• April 1953: setting up of Office for the Supervision of the Press• In the 1960s, system lost its ideological ardour• Censorship office abolished in June 1968• September 1968: Czech, Slovak Offices for Press and information created, but:• PRELIMINARY CENSORSHIP WAS NOT REINSTATED

Censorship before and after 1968:From the late 1950s and in the 1960s,

journalists could play cat and mouse with the censors

Antonín Máša: “In the 1960s, censorship was no longer ideological.”

After the Soviet invasion: individual journalists and editors-in-chief became responsible for what they published

Harsh new era after Soviet-led invasion:

Václav Havel: “Ominous new world appeared, ruthless, gloomy, Asiatic and hard.”

• Virulent, aggressive, ideologically extremist• Third raters were given power• They were aware their power was illegitimate and no one believed the regime’ s ideology any longer• The new rulers exercised power to excess

• Husák´s “normalisation” did not take off until two years after 1968, spring to summer 1970• Prior to that: Zprávy, Tribuna – “The Leninist Union of Youth” – viewed by majority society as doctrinaire and weird• As the result of the purges, their attitudes were forced on majority society

• The traditional fight between censor and writer/journalist ceased to exist• After the mass purges, there was no one to try to bypass the censor• The new writers were now more ideologically zealous than the censors

• Václav Žák: Extreme measures are always taken in the Czech community after a regime change• The majority accepted a modus vivendi with Husák´s regime “out of their sense of shame”

• The population accepted it without a murmur of dissent• The sacked reformers were isolated from mainstream society• The 1970 demographic change contributed? People with experience of interwar democracy left the public sphere by this time• No one was trying to outwit the censors, everyone had given up

• Paradox: The western media had a total information monopoly in Czechoslovakia from 1970 onwards.• People kept themselves informed, but did nothing• “No action is possible as long as the nation is a colony of Russia”• 1977: Charter 77 manifesto had 242 signatories; by 1989 their number had increased to 1886 (Czechoslovakia had 15 million inhabitants)

• The Nazis first to know that intellectuals were a danger to totalitarianism• Under Husák´s communism: intellectuals either shut up or was moved to a dissident ghetto• Lines of communication beween intellectual “head” of the nation and its body were cut

• From 1970 : the media ran emotional campaigns, for something or against something• Shrill ideological language blotted out public discourse• No one believed what was being said, not even those who were saying it• What mattered was that rituals were being carried out

• Igor Hájek, used to the 1960s: “A communist is a naive, slightly idealistic person, reformist, means well.”• Jan Čulík, having lived through the first seven years of Husák´s normalisation: “A communist is scum of the earth.”• The latter concept has survived in the Czech mainstream media.

• All reformist organisations (Czech Writers Union) disbanded in the early 1970s• Independent literary and cultural periodicals were banned• Hundreds of thousands of books removed from public libraries• 400 writers became non persons• Hundreds of thousands of academics, politicians, journalists lost their jobs

• The banned writers copied out their own books on the typewriter in up to 70 copies• Heyday of samizdat publishing in late 1970s and in 1980s• Works republished by Czech emigré publishers in the West (up to 2000 copies)

• No censorship issues – the work of dissidents was not published in Czechoslovakia• A few exceptions: writers in the grey zone: Text by Hrabal (expurgated by author), Jiří Šotola, Miroslav Holub, Jan Skácel• Nobel Prize laureate Jaroslav Seifert was taught in schools, but his latest work was suppressed

• Official media gave saturation coverage to Charter 77 manifesto in the first quarter of 1977• The whole nation was forced to sign an Anti-Charter 77 document (Havel´s current wife was among its signatories)• Why did famous actors near retirement age sign this?• In line with the tradition of customary “loyalty rallies” by the Czech cultural elites:YouTube - Národ sobe

• Was relatively small• The “headless body” of the Czech society developed a distinctive culture of subjugation• Typical features: conformism, consumerism, self-interest, avoidance of the public sphere and avoidance of politics• These values prevailed in Czechoslovakia after 1989, not the values of the dissident community

Major Zeman: a highly popular TV series

Highly popular: Re-interpretation of

postwar Czechoslovak history to show Stalinism in a favourable light

Treacherous intellectuals

Zeman: epitome of a true Czech and a communist

• There was no official censorship in Czechoslovakia after 1970• Those who suppressed ideas by spreading ideological jargon did this willingly, although they did not believe in what they wer doing• Czechoslovak population enthusiastically supporter the 1968 Prague Spring• Within two years of its defeat, it adjusted itself happily to the Husák postinvasion regime