The classic socialist community: housing blocks in Chodov, Prague, taken by my girlfriend on her way to work |
Speaking to older Czechs, as I get the opportunity to do regularly, it is difficult to ignore a shared sense of sentimentality about life under the old regime. This sentimentality touches the pasts of most, though especially those - the majority in fact, statistically speaking - whose recent family history lies outside the capital. I am keen to stress the distinction between this common sentimentality, the sense of which is expressed in images of semi-rural towns and agricultural idylls, and a much angrier, explicitly political nostalgia which still fuels the Czech C.P. (currently the fourth largest in the Czech parliament). The political nostalgia of the 'older generation' (and the success of the C.P. is always accounted for in generational terms) is founded upon a vague sense of betrayal, and resembles (in form if not in content) West Europe's far-right. The nostalgists tend to be the overall losers of the marketization reforms of the 1990s - pensioners, the poor, manual labourers - whose social standing has plummeted relative to more flexible, accumulative and highly-skilled industrial sectors. The sentimentalists, by contrast, are often highly successful, and are of course under no illusions about the real character of the Czechoslovak socialist state.
A common concession, exhaled
half-guiltily, is:
"But, of course, we had communism
then."
The verb sits awkwardly there - like having a cold or a gammy knee; an affliction that
was lived with, made the best of despite its hampering burden. An
English-speaker would say We lived under communism,
unconsciously foregrounding the sense of subjugation. But there is something
clunkily apt about the Czech bluntness. Communism was, this phrasing
implies, mostly experienced as a dull, practical limitation.
Or more
euphemistically: "It was different then."
This sighing
acceptance of the 'bad past', of the historical crimes that comprise the backdrop of their lives, hasn't alienated people from more personal experiences. In the description of people dotted about in abundantly green parks, of caring for the local allotment, collecting mushrooms in the woods, and (only rarely) the 'plus
sides' of having fewer Asians around, one can sense a very profound
regret. A disappeared world occasionally makes itself felt, like a divorcee confiding their pleasure in married life's simple, predictable absurdities.
A student from
Ostrava, Czechoslovakia's once-booming industrial heart, gave me one
such confession. She's successful, pretty wealthy, intelligent and
brims with confidence - her 50s, I think, have been a kind of victory
lap, a chance to exploit her professional and intellectual talents to
the full. The years of communist moral compromise and post-communist,
indiscriminate opportunity hoarding have been kind to her. But when
she talks about Ostrava it is like the loss of innocence - in the
prelapsarian idyll, everyone young lived in Ostrava and made real
things with their hands. People looked after each other. There were a
thousand shops. There was respect and closeness between families. Yet it's obvious - she would never
'turn red'. She would never do anything that might suggest, even
symbolically, a desire for a re-run. But still she describes vividly,
with an acute clarity, Ostrva as it looks today - there are only old
people; it's a poor place. She doesn't look at me as she says this
but at the long fingers of her hands as they draw emphatic cuboid
shapes in the air. I can only imagine she is miming the rationalized
communist environment of low-rise housing blocks with blocky
courtyards and blocky bushes.
"Of course,
we had communism then."
She
doesn't moan for an instant, however, about post-89 price hikes or
political corruption or economic cronyism. Unemployment, yes; but
only in a distracted way. Of course, if pushed, like almost everyone
else, she will be clear in her condemnation of the selling-out of
working people, of the disenfranchisement and alienation and anomie
that run like a dull flame through Czech society today. She might,
like some, scoff in disbelief at the postcommunist naivety of the
Czechs, who started a million private businesses, only to be bought
out by those whose nomenclatura
or party status predisposed them to market dominance in the context
of a so-called 'return' of class (might this rather be termed the
return of the permissibility of 'being bourgeois'?) But, after all, her
sentimentality is classically pictorial, a figural arrangement
expressing some vanquished harmony, not a political stance.
When she talks
about her own experiences of living under communism, it is clear that
she had to fight for every inch of breathing space she had. She
graduated in law and earned less than a factory-hand. In Prague there
was no work but unemployment was illegal. Her father, a good
proletarian, could never reconcile with her one change of job. This
was, almost literally, a black stain on her character - her small ID
book was stamped with news of her change of employers, thus marking
her out for the suspicion of any petty official. She lived for years
in shared accommodation, the youngest of a group of women, the eldest
of whom was eighty and died alone in her bed in the hostel. She once
described the smell - the close proximity of uncared for and unwashed
old-age. Eventually she signed a lifetime contract with a company and
was allocated a flat of her own - until then, her sole motivation,
one worth signing oneself into virtual serfdom for.
Life - or at least
western-style expectations of it - only started for her amid the
shock and awe of the awakening Czechoslovak economy. But she shows no
nostalgia for that period of simultaneous enlargement and enclosure of
the very frame of life - when real 'freedom' for the first time
appeared (if only in the negative form of market competition). The
only condition of this new opportunity was that access to it had to
contract horizontally even as it hurtled upward. That
was a time of harsh lessons and necessary, if brutally imposed,
experience.
What accounts,
then, for her communist sentimentality? Indeed it's a wonder that her
generation, cynical of both the command economy and of the free market,
permit themselves this indulgence. Is it just a collective coping mechanism - as if by
making the very propaganda tropes of socialism (happy workers in
abundant fields) somehow 'internal' one can actually alienate the
trauma? Perhaps it partly functions that way, but I'm not convinced that this is all. Like all shared and much-talked about memories it
owes a great deal of its current appearance to fabrication. What is
felt lost today, to one degree or another by all who care to
remember, is not something present in "really existing
socialism" but something always-already absent from liberal
democratic capitalism.
Now,
if it is to be distinguished from its nostalgic
counterpart; that is, rescued from its rendering as the soppy shadow
of that more politically reactionary view, this sentimentality
should have its content mapped. So what is it then? Mostly an image of a displaced agricultural idyll, the merry working farm, semi-urbanised, sort of corporatist and unified, somehow balanced.
It regrets the same absence as a long line of English
arch-conservatives did in distinctly hierarchical form: that is
social solidarity, or some sense of common purpose, a driving motivational force that (even in its most benign manifestations) ultimately requires some coercive, paternal authority.
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