An Uncommon Course: Normalisation in Slovakia

Abstract

This chapter deals with the specific features of Slovak development in the 1970s and 1980s. The normalisation regime had the same objectives in both the Czech lands and Slovakia, but the tactics on how to reach them differed. The post-1968 communist leadership utilised the differences between the Slovak and Czech situation to its advantage. Political persecution was less strict and more selective in Slovakia and ‘capitulation to normalisation’ was much more widespread and faster than in the Czech lands. The legitimacy of the Slovak ‘normalisation regime’ was not dependent solely on the material well-being of the population. Slovak national communists created a viable narrative, which promoted ‘real socialism’ as the fulfilment of the decades-long emancipatory efforts of the Slovak nation. Slovak opposition was weaker, less politicised and lacked a common platform and could not provide a political alternative to the existing regime. The results of the different approaches towards Czech and Slovak society during normalisation significantly influenced post-1989 developments in Slovakia, as well as the dissolution of Czechoslovakia.

This work was funded by the Agency for the Support of Research and Development, contract no. APVV-16-0047APVV-14-0644: ‘From Denarius to Euro: The Money Phenomenon in the History of Slovakia from the Middle Ages to the Present Day’. The research undertaken for this study was conducted under the auspices of the grant VEGA 2/0099/20: ‘University research in the context of the constitutional and political changes in the years 1918–1968’.

After the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in late 1989, Slovak sociologist Róbert Roško became a member of the newly-created Slovak Republic governmental committee for the analysis of historical events during the years 1967–1970.¹ In his interpretation of the differences between Slovakia and the Czech lands, he wrote: ‘The Soviet model of socialism in the 1960s was like a suit, which unbearably suffocated the Czech body. However, it more or less fitted the Slovak one, which even gained a measure of real or illusive profit from wearing it’.² This statement is true for many aspects of Czechoslovak development during the period of so-called ‘real socialism’, 1969–1989. There are still relatively few texts dealing with the peculiarities of Slovak normalisation. Their authors are predominantly Slovak historians, political scientists and sociologists, a couple of them former dissidents like Miroslav Kusý, Milan Šimečka and his son Martin. All agree that there were important differences between the Czech and Slovak cases, the roots of which lie in the specific social, cultural and economic evolution of the two parts of the country. Hence, despite common objectives, the course of normalisation in Slovakia and the Czech lands was not identical. For example, the post-Prague Spring persecutions and purges were less severe and more selective in Slovakia. Open social confrontation with the regime barely took place, and ‘capitulation’ in the face of normalisation was quicker and more widespread. There was significant continuity of leading functionaries in the Communist Party of Slovakia (KSS), the most prominent, Gustáv Husák, becoming a symbol of both the Prague Spring and the normalisation regime. Contrary to the Czech lands, the legitimacy, even popularity, of Slovak ‘real socialism’ was not dependent solely on the material well-being of the general public. Slovak communists rather successfully propagated a narrative claiming that the combination of socialism and federation was a concrete realisation of the decades-long Slovak national programme.

This chapter analyses the strategies adopted by the communist leadership in Slovakia to achieve the desired ‘normalisation consensus’ based on a stable community of satisfied apolitical citizens. It also deals with societal responses to these efforts. The main focus is on the modernisation process, social structures, economic development, the ‘Slovak national question’, the issue of the Hungarian ethnic minority and the peculiarities of Slovak dissent.

Historical Context

Initially, the reactions of both Slovaks and Czechs to the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies on 21 August 1968 were identical. Citizens almost unanimously protested against the occupation, even though the Soviets sought to play the ‘Slovak national card’ to disrupt Czech-Slovak unity.³ However, a number of differences between the two parts of the Republic became visible soon after the beginning of the normalisation process. To explain them, we need to examine briefly Slovak developments in the post-war era. In 1945, Slovakia was in every aspect less developed than the Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia). The population was generally poorer and less educated. The workforce distribution in Slovakia had not changed much since the establishment of the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1918. Slovakia was predominantly an agrarian country where more than 60 per cent of the population worked in agriculture (in the Czech lands it was about 30 per cent) and roughly 20 per cent in industry (around 40 per cent in the Czech lands). The GDP per capita was approximately 60 per cent of the Czech part of the Republic. Experts at the time estimated that certain sectors of the Slovak economy were thirty or even seventy years behind the Czech.⁴

In the dominant post-war Czechoslovak economic discourse, and not only the communist variant, Slovakia needed swift industrialisation in order to achieve modernity and equality with the Czech lands. This campaign started immediately after the communist takeover in February 1948, with results that defined Slovakia for the next few decades. The emphasis on rapid industrialisation led to a ‘wide gap between technical and economic features of modernization on the one hand, and cultural and social processes of modernization on the other’.⁵ In the 1950s, modern industry existed in an environment largely devoid of the elements of a modern industrial society. At the beginning of the 1960s, a mere 30 per cent of the Slovak population lived in cities, and migration to urban areas did not necessarily alter people’s way of thinking or behaviour.⁶ In short, new city dwellers did not always become urbanised. On the contrary, they tended to ruralise the cities, outnumbering the relatively small communities of local townsmen.⁷ As Jiří Musil has argued, ‘The concept of Slovak industrialisation was implemented based on new enterprises and was imposed upon a network of agrarian settlements with limited resources for building houses and for the technical and social components of urban infrastructure’.⁸ The emergent Slovak proletarian often worked in a factory, but remained in a village, thus retaining aspects of a typical rural life. The so-called kovoroľník, a mixture of proletarian and peasant, became a ‘hybrid class’ which outlived the communist regime.

Regardless of these contradictory developments, some progress was made. By 1970, 40.8 per cent of the Slovak population worked in industry and lived in cities, and only 23.5 per cent were employed in agriculture.⁹ Industrialisation, despite its apparent shortcomings,¹⁰ brought a measure of economic prosperity and modest well-being to a region chronically struggling with unemployment, mass emigration and vast regional differences between its western and eastern parts. The majority of Slovaks thus perceived communist economic and social policy more positively than the already industrialised and urbanised Czechs. As a result, in the late 1960s the influx of new candidate members into the Communist Party was much faster in Slovakia than in the Czech lands, although overall membership continued to be significantly lower in Slovakia (10.4 per cent compared to 18.7 per cent).¹¹ Nevertheless, Slovak society remained more rural, conservative, traditional and religious with a higher acceptance of authoritarian structures.¹² In sum, it can be argued that the modernisation of Slovakia had failed to attain its primary objective: to solve the dilemma of perceived Slovak inequality vis-à-vis the Czechs.

Given these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the ‘Slovak question’, or the issue of Czech-Slovak relations, emerged as a recurring problem throughout twentieth-century Czechoslovakia. For many high-ranked Slovak communist politicians and intellectuals, the troubled Czech-Slovak relationship represented a permanent theoretical and practical challenge of seminal importance and overcoming it was an essential condition for building a successful socialist Czechoslovakia. The agenda of what became known as ‘Slovak national communism’ was based on two axioms. First, Slovaks were an independent nation and, following Lenin’s teaching, had full rights to national self-determination and independence. Second, Slovaks had willingly decided to live in a common state with the Czechs. The only possible intersection of these two arguments was a federal state, as a middle way between two unacceptable alternatives—the flawed inter-war Masarykian notion of ‘Czechoslovakism’ and the wartime ‘clerico-fascist’ Slovak separatism. However, despite initial promises after 1948 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CC KSČ) under Klement Gottwald chose a different strategy. In line with communist theory, the fundamental precondition for the political equality of Czechs and Slovaks lay not in federation, but in removing Slovakia’s economic and social under-development.¹³

In the early 1950s, the KSČ leadership denounced the ideology of Slovak national communism as ‘bourgeois nationalism’ and viewed its propagation as a conscious effort to sabotage the goals of the communist movement and as crimes against the unity of the Republic. For a decade, until their rehabilitation in 1963, an entire generation of Slovak communist intellectuals and politicians formed in the inter-war period was silenced through repression and political trials.¹⁴ Their leading representative, Gustáv Husák, received a twenty-five year prison sentence. Hence, in contrast to the Czech environment, the Slovak liberalisation process in the early-to-mid 1960s acquired a pronounced nationalist undertone. Slovak communist intellectuals, especially rehabilitated ‘bourgeois nationalists’, regarded the centralist state imposed in the 1950s as an integral part of Stalinist deformations. For them, de-Stalinisation meant the removal of everything impeding a fair solution to the ‘Slovak question’. The programme of Slovak national communism quickly became a central component of intellectual and later political discussions. It was the discontent of the KSS leadership, headed from 1963 by Alexander Dubček, with the criminalisation of their rather modest demands, which persuaded them to join Czech reformers in toppling the unpopular personal dictatorship of the KSČ First Secretary (and Czech) Antonín Novotný in January 1968. This was the move that sparked the Prague Spring.

Due to their aura of martyrdom, the national communists around Husák gained substantial social and political credit, which enabled them to move to the forefront of the Slovak reform movement. During the Prague Spring, the call for democratisation in Slovakia was inseparably linked with the demand for federalisation. As the Slovak national communists insisted, the liberalisation process could not be successful without a judicious solution to the national question, which meant the federalisation of the state.¹⁵ Slovak critics of the ‘Husák clique’ focused mainly on its lack of interest in the goal of democratisation.¹⁶ However, federalisation was perceived as a sine qua non in Slovakia by both radical reformers and their more conservative and nationalist opponents. The former understood it as a natural part of democratisation in the sense that nations had the same right to equality as individuals. For the latter, it was an alternative to radical reformism, which, in their eyes, threatened the existence of socialism. The Warsaw Pact’s military intervention on 21 August 1968 secured victory for the conservatives and Slovak nationalists.

Although thereafter Czechoslovakia was forced to return to a Soviet-style socialist dictatorship, federalisation was formally introduced on 1 January 1969. Its existence was largely irrelevant for the future of the communist project, but it had a substantial impact on the creation of the different Czech and Slovak versions of normalisation. Even the Kremlin recognised the potential for federalisation to help ‘normalise’ Slovakia by driving a wedge between the united Czech-Slovak opposition to the occupation. A reading of Petr Pithart’s reminiscences of 1968 shows that this tactic was successful: ‘The Czech public was disappointed, even disgusted, by the Slovaks’ experience at having gained satisfaction with federalization; at best, it was seen as foolishness and at worst, as blind selfishness and even betrayal’.¹⁷ As we shall see, this Czech sense of Slovak betrayal had a profound influence on the future of mutual relations during the normalisation period.

The Normalisation Purges

Even the most general statistical data prove that there were notable differences in the severity of the mass party screenings that took place in the course of 1970 in the two parts of the newly created federation. In the Czech lands, 23 per cent of KSČ members (about 273,000) had to leave the party, while in Slovakia it was only 17.6 per cent (around 53,000).¹⁸ The cultural, scientific and technical intelligentsia bore the brunt of the purges. According to Milan Štefanský, ‘whereas in the Czech lands 34.7% of people belonging to it (including artists and journalists) were expelled, in Slovakia the figure was 15.8%’.¹⁹ There are several explanations for this discrepancy. First, the Slovak elites were numerically too weak for a radical purge. In the words of Martin Šimečka, ‘Slovak communists obeyed the reflex of a small and young nation, which needs to protect its tiny group of elites in order not to sink to the level of a mere tribe’.²⁰ The dissident Miroslav Kusý compared the post-August 1968 situation in the Czech lands and Slovakia to the destruction of Czechoslovakia after March 1939: while in the Nazi-dominated Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the new ruling power was ruthless, in the wartime Slovak clerical state, the regime offered the exclusively Slovak elite a comfortable life in exchange for loyalty.²¹

The second hypothesis is based on the argument, also countenanced by the KSS leadership, that during the Prague Spring the ‘counter-revolution’ in Slovakia was weaker, and the principal issue was federalisation which was perceived as a ‘progressive course of action’. In general, party members whose reform activities were focused predominantly on the national problem of Czech-Slovak relations had a good chance of surviving the screenings unharmed. This was in line with the Brezhnevite understanding of the relationship between nationalism and Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union. According to the Brezhnev Doctrine, an emphasis on legitimate national demands did not threaten socialism. Providing it did not undermine the power monopoly of the Communist Party, policy on the ‘national question’ was an internal matter for each state in the Soviet bloc.²² This relates to the third aspect of the purges. After federalisation was enacted, the Slovak national communists, having achieved their primary objective, concentrated on maintaining the existing system and their place within it. Some of them were backed by Husák, even if they openly criticised the mass purges.²³ National communists were fully aware of the nature of the emergent regime and also what would be expected of them.²⁴ However, the fact that they were granted positions in culture, science and education, which in the Czech lands fell to hard-line ‘ultra-dogmatists’,²⁵ had some initial benefits for the Slovak intelligentsia. Intellectuals like Vladimír Mináč, Laco Novomeský and Ondrej Pavlík had been part of the Slovak cultural milieu for decades, and even if they were unable to hold back the purges, they most certainly did not call for their radicalisation and often tried to help persecuted friends and colleagues.

The fourth line of argumentation states that ‘there is no evidence that, at least initially, the Slovak intelligentsia was more buffered from persecution than the Czech’.²⁶ This assertion is not in complete contradiction with the aforementioned explanations. Analysis of the Slovak intelligentsia as a homogeneous group shows that the purges were milder than in Czech lands. However, in comparison to the situation in the crucial institutions and groups connected with the liberalisation process, the differences become less visible. At universities and colleges in Bratislava, between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of party members did not pass the screenings. The same went for Slovak national newspapers, television and broadcasting. In the Slovak Academy of Sciences, the ratio was 40 per cent.²⁷ These data are comparable to those in Bohemia and Moravia. There is agreement on the fact that the fate of the Slovak purge victims was usually milder and that ‘politically unreliable Slovaks tended to be demoted within their fields rather than thrown into menial positions, as was characteristically the case in the Czech lands’.²⁸ The repressions were less severe because Slovak elites did not put up significant resistance, and no relevant oppositional group was established. There were only individual protesters who were quickly isolated and silenced, the most prominent being the writer Dominik Tatarka. For Ivan Kamenec, Slovak elites, as in 1939, chose the path of the lesser evil. In an attempt to prevent a sweeping purge, they voluntarily capitulated and willingly served the ‘the evil’ they wanted to avoid.²⁹

Contrary to the Czech lands, very few intellectuals were imprisoned in Slovakia.³⁰ Even the prominent ‘faces of the Prague Spring’ were permitted to retain their party membership and return to public life, albeit after proper public penitence.³¹ In the words of Gil Eyal, ‘[T]he Czech intelligentsia was pushed into dissent, while the Slovak one compromised and collaborated with the regime’.³² By the end of 1971, the authorities’ records on ‘exponents of the right’ from the ranks of reformist communists and members of various oppositional associations comprised 9700 persons, of whom only 500 came from Slovakia.³³

The Slovak Socialist Republic

The different development in the two parts of Czechoslovakia was possible only because of the existence of federation, which enabled independent cultural and educational policy in both parts of the country. As Carol Skalnik Leff notes, socialist Czechoslovakia was an ‘ethnofederal state’, the same as the USSR and Yugoslavia. It was the communist parties’ solution to the ethnic diversity problem providing formal recognition for the national aspirations of competing groups.³⁴ The normalisation narrative interpreted the establishment of a federation as the only positive aspect of the 1968 crisis. On 1 January 1969 the Slovak Socialist Republic and the Czech Socialist Republic were established. Each of them had a parliament (National Council) and a government. Both ceded part of their powers to the federal government, which had exclusive control over foreign policy, defence and the State Material Reserves. The cardinal Slovak demand and the specific trait of the federation was ‘a complex system of voting on important issues, which introduced the “ban on majorisation”, a minority veto that protected Slovak MPs from being outvoted by their more numerous Czech counterparts’.³⁵

However, Moscow forbade the planned federalisation of the KSČ, because it went against two Leninist axioms regarding party organisation: unification without ‘national federalism’ and the principle of ‘democratic centralism’, whereby the decrees of the Central Committee are binding for the whole party.³⁶ This decision significantly weakened the relevance of the Czechoslovak federation. Already in 1970, the normalisation regime considerably strengthened the federal centre at the expense of the republics, which lost their competences in the economy. The independent powers of the national governments now covered mainly the cultural sphere. Just as in other socialist dictatorships, the real power centre lay in the party leadership. The governments, federal or national, functioned only as gear-levers implementing the decisions of the Presidium of the Central Committee. The autonomy of the KSS was almost completely curtailed; all aspects of its functioning were subordinated to Prague. Nevertheless, even the formal federation had a deep influence on Slovak developments. As Skalnik Leff has observed: ‘The rise in ministerial representation was dramatic, immediate, and persistent—far outstripping the more modest gains of earlier years. Between 1969 and 1983, Slovaks received about one-third of the ministerial assignments, an advance to truly proportional representation at the top’.³⁷ The same was true for the Central Committee of the KSČ and its Presidium. Contrary to the inter-war period and the 1950s, when Czech functionaries were dispatched to Slovakia, the party, state and cultural administrations were fully Slovak,³⁸ with proportional representation for the Hungarian and Ruthenian ethnic minorities.

The overly influential group of Slovak national communists went through a significant transformation in the 1970s. Normalisation satisfied their power aims, and maintaining the status quo became the focus of their interest. Slovak national communism ceased being the bearer of emancipation and democratisation efforts and instead became the dominant legitimising narrative of normalisation in Slovakia. This downgrading of Slovak nationalism even portended a certain revival of the ‘Czechoslovak spirit’ in the name of stability. As Husák put it: ‘The national question has been resolved here. It is necessary, however, to strengthen Czechoslovak awareness in the people, including national minorities, and that must come from the socialist establishment’.³⁹ One of the ‘fathers of the federation’, Slovak constitutional lawyer Karol Laco, stated at the beginning of 1970: ‘We should reconsider if we did not go too far with the one-sided accentuating of Czech or Slovak statehood’.⁴⁰ The 14th congress of the KSČ in May 1971 declared the problem of Czech-Slovak relations to be solved.

The official arguments for federation were pragmatic with barely any ideological superstructure: put simply, the federal state was politically and economically beneficial for both Czechs and Slovaks.⁴¹ However, for Slovak communist intellectuals, it became a popular topic. One of their leading figures, the writer Vladimír Mináč, regarded federalisation as the realisation of the programme of the 1944 anti-fascist Slovak National Uprising. Others argued that in 1968 the ‘counter-revolutionary forces’ tried to deform the idea of a federation with non-Marxist and non-class chauvinist conceptions.⁴² For them, the essential attributes of a truly socialist federation lay in accepting the right to self-determination including the right of secession, while simultaneously respecting the interests of the working class, democratic centralism and the leading role of the Communist Party.⁴³ Since autumn 1968, federalisation had lost much of its appeal to the general public.⁴⁴ The hopes for change swiftly disappeared in the face of Soviet occupation, and yet the existing problems remained. As Ján Rychlík has pointed out: ‘The situation by which the centre of the federation was also the centre of the Czech Republic proved to be very unfortunate… From the Czech point of view… the Czechoslovak and Czech state meant the same thing, while from the Slovak point of view, the federal institutions appeared to be alien and hostile’.⁴⁵

Hence, the ‘normalised’ federation failed to meet the expectations of many Slovaks. The state appeared as centralised as before, all the decisions being made in Prague. The ‘federal’ or ‘Prague’ Slovaks, including Husák, were seen as renegades, who betrayed the nation for personal gain. The Czech population considered those same luminaries as evidence of Slovak over-representation in the top positions. According to Skalnik Leff: ‘The feeling that Slovaks have come out of the crisis better off and are suffering less under “normalization” is widespread’.⁴⁶ In his essay from 1988, Kusý confirmed this assertion on the basis of his personal experiences in Prague.⁴⁷

Slovak Development During the Normalisation Era

When describing his interrogation by the secret police sometime in the mid-1980s, dissident Martin Šimečka recalls a man in an elegant suit, shining shoes and well-manicured fingernails telling him: ‘Look at me. I grew up in Kysuce in a wooden house with a dirt floor. We had to take water from the nearby stream. Today, I have a three-room flat with hot water running from a tap. Are you surprised that I will defend this system against you and that I can be sure that the majority of people are on my side?’.⁴⁸ The assumption about significant support for the economic and social policy of the normalisation regime in Slovakia was right. The promise of reasonable universal living standards materialised in Slovakia more clearly than in the Czech lands. Despite persisting problems, Slovakia approached the Czech part of the federation in various important indicators during the 1970s and 1980s. Industry was now the principal employer in both lands. Slovak GDP per capita was 87.81 per cent of the Czech level in 1989,⁴⁹ while gross salaries were only about 3 per cent lower in Slovakia. In 1985 the Czechoslovak government officially announced that the process of equalisation of the two republics had been successfully achieved.⁵⁰ However, general Czechoslovak stagnation in comparison to the Western democracies grew more noticeable.

As a result of economic centralisation, it was easier to subsidise Slovakia from the federal budget.⁵¹ The adverse side-effects are described by dissident Ján Čarnogurský: ‘Money transfer from the Czech lands to Slovakia creates artificial economic conditions. The communist nomenklatura can, therefore, carry out projects, which would not otherwise be possible and which, in the end, only work towards reinforcing imbalances in the national economy’.⁵² The prime example was the vast armament industry in Slovakia. It exported heavy weaponry to ‘friendly’ Third World countries, whose fiscal discipline rapidly deteriorated in the second half of the 1980s. After the fall of communism and the loss of its traditional markets, this industry became a huge burden in the transformation of the Slovak economy. The crucial Czech-Slovak issue was also adversely affected. The question ‘who pays for whom’ became a typical trope aggravating the already strained Czech-Slovak relationship.⁵³

The success of Slovak modernisation was manifest in continuous urbanisation. The construction of flats was faster in Slovakia than in the Czech lands. The vast ‘Petržalka’ housing estate in Bratislava became home to 100,000 people, making it the largest residential district in Czechoslovakia. Villages also went through a period of rapid housebuilding. The gap between city and country regarding salaries and quality of life decreased considerably.⁵⁴ Slovak society grew richer. The baby boom of the 1970s (dubbed ‘Husák’s children’) brought about a near 10 per cent population increase (compared to 5.5 per cent in the Czech lands).⁵⁵ The normalisation purges affected the number of new college students only marginally. While in Bohemia and Moravia their numbers decreased by 2500 between 1970 and 1973, in Slovakia there was an increase of 6000. In the 1980s, Slovakia had overtaken the Czech lands in the ratio of college-educated people (10 per cent as opposed to 8 per cent).⁵⁶ Slovak membership in the KSČ grew by 25 per cent in the 1970s, to an all-time high of 320,000 people. However, this growth had predominantly pragmatic reasons. Just as with the college degree, the party card became a ticket to a successful career and a comfortable life. The influx of young opportunists and pragmatists seemingly strengthened the position of the party as the universal ‘gatekeeper’.

From the viewpoint of the KSČ, the main problem of Slovak socialist development was the issue of religion. Despite various forms of persecution, restraint and atheistic education, the number of Christians of all denominations decreased more slowly than expected. In 1950, official figures showed that 83 per cent of the Slovak population was Catholic and 13 per cent was Protestant. In 1989, the numbers were 64 per cent and 6 per cent respectively.⁵⁷ The communist leadership considered the Catholic Church in particular as a dangerous source of opposition, undermining its ideological hegemony. The activities of the Catholic hierarchy were closely monitored, scrutinised and curtailed. However, the normalisation regime in Slovakia was never able to disrupt the underground church and associated ‘lay movements’, which became exceedingly popular among Slovak youth in the 1980s.

Contrary to the nationally homogeneous Czech lands, Slovakia had ethnic minorities. The most numerous, the Hungarian, numbered 554,000 people, more than 12 per cent of the total population. Others included Ruthenes and Roma. Although the Czechoslovak constitution guaranteed all ethnic minorities equality, as well as cultural and language rights, the reality was somewhat different. The Hungarian minority had to face suspicions about their irredentism and a negative image portrayed in Slovak history books. In the immediate postwar era, the KSČ became the leading nationalist force supporting the expulsion of ethnic Germans and Hungarians from Czechoslovakia. The Slovak national communists around Husák were the most radical proponents of the forced Czechoslovak-Hungarian population exchange in the late 1940s.⁵⁸ In the 1950s and 1960s, relations between Slovak and Hungarian communists were far from cordial. Representatives of the Hungarian minority in the KSS, even in its top ranks, were often considered by their Slovak peers as lobbyists on behalf of their minority, which was true, or even proxies of the Hungarian government, which was exaggerated.⁵⁹ During the Prague Spring, Slovak nationalism, in stark contrast to the democratising essence of the reform movement, focused on curtailing the cultural and linguistic rights of the Hungarian minority. On the other hand, the organisation representing Hungarians in Slovakia became more active in its demands.

In the 1970s, the regime attempted to silence existing conflicts by integrating the minorities into Slovak society. Egid Pepich, Minister of Interior in the Slovak government, argued that the false revival of the isolationism of the minorities contradicted Brezhnev’s thesis about the convergence of nations.⁶⁰ The poor understanding of the Slovak language by many members of the Hungarian minority was considered a key problem and was used to explain the low educational level of Slovak Hungarians.⁶¹ As a result, the Slovak government restricted the usage of the Hungarian language in public spaces and administration. Attempts to increase the share of Slovak language in Hungarian schools caused strong disapproval and led directly to the emergence of dissent among the Hungarian minority. Another source of discontent was the travel restrictions to Hungary introduced in the 1980s. It was mostly the Hungarians in Slovakia who were affected by the attempt to isolate Czechoslovak citizens from the ‘excessively liberal’ regime of János Kádár.⁶²

An isolationist, pro-Russian, anti-western, plebeian and conservative Slovak nationalism became typical of Slovak normalisation. In this narrative, the Slovak path to socialism was intertwined with the battle for national emancipation against stronger neighbours—Hungarians, Germans and Czechs. Although Slovak national communists like Mináč were a pillar of the normalisation system, their actual (self-) legitimisation consisted of a continuous reproduction of this national narrative.⁶³ By preventing the Slovak question from becoming an exclusive subject of anti-communist dissent, especially of its Catholic segment, they significantly secured the legitimacy of the normalisation regime in Slovakia. There was no comparable narrative fostering legitimisation of normalisation on national grounds in the Czech lands.

Dissent

The combination of positive economic and social development and a successful national communist narrative meant that Slovak society had much weaker motivation for radical systemic change than the Czech. The different situations in the two parts of the federation influenced the evolution of the dissident movement. Both secret police reports and dissidents themselves agree that the opposition in Slovakia was much weaker and less organised than in the Czech lands.⁶⁴ In 1985, Kusý wrote that the achievement of their national aspirations had satisfied the Slovaks, so that they did not, as yet, care much about the issues of human rights and freedom.⁶⁵ Besides the smaller numbers, dissent in Slovakia was also ‘less political’, and even the groups which could be labelled as oppositional did not declare their objectives in terms of politics. They were more non-conformist communities than fully-fledged dissident associations. One such cluster, consisting of Slovak sociologists, introduced the term ‘islands of positive deviations’ to describe this situation.⁶⁶ This was true for two of the most visible cases—the underground church and the ecological movement. The weak opposition resulted in a more benevolent regime and milder censorship. Especially during the perestroika era, discussions in Slovak ‘intellectual’ journals were more open than in the Czech lands. However, according to Martin Šimečka, because of this, Slovak dissidents’ plans, contrary to their Czech counterparts, dealt with reforming the existing regime instead of establishing a liberal democracy.⁶⁷

This less hostile stance towards the socialist dictatorship had many other causes, some of which have been discussed above. However, Šimečka’s insider statement confirms the lack of radicalism in Slovakia and the different nuances of the Czech and Slovak opposition. It was, to a great extent, a consequence of the regime’s highly successful strategy to prevent contacts between Czech and Slovak dissidents.⁶⁸ An important result was the negligible Slovak participation in Charter 77, the main dissident initiative established in Prague in January 1977. ‘[T]he original list of Slovak Charter signatories was an exclusive club of those who were resident in Prague or passing through at the relevant time. Subsequent attempts to bolster Slovak adherence to Charter principles were largely unavailing, even among the politically ostracized’.⁶⁹ On the other hand, very few representatives of the Czech dissident movement were interested in the situation in Slovakia.⁷⁰ One of the explanations why Charter 77 did so poorly among Slovaks is that it did not reflect either the situation in Slovakia or specific Slovak issues.⁷¹

Although Slovak opposition groups lacked a similar platform, Charter 77 was, as Ján Čarnogurský argues, of critical importance for the Slovaks. It was able to nullify communist propaganda aimed at Western audiences. This was crucial for the representatives of the Slovak underground church, routinely described as ‘clerico-fascists’ by the normalisation regime. Charter 77 was instrumental in reassuring the West that Slovak Catholic dissent was a part of the democratic opposition.⁷² Despite the politics of repression, isolation and elimination of its influence, the Catholic Church, especially its underground structures, represented the dominant force of Slovak ‘parallel culture’. Catholic dissidents may have presented themselves as non-political,⁷³ but the communist authorities perceived them as the main oppositional force in Slovakia. Indeed, after Karol Wojtyła’s inauguration as Pope John Paul II in 1978 the Slovak underground church became more active and politicised. This was especially true for the lay movement whose leading representatives, Vladimír Jukl, Silvester Krčméry, Ján Langoš, Jozef Mikloško and Ján Čarnogurský, focused largely on religious rights, but also on other civic freedoms such as freedom of speech and assembly.⁷⁴ As a result, the Slovak government always pursued a stricter atheist policy than its Czech counterpart.⁷⁵

In the 1980s, attendance at pilgrimages demonstrated the strength of the Catholic movement. On 7 July 1985, about 150,000 people celebrated the ‘Slavic saints’ Cyril and Methodius at the Moravian Velehrad. More than half were from Slovakia. The official celebration turned into a protest as the attendees hissed down the communist speakers and demanded religious freedom. What leading party representatives considered most troubling was the high involvement of youth.⁷⁶ Activities in the lay movements and attendance at pilgrimages were a relatively safe form of protest. Peaceful mass gatherings gave participants a sense of solidarity and safety as they knew that it was hardly possible for the regime to prosecute all of them.⁷⁷ However, the attempt at direct political action in the form of a 5000 strong ‘candle demonstration’ for religious rights in the centre of Bratislava on 25 March 1988 was brutally dispersed by the police. The Slovak underground church then abandoned direct confrontation with the regime but continued its activities. In the same year, 291,284 Slovaks (out of a total of 501,590 signatories) signed a petition demanding religious rights in Czechoslovakia.⁷⁸

The policies towards the Hungarian minority gave rise to Hungarian dissent in Slovakia. In 1978, a geologist Miklós Duray, founded the ‘Committee for the Legal Protection of the Hungarian Minority’ to challenge discrimination against Hungarian speakers. A year later, he signed Charter 77. Even so, the Chartists remained reserved about Duray’s opinions and demands on Hungarian-Slovak relations. As Michal Kopeček writes: ‘The Chartists, especially the Slovak ones,⁷⁹ who generally supported Duray, deplored the one-sided stress on infringements of Hungarian nationality rights without a broader picture of general human rights abuses in Czechoslovakia and, as a matter of fact, also in Hungary’.⁸⁰ Duray was repeatedly imprisoned on various charges during the 1980s and in the second half of the decade the younger generation did not limit its activities only to minority issues and started to build contacts with other oppositional groups.⁸¹

The Slovak ecology movement also became an example of a semi-official, non-conformist initiative that turned towards dissent, albeit somewhat unintentionally. In 1980, environmental topics came to the fore; many socialist dictatorships had to acknowledge their importance. In Czechoslovakia various grass-root movements emerged, many of which cooperated with the official environmental organisations.⁸² In October 1987, the Bratislava branch of the Slovak Union of Nature and Country Conservation issued the publication Bratislava/nahlas (‘Bratislava/aloud’).⁸³ It criticised the authorities’ ignorance of environmental problems in Bratislava and offered solutions for the most crucial issues. Most of its authors were scientists who merely wanted to start a discussion about the topic. However, one of the editors, Ján Budaj, was a well-known non-conformist with a dissident background. Officially, there were 3000 copies of Bratislava/nahlas, but it is estimated that 60,000 more were created via samizdat (illegal self-publishing). Regime functionaries started to perceive the project as a political problem only after it was mentioned in a Voice of America broadcast and in the New York Times. Sharp criticism in the party press and from representatives, including Husák, followed.⁸⁴ For the ecologist Mikuláš Huba: ‘After that, there was no other possibility than to start to behave “politically”. The two years from October 1987 to November 1989 became a university of “dissentship” or oppositional politics for many authors of Bratislava/nahlas. Possibly because of this, Václav Havel called it the Slovak version of Charter 77’.⁸⁵

From 1987, the first hints that the Slovak opposition was joining forces became visible. Members of the civic dissident movement and the underground church signed a joint ‘Declaration Regarding the Deportation of Jews from Slovakia during World War II’. This statement was necessary for Catholic dissidents to distance themselves from allegations of sympathy towards the authoritarian regime of the wartime Slovak state, 1939–1945.⁸⁶ In 1988, a small group of Slovak ‘sixty-eighters’ became more active. Their renowned leader, Alexander Dubček, gave interviews for Hungarian and Italian newspapers in which he spoke of the need to reform the communist regime.⁸⁷ Young communist scholars, utilising the ‘perestroika thaw’, did the same in Slovak journals like Nové slovo (‘New Word’). The preparation of the new Czechoslovak constitution agitated the younger generation of Slovak national communists, who criticised the process as impinging on ‘Slovak sovereignty’.⁸⁸ The approval of the constitution by the Slovak National Council engendered a situation unprecedented since 1968—some deputies wanted to vote against the proposal and had to be brought to heel by the party leadership. However, communist reformers, both young and old, never established working contacts with the dissident movement or the non-conformist bloc.

The somewhat isolated Slovak ‘islands of positive deviation’ finally became connected as a result of the last political trial in communist Czechoslovakia. On 17 August 1989, five Slovak dissidents were arrested and charged with subversion and incitement.⁸⁹ The trial of the so-called ‘Bratislava Five’ ignited an unexpected wave of protests, and not only from traditional oppositional circles. A significant example is the letter of Slovak sociologists addressed to President Husák, which became a broad appeal.⁹⁰ Together with the mass signing of the Charter 77-inspired petition Několik vět (‘A Few Sentences’), it was proof of the growing wave of discontent in Slovakia. On 16 November 1989, a protest march of about 200 university students in Bratislava demanded reform of the school system. The police monitored the event but did not intervene. The KSS leadership considered the demonstration a marginal incident with no future negative consequences.⁹¹ As subsequent events showed, it was not an entirely accurate assessment.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the underlying assumption is that the normalisation regime had the same objectives in both the Czech lands and Slovakia, only the tactics on how to reach them differed. In this sense, the post-1968 communist leadership skilfully utilised the differences between the Slovak and Czech situation to its advantage. According to Juraj Marušiak, the seemingly milder course of the ‘consolidation process’ in Slovakia achieved the capitulation and integration of much broader segments of the population.⁹² On the other hand, the communist regime’s modernisation policies had already helped to build a reservoir of loyalty since the 1950s. In Slovakia, the communist system was better able than in the Czech lands to fulfil its pledge to improve material well-being and the consequences of economic stagnation appeared later and were less visible.

As Martin Šimečka notes, Slovak normalisation as a quid pro quo of Czechoslovak federalisation absorbed the majority of Slovak elites and blunted their ambitions to ponder alternatives.⁹³ The Slovak national communists created a viable narrative, which successfully promoted the existing system as the fulfilment of the century-long efforts of the Slovak nation. Despite its shortcomings, the federal system and the existence of the Slovak government produced political, administrative and managerial elites in much higher numbers than before, a development which greatly facilitated Slovak independence in 1993. Contrary to the Czech case, the Slovak opposition was weaker, less politicised and lacked a common platform. It could tackle specific issues like religious freedom or the environment but did not provide a political alternative to the existing regime. The crucial factor was the successful compartmentalisation of the Czech and Slovak dissident movements, making productive cooperation difficult if not impossible. Paradoxically, with policy focused on the economic equality and self-sufficiency of the two republics, the normalisation regime unintentionally achieved the same outcome among both Czechs and Slovaks. The two parts of the country became more isolated and their interaction continuously declined, which caused alienation at the level of elites and the general public.⁹⁴ The results of the different approaches towards Czech and Slovak society during normalisation significantly influenced post-1989 developments in Slovakia as well as the dissolution of Czechoslovakia into two independent states by 1992–1993.⁹⁵ In the last days of the Czechoslovak normalisation regime, on 5 November 1989, the non-conformist sociologists Martin Bútora and Zora Bútorová asked their Czech friends: ‘My dears, will you still like us even when nationalist passions burst forth, as they sadly will …?’.⁹⁶