A few reflections on history, memory and democracy

24. 2. 2022 / Muriel Blaive

 

Václav Havel, in his essay Stories and Totalitarianism (1987) wrote: “Ideology, claiming to base its authority on history, becomes history's greatest enemy.” He spoke of course of the communist ideology. Today, it is anticommunism which claims to be based on the authority of history. It has an answer to everything and can never be faulted: the pre-1989 period was evil, and communism is to blame for everything, past and present. In this sense, anticommunism also functions like an ideology. So the real opposite of “communism” is not “anticommunism”: it is, as Havel correctly pointed out, history. History is doubts, debate, dissent. It is the inverted pole of ideology.

“Totalitarianism” or however one names the period between 1948 and 1989 in Czechoslovakia (communist dictatorship would be a better term) did leave traces. A vibrant testimony to the profound destruction of critical thinking by the four decades of communist rule is the continued societal urge to hear “the truth” from an established authority. I see the mission of ÚSTR in bringing the people who long for such a simplified world to progressively understand that the opposite of a dogma is not another dogma but a lengthy debate. No one holds “the historical truth”, nor should they. Democracy entails a pluralistic society that calls for the confrontation of many opinions, including on history.

In this context, the concept of totalitarianism started to lose currency in Germany already in 1993. It was replaced by an interrogation on “normality”, “agency”, “practices of domination”, “everyday experience of the dictatorship”, all concepts that denied the notion of total control from above and replaced with a questioning of the relationship between rulers and ruled, on the “borders of dictatorship” (Thomas Lindenberger). The Soviet historiography had known a similar trend – for instance Sheila Fitzpatrick requalified life under Stalinism as “ordinary lives” already in 2000.

Historians in other post-communist countries have routinely started to use the term “social contract” to describe the relationship between the regime and the population. They do not mean by this that some sort of concrete round table ever took place. It does not literally mean that people and the regime sat down together. It is, instead, a sociological notion. It refers to Václav Havel’s Letter to Dr Gustáv Husák (1975) and other essays. In Havel’s analysis, the regime exchanged the political passivity of the population against access to consumer goods and a relatively decent standard of living. It does not amount to denying that some people, indeed too many people, did suffer actual, personalised repression; it is only the starting point for a reflection on modern European society, on its ability to resist and its temptation to consent.

So how are we to study totalitarianism? I favour the Havelian concept of “autotalita” (The Power of the Powerless, 1978) that emphasises the notion of individual responsibility. One of my professors, Pierre Hassner (who grew up in communist Romania), used to say: “I am totalitarianism.” By this he, like Havel, meant that totalitarianism embodied a specific historical experience for each and everyone. Autotalita implies that everyone was a little responsible, if only because everyone pretended to agree with the regime even when they didn’t.

How do we deal with this past, then? Hassner quotes James Joyce: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake up.” But for some, he adds, it is the nightmare from which they are trying not to wake up. My project is for ÚSTR to be wide awake and to deconstruct how easy it was to lead a democratic society to a dictatorship and keep it there for four decades. My aim is that this can never happen again.

ÚSTR is a microcosm of communist society

The path to a historicized approach of the communist times is paved with obstacles and to essentialize history is surely not the solution. I will give an example of how twisted our vision can be if we decide in advance of research what to think of a society or of an institution, for instance if we essentialize Czech communist society as “suffering” rather than being “normal.” We could, for the sake of demonstration, claim that ÚSTR is a microcosm of the communist society it so vehemently purports to vilify. Among its personnel are nice people and vile people; there are competent people and incompetent people; there are people who were hired for the “right” political background and people who got there on their own merits.

There are the jealous types, the envious types, the denouncing types, the hard-working types, the honest types, the deceitful types, the showing-off types, and the painfully inadequate. There are people who are cowards, and people who are courageous. There are those who have an acute professional conscience, and those who couldn’t care less about doing good work. There are those who bully, those who are bullied, and those who pretend they don’t see anything. But there are only very few people ready to argue and defend an alternative view. One commodity that is generally in very short supply in this institute as in society is tolerance.

There is a considerable level of sexism, too. There are those who see women primarily as pretty objects, who should look nice and smile; and there are those, unfortunately less numerous, who think women are worth hiring as researchers and colleagues and being paid their fair worth. These few female researchers serve as virtue signaling, they are not the sign of a real will to change the situation. Such an exclusive male vision distorts research.

Like in the communist party, there is a long cohort of people who have been fired, forced to resign, or who left in disgust. Also like in the communist party, there is a long list of people who will do just that in the coming years.

Like the communist regime, ÚSTR is obsessed by numbers and statistics: so many articles, so many books, so many pages scanned, so many points collected at RIV, so many hours spent at work; and like in the communist regime, form is threatening to take precedence over substance. Quality of research produced is a stated objective, but quantity is better. The number of millions of archival pages scanned is perhaps the most absurd objective of all. It has apparently still occurred to no one to ask who is going to read these millions of pages, how equipped this public will be to interpret this material, and what social or historical purpose will this serve. The respective answers are: no one; not equipped at all; nothing. Do not misunderstand me: I greatly support keeping the archives open. But putting all the archives online might just not be the best investment. Educating the public would be a better one.

The institute has become a small ministry of its own, a bureaucratic factory whose employees have no idea what they stand for and where there is an unprecedented ratio of employees to researchers. I have seen employees who don’t have the first idea about what research is, what it is good for, how it works, why it is important for society and for human sciences, what they can do to help, and why they should even help. I have literally argued with personnel who can’t get the point of even applying for research grants, since we get our paychecks anyway. I have seen employees who do not care about deadlines and think it is ok to stay at home on the day the project must be handed in. I have fought with employees who couldn’t be bothered to do any little extra effort, even when I pointed out how we could save money to the institute and to the taxpayer by just changing our methods. Of course, I have also encountered extremely kind and open-minded employees, who were curious to know the purpose and the concrete translation of their work, and were absolutely willing to try new things. There should be more of them.

This is why my first priority inside ÚSTR would be to educate all these employees as to the purpose of the institute, to enchant their vision. Their work does have a purpose. This purpose is not just to get a job that they could get at any ministry, but to serve the public by contributing to building its democratic identity, based on a healthy attitude to its past. Their job is to help the researchers and educators do theirs for the benefit of the public. Their job is to help promoting debate and tolerance of opposing views.

The absence of a debate culture, or the naïve belief in “historical truth”

Like society in general, ÚSTR suffers from an absence of a debate culture – that I, as a Western foreigner, cannot help but interpret as a remnant of what I call the “communist mentality.” The absence of debating culture manifests itself in the absolute conviction of too many researchers that he or she is telling “the truth” and therefore only two types of answers are possible: “agreement” or “treason.” In this toxic tribalism, the verb “to disagree” does not seem to exist anymore. If one disagrees with a pundit, then this pundit is “not telling the truth” or is outright “lying.” Apparently, it is extremely difficult to say “I have a different point of view. I think you interpret the facts in a biased way. I think your bias lies in the fact that …” It is simply the notion of “different interpretation” that appears to be missing. As a result, society in general, including many ÚSTR historians, tend to have a warped notion of “historical truth.”

To imagine that there is a univocal “historical truth” is a naïve representation of history – one that was historically imposed upon society by the communist regime. More precisely, it used to be shared by every Western country. But after World War II, civic society developed in the West for the first time in history thanks to unparalleled conditions of economic growth and scientific progress. Critical thinking became an essential part of the curriculum of schoolchildren. It took two generations to educate citizens to have a more critical attitude towards their own history – even then, it is a progress which remains a volatile enough teaching, bound to be forgotten at every new crisis. In the meantime, Czech society, as all communist societies, continued to be assaulted by the communist regime and critical thinking remained the apanage of a very tiny minority: the dissidents.

As a result, the public in general and some ÚSTR historians, too, are not sufficiently aware of the necessity of historical contextualization, and thereby of historical methodology. I organized a methodological seminar for the ÚSTR researchers for one and a half years. It consisted in excellent presentations from the researchers I had invited (either from ÚSTR or from the outside.) It was followed by a “debate” that consisted in long monologues by a minority of ÚSTR researchers who are convinced to be the exclusive heralders of the “historical truth” and who seemed convinced that the degree of truth is best expressed by how loud one speaks. Only after that, and it was often too late since everyone was by then exhausted and/or exasperated, could a timid discussion begin. After months of this bullying technique, a researcher kindly told me in the ear (he was trying to be nice), “You know, we don’t need historical methodology.” There is no methodological seminar now, and there are in fact no more institute-wide research seminars at all, since the atmosphere was so poisonous that no constructive debate could ever take place. This is unprecedented for such a wide institute as ÚSTR and it is a terrible failure.

We do need historical methodology. This would therefore be my second priority: to educate the historians and the public about the necessity of contextualization and historical methodology. Archival documents do not in and of themselves tell “the truth.”

The question of the interpretation of the archives

What ÚSTR/ABS must do is to interpret these archives and to make them available to the wider public in a way that makes the past understandable to everyone, especially to the younger generations, who were not personally confronted with the question of collaboration with the secret police. A good institution must spend its resources on reading, analyzing, presenting, and explaining those files to the people.

In post-communist Europe, every institute of this kind started after 1989 with the same intent of documenting the extent of the persecution and suffering, which is a perfectly legitimate aim. East Germans needed to prove that they were not just cowards, they had not just enjoyed themselves; they had suffered, there was a dictatorship, they went to jail, they were persecuted, and it was morally extremely important for them to make that point, as it was for Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, and everyone else. What happened in all countries, however, was that little by little, the sources started to contradict the political and ideological intent that had presided to the very opening of these archives. It turned out within a few years that there had been a dictatorship and people acted under constraints for sure, but the dictatorship did not deprive them of all choices. Therefore, at some point, the human factor comes back. Some measure of freedom, internal freedom, did exist, people had a measure of choice – not everybody had to become a collaborator, for instance. This is where the historian’s role is crucial: he or she has to contextualize the “choices”, not condemn and bring judgments.

It is impossible to study repression without studying everyday life. We cannot analyze how people dealt with repression without seeing how they dealt with it on an everyday basis. That’s where the notion of everyday life is seriously misunderstood and abused for political purposes. To study everyday life has nothing to do with denying that there was repression. On the contrary, to study everyday life is to precisely deconstruct how repression worked. The alleged triviality of everyday life is an ideological argument, not a historical or methodological one. The secret police files are the best source to map out the extent of repression, and that includes showing how people internalized the notions of what was allowed or not allowed, forbidden or not forbidden, and what they could negotiate for themselves in terms of power relationships with the regime.

Police archives are not the only source, and no historian should base their entire analysis on this one source only; it shows the point of view of the StB only, it’s a top-down source that primarily shows us what the StB wanted us to see, which is not necessarily the same as what actually happened. It shows what StB officers had to report to their superiors and what they were expected to say. To give just one example, in the sources from 1956 in the StB files, there is not one single mention of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, although everyone knew about it, everyone talked about it. It was a serious source of concern for the authorities, but one will barely find a single mention of it in the StB archives. Historians and the public have to be aware that not everything is in the archives; it is not just a black and white story. The whole point of source criticism is to resist surrendering to such a vision by comparing sources. It would be very ill-advised to base any study on one source alone, without contextualization. Oral history, for instance, is an excellent point of comparison. There are also many other sources: the press, the foreign press, testimonies, literature. The bottom line is, we can only get a complete picture of any given period if we compare different kinds of sources.

Of course it is impossible to escape one’s own values and the context in which one is living, but a historian is expected to display more subtlety than by openly professing moral judgements. Moreover, to study anything else than “the horror”, the most repressive aspects of the totalitarian regimes, does not amount in any way to deny it. Christopher Browning, for instance, has argued in the preface of his famous volume Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland that the history of everyday life is no “evasion.” To describe the experience of ordinary people is not to “shift attention from the unparalleled horrors of the Nazi regime’s genocidal policies to the mundane aspects of life that continued relatively undisturbed.” One might describe the experience of everyday people all the while analyzing the “degree to which the criminal policies of the regime inescapably permeated everyday existence under the Nazis.” In other words, explaining is not justifying.

An unfulfilled sense of victimhood: how everyday life history can help

The real agenda of the people who participate in public discourse with their unreflected anticommunism, and who claim they want to hear “the historical truth”, is to be recognized as victims. A significant part of the country feels like a victim of communism and is demanding redress. Why? Not because of the past but because of the present; namely because the current post-communist regime is not perfect. Not everyone is rich and happy, not every voice counts, not everyone profited from the regime change, and too many people are struggling to even maintain a semblance of dignity in their everyday lives.

But how to even account for this past suffering? Political history is missing the point when describing the communist period. Political history is focused on events and personalities in power. But in the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, almost nothing “happened” and the communist leaders were anything but fascinating personalities. People were not executed for their political opinions anymore, or thrown in labor camps. Show trials were not staged anymore and no popular revolts took place. The slogan changed from the Stalinist “Who is not with us is against us” to the normalized “Who is not against us is with us.” People were not electrified on the Iron Curtain anymore but left for Yugoslavia on trade-union holidays. Does this lack of drama mean that people entirely stopped suffering from the communist rule? Is only spectacular repression worth remembering? Is low-key humiliation to be disregarded because it did not make headlines in the free world?

The answer is no, on the contrary. But only social and cultural history is equipped to describe the banal mediocrity of normalization. That is how everyday life history is useful: to account for the day to day, discreet poisoning of people’s lives by zealots and bullies who used the pretext of communist authority to exert their personal toxicity on the people around them. It is not about trivializing repression but, on the contrary, restituting it, making it more visible, analyzing it. The leaders at all levels of the normalization regime went almost entirely unpunished after 1989, and this is contributing to a general feeling of historical injustice. This is why it is crucial to find the words to express this frÚSTRation. Again, only socio-cultural history can do that. The injustices of the Stalinist era have hardly been redressed and to attain justice in this case is going to be a very difficult process, albeit perhaps not impossible (see my research project on transitional justice at ÚSTR.) But the small-scale, everyday humiliations people experienced under the regime of normalization from 1968 to 1989 are easier to document and this is another research priority I would set for ÚSTR.

Instead of, or at least: on top of, glorifying heroes of the resistance, the historians could bring the attention of the public to the lack of justice concerning communist criminals. If the individuals who poisoned the everyday life of the population under normalization could be singled out, many of whom are still alive, if the wider public was aware that something can be done and could exert some form of pressure, the justice system and the political elites might be more inclined to revisit the shameful lack of concern for elementary justice after 1989.

ÚSTR as an institute of national memory

ÚSTR fulfills the role of an institute of national memory, and this is why I would abandon its current name, which is much too politicized, and change it to the more neutral Institute of National Memory.

The function of public memory is to mediate the competing restatements of reality expressed by opposing parties. But so far there has been no symbolic language that would have the capacity to mediate both the popular loyalty to economic equality (that leaves a place that is not all negative concerning the memory of the communist past) and the official loyalty to a patriotic structure of resistance to communism. There is no unitary conceptual framework that connects the ideal with the real, the right and the left, the nostalgics and the anticommunists. As commemorative activities imposed from the top down primarily serve the regime in place and aim to maintain social order, every government is tempted to ignore the part of collective memory that does not obey to its own narrative. This is what happened in post-1989 Czech Republic, too.

The result has been a deleterious socio-historical situation symbolized by the commemorations concerning the communist past. For the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in 2014, for instance, President Zeman was pelted with eggs as he was unveiling a plaque. One of the eggs missed its target and hit German President Joachim Gauck instead. In 2018, in the context of wide criticism for alleged corruption and possible involvement with the past secret police, Prime Minister Babiš came to commemorate the Velvet Revolution alone at midnight before going abroad for the rest of the day and leaving the street to joyful demonstrators. In 2019, for the thirtieth anniversary of the revolution, neither president Zeman nor himself took part in any public commemoration. Premier Babiš only presided over an indoor celebration for selected guests from Visegrád countries, and he avoided the street. Such farcical and/or disconnected commemorations are a disaster, and ÚSTR should have played a much stronger role in uniting the country in its collective, yet diverse, memory of communism.

In order to do so, we are back at the necessity of restituting all aspects of everyday life under communism, not only repression. What Veronika Pehe calls the “anticommunist consensus of the cultural elites” dominates the political discourse and is largely reflected in the mainstream media, as well as in official memory politics. But she also shows that the scene of popular culture is much more colorful, and the wider public is far from endorsing this black and white vision of the communist past. An alternative “retro” culture has developed, one that endorses a nostalgic vision of times past if not of the communist regime. To ignore this culture in historical work does not make it disappear, rather it discredits this historical work as unrepresentative. Moreover, a vision glorying the Velvet Revolution does not help a critical construction of the democratic regime. According to an opinion poll commissioned by Mikuláš Kroupa’s Memory of the Nation, thirty years after the fall of communism only 36% of the people above forty years of age had a positive opinion of the Velvet Revolution. More than one-third of those above forty thought they “lived better” under communism (for those with minimal education, the level rose to half of them.) They mentioned as advantages under communism: job security, a better welfare state, and more consideration for people within society. Also, only half of all respondents indicated that their standard of living increased after 1989.

The country is thus effectively divided between those who promote an anticommunist narrative of what the national assessment of the communist past should be, who occupy a large portion of the public sphere, and a more motley and skeptical wider public. Moral questions have been appropriated only by vernacular culture. The media, in particular popular TV shows, are the only public channels to address the issue of collaboration with the secret police, while historians and politicians are too constrained to do so. To date, there is no historical study of collaboration as a social practice under communism. To write such a history would be yet another of my priorities for ÚSTR.

Here is an example of what this historical approach could bring. In 2016, Česká televize ran a program on informants in its version of the radio series Histories of the Twentieth Century. One episode tells the story of singer Jiří Imlauf, who, together with his friend Petr Mička from the band Houpací koně, accidentally saw an anti-regime demonstration in Prague in 1988. Someone overheard them discussing the incident at the train station and reported them to the secret police. When they came home to Ustí nad Labem, the police zeroed in only on Imlauf, who was singled out for collaboration while Petr Mička was left alone. The filmmaker reconstructs what Imlauf really did, why he did it, and how both Imlauf and Mička dealt with the belated revelation of this collaboration. Why is this useful? Because the precondition for reconciliation is for all sides to understand each other, and to speak to one another. And reconciliation is what society needs now, more than anything. National victimhood is not a constructive political and societal program.

History, justice, and commemoration must be kept separate

ÚSTR is the only institution that can restore the boundaries between history, justice, and commemoration. Nazism, communism and, more generally, all populist regimes like to blur the distinction between the three; in contrast, democracy prefers a healthy separation. The role of a historian is to determine what happened and to explain why it happened in view of the context. It is not to pass judgement. The role of the justice system is to find and punish the culprits. It is not to serve as an instrument for politicians to eliminate their adversaries. The role of a politician is to honor the victims and commemorate past events. It is not to tell historians what to write.

But in the public sphere, the overwhelming feeling of resentment leads to such confusion that many politicians and some historians feel emboldened to profess expertise in all three fields of history, justice and politics. Yet as a matter of principle, a politician should refrain from intervening in the writing of history. It is not his or her role and such an intervention never helps. Victims and survivors are often opposed to historians. This is normal. Historians have great respect for them, but this does not mean that opinions cannot differ and that there should be a unanimous interpretation of the past. It is certainly not for a politician to determine what that interpretation should be.

The only esult of political intervention is that historians think twice about communicating the results of their research if they think it might provoke anger in certain groups (it almost always will.) Is academic freedom benefiting from, or being endangered by, such a situation? The answer is obvious. The slow and painful formation of collective memory cannot be accelerated by political means. History, justice, and commemoration are three different aims that should be pursued by three different categories of professionals. This is essential for democracy to work.

This is why I would clearly separate, within ÚSTR, the researchers who do a commemorative work from those who do historical research work, and I would create two separate departments, one for history, and one for commemoration. To remind the memory of the victims is a necessary function, but it does not amount to research work. To remind the normative foundations of democracy is essential, but it is not research work. To tell about one’s memories under communism is useful and instructive, but it is not proper historical work and it should not take its place.

Anticommunism renders reconciliation impossible

As far as the ordinary people who feel aggrieved by the former regime are concerned, anticommunism as an ideology has continued poisoning their life with resentment; for those who do not feel aggrieved, it has only irritated them, and they have taught their children to know otherwise – just like they had done under communism. Many history teachers still do not take chances anyway and simply refrain from teaching about the communist period, although ÚSTR’s educational department is a genuine success story and is producing truly excellent material.

But the most damaging aspect of the anticommunist narrative for the social fabric is that it renders dialogue impossible. In 2018, a lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences (FSV) in Prague who happens to be all at once Slovak, a priest, and a sociologist, Dr Karol Lovaš, invited General Alojz Lorenc, the last head of the StB, to a debate on the 17 November 1989 events. As usual, the watchdogs of the anticommunist orthodoxy tried to prevent Lorenc from speaking; the faculty was in turmoil and its Dean had to publicly justify this daring invitation; afterwards, Karol Lovaš was trashed on social media.

Instead of letting Alojz Lorenc speak in order to deconstruct and invalidate his arguments (can it be that difficult?), analysis was replaced by indignation. Why is this bad? Because emotions can only ever be shared by the people already holding the same opinion as the speaker. Emotions convince only those who are already convinced while further antagonizing those who disagreed from the outset. Indignation is not an argument. It entrenches the country into mutually irreconcilable factions and keeps the nation from being appeased.

What is so scary about a dialogue between the past and present communists and the rest of the nation? Evidently that it might, as it should, lead to a form of societal reconciliation. The communists can apologize; it does not hinder the fact that some elements of life under communism were genuinely popular—first and foremost a strong welfare state. Vice versa, for society to forgive the communists does not mean that they should condone the persecution of innocent people. To reconcile does not mean to forget. It means moving forward in a constructive way instead of being mired in the battles of the past.

Conclusion

The damage caused to the social fabric by anticommunism could not be better symbolized than by the (mis)use of the slogan from George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This citation opened the 2007 law creating ÚSTR, but it is doing exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. It should historicize the Velvet Revolution and the post-communist period. Historicizing means replacing these events in their historical context in order to understand the behavior of the social actors and the obstacles they encountered. In Santayana’s volume The Life of Reason (1905), the sentence “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is preceded by: “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.” This paragraph is entitled “Continuity (is) necessary to progress.”

Applied to the contemporary Czech Republic, what Santayana meant is the exact opposite of what he was used for. If we paraphrase him, what he would have said was: “Those who cannot remember the communist past are condemned to repeat it. Those who cannot learn from the mistakes of the communists, of the dissidents, and of the population, before, during, and after the Revolution, are doomed to repeat them. Those who cannot learn from the errors of mass collaboration and mass support for a communist dictatorship that later dwindled into dictatorship fatigue expose themselves to repeating them. Those who do not learn from the experience of a democracy falling into dictatorship without a hitch – twice in a row, in 1938 and in 1948 – will fall prey to any new populism with the same ease.”

Those who do not accept the continuities with the communist regime, who will not grow from this experience, will remain in infancy. Santayana advocated memory – not selective memory.

In an interview for Deník N, Michael Kocáb perfectly expressed the schizophrenia that now reigns regarding the narrative on the communist past. To the question “Do we have anything to celebrate”, he gave two answers, one “politically correct” and one “rock & rollesque.” The political answer is that we gained freedom and independence so yes, we have something to celebrate. The rock & rollesque answer is the following: “Comrades! It has all gone to shit.”

Thirty-three years after the fall of communism, it is time to stop viewing unanimity as a desirable state. Embracing the existence of dissenting opinions, of a debate, even of disputes, is the condition for reconciliation; and reconciliation is the only way to finally turn the page of this depressing post-communist period. As long as there is no reconciliation, there will be no closure and no national narrative on communism in which every citizen can feel included. To promote reconciliation will be my highest priority of all for ÚSTR.

Summary and action program:

Here are ten of the most common misconceptions that dominate the public sphere today concerning the history of the communist and Nazi past. My program for ÚSTR is to have ÚSTR historians reflect on these misconceptions, correct them, and educate the public about them.

1) To try and understand what happened in the past is not the same as to morally condone it. Explanation and understanding do not result in exculpation. The communist regime was not legitimate; but we must remember that the people’s lives are. Not to have been a hero under communism does not turn all Czechs into victims, nor does it disqualify them as citizens of this country today. It is too easy to dismiss the past on the assumption that “all communists were evil.” Not to learn our lessons from the past means to expose the country to future dictators. For democracy to grow stronger it must learn from its past defeats. Knowledge is empowerment – which is why the communists were so keen on manipulating history. I want ÚSTR not to dismiss knowledge like the communists did.

2) Suffering is a characteristic shared by almost all European peoples in the twentieth century. All the people tortured and killed, and their families, suffered hell at the individual level. The evil character of each regime that implemented such practices is already made clear in these sufferings; there is no need to try and make collective figures bigger than they are. Competitive martyrdom between Nazism and communism is an unwinnable game; its victims are already dead. The communists liked to see only their own suffering and to dismiss the suffering of others. I want ÚSTR not to boast about communist victims at the expense of disregarding other victims, like the communists did.

3) The world is not unilaterally divided between victims and traitors. Every human life is nuanced and complex. Many, if not most people were victims at some level while simultaneously collaborating with the regime at another level. Moral judgement is easy only for those who were never placed in the impossible situation in which almost everyone found themselves in their everyday lives. A minimal empathy for individual trajectories often helps understanding their behaviour. It does not amount to condoning the communist system as a whole. Empathy, by the way, is not a dirty word. Communists used to despise empathy. I want ÚSTR to refrain from judging and morally condemning others like the communists did.

4) History is a human science, it is not just about telling a story. The professional study of history has disciplinary standards. If a historian does not know how to appraise and corroborate sources, a superficial reading can give him or her the exact opposite result compared to a contextualized reading: a document never simply “tells the truth”, especially if it is coming from secret police archives. Moreover, if a historian doesn’t know how to appraise an interview, he or she might believe witnesses who are completely mistaken or outright lying, and are in any case telling only their story. If historians don’t keep up to date with methodology, they can miss the chance to explain things in a new light. If historians don’t know what historians are researching in other countries, they risk thinking that their own situation is unique whereas it is not, and their fail to learn from lessons and progress made in other countries. Communists were incredibly provincial. I want ÚSTR not to be provincial and condescending to other experiences like the communists were.

5) History is complex and messy. We like to tell our children simple tales with a simple moral but children have to grow up one day. Life is complicated and none of us are exempt from dubious moral choices. What is true for us is true for the nation. It is not enough to read half a sentence, complacently simplified by the media, to “know” what a historian is telling and to condemn it. If historians and the public don’t make the effort to read, they will not be able to understand things in their complexity. Communists were masters at presenting situations in artificially simple, black and white terms. I want ÚSTR not to be simple-minded like the communists were and on the contrary to embrace complexity.

6) History is not politics. Only by constantly thinking about the issues at stake and the methods they use can historians keep at bay the temptation to use the past for present purposes. “Historians” who know the answer before they even ask the question are not historians but politicians. History is often contradictory, just like life is, and it does not provide a unilateral message immediately available to justify this or that political choice. Communists knew in advance the answer to everything. I want ÚSTR not to politicize everything like the communists did, and I want it to ask unpleasant questions rather than provide comfortable truths.

7) There is no such thing as a definitive and forever indisputable historical truth. We are always learning more about the past. What we think is the truth today is determined by our actual situation and by what we believe in. “Truth” is contingent on our social and political environment. What we think is true tells almost more about who we are today than about our actual past. History is not the expression of “historical truth” but a narrative, constructed by a historian who is reflecting all along on how to make it as objective as possible. This is why it is a human science. History consists of a consensus arrived at by many historians, who are constantly engaging with one another about our understanding of the past. And that is why many people posing as historians are not actually doing genuine historical work. No one knew better than the communists what the alleged “historical truth” was without having to do any research. I want ÚSTR not to edict the historical truth like the communists did and to do actual research by asking questions to which we do not know the answer, not just to document something we already firmly believe to be true.

8) To tell over a beer what happened to one personally is not “history” but one story. First-hand experience is irreducible and is a precious source for a historian. But other people have other stories to tell, that might contradict these stories yet are equally valid. Individuals are not always equipped to tell what is what – historians are, or in any case should be. One opinion and one experience are not the basis for a historical monograph if they are not properly contextualized. I want ÚSTR not to dictate to historians what they should write, like the communists did.

9) One does not have to have been there in person to understand what happened. None of us was sitting with Hitler in Munich in 1938 and yet we know very well what happened. None of us was living in the Middle Ages and still we have medieval historians that teach us a lot. Similarly, we don’t have to have experienced communism personally to know what it was about, nor does the profession of one’s parents invalidate one’s opinion. A direct witness has the ability and the competence to say what they saw personally but the witness standing next to them will often have a very different opinion about what they saw at the very same time. A historian’s task, again, is to sort these opinions out and to confront them to other sources, while reflecting on the way he or she does it, in order to produce a narrative – one narrative, not the “historical truth.” I want ÚSTR to restitute this complexity of the communist and Nazi past, as opposed to what the communists did.

10) Finally, I would like to put an end to the argument that I do not know what I am talking about because I am not Czech. I have been sitting in the archives for thirty years, I have spoken to dozens of witnesses, I have read thousands of books, I can place the Czech situation in its Central European and European context and compare it with other cases, including Western countries. If one thinks I cannot understand the tenets of communist ideology such as terror, censorship or state lies because I am French, that shows only their ignorance of French history. If they think the Czech situation is unique, they are mistaken: much is to be learned from the Czech Republic’s neighbors, and from their historians. My job is to try to understand the entirety of this historical experience, not to produce a result that people find easy to digest or that might be politically useful. The life of a country is a complicated matter. Only people as dogmatic as the communists were could claim otherwise. I want ÚSTR not to disqualify people for their origin like the communists did.