Abstract
The collectively-authored monograph The Optimal Censorship Will Be Cadre Policy: Press Politics in the "Normalisation" Era 1968-1989 is dedicated to press politics in Czechoslovakia - specifically, the historically Czech lands of Bohemia, Moravia, and the Czech part of Silesia - in the years 1968-1989. Its foremost concern is with two main spheres: cadre policy and the censorship and propaganda used in regulation of the press. Seven chapters examine these two domains through the lens of the party and the state institutions that created and implemented press policy. The first chapter looks at press politics from the perspective of the highest authorities in the Czechoslovak Communist Party and reveals the significance of cadre-based management of the media in the execution of its policies. The second and third chapters focus on the press and information offices. They trace the practice of censorship and the propaganda activization of the media (and their results) against the background of changing political priorities. The fourth chapter, based on the programmes and approaches of the party apparatus and the censorship office, studies the tension in the conception and regulation of Czech cultural journalism. The role of the Federal Ministry of the Interior in the administration of press policy is discussed in the three final chapters.
The first chapter looks at press politics through the lens of key individual, institutional, collective, and actors - primarily the Presidium, Secretariat, and Politburo of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, which sought to manage the media directly from its central office. It maps out the nature of the decision-making processes and management tools they were working with in detail. In 1968 the dynamics of press politics was closely linked with a qualitative change in the leading role of the party: to wit, consolidating the media was the first priority in preparations to facilitate the painful "reestablishment of order" after the Warsaw Pact troops' invasion. The key tool in this process was cadre policy. Here, press politics is not only conceived as a means for the ruling party to indoctrinate society and suppress opposition voices, but also as a metapolitics - part of the activity of creating norms, and a mechanism through which the ruling party could bring its resolutions, which were often only of a declarative character, to life. The second part of the chapter discusses how the system of sharing information changed after 1985 under the influence of perestroika.
The second and third chapters follow upon these findings, and they analyse the implementation of press policy by the Office for Press and Information, the Czech Office for Press and Information, and the Federal Office for Press and Information as the national and federal government agencies. These chapters examine the dynamics of censorship regulation in connection with the priorities of political assignments, the institutional development of relevant government agencies, their relationships to competing authorities, and their position within the apparatus of the Central Committee of the KSČ. It is demonstrated that during the two "normalisation" decades of 1968-1989 the centre of gravity in press politics shifted between various levels, and a chronology with milestones in this development is elaborated within them.
These chapters discuss the main level where changes took place - the replacement of prior censorship with subsequent and self-censorship. However, they also address areas that have been neglected, such as the party's efforts to expand censorship regulation to propagandistic activation of the press. Further topics these chapters cover include the urgency of economic priorities in the political management of the system of the periodical press, journalists' informal negotiations with censorship, and administrative sanctions applied to editorial offices, as well as the hampering influence of the self-guided activity of the bureaucratic censorship institution in implementing political assignments. Besides the classic milestones (the August occupation, Gustáv Husák's accession to the leadership of the KSČ, and the background checks [kádrové prověrky] and purges performed in the wake of the August invasion), the present volume describes other, less agonistic processes. These include the retreat from political repression, the return to central planning in publishing policy, the creation of the institution of editor-in-chief boards and then it looks at the harmonization of labour performed by censors, editors and the party apparatus (which was a foretoken of the period of normalisation stability), and the ways politicians and the censorship apparatus coped with Gorbachev's glasnost - all of which are set into a timeline. The third chapter also emphasizes the effects of censorship norms in the everyday activities of editorial offices.
In its introduction, the fourth chapter describes the post-Stalinist cultural policy of the nineteen-sixties and the reform-communist conceptions that were implemented during the brief period of the Czechoslovak spring of 1968. This is followed by an outline of the basic argument that legitimised normalisation: it was presented as a means of "restoring order" after what was described as the "chaos" of the reform era. It is demonstrated that the restoration of order required more than a one-time purge: there had to be a continuous reminder of the counterrevolutionary threat of 'sixty-eight, which had given rise to a certain contradiction where cultural theory was put into practice. The main part of this chapter outlines the basic goals of normalisation cultural policy and culture, which focused on the formation of socialist human beings. Concepts such as "internationalism", "party loyalty", "democratism", and "socialist character" indicate the period effort to define culture and its contents in such a way that it was demarcated against the past as well as shaping the present. At the same time, it touches on the requirements that the press supervision authorities laid upon cultural journalism, which illustrates the interconnectedness of the normalization ideas about cultural policy with press policy. At its conclusion, the chapter returns to the original question of what the normalization concepts actually reveal about the last twenty years of Czechoslovak state socialism: because the cultural events and journalism of the cultural and political magazines in the nineteen-sixties were considered one of the causes of Prague Spring of 1968, writing about culture was one of the areas - alongside journalism and propaganda on economics - which the authorities supervising the press paid special attention to.
The fifth through seventh chapters deal with the censorship and propaganda activities undertaken by the Federal Ministry of the Interior. The fifth chapter examines press propaganda in the form of active measures taken by the secret police, as well as its nature and its origin from the perspective of authorship and its application in the periodical press. It also maps the State Security interventions in the periodical press at the level of staff (interactions with journalists) and at a material level (e.g., confiscation of printed materials). The sixth chapter describes the mechanisms of foreign press censorship: the FMV secured the import of foreign press into the country under administrative cooperation with the Czech Office for Press and Information, as well as also engaging in direct interventions at the borders. The seventh chapter discusses the State Security force's own publishing activities in the area of propaganda. It shows how the privileged position of security in the state manifested in a fairly extensive and autonomous structure of magazines and literary fiction.
The monograph The Optimal Censorship Will Be Cadre Policy aspires to present a comprehensive overview of press politics through a cross-section of the activities of all its key agencies, and through tracking these bodies through both of the normalisation decades. Instead of depicting a relationship of censorship-propaganda authorities versus society, it puts the relationship between these authorities and other actors at the forefront. This opens up their internal perspectives - the political assignments, the situatedness among others, and their own dynamics and goals - which is one of the prerequisites for understanding the operation of the press and the media in that period.