Perceptions of Society in Communist Europe

Regime Archives and Popular Opinion

Muriel Blaive, Muriel Blaive

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350051737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Drawing on archival sources from Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, Romania and Bulgaria, Perceptions of Society in Communist Europe considers whether and to what extent communist regimes cared about popular opinion, how they obtained their information, and how it helped them implement and maintain their rule. Contrary to popular belief, communist regimes sought to legitimise their domination with minimal resort to violence in order to maintain their everyday power. This entailed a permanent negotiation process between the rulers and the ruled, with public approval of governmental policies becoming key to their success. By analysing topics such as a Stalinist musical in Czechoslovakia, workers' letters to the leadership in Romania, children's television in Poland and the figure of the secret agent in contemporary culture, as well as many more besides, Muriel Blaive and the contributors demonstrate the potential of social history to deconstruct parochial national perceptions of communism. This cutting-edge volume is a vital resource for academics, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates studying East-Central European history, Stalinism and comparative communism.

Part One

From Post-War to Stalinism

1

Secret Agents: Reassessing the Agency of Radio Listeners in Czechoslovakia (1945–1953)

Rosamund Johnston

‘Eavesdropping, censorship, recording, and surveillance are weapons of power’,¹ writes Jacques Attali in his analysis of the political economy of music. ‘At the heart of this apparatus’,² he continues, is ‘the technology of listening in on, ordering, transmitting, and recording noise’.³ In Czechoslovakia in the post-war and early communist period, Ministry of Information documents demonstrate how authorities experimented with every single one of Attali’s ‘weapons of power’, though not uncontested and not without a degree of self-doubt. Indeed, in attempting to differentiate themselves from the recent Nazi past, Czechoslovak officials tied themselves in knots controlling and patrolling their citizens’ listening practices.⁴

As well as techniques to maintain power, recorded sound and eavesdropping constitute for Attali ‘the fantasies of men in power’.⁵ And fantasies they most certainly were in post-war and early communist Czechoslovakia, marked by an acute shortage of tape recorders and nowhere near the official and technological capacity to detect every sound generated in and transmitted to Czechoslovak territory. In light of these shortcomings, the Czechoslovak authorities turned to negotiation with their listener-citizens. Through an analysis of the resultant bargaining between officials at the Ministry of Information and Czech and Slovak radio audiences, this chapter argues for a reappraisal of the agency of the allegedly ‘passive’ listener and complicates our understandings of domination practices in a nascent dictatorship. Radio listeners petitioned the Ministry of Information, using what they clearly understood to be legitimate and illegitimate listening practices, to extract concessions from officials.⁶ Focusing on the elite discourses contained in these documents, furthermore, does not ‘silence’ non-elites as David Hopkin has charged; instead, I argue that such ministerial sources can be read to understand the bargaining power and strategies of those surveyed.⁷

This chapter examines debates surrounding Czechs’ and Slovaks’ radio listening habits in documents from the Ministry of Information between 1945 and 1953.⁸ I argue first for an understanding of listeners as social agents, rather than passive recipients of sound, the etymologically related Czech terms poslouchání (listening) and odposlouchávání (eavesdropping) illustrating a repertoire of listening techniques historically available to the active listener. The chapter then explores the listening environment in Czechoslovakia during the post-war and early communist period. What was available to listen to, where, and when? Next, I turn to how listeners portrayed themselves and were presented in letters written to the ministry. These sources expose an official dilemma of whether to acknowledge, or not, the phenomenon of Western radio listening in Czechoslovakia during this period. Finally, I turn to representations, including self-representations, of the eavesdropper: debates surrounding the naming of the monitoring service and foreign radio transcripts evince the unease of those eavesdropping – as well as their clear technological advantage over the ordinary listener.

Eavesdropping versus listening: How audiences positioned themselves in political space

These reflections upon the agency of radio listeners in early Cold War Czechoslovakia were spurred by the recollections of one Polish radio listener, Ireneusz Haczewski, cited by historian Paweł Machcewicz in his monograph on Radio Free Europe’s reception in Poland. Of his youth in Lublin in the 1950s, Haczewski recalled:

A Phillips radio was one of the first pieces of furniture my father bought. I can remember our covered windows, the volume turned down low since we knew there were people who walked around outside and eavesdropped. The whole family huddled around this radio, as everyone tried to catch the words over the rattle of the jamming machine.⁹

In the scene depicted by Haczewski, his family listened to the radio, while state security informants eavesdropped outside.¹⁰ But what was the essence of the distinction which Haczewski drew between eavesdropping and listening? The answer, in a word, was legitimacy. According to Haczewski, it was legitimate to tune into Radio Free Europe in one’s own home and illegitimate to listen into that.¹¹ Poland’s legal code in the 1950s begged to differ; it refuted the legitimacy of listening to Western radio programming,¹² but not the legitimacy of monitoring such behaviour and denouncing it.

In both instances of listening, a measure of secrecy remained essential. Haczewski’s family hushed the volume of their radio set and covered their windows to avoid detection, while eavesdroppers had to conceal themselves in order to catch the Haczewski family in the act. Both parties had to pretend they were not listening, while operating on the assumption that the other one was. Both of the parties concerned were thus secret agents.

While the category of passive listener has long been a trope of linguists, and indeed the communications theorists behind Radio Free Europe’s establishment,¹³ this dichotomy between listening and eavesdropping (poslouchání and odposlouchávání) presents a good example of the political stance of the active listener at any given time. Whether one listened or eavesdropped depended on context and company. Puzzling out what constituted listening versus eavesdropping (and to whom) in the post-war and early communist years in Czechoslovakia furthermore complicates our understanding of the dynamics of power in a period frequently characterized as totalitarian in its forms of governance.¹⁴

The question of the sources

An analysis of radio listening in Cold War Czechoslovakia outlines the limits to surveillance. Despite jamming and other attempts to deter Western radio listening, successive Czechoslovak governments could not control the diffusion of foreign radio broadcasts on their territory. As a consequence, listening practices were negotiated between audiences and authorities. Surveillance is often discussed in terms of seeing;¹⁵ this view is not so much wrong as it is partial. A study of aural forms of surveillance, which takes early communist radio as its central point of reference, enriches our understanding of the practice’s mechanisms: radio renders audible the uneven ways in which power and surveillance were implemented in Central Europe during this period.¹⁶ Surveillance staff did not live in isolation; on the contrary, they navigated the same dilemmas, rules and structures of secrecy as those they surveyed.

The sources used here date from 1945 until the demise of the Ministry of Information in 1953. Of course, the communist takeover happened in 1948 in Czechoslovakia, and so, at the state level, I am analysing sources generated under two different regimes. It is methodologically profitable, however, to understand communism as a regime that established itself institution by institution in Czechoslovakia, rather than overnight with the sudden resignation of non-communist coalition ministers in February 1948. Indeed, from the very first days of the Third Czechoslovak Republic in 1945, both the Ministry of Information and Czechoslovak Radio, which answered to the former, were firmly in the hands of the Czechoslovak communists, with party luminaries Václav Kopecký and Bohuslav Laštovička at their helms, and employees with ‘rightist sympathies’ promptly purged from both.¹⁷ As historian Bradley Abrams has argued, ‘the events of the hectic days of February 1948’¹⁸ and political crisis have been overemphasized by Western scholars of Czechoslovakia. Consequently, it has been overlooked that the ‘general atmosphere and charged political and social realities of the postwar era’¹⁹ were incremental and sustained, reaching even beyond the communist seizure of power.

Rather than locating ‘revolutionary changes’²⁰ in the events of February 1948, the sources I examine posit a revolution taking place on 5 May 1945 and unfolding over the years that followed. Ministry of Information documents, furthermore, display an extraordinary continuity of language and hostility to Western radio broadcasting into Czechoslovakia throughout the period 1945–1953. I argue, therefore, that it is relevant to emphasize the continuity of documents produced by the organizations studied here over the dramatic political changes taking place at the time of their creation. I opened with a Polish example rather than a Czechoslovak one, but it was not just the Haczewski family teasing out the difference between listening and eavesdropping at the period – Czech and Slovak radio broadcasters and the highest echelons of the Czechoslovak government were as well.

The listening environment in Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1953

Radio historian Eva Ješutová contextualizes the importance of the medium of radio in Czechoslovakia at the beginning of the Third Republic,²¹ suggesting that ‘the number of [state broadcaster Czechoslovak Radio’s] listeners was higher than the number of those who read the daily press. On May 1, 1945, the authorities registered 1,083,208 radio license payers; by the end of 1948, this number had doubled (to 2,108,000)’.²² The cost and size of contemporary radio receivers meant that one household would, in all likelihood, have only one set. Family members would have to reach a consensus on what to listen to, and listen together. We thus have to add to the millions of license payers many more who listened together with them to those same receivers. Oral history likewise suggests that group listening outside of the home was still common,²³ and Ministry of Information documents show that radio was broadcast and listened to collectively in factories.²⁴

There were two Czechoslovak Radio stations with national coverage (Prague I and Prague II), as well as numerous regional stations (in particular in Czechoslovakia’s strategically important border zones). As journalist and memoirist Josef Josten writes, stations broadcasting from outside of Czechoslovakia could be received by Czechoslovak transmitters as well.²⁵ The BBC, with its wartime prestige, broadcast in Czech and Slovak from London: Josten suggests that Czechs and Slovaks followed the station’s English-language programming ‘with almost religious fervour’²⁶ at the time of the communist takeover in February 1948. American Forces Network broadcast from Bavaria, and was also picked up by listeners in Czechoslovakia, as were Voice of America (broadcasting in Czech and Slovak), Radio Vatican, Radio Vienna and Radio Luxemburg.²⁷ In 1951, Radio Free Europe programming in Czech and Slovak elbowed its way onto the airwaves, quickly becoming a thorn in the flesh of Czechoslovak government officials, not least Information Minister Václav Kopecký.²⁸

In listener polling conducted by the Ministry of Information both during the Third Republic and following the 1948 takeover, listeners invoked foreign stations as examples for, and ways to leverage, the state broadcaster. One listener petitioned the ministry in 1945 for more ‘reports delivered naturally, like they are in the West’.²⁹ And post-coup, in October 1948, a listener told the Ministry of Information: ‘Believe me, I’m always somewhat ashamed when I catch a foreign station (for example Vienna or Budapest) and I hear lots of beautiful arias from our operas, while here amateur brass music [kutálka] prevails.’³⁰ In December 1948, a third listener complained that ‘a lot of us get up [early] and so we have to listen to foreign stations’³¹ (as state broadcaster Czechoslovak Radio’s programming only began at six o’clock in the morning). From polling, then, we can infer that a range of foreign stations in a number of foreign languages were audible to Czech and Slovak listeners, and also, in late 1940s Czechoslovakia, citizens actively discussed listening to foreign radio (perhaps using an appropriate language of shame or regret) in order to extract what they wanted from state broadcaster Czechoslovak Radio (in these instances, less brass music on air or programming at an earlier hour).

How should historians approach polling conducted in a nascent dictatorship? Czechs and Slovaks signed up to submit their opinions on radio output in regular written form to the Ministry of Information, having been encouraged to do so through rad...