonial methods of the Soviets? Probably nobody. Who will truthfully evaluate all aspects of the occupation, in which we had to work? And it really was an occupation.’2 1 Rudolf Chmel, ‘Keď sa bratislavská jar nestretla s pražskou’ [When the Prague Spring Failed to Meet the Bratislava Spring], Pravda, 17 August 2013, pp. 30-31. 2 Ibid. 140 Dobrota Pucherová According to Mircea Martin, ‘in some of its aspects, Soviet communism was even more colonialist than Western colonialism’.3 This is due to its ‘totalitarian character’,4 which used ideology to suppress individual self-consciousness, erase local collective memory and national histories and force local populations to unconditionally adopt the position of the metropolis, all the while masking its totalitarian character. In terms of Foucault’s power- knowledge nexus, writes Martin, ‘nowhere was the relation between knowledge and power stronger and more intimate than in the case of state communism’.5 Of course, Soviet imperialism took various forms: as Liviu Andrescu points out, it would be an oversimplification to lump together countries such as Hungary, Uzbekistan and Lithuania on the mere basis of their being under Soviet control. 6 However, some of the characteristic features of Soviet hegemony can in various degrees be identified also in the Czechoslovak experience. This includes what Martin calls an ‘exportation of the socialist revolution’7 in 1948 and ‘indirect rule’8 or, in Lefter’s words, ‘semi-colonization’9 in which the government officials in Prague listened to the directives from Kremlin and any ‘misbehaviour’ was liable to be punished. In addition, the USSR controlled Czechoslovak exports and imports and forced the country to contribute to its own postwar reconstruction. In terms of ‘mental colonization,’10 official adoration and imitation of the Soviet culture formed the core of state ideology, and pupils were indoctrinated in schools through compulsory classes in the Russian language, Soviet history and culture, and, at university, of Marxism-Leninism and the history of the proletarian movement. In art, socialist realism was the only officially endorsed style. Even though after the 1950s the doctrine that a work of art must serve the goals of socialism and communism) started to lose its grip in Czechoslovakia, it continued to serve as a blueprint for all 3 Mircea Martin, ‘Communism as/and Colonialism’, in Postcolonialism/ Postcommunism, ed. by Monica Bottez, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, and Bogdan Ştefănescu (Bucharest: Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2011), pp. 77-102 (p. 96). 4 Ibid., p. 97. 5 Ibid., 92. 6 Liviu Andrescu, ‘Are We All Postcolonialists Now? Postcolonialism and Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe’, in Postcolonialism/ Postcommunism, pp. 57-74 (p. 66). 7 Martin, p. 78. 8 Ibid., p. 85. 9 See Ion Bogdan Lefter, ‘Poate fi considerat postcommunismul un postcolonialism?’ [Can Postcommunism Be Considered Postcolonialism?], Caietele Echinox, 1 (2001), 117-119 and Radu Surdulescu, ‘Identity-Raping Practices: Semicolonialism, Communist Reeducation, and Peer Torture’, Euresis, 1 (2001), 54-65. 10 I am using the term in the sense theorized by anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Albert Memmi. .

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