Pohyblivé hranice diktatury ve světle stížností občanů
The Shifting Boundaries of Dictatorship in the Light of Citizen Complaints

Summary/Abstract: In the introductory essay to the thematic section “Citizen Complaints in Communist Czechoslovakia”, the authors present the theoretical background of this project as well as foreign research into complaints made to official institutions in communist dictatorships (especially in the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union). They draw on the concept of the “shifting boundaries of dictatorships” that has emerged in German historiography since the 1990s in an attempt to clarify the embeddedness of communist rule in the interactions and interrelationships between power structures and society in the GDR and how it played out primarily in the space of the everyday. As an authentic and largely preserved source, citizen complaints provide a number of valuable impulses for the analysis of the functioning of the communist system and the problems that resonated in society, despite their considerable degree of subjectivity. In doing so, they focus on the main interpretative frameworks for interpreting this type of source as inspired by foreign research. The first framework interprets complaints and suggestions as a specific, “top-down” directed way of resolving and dampening social conflicts, which in principle did not undermine the position of the ruling party, but on the contrary supported it. As soon as this method stopped meeting the expectations raised, however, it ceased to function as a “safety valve” and may have contributed to the destabilization of the system. Another scholarly approach views grievances more as a tool for advancing personal and group interests, in which space for negotiation opened up and in which the pragmatic use of ritualized language was applied. In this context, the authors conclude that the purposeful appropriation and use of ideological discourse had an ambivalent effect on the stability of communist rule and depended mainly on how rigidly or flexibly the official institutions were able to respond. The authors find the approach of analysing shifts in the content and style of grievances particularly productive, as it attempts to reconstruct changes in communist everyday life, values, attitudes and the collective mentality of actors. The last part of the text presents the terminology and methodology used by the authors in their research project "Pohyblivé hranice diktatury ve světle stížností a anonymních dopisů československých občanů v letech 1948 až 1989" [The Shifting Boundaries of Dictatorship in the Light of Complaints and Anonymous Letters from Czechoslovak Citizens Between 1948 and 1989] and introduces the articles in the thematic section.

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