Abstrakt
The political appeal of the 'quiet life' was a powerful device in the process of consolidation in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s. Born of the military occupation of the country by Warsaw Pact armies in August 1968, the normalisation regime turned out to be surprisingly stable over time, marginalising and displacing alternative paths of development and ideological variants, at least until the late 1980s.
A crucial hallmark of these two decades was the patent ambiguity of the regime's conservative and modernising effects. The era was epitomised by a set of specific features of stability and gradual movement of conservative retrenchment towards an insistence on 'socialist modernity', the combination of which served to bolster a certain acceptance of the normalisation administration.
In this complex dynamic, the new Communist Party (KSČ) First Secretary from April 1969, Gustáv Husák, did not simply rely on Soviet military and ideological weaponry and the 'ruse' of rising standards of living; he also offered a distinct interpretation of the era that privileged particular responses and preferences. This is not to say that official constructions and ideological narratives were fully endorsed by the Czechoslovak population, but they were used as an authoritative discourse, interpreted and re-interpreted in everyday life.
Although this discourse was scarcely believed in its literal meaning, it did become the hegemonic narrative justifying selective needs, values and ideological stances.