Censorship in Czech and Hungarian Academic Publishing, 1969-89

Snakes and Ladders

Libora Oates-Indruchová

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350253155
• eBook ISBN: 9781350106666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

How did writers convey ideas under the politically repressive conditions of state socialism? Did the perennial strategies to outwit the censors foster creativity or did unintentional self-censorship lead to the detriment of thought? Drawing on oral history and primary source material from the Editorial Board of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and state science policy documents, Libora Oates-Indruchová explores to what extent scholarly publishing in state-socialist Czechoslovakia and Hungary was affected by censorship and how writers responded to intellectual un-freedom. Divided into four main parts looking at the institutional context of censorship, the full trajectory of a manuscript from idea to publication, the author and their relationship to the text and language, this book provides a fascinating insight into the ambivalent beneficial and detrimental effects of censorship on scholarly work from the Prague Spring of 1968 to the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Censorship in Czech and Hungarian Academic Publishing, 1969-89 also brings the historical censorship of state-socialism into the present, reflecting on the cultural significance of scholarly publishing in the light of current debates on the neoliberal academia and the future of the humanities.

1

Introduction

The annus mirabilis of 1989 brought an end to the communist surveillance of creative expression, media and knowledge production, although not all of the overseeing structures were dismantled immediately and some have perhaps never even been challenged. Fairly strict measures and legislation applied to the media and also to art in all of the countries of the former Eastern Bloc throughout the period of the communist rule. The production of knowledge, however, was not subjected to ideological restrictions in the same measure. Official censoring bodies overseeing science and scholarship existed only in some countries some of the time and were replaced by elaborate systems of negotiations and self-censorship at other times. Social sciences and humanities were placed in the ‘ideological sphere’ according to orthodox Marxist categorization and therefore more closely watched than sciences (Merton [1945] 1973). Yet, research institutes and university departments produced wagonloads of scholarly publications in all or at least most of the then existing disciplines. The argument that all that was worthless junk produced by stooges of communist ideology will not stand. It would imply that whole disciplines, research units and university departments would have to disappear overnight, unless they were filled by new personnel from ‘the West’ (which is what happened to a large degree in East Germany) or from the ranks of those who were educated in clandestine seminars on contemporary scholarly discussions. As to the latter, there were definitely such scholars, but the fact of the matter is that many – if not most – of the people teaching at universities and publishing scholarly work before 1989 continued to do so afterwards. Perhaps even more importantly, they produced cohorts of students who have peopled their disciplines in their home countries – and sometimes abroad – since. Instead of dismissing the knowledge produced under state socialism, we need to take it seriously and allow the authors, the researchers and the university lecturers, professional allegiance that came before loyalty to the Communist Party if they were members, and agency if they were not.

What was the life course of a thought under the politically repressive conditions of state socialism? What did the ‘family’ and social life of thoughts look like? Were thoughts perhaps communicated in a code shared by authors and their readers but inaccessible to censors? These are the questions this book explores: the rounds of permissions and other hoops through which a thought had to progress on its way from an author or a community of peers, through a publishing house, to book reviews; the handling of texts by their authors and in the contexts of scholarly institutions and communities; and how the scholars thought they communicated their ideas to readers.

The origins of this project go back to the late 1990s when I interviewed informally a former professor of mine in Prague to get help with collecting material for a chapter of my doctoral thesis that dealt with some Czech undergraduate textbooks written in the 1980s. I was trying to explain to the British audience, for whom the thesis was written, how the state-socialist ideology interfered in those texts (Oates-Indruchová 2003). I would not need this explanation for a Czech audience, everybody – or so I believed – would understand, because it was common knowledge; but the British needed printed evidence. I went first to my undergraduate faculty library that should have held plenty of textbooks and documents explaining the ideological grounds of the subject area about which I was writing. I ordered a dozen or so publications from the ancient card catalogue. They all boasted titles such as Communist Education for the Teachers of … , Collected Documents of the Communist Party toward the Further Development of … , The Resolutions of the XIVth Communist Party Congress and … or Ideological Principles of the Methodology of …

The next day I came to collect my ‘catch’. The librarian handed the order slips back to me saying, ‘I am sorry but none of these are available.’

Incredulous, I asked, ‘Are you saying that they have become such popular reading that they are all out? Every one of the multiple copies?’

After a moment of – embarrassed, I wanted to believe – hesitation, he responded, ‘No, the head librarian decided that these books were to be destroyed, because they were no longer needed. You see, they have no scholarly value.’

No doubt the head librarian’s destructive zeal was motivated by a desire to purge the library of the books that were considered empty verbiage by generations of students and teachers, and who only read them because they were required reading in ideological courses. She probably did not realize that by this act she was also removing evidence of the ideological manipulation of Czech social sciences and education. The librarian at the counter saw my dismay and advised me to consult the National Library, which should hold one copy of all of these publications through legal deposit. I went – and drew a blank. These documents were all internal prints of that particular faculty, grey literature, and as such, were not kept in the National Library. They were gone.

And that is how I came to interview my former professor, let’s call him Professor Horn. Not only did he not turn me out, but he wanted to talk and share his experience. He supplied me with the information I needed for the thesis chapter on the presence of the state-socialist ideology in textbooks, and then opened other questions – those that motivated the research leading to this book.

The question that triggered further questions in our conversation concerned the interweaving of the personal and the political: if the second-wave feminists declared that ‘personal is political’, during late state socialism in Czechoslovakia the political was always also personal.¹ Professor Horn himself was not able to say to what extent the harassment he received concerning his publications had to do with his person or with his subject matter. By association, he followed up with an example of how personal relations could also mitigate the ideological influence: ‘We were writing an encyclopaedia and my boss insisted that we had to write an entry on the contribution of communism. Neither I, nor the editor, wanted to have anything to do with that entry. So, what did we do? We invited my boss to a pub, ordered drinks, and after a couple of those, she – the editor – said to him, “Honza, we don’t give a shit about that entry.” And that was the end of that.’

What was the relative power of ‘the boss’ at the department and ‘the editor’ at the publishing house? And where was the author? As to the latter, Professor Horn added still more complexity: ‘When I wrote the history of one nineteenth-century Czech cultural movement, some passages in the published version were written by my boss, because I would have never written them in that way. If anybody reads that today they must think I am some Red-minded idiot.’

‘Why did you agree with the publication?’ I asked – naïvely, as it immediately became clear, for he answered simply, ‘He was my boss and he told me to submit a manuscript.’

‘But you had to give the final approval, you were the author, right? Or was he printed in the book as a co-author?’

‘No to both questions. My approval and my being the author had nothing to do with it. He asked to read everything his staff members wanted to publish and made his decision about the suitability of the material. If he thought my work ought to be published, but required changes, that was “the law” and I had no say over whether I wanted to see it in print with his additions or not.’

Professor Horn just demolished my idea of the author with this statement – or at least a belief in some minimal autonomy of the creative process. Moreover, if one generally agrees with Pierre Macherey that the ideologies that govern the writer as a subject make it into her or his texts unknowingly, despite honest attempts at independent thought (Macherey 1978), Professor Horn’s experience stood this theory on its head in the authoritarian conditions of state socialism. There, the official ideology asserted itself blatantly and consciously into what it allowed to be published. It happened in an act of manipulative creation that is familiar even today to spin doctors in public relations agencies: combining censorship, a restrictive action, with propaganda, a prescriptive action.

Professor Horn’s revelation presented questions that concerned the author as much as the reader. How did the authors personally relate to their texts, what strategies did they have to employ to minimize the external ideological interference with the text? And where did all this leave the readers? Did they suspect that the author was not necessarily the one printed on the book cover, and did it change in any way the reading process? Did the reader perhaps approach a book published under state socialism with some sort of virtual reality glasses, which gave the text its ‘true’ shape? With a bow to reception theory, one must acknowledge the impossibility of any search of a ‘true shape’ of any text. Nevertheless, one can try and reconstruct the strategies the authors as creators employed to convey their ideas to the readers and, in turn, the authors as readers employed to learn what they wanted to learn in the state-socialist environment. Moral dilemmas challenged the authors along the way: to withdraw into silence or to stay and speak, albeit with tongues tied by authority?²

Censorship in the Eastern Bloc

Even if we take only the later period of state socialism (Kádár or Ceaușescu years, period after the Prague Spring) rather than the whole era, we will find that scholarly publishing differed quite significantly in its relation to censorship across the Eastern Bloc. Some countries, such as Poland, had a formal censoring body, but small-circulation scholarly publications were expressly permitted greater freedoms than publications intended for public consumption (Schöpflin 1983: 32–102). Others, such as Czechoslovakia and Hungary, had no designated censoring institution regulating scholarship and science. The latter countries provide a better ground for the inquiry into intellectual communication and structures of text production under repressive conditions. Any restrictions on scholarly creation in countries without formalized censorship had to be ‘dispersed’ through various elements of the publishing process and ‘displaced’ away from the overseeing centre (Burt 1998: 17). A pattern of action following written rules of dos and don’ts and leading from one link to the next in the publishing chain was thus replaced with a pattern resulting from perception and anticipation. The perceptions were likely to be based on an idea of a system of state censorship that was countered by – possibly – a system of intellectual communication. The absence of a formal institution has methodological implications for the present research. Archival documentation is likely to be sparse and any ‘perceptions’ cannot be easily verified against a written record: the state that claimed it exercised no censorship was touchy about any suggestions of such practice and the word itself, a fact noted by researchers also on other state-socialist countries and beyond (Mihály 1993: 49; Coetzee 1996: 34; Klötzer and Lokatis 1999: 24; Dąbrowski 2017: 214).³

The element of perception is strongly represented in the pre-1989 works on censorship published either outside of the Eastern Bloc or in samizdat. They relied on testimonies of exiles or dissident and blacklisted authors giving accounts of their own experiences with censorship (Dewhirst and Farrell 1973; Siniavski 1989; Zipser 1990a). Testimony was also the flagship genre of articles in the magazine Index on Censorship (Gruša 1982; Šiklová 1983; Voslensky 1986; Demszky 1989). Occasionally, documents detailing censoring practices were smuggled through the Iron Curtain and supplemented the authors’ perceptions with evidence from contemporary cultural policies, that is, with the perspective of the state. The so-called Black Book of Polish Censorship (Curry 1984) is an outstanding example of such a publication, and also George Schöpflin’s collection of documents mainly on media censorship in Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia (Schöpflin 1983). A surge of testimonies came out in the 1990s in the general a tmosphere of hunger for ‘witness accounts’ of state repressions. Lidia Vianu was the first to collect systematically such testimonies in 1991–2. Her book, Censorship in Romania, contains twenty-six edited interviews with literary critics, poets and prose writers of several generations about their experience with getting their work published during the Ceaușescu regime (Vianu 1998). The narrators’ detailed descriptions of the phases of the publishing process and the roles played by the various actors became a crucial inspiration for my project.

The opening of the archives in the 1990s stimulated document-based research of institutional processes (e.g. Wichner 1993; Tomášek 1994; Kaplan and Tomášek 1994; Kelly 1995; Lokatis 1996; Costabile-Heming 1997; Dobrenko 1997; Blium 1998; Šámal 2009; Romek 2010; Bock 2011). The researchers mined the archives for previously unknown details of institutional functioning, synthetized those into descriptions of censorship systems and proposed theoretical models of censorship. Reviewing the body of literature now, one finds that the details themselves did not bring any new conceptual information. All the pieces to construct models were available to researchers of censorship already in the sum of the perceptions articulated in the testimonials, which raises social interaction between the various actors into prominence. They rarely had access to the exact directives; they learned by doing and at least in the late phase of state socialism it is likely that together they also participated in the creation of the system of censorship and its practice.

Nevertheless, most of the testimonies or studies of documents focused on the repressive actions of institutions against the creative spirit and tried to build a taxonomy of state-socialist censorship.⁴ The Hungarian blacklisted writer György Konrád, writing in 1983, considered censorship during the Stalinist period ‘positive, aggressive’ in contrast to the ‘negative and defensive’ kind of the 1980s (Konrád 1983: 449): ‘At that time you were told what to say, now you’re only advised what not to say.’ The aim of this latter censorship that pervaded all state and social institutions was ‘to discourage people from thinking’ (Konrád 1983) and that made these ‘state-owned citizens’ who knew what not to say ‘predictable, transparent’ (Konrád 1983: 451). Another author, Richard A. Zipser, writing about literary censorship in the GDR in May 1989, distinguishes between self-censorship, editorial censorship (or sanfte Zensur, because it is mostly expressed as a ‘frien...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Epigcraph
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the translation
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The limits: Regulation of Czechoslovak scholarly life in policy documents
• Four Sheets of Stories: A visual metanarrative: ‘The beginnings’
• Dramatis personae
• 3 People and institutions: Surviving in normalized academia
• 4 The work: ‘Driving’ a manuscript on the highways and byways of state-socialist academic publishingThe work: ‘Driving’ a manuscript on the highways and byways of state-socialist academic publishing
• 5 The author: Censoring and authoring under state socialism
• 6 The language: Research topics, vocabulary, writing in code
• 7 The review: Loss of memory, the ghosts of academia past in the present
• Four Sheets of Stories: A visual metanarrative. ‘The ends’
• 8 Snakes and ladders: A theory of state-socialist censorship
• 9 Coda
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright