Abstract
Though Alexander Dubček spoke of the need for 'normalisation' upon returning from his forced visit to Moscow in August 1968, the term took on new meaning after the April 1969 plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, when Gustáv Husák replaced Dubček as the Party's First Secretary. This chapter explores how the normalisation 'panorama', which Václav Havel would analyse in The Power of the Powerless and which would dominate Czechoslovakia's socioepistemological landscape until 1989, was established between August 1968, in the aftermath of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, to November 1969, by which time the panorama's edifice was largely constructed.
The chapter reconstructs the evolution of political practices and mentalities among citizens and officials at the grassroots level, drawing on evidence from the district of Nymburk in central Bohemia. It identifies six phases in the process by which a critical mass of citizens came gradually, compromise after compromise, to deny the support they had expressed in 1968 for the Prague Spring's reform programme and instead to profess love for the Soviet invaders and loyalty to Husák's regime.
The chapter documents, in other words, a process of 'auto-normalisation'-by which individuals rejected a social contract they had started to co-author in favour of one dictated to them.