Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism by Jonathan Bolton (review)

Czech dissent, Jonathan Bolton argues in this ambitious and thoughtful book, needs rescuing not just from its detractors but from its eulogizers as well. Both sides portray the dissidents as an isolated, minute counter-elite, defined either in terms of human rights activism (“the Helsinki narrative”) or as theorists of civil society alternatives to the Communist systems (“the parallel polis narrative”), but neither perspective does justice to the complexity and diversity of dissent in Czechoslovakia. The problem has been exacerbated by the backshadowing often present in discussions of the impact of dissent in bringing down Communist rule, as these tend to assume that getting political results was a major motivating factor for the dissidents. This, Bolton shows, was not necessarily the case.

Bolton welcomes the recent trend to question the understanding of Communist rule under “normalization” as resting only on repression and popular apathy and to study everyday life and the complex negotiations of power and consent going on in various spheres. The “ordinary people narrative,” too, however, tends to stylize the dissidents as a small band of heroes (or, in Václav Klaus’s political exploitation of the trope, of mostly ex-Communist exhibitionists indulging in their imagined moral superiority) with no everyday of their own. This obscures the intersections between dissent and the rest of society and overlooks how dissidents persistently struggled with the painful question of how to judge and address the vast non-joining majority.

Dissent, Bolton suggests, must be studied as a cultural phenomenon in its own right, shaped by the specific conditions of Czechoslovakia in the 1970s. He therefore sets out to “recover that world, better to understand the texture of dissident life, its local practices, its vocabulary, and its obsessions” (p. 4). Based on comprehensive and varied source material, Bolton’s effort to recover that world (or, more accurately, reconstruct it) produces a meticulous investigation of how a heterogeneous group of Czech intellectuals came to converge around the Charter 77 Declaration and of how this nascent community came to define its identity and purpose for its surroundings and for itself. The account ends in 1980, a choice made to liberate the analysis from the shadow of 1989.

The result is an innovative, thought-provoking study that combines perceptive reinterpretations even of such well-digested texts as Václav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless” with solid factual historiography. Bolton expertly dismantles the myth of the “trial of the Plastic People,” frequently presented as a main catalyst for the drafting of Charter 77, and also shows when, how, and why that myth arose and caught on. Equally convincing is his description of the many contingent factors affecting the recruitment of potential Charter signatories in December 1976. Bolton has an astute eye for the concrete: what it took to draft a samizdat text and to get in contact with potential contributors and readers, the role of spouses and the distribution of labor within dissident “husband-and-wife-teams,” the locations of dissent, and the impact of surveillance, interrogations, and media smear campaigns. Such contextualization adds authority to his analyses of the many heated debates within the dissident community.

Charter signatories constantly discussed the meaning and purpose of their activity in the light of what Havel called the “cruel paradox” of dissent: the more some citizens stood up in defense of fellow citizens, the more they were labeled with a word separating them from these—hence also the ambivalence of Havel and others toward the term “dissident.” The discussions brought no consensus on what dissent meant or was to achieve, but keeping a public debate alive was, Bolton argues, valuable in its own right, and dissent’s ongoing commitment to articulating its own relationship to society at large gives it a different quality from other local manifestations of resistance to the regime. Historians may feel unfamiliar with Bolton’s emphasis on...