The Stigma of the Past and the Bond of Belonging (Czech Communists in the First Decade after 1989)
The Stigma of the Past and the Bond of Belonging (Czech Communists in the First Decade after 1989)

Summary/Abstract: This article is concerned with the attitude that the Communist Party of Bohemiaand Moravia (Komunistická strana Čech a Moravy – KSČM) has had towards its own past. It examines the subject from the perspective of the internal development of the Party and its search for a political and cultural identity in the Czech political system. The interpretation of the past and the role of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Komunistická strana Československa – KSČ) in Czech and Czechoslovak history were key elements in the ideological development of the Party in the first ten years of Czech democracy after the changes beginning in November 1989. And they played a central role in the Communists’ efforts to respond to the new democracy’s systemic and rhetorical anti-Communism. In this article the author seeks to demonstrate what effect debates about the past had in causing divisions in the Party in the first years after 1989. On the one hand they contributed to cleavages within the Party, but on the other hand they also created conditions for its later consolidation and new self-confidence. The initial reformist strategy inclined roughly to the ideas of the Social Democratic Party and sought to win the maximum number of votes and ultimately a share in government. It was supported by the film-maker and chairman of the Party, Jiří Svoboda (b. 1945) from 1990 to 1993,but was gradually superseded by the strategy of what one Czech expert on international relations, Vladimír Handl, has called the “left-wing retreat”, and what one British political scientist, Seán Hanley, calls “voter representation”, based on the strengthening of political-cultural identity and the emphasizing of communication between the rank-and-file and the leadership of the Party.As the author demonstrates, the idea of “coming to terms with the past” graduallyacquired a meaning amongst the Communists that was markedly different from the meaning it had for most Czechs. The pragmatism of the subsequent leader,Miroslav Grebeníček (b. 1947), to a certain extent attenuated, but did not solve, the fundamental dilemma faced by the Party, which consisted in the conflict between the “logic of the electoral struggle” and the “logic of voter representation”. The first trend after the downfall of the reformists in 1993 included, in particular, neo Communist theorists (like the political thinker Miloslav Ransdorf, b. 1953), who sought to formulate Socialist alternatives acceptable to most left-leaning Czechs.That also led them to attempt a more critical analysis of their own past than the majority of their rank-and-file members would have done. The second trend, the logic of voter representation, oriented to preserving and strengthening the strong identity of Party members and supporters, was linked with the continuing conservative majority of the rank-and-file represented by local activists, the Party press, and some members of the Party leadership. All of them preferred the programme of political and social populism. They tended to understand history as the “politics of history” – in other words, as a means to support their own identity and to resist the hostile environment outside the Party. For both trends in the Party, however,the challenge presented by anti-Communism – whether systemic or spontaneous –remained, to the end of the 1990's, an important, if not the most important, unifying motive. But it considerably limited their possibilities to raise sensitive questions about their own past and to hold a potentially critical debate.

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