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Miroslav Vaněk: Victors? Vanquished?: political elites and dissidents in the years of so-called normalization (1968-1989) in Czechoslovakia. Biographical interviews.

Paper abstract:

This report is based on the results of the three-year research project which was carried out by a team of historians working at the Oral History Center at the Institute for Contemporary History in Prague. During this project, so far the only one of its kind in the post-communist countries, the research team collected about 120 interviews with representatives of the Communist regime as well as with dissidents who opposed the regime during the years 1968 -1989. This represents more than 450 hours of audio or video recording and almost 7,000 pages of transcription.

One of our main aims was to come to a deeper understanding of the studied period using oral history methods in collecting, publishing and interpreting the interviews, and simultaneously to adapt and develop oral history methods to the specific conditions in our country, where a number of historians have been skeptical of the oral history method itself.

Surprisingly enough, we found that a large percentage of the former functionaries we contacted were willing to give us an interview and expressed their unchanged political opinions quite openly. 

From the results of this research, we can highlight the fact that narrators from both groups spoke more freely about their political standpoints, functions or dissident activities than about their everyday lives, families, hobbies and friendships. It seems that among functionaries of various levels, friendly and collegial relations almost did not exist because of mutual distrust and individual career ambitions.