Vítězové? Poražení? I.+II. díl [Victors? Vanquished? 2 volumes]
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Miroslav Vaněk, Pavel Urbášek (eds), Praha, Prostor 2005, 1970 p.
The two-volume study Victors? Vanquished? presents a selection of 50 exemplary interviews chosen from a total of 120 recorded biographical narrations of former dissidents and communist officials. The first volume consists of 30 interviews with former Czechoslovak dissidents who participated in the opposition to various extents and at various levels; the second volume comprises 20 narrations from pre-November Czechoslovak Communist Party functionaries from the level of the district council all the way up to the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CCP.
The interviews were conducted by researchers of the Institute of Contemporary History using oral history methodology. Not only do these interviews enrich our knowledge of the normalization period, they also enable us to peer into the lives and experiences of people who, in some way, influenced that era or took part in forming it. Readers can create for themselves a three-dimensional and, at the same time, non-textbook view of our recent history because they can confront the experiences captured in the narratives of dozens of actors.
On the one side, we find the narrations of former dissidents such as Petr Oslzlý, Václav Malý, Mikuláš Huba, František Stárek, Petr Uhl, Vladimír Hučín, Václav Havel and many others; on the other side, we find the stories of former communist officials, including Jindřich Poledník, Rudolf Hegenbart, Miloš Jakeš, Miroslav Štěpán, Zdeněk Hoření, and Jaroslav Čejka.
Both historians and the general public have the opportunity to contemplate the authentic narratives of a wide range of people of various ages who came from both the center and the regions, including those who were famous and those for whom this project presented the first possibility to tell their life story. The biographical interviews do not focus only on historical events or on party, political or dissident activities, they also present us with authentic life stories that are sometimes very intense and touching, sometimes ordinary, and, at times, in spite of attempts at positive self-representation or "autostylizace", repulsive. The interviews also record the narrators’ social and family environment and their leisure activities and hobbies, in an effort to give “life” to otherwise empty words such as “communist official” and “dissident”.
This book, which was intentionally given the ambiguous title Victors? Vanquished?, fills a gap in history which is not possible to reconstruct on the basis of written sources. It is intended not only for those who lived through the period, but also for young readers, who are given a chance to reflect upon the public and personal images of those who provided us with their narrations and to put the finishing touches on their own picture of the historical period in question.
