K socialněhistorickemu vyzkumu komunistickych systemů
Socio-historical Research on Communist Systems

Summary/Abstract: Using an example from Czechoslovak history, this article aims to help clarify aspects of social-history research in the analysis of Communist systems. It is concerned chiefly with how this research approaches political history, which has so far clearly dominated in Czech scholarship. The author discusses the networks of informal social relations, which were established below the surface of the formal hierarchy of the system. These networks helped, on the one hand, to stabilize the system by compensating for its dysfunctionality, but, on the other, they led to the erosion of the power structure. Drawing on his own research, the author demonstrates this using the example of Czechoslovak industry in the 1950s, when State and Party institutions, in negotiations with employees (for example, about wages, norms, and hours) ran up against the resistance of these informal networks, and then left the field to the trade unions, which were gradually gaining their freedom and, during the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968, began to act independently. This effect was projected also in conflicts over political power in factories in the first half of the 1950s, which in a number of cases took the form of short strikes, although the strikers, under the umbrella of the unions, were often protected from prosecution. The author argues that social research on Communism has recently been strikingly applied also in Czechoslovak historiography, which has mostly started from assumptions of the omnipotence, or at least the ubiquity, of the Communist regime. Despite the shift in this direction, historians continue to be more interested in the effects the regime had on society and in the overall conditions of how it operated than in the behaviour of society as such. A result is mistaking social history for history of social policy. This orientation fails to take into consideration, among other things, the role of tradition, and has difficulty finding continuity between the repressive nature of the first half of the 1950s and the reforms of the second half of the 1960s. These reforms were, according to the author, a result of the long-term process of structural decline in political power under pressure from informal social networks.

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