1985–1995: The Anti-decade, Discommunism, and Tunneling the Memory

Although the term “contemporary history” is actually a contradiction, it refers mostly to the period of history that we lived in and that still directly affects us and our present. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent events leading to the collapse of the Eastern bloc are still a subject of speculation and re-interpretations that often lack a broader context. Such a context has a lot of parallel dimensions: a historical, geopolitical, social and media one, or a personal, family and local one (if we talk about the “history of the present”).

The very interpretation of the polarity between communist totalitarianism and the newly established democracy has become a political issue, dividing the society into two inappeasable camps. One camp advocates drawing a thick line between the past and the present and almost criminalization of the previous regime; the other one relativizes the harmful effects of communism and the party dictatorship or simply ignores it, referring to its alleged positives.

However, even historians debating totalitarianism have begun to break out of the “bipolar” concept of the battle between the good and the evil in the past decade that was shaped by the ethics of the dissent as the winning party and that impeded any deeper analysis of totalitarianism as a system of mutually balancing forces and movements. The younger generation of Czech historians (e.g. Michal Pullmann) works with the concepts of totalitarianism as a special social and cultural consensus that could exist only until the society, encouraged by Gorbachev’s efforts to innovate socialism, began to ask what socialism was and what people actually wanted from it. Liberalization, which gradually started in the mid-eighties, also brought more frequent signs of resistance or attempts to liberalize the fixed cadre system and a growing trend of questioning, criticising or even ridiculing the regime, often through official channels.

We decided to focus on the period between 1985 and 1995 and to use this deliberately illogically defined “anti-decade” to show the causes and consequences of what actually happened at the end of 1989 more broadly and in detail. During this anti-decade, media and their distribution methods underwent a radical change: we shifted from LPs and cassettes to CDs; directive television partly made way to democratic videos, computers became part of the mainstream and in 1992, Czechoslovakia was connected to the Internet. Black and white analogue photography (developed in bathrooms at home even in the 1980s) was replaced with automated photo labs only to be followed by the early onset of digital photography. The withdrawal of photography as the main news media was symbolically topped off with its 150th anniversary, accompanied by a rich exhibition programme.

The second half of the 1980s – that we can be provisionally call “discommunism” – was more and more influenced by Western pop culture and the market economy. If Western Europe in the 1970s was officially an enemy and unofficially a distant paradise somewhere behind the Wall, in the 1980s, the regime openly admitted its effort to catch up with the West and draw level with it. During the so-called normalization and due to the increasingly weaker ideological support, the communist regime from below tried to encourage consumerism to mitigate the political pressure, but it ended up in a trap since the West consumerism became the prototype of socialist success. The ideology faded and the economy was insufficient. Czechoslovak socialism of the late 1980s gradually embraced the outward signs of Western pop culture and consumerism, and people automatically and uncritically adored anything “from the West”. The revolutionary slogan “Back to Europe” was then a logical continuation of that ever-growing schism between the West and the East.

In the 1980s, the Czechs had this (almost childishly naive) “socialist utopia” that, putting aside extreme political and professional (or tourist) limits, allowed people to live relatively undisturbed lives, independent of and distant from any historical logic. The “end of history”, as described by Francis Fukuyama, came in an absurd Marxist version. The contradiction between the everyday individual memory and the heroizing concept of “great history” is discussed even today. The absurdity of “non-historicity” of most of Czech post-war history inevitably leads to frustration, similar to that experienced by released prisoners or hostages.

The 1990s brought not only political and cultural freedom, but also the absence of fixed rules that allowed things now impossible, from crime to utopian (and often confused ) cultural and social visions. The revival of racist and nationalist sentiments led to the split of Czechoslovakia into two separate states, which, however, proved beneficial for both the parties. 

During the anti-decade, we actually experienced something of a rapid tunnel transit from one era to another. The notorious “tunnelling” – an economic symptom of the 1990s and one of the few global terms of Czech origin – took place on the plane of national memory where the issues of the regime ethics and personal guilt are pushed away by consumerism and market efficiency. Our memory is being tunnelled even today. Currently, we can witness strong extremization of views on the totalitarian past: on the one hand, it is simplified as pure evil; on the other hand, it is relativized or completely ignored. Yet we do need to understand the proportions and rules of the social consensus that gradually changed from one regime to another to deal with our own history and the foundations of democracy – to understand its pitfalls and weaknesses.

Even during this anti-decade of political and social changes, we have experienced many formative moments that prove that politics and happiness have little in common. Totalitarianism can never be fully (figuratively and literally) seen from the outside. The existence of multiple, parallel histories and their public and private planes is one of the elementary frames of reference for understanding of the archaeology of the present.

The “anti-decade” of the end of communism and the beginning of capitalism is still largely an untouched territory, yet its canon is all around us, still not fully expressed. In the context of the great “contemporary history”, we can also think about the subjectivity of its perception, the family, the nation, and self-determination that we slowly and gently, often apologetic to ourselves, adjust. But above all, it is necessary to think about the (gradually lost) euphoria, about the changes, and about history in motion.

Text | Pavel Vančát

IMAGES CAPTIONS

1 | Karel Cudlín, Prague, 1989
2 | The exhibition catalog, 150 years of Photography, Prague, 1989
3 | Screenshot, ING, 1985, directed by Tomáš Vorel