Stories Archive - Socialism Realised

Choose the angle from which you’d like to look at a given era. You can, for example, get closer to people in the past and witnesses still living today, or take a closer look at the specific features of the communist regimes in Europe. This option gives you a specific choice of perspectives that offer a basic overview of the past of the Eastern bloc.

Ideology is the main perspective we would like to explore here. The period clips and documents focus on journalism and news coverage representing the official, regime-approved interpretation of the events. The items illustrate the elementary principles in addition to the rhetoric of the communist ideology in Central Europe.
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Of all the perspectives we offer, memory is the most difficult one to grasp, as it presents the various forms of recollecting the socialist era. We include it here because the prominence of the debate about collective memory in the countries that shared the experience shows how important it is.
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From a variety of viewpoints of the socialist past, oppression is usually considered to be one of the main characteristics of the given period. We chose it as one of the axes, because although the situations presented here never concerned the majority of society, human rights violations were characteristic of the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, thus putting them side by side with the other iliberal, non-democratic regimes of the world.
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This axis connects all the other perspectives. It does not attempt to cover one certain social phenomenon in its full scope; we selected examples that can transmit the personal and emotional experience of an individual face to face with ideology or repression.
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The content here is organized according to chronological theme. We have chosen elements that are key to the Czechoslovak communist past, but also speak to the similarities and differences among the individual communist regimes in Europe. We have divided some of the eras into multiple themes in order to create a more multi-dimensional picture of the era.

The Show Trials chapter includes materials regarding the first half of the 1950s, a period of consolidation in the Czechoslovak communist regime when it controlled the judiciary and eliminated its real and imagined opponents.
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The process of collectivisation is a specific form of the Stalinist modernisation in rural areas. Its essence was the demise of private family management and the creation of agricultural cooperatives and state farms.
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The Prague Spring is a unique period in the development of the Eastern bloc, when Czechoslovak society attempted to implement a programme of reform of the communist regime.
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In 1968, the armies of the Soviet Union, along with several other countries of the Eastern bloc, occupied Czechoslovakia. It is one of the examples of how the Soviet Union controlled and limited the autonomy of the communist countries.
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Normalisation is the name for the Late State Socialism in Czechoslovakia. This period was marked by strong political stability and the great paralysis of the public space, in which any politically oriented civic activities that were not in line with the official ideology essentially vanished.
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After the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the five Warsaw Pact countries in 1968, a regime known as the Normalisation regime was gradually created. The social liberalisation and political and cultural relaxation of the 1960s were gradually replaced with purges and protection.
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Over the course of 1989, the communist regimes in Europe started to collapse. Although these changes progressed more slowly in Czechoslovakia, the strengthening protests culminated in a student demonstration in November.
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