Rozpaky nad výkladem komunistické diktatury. Kritické poznámky k projektu „Socialismus jako myšlenkový svět“
Baffled by an Interpretation of the Communist Dictatorship: Critical Remarks on the ‘Socialism as Sinnwelt’ Project

Summary/Abstract: The author criticizes some of the theoretical starting points, published results, and ideas of the international research project called ‘Socialism as Sinnwelt’, as they were presented in several articles of the special issue of Soudobé dějiny, vol. 19 (2012), no. 2, and in a few other publications. The project was run by the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam and the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague, with the participation of the Czech historians Pavel Kolář, Michal Kopeček, Michal Pullmann, and Matěj Spurný, together with scholars from other countries. The author briefly recapitulates the basic ideas with which the project participants approach the interpretation of the Communist or, to use their term, Socialist dictatorship; he lists criticism of the project, which has appeared both in specialist Czech periodicals and in the Press; and he puts this new view of recent history into the context of the development of Czech historiography since the Changes beginning in November 1989. He states that this attempt at an alternative interpretation of the Communist past is a reaction to the ‘traditional’ interpretations in earlier works by Czech historians, which had put the emphasis mainly on the institutions of power, the machinery of repression, and the use of force by the Communist rulers, or on resistance to them. This project, drawing inspiration particularly from approaches taken by German social scientists conducting research on everyday life, refuses, by contrast, to conceive of the Communist dictatorship as an allegedly omnipotent regime on the one hand with a powerless public on the other, and to understand its character the proponents of this project think it is essential to comprehend the wide range of relationships between the ruling and the ruled in their everyday dimensions, in all their confusion and equivocation; they seek the explanation for the duration and stability of the Communist dictatorship in forms of social consensus, the ways the public participated in the dictatorship, and in the ways its legitimacy was renewed. The historians who use these approaches are, according to author, revisionists, because they seek to provide new interpretations to substitute for, rather than only to add to or expand, earlier ones, for they argue that the earlier interpretations are burdened with the legacy of outmoded theories of totalitarianism.

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