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Czechoslovakia The Society and Its Environment
Modern housing in Czechoslovakia
THE CZECHOSLOVAK SOCIALIST REPUBLIC of the 1980s provided any
number of contrasts with the Czechoslovak Republic (the First
Republic), the multinational Central European state formed in
1918 from the dismantled Austro-Hungarian Empire. Large
communities of ethnic minorities, some with strong irredentist
leanings (like the Sudeten Germans), were a major force in the
First Republic's social and political life. As a result of the
expulsion of most of the Germans after World War II and the
ceding of Carpatho-Ukraine to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia
had become predominantly a nation of Czechs and Slovaks, with
small minorities of Germans, Hungarians, Poles, and Ukrainians.
Even though Czechoslovakia's ethnic makeup was simplified, the
division between Czechs and Slovaks remained a potent social and
political force. During the 1950s and 1960s, planners had put
intensive efforts into redressing the economic imbalance between
the Czech lands and Slovakia. Although many of the glaring
economic disparities between the two were gone by the 1970s,
social and political differences persisted.
Interwar society in Czechoslovakia was a complex amalgam of
large landholders, farmers, tenants, landless laborers, and
specialists (herders, smiths, teachers, clerics, and local
officials) in the countryside and of many major entrepreneurs, a
large industrial proletariat, hundreds of thousands of
small-scale manufacturers, a diverse intelligentsia, shopkeepers,
tradesmen, and craftsmen in the city. Nevertheless, extremes of
wealth and poverty then typical in so much of Eastern Europe were
largely absent.
Because of the post-World War II nationalization of industry
(affecting not only large enterprises but nearly half a million
handicraft and small-scale industries as well) and
collectivization of agriculture, private ownership virtually
became a thing of the past in communist Czechoslovakia.
Czechoslovakia's much-simplified contemporary social spectrum is
made up of collective farmers, workers, the intelligentsia, the
communist party elite, and a few private farmers and tradesmen.
The reform movement of the late 1960s, popularly dubbed the
"Prague Spring," was an effort mainly by the Czechs (with some
Slovak support) to restructure Marxist-Leninist socialism in a
way more suitable to their respective historical, cultural, and
economic circumstances. "Normalization," the official label for
the government's efforts to stamp out the remnants of this
"counterrevolutionary" movement, was essentially a series of
carrot-and-stick measures: far-reaching purges of those who might
have been active in the reform era or remotely dissident in the
1970s, coupled with a concerted effort to placate the majority of
the populace with relative material prosperity. In the 1980s, the
emphasis remained on stifling dissent while trying to prevent
further economic deterioration.
Data as of August 1987
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