How to Normalize Unfreedom: Lessons from Czechoslovakia after the Warsaw Pact Invasion

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine naturally evokes memories of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia 54 years ago. That invasion famously failed to bring the Prague Spring to an immediate end, thanks to the unified, passive resistance of Czechoslovak citizens, but by the invasion’s first anniversary a refined process of “normalization” had begun, in which citizens were pressured into renouncing their words and deeds from 1968, while many were purged from public life and dismissed from their places of employment. Though it is too early to predict what will happen in Ukraine, some form of “normalization” is a possibility. This talk will outline the five-step process by which “normalization” was achieved in Czechoslovakia, highlighting local-level patterns of “auto-normalization” and identifying techniques that may typify normalization processes generally. The talk will also emphasize how, despite normalization, Czechoslovak consciousness shifted permanently from the status quo ante; citizens for the next twenty years knew they were living a lie, and thus their experiences in 1968-69 could inspire their collective revolutionary action in 1989.

James Krapfl is an associate professor of European history at McGill University and the editor of Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue canadienne des slavistes. He is the award-winning author of Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture, and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989-1992, the co-editor (with Barbara J. Falk) of a critical reassessment of Václav Havel's Power of the Powerless, and the author of multiple articles and book chapters on revolution, dissent, and democratic culture in twentieth-century central and eastern Europe.

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