Velvet Revolutions: An Oral History of Czech Society by Miroslav Vaněk and Pavel Mücke (review)

One of the highlights of Czech writing on the recent past has been the oral history project conducted by Miroslav Vaněk, Pavel Mücke, and their teams of interviewers at the Institute of Contemporary History and at Charles University, in Prague. The project has collected the life stories of several dozen former Czechoslovak Communist Party functionaries and dissidents; of 300 "ordinary people" born in the 1935–1955 period; and of 100 students active in the 1989 revolution. Thousands of pages of transcription have been published in Czech, accompanied by several collections of interpretive essays. The book under review here offers a snapshot of the "ordinary" folk, from the generation that had to adapt in early adulthood to the post-1968 "normalization" and then in middle age to the post-1989 transition to capitalism.

The picture that emerges from these conversations is a splendid representation of the ambiguous collective memory of the Communist period and what followed it. Chapters on civil and political rights, family, friendships, school years, work, leisure, and perceptions of "them" (anyone who had power or privilege) brim with mixed emotions. Grievances and complaints are interwoven seamlessly with happier recollections of childhood, friends and holidays. Daily life is remembered as a manic grind, owing to the scarcity of goods, the demands of meeting the targets of the planned economy, and the frequency of moonlighting at second jobs to make more money, but somehow it still allowed for various forms of shirking, camaraderie, and fulfilment that capitalism would not. The post-Communist present is no less contradictory: opportunities and freedoms commingle with regrets and anxiety. To their credit, the authors do not attempt to smooth out these tensions but present them as a tangled whole, much as would arise from conversations with people in Western Europe or North America if asked to reflect on their experience of difficult decades such as the 1970s.

To specialists, much of this will undoubtedly be familiar. Anyone who has spent enough time in the Czech Republic has probably had conversations along these lines, and these curated snippets are no substitute for reading the full transcripts in all their richness. But the book would be an ideal, very human introduction to everyday life in the Communist period for anyone new to Cold War history, or even for Czechs and Slovaks too young to have their own memories of it. It could be neatly paired with Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More on the last Soviet generation, with the benefit of being written in a livelier and more accessible style than Yurchak's book.

Nonetheless, even specialists will find plenty of fresh details in these pages. I was struck by the recollection of people when traveling to the West for the first time that what they experienced most intensely was not consumer overload but "light shock"—the dazzling novelty of public spaces that were well lit (perhaps excessively so). In the section on marriage, the authors stress just how common it was—maybe half the time—for the bride to be already pregnant on the day of her wedding; in fact, the expectation was that if a couple got married they already had a child on the way. Emulating many bourgeois norms, the Communist state wanted children to be born within marriage, and the birth rate peaked in the mid-1970s. Only under capitalism after 1989 has there been a surge in births out of wedlock. The state invested remarkably little in childcare, despite its potential uses for political indoctrination, leaving preschoolers largely in the hands of their grandmothers. Divorce was rampant under socialism, but the interviewees do not blame this on anything specific to the regime; rather, they viewed it as a secular trend in all developed societies at the time (one of the "velvet revolutions" suggested by the book's title).

Much of the story is told with little...