Customer Reviews

The Restoration of Order: The Normalization of Czechoslovakia

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

People read George Orwell's "1984" to imagine the kind of inhuman state where individuals don't matter and the state's right to control all is paramount. Orwell's "1984" is fiction. Milan Simecka, a Czechoslovak dissident writing in the early 1980's explains for history what happened in Czechoslovakia following the people's attempt to "put a human face" on socialism.

How was the totalitarian country able to re-institute a Stalinist-style state without violence after the Prague Spring in 1968? How did the government eliminate dissent in less than two years? In chilling detail, Simecka shows how the State used it's power over people's income, jobs, friendships, even their children's future to control each citizen's every move.

I recommend this book for every reader of any country who wants to understand the communist period. I think it would be especially useful for every Czech and Slovak high school student (this would be a superb title for required secondary school reading) to understand the choices their parents and grandparents had to make to survive.

For most Czechs and Slovaks the Prague Spring was an exciting experiment in socialist democracy. For conservative apparatchiks throughout Eastern Europe, it represented a frightening slide into the politics of disorder and chaos - the bureaucrat's Babylon. The dramatic Soviet invasion of August 1968 was but the first step towards 'normalization' - the restoration of order.

This process, which was begun in 1969, involved one of the most extensive and political purges ever undertaken in post-war Eastern Europe. Having experienced their methods himself, Milan Simecka has been able to disect the work of the 'normalizers' as they single-mindedly eradicated the last traces of independent thinking from the Party and coordinated a ruthless onslaught against the cultural intelligensia. Simecka's account will not only be of use to students of Czechoslovakia; it also invites comparison with Poland and other East European countries, focusing as it does on the relationship between state and intelligensia.

For the English edition, Zdenek Mlynar, author of Night Frost in Prague and the highest ranking Czechoslavak Communist Party official to emigrate to the West, has written a special introduction.
--- from book's back cover