Ideologies and Realities of the Masses in Communist Czechoslovakia
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by D-Scholarship@Pitt IDEOLOGIES AND REALITIES OF THE MASSES IN COMMUNIST CZECHOSLOVAKIA by Vanda Thorne BA and MA Masaryk University, 1994, 1996 MA Central European University, 1997 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2005 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Vanda Thorne It was defended on February 3, 2005 and approved by John Poulakos Peter Simonson Barbara McCloskey Jonathan Sterne Jonathan Sterne Dissertation Director ii IDEOLOGIES AND REALITIES OF THE MASSES IN COMMUNIST CZECHOSLOVAKIA Vanda Thorne, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2005 This thesis rethinks some of the core arguments of the Western theories of the masses. By demonstrating the inapplicability of these theories in the situation of the Twentieth Century totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia, this study argues for a replacement of the dominant paradigms with new theories of the masses relevant to the specific historical and social conditions. History of the masses in communist Czechoslovakia shows that the masses were not viewed as an inherently destructive social element. Instead, the masses functioned as supportive social structures for the oppressive regime, but also as the expressions of the nascent democratic civic interaction that later challenged this regime. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS 1.0 INTRODUCION………………...…………………………………………………………...1 1.1 Methodology…..…………………………………………………………………………...8 1.2 Czechoslovakia in the Twentieth Century…..……………………………………………14 1.3 Masses in Non-Totalitarian and Totalitarian Contexts……………………………….......22 2.0 PUBLIC COLLECTIVE IDENTITY.……………………...….………………………….39 2.1 Defining the Socialist Masses..…………………………………………………………...43 2.2 Visual Representations of the Masses – ‘United We Stand’…...…………………………51 2.3 Socialist Collectives as the Real Life Masses…..………………………………………...55 2.4 Official Enthusiasm: The Masses in the Public Staged Events…...………………………65 2.5 Unofficial Laughter: The Masses Mocking Themselves.....………………………..……..72 2.6 Conclusion…..………………………………………………………………………….…79 3.0 “EVERYDAY LIFE IS NOT A PRIVATE MATTER” – COLLECTIVIZATION OF LIFE IN THE PRIVATE SPHERE……………...………………………………………....81 3.1 Socialist Home as a Place for the Production of New Citizens…….….………………….84 3.2 A Personal Problem? Ask Your Collective!........................................................................91 3.3 Weekend Escape of the Masses: The Chata and the Chalupa Cultures…...……………...96 3.4 Chata vs. Chalupa: Collective vs. Individual Style…..……………………………….…100 3.5 Conclusion…..…………………………………………………………………………....108 4.0 BODIES IN MOTION: MASS GYMNASTICS AS A COLLECTIVE SOCIAL PERFORMANCE………..………………………………………………………..…...…....110 4.1 The Body as a Symbolic Tool…..……………………………..………………………….112 4.2 The Rise of Exercising Masses…..……………………………..………………………...115 4.3 Every Czech a Sokol…..……………………………………………………………..…...118 4.4 Individualized Collective vs. Collectivized Individual…..……………………….……....123 4.5 The Glory and Agony of the Spartakiads……..……………………………………......…130 4.6 Conclusion……..……………………………………………………………………….....143 5.0 THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS IN THE SOCIALIST PARADISE…....…..……145 5.1 Youthful Socialist Paradise…..……………………………………………………..…….146 5.2 Healthy Children in a Healthy New Era…..………………………………...…………….151 5.3 Pioneers as the Ultimate Socialist Citizens…..………………………..………………….153 5.4 Disciplined Children of Socialist Collectives…..………....……………..……………….156 5.5 Transforming the Imposed Collective: Private Meanings of the Pioneer Movement….....163 5.6 Conclusion…..………………………………………………………………………….....170 6.0 CONCLUSION…..……..………………………………………………………………...…172 7.0 BIBLIOGRAPHY…..…...………………………………………………………………......180 iv 1.0 INTRODUCTION Many of my childhood memories of growing up in socialist Czechoslovakia involve participation in public mass events and organizations. I can vividly recall walking in May 1st parades with my elementary school classmates, attending the celebrations of the Great October Socialist Revolution with my parents, exercising in the mass gymnastic events called Spartakiads, and joining the children’s organization – the Pioneers. I also remember the many jokes that my parents and their friends made about the official parades, about their own involvement in the state-organized ‘work collectives,’ and about the nation-wide mass traveling to and from weekend houses in the countryside. The connection between these two sets of memories is clear – the first refers to my participation in the official representations of the united socialist citizens, the second to the private perceptions of these representations by the millions of people who endured the socialist regime. Years after the collapse of the totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia in 1989, I tried to explain to my American husband the extent to which my socialist experience was structured by both the ideology and reality of collective life. I realized that most Western ideas of organized socialist life revolved around, and perhaps was even limited to, the images of perfectly lined rows of soldiers walking in unison at a May 1st parade in Moscow’s Red Square. But there was so much more to what collectivity and mass events meant for the Czechoslovak people. This thesis is a result of my attempts to articulate the magnitude of organized mass activities and their impact on the lives of Czechoslovak citizens. Much has been written about resisting totalitarian oppression in the countries of the former Soviet Bloc, primarily focusing on the dissident groups and individuals, who were brave enough to challenge their regimes openly. On the other hand, very little has been written about 1 the daily lives of the masses of seemingly ordinary people, who were overshadowed by the outspoken and persecuted heroes. My goal is not to condemn these ordinary people for their passivity or what some have called idleness or fear to oppose the regime. Rather, I wish to examine how they responded to the official propaganda and pressure in their own way. Instead of resisting the regime openly, a majority participated willingly in the required public rituals. While many criticized their situation in private, in public they felt the need to conform. As a result, two radically different sets of public and private behavior and morals emerged, and this separation between the two far exceeded the division between the public and private spheres in Western democracies. In the following chapters, I examine the ideologies and realities of the socialist masses. My definition of these masses is threefold. First, the masses are an ideological unit synonymous with a nation-wide homogeneous collective. These masses exist only on a theoretical level, and were depicted in official representations, including posters, paintings, poems or films. In addition, they were used as a model for real life events in Czechoslovak society. Public mass ceremonies, work relationships, housing schemes, sports activities or vacation patterns were all affected by this theoretical construction of mass collectivity. Both the imposed theoretical concept and the real life mass events resonated with a deeply-felt need for a national community as a protective and celebrative togetherness. The socialist masses as an ideological unit and especially as its staged public representations therefore attempted to fill the void of independent communal interaction that the regime had previously silenced. Second, the real life mass events point to another perception of the masses: masses as controlled density within spatial proximity. Parades, official ceremonies, mass gymnastics, factory meetings or collective holidays all involved physical massing of people, who were 2 unrelated to one another and yet functioned temporarily as a homogeneous unit. Unlike the endless and uncontrollable crowds feared by the crowd theorists of the Nineteenth Century, the socialist masses were always perfectly organized – the Communist Party representatives tolerated no spontaneous, crowd-like behavior and always issued detailed instructions for the masses’ behavior. Undoubtedly, most people participating in these events were unified and organized only through their pretended public conformity to the prescribed mass activities. Yet, as the post-1989 polls revealed, many Czechoslovaks living in the totalitarian regime kept longing for a genuine expression of mutual solidarity. For these people, the communist versions of mass collectivity were the only available, and officially sanctioned, forms of communal and national togetherness.1 Third, the socialist masses are also the invisible multitudes of real people, whose lives were involuntarily homogenized through required participation in the public collective rituals and through their remarkably similar private lives. These masses, although comprised of real people, have no empirical form in the sense that these individuals did not gather in one place at one time. Such invisible multitudes correspond to the description of the masses by Raymond Williams in which he stresses the illusionary quality of masses as a concept: “The masses are always the others, whom we do not know, and cannot know. ... To other people, we are also masses. Masses are other people. There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.”2 As this thesis shows, both public