Late Communist Rule at the District Level

This volume is comprised of the papers that were presented at the seminar “Hierarchy as the Strength
and Weakness of Communist Rule”, which was held on 11–12 September 2003 at the Faculty of Social
Sciences of Charles University in Prague. The general purpose of the seminar was to reveal and interpret,
in so far as possible without misrepresentation or bias, the procedures on which communist
rule of society was based at the end of the 1980s. The papers delivered at the seminar and presented
here in this volume can be divided into three thematic groups. The first group is made up
of investigations into the methods and strategies of communist rule in general. This refers mainly
to the legal framework of this rule, how it fits in among the modern forms of government, which
can only with difficulty separate the political from the economic and which often feature all-encompassing
planning ambitions. This group of papers also covers the issue of the character of the
rules and orders in “really existing” socialism. The second group is made up of papers devoted to
analysing the form of rule at the highest level, the district level and the local level. The final and concluding
section is comprised of one paper dealing with the subject of communist rule and individual
and collective memory.