Abstrakt
The text explores the role of propaganda in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, the methods and tools used by the communists in power to maintain the pretense that society agreed with the power arrangement. Czechoslovakia belonged to the horizontally divided societies (Guelke 2012: 1), where a narrow group of ruling communist elite ("nomenklatura") governed the entire society through a one-party system.
Since 1948, the Communist have widely used propaganda to gain support for their actions and legitimize their political power. During the 1950s, the state enforced the dominance of its ideology (Thompson, 1984, 2013), through massive repressions, imprisonment and violence.
Yet by the end of 1960s, the overall situation began to change. Cultural and intellectual movement, supported by dissident's historical narrative of Czechoslovakia as a country of democratic traditions (Blaive in Kind-Kovacs, 2013: 130), was brutally oppressed after the Prague Spring in 1968.
In 1970s, the era of "normalization" started (Eidlin, 1980). The Communist propaganda became a staged theatre, which was externally approved by the vast majority of citizens (Havel 2012).
Havel calls this attitude of the Czechoslovak citizens "the principle of external adaptation" (Havel 2012: 53). However, the mutual relationship between various societal groups and the state propaganda was more complicated.
The propaganda techniques used by the Communists in the 1980s have become more subtle and soft, and the concept of "Öffentlichkeitsarbeit" was introduced through GDR, or "public relations" through Great Britain (Hejlova in Watson, 2014). Despite the notion of "socialistic PR" (Pavlů,1977) resembles in some ways the Western approach (Grunig and Hunt, 1984) and some authors discuss the existence of "PR" within socialistic societies (Szyszka, 1998, Kocks and Raupp, 2014), we cannot talk about public relations in the sense of a communication process in order to support the required position in "competing discourses" (Daymon, Demetrious 2013: 3) or "dialogic theory (Kent, Taylor, 2002).
Within the context of the authoritarian regime, propaganda (Jowett and O'Donnell, 2014; Bentele, 1998) was used to unify the official discourse of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. To research the practical manifestation of the communist propaganda of 1980s Czechoslovakia, there is very little specialised literature available - primarily essays written on the topic (Fidelius 1983, Havel 2012, Šimečka 1990).
Recent literature connects the examination of propaganda with the research of a specific issue (for example, the process of rebuilding, Pullmann 2011). Further literature maps out the specific development of communistic propaganda (Hejlová in Watson, 2014).
The main research question "How was dominant ideology reproduced in the 1980s in Czechoslovakia?" is therefore divided between researching the reproduction of ideology as it appeared in the media. Here, we examine the production of the Czechoslovak Press Agency, press agency of the Czechoslovak government.
We also comprehensively explore ideology reproduction in enforced public consent: the educational system and the production of propaganda textbooks. The text brings key insights about specific procedures and perceptions of communistic propaganda that are not only valid for 1980s Czechoslovakia but were also a reality for the majority of communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1980s.
However, it also brings an interesting insight into the mutual relationship between the power, its ideology and propaganda machine, and the society: a relationship that can seem strong, because it is performed in a ritualised, repetitive and symbolic way, but it is empty from the inside, and therefore can then collapse easily.