Abstract
The collapse of the communist totalitarian regimes in Eastern and Central Europe and the end of the Cold War is one of key historical milestones in the history of the 20th century. However, the process itself and the consequences differed immensely from state to state: e.g., from peaceful so-called Velvet Revolution in former Czechoslovakia to the brutal civil war in former Yugoslavia.
The aim of article was to analyze the preconditions of the political and societal change in the Czechoslovak media - were there any signs of the change? How did the ruling party present the Soviet perestroika, which signalized a step towards democratization? The nomenklatura (ruling elite) was rather surprised by Gorbachev's plans and feared the resemblance with the Prague Spring 1968. Nevertheless, they had to comply with the official Soviet dictate.
Authors used Wodak's discoursive-historical approach to analyze official propaganda reports and press agency news. They found that the Czechoslovak official nomenklatura used several argumentation and persuasive strategies to present perestroika not as a political change, but as an ongoing path towards Communism.
Perestroika was presented as an accelerated path towards a classless society, however, the words were often vague or meaningless. Authors show that the nomenklatura welcomed perestroika verbally, but the disparity between the words and actions was omnipresent.
Citizens could "read between the lines", which meant that they revealed inner inconsistencies and problems of the regime from discoursive strategies. The aim to communicate perestroika thus served merely as an evidence of the inner disintegration of the system.
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 pretence that society agreed with the power arrangement. In the 1980s Czechoslovakia belonged among the horizontally divided societies (Guelke 2012: 1), where a narrow group of ruling communist elite governed the entire society through a one-party system.
However, the state did not enforce the dominance of its ideology through violence as like in the 1950s, and was instead content that its inhabitants externally approved of the official propaganda (Havel 2012). Havel calls this attitude of the Czechoslovak citizen "the principle of external adaptation" (Havel 2012: 53).
The presented article point out that in the former Czechoslovakia of the 1980s 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). Within the context of the authoritarian regime, propaganda 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 article clearly states that propaganda as an ideology tool helped to establish and maintain dominance relationships (Thompson 1990: 56) and uses Thompson's classification of how individual ideology methods work and reproduce power relations (Thompson 1990: 60).
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. Authors analysed materials produced by the Czechoslovak Press Agency, press agency of the Czechoslovak government.
Subsequently, they explored ideology reproduction in enforced public consent. Therefore, the educational system and the production of propaganda textbooks is described.
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.