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Czechoslovakia Intelligentsia
By convention, Marxist theorists subdivide the intelligentsia
into the creative (writers, artists, and journalists), the
professional (lawyers, educators, physicians, civil servants, and
party bureaucrats), and the technical (engineers). Insofar as one
might speak of the intelligentsia as an elite, they are the group
that has undergone the most drastic change since 1945. Capitalist
entrepreneurs and the clergy were obvious and early victims of
shifts in the political spectrum. Although their individual fates
varied, party membership was a prerequisite for civil servants,
the police, military officers, and educators who wished to
continue in their chosen fields.
The typical professional career under party rule has turned
out to be anything but secure. The year 1948 saw a turnover in
civil service personnel (especially the police) and a substantial
influx of workers into political and managerial positions. The
1950s purges struck hardest at the party faithful, i.e., the most
direct beneficiaries of the 1948 takeover. The upheaval of
nationalization and collectivization efforts that went further
than anywhere else in Eastern Europe, coupled with two currency
reforms, signaled a flux in economic fortunes during the first
decade of communist rule. A Czech, for example, who was a chief
executive in industry in 1948, worked as a carpenter for several
years thereafter, served a number of years in prison, and then
retrained for a career in law was not exceptional.
Change continued to be a defining characteristic of many
professional occupations through the 1970s: in 1968 about 60
percent of all army officers under thirty years of age had
resigned; by 1971 half of all school supervisors had been
replaced; and by 1972 approximately 40 percent of all journalists
had been purged. The magnitudes involved were simply staggering,
the more so because the victims of the 1970s purges were
overwhelmingly Czech
(see Ethnic Groups
, this ch.). During
normalization, over 25,000 government and trade union officials
were replaced. All told, perhaps 150,000 professionals were
unable to work in their fields by the end of the decade. The
purges included technical and managerial personnel, as well as
writers, artists, and KSC members active in the reform movement.
Estimates at the high end suggested that, from the late 1960s to
the late 1970s, some 400,000 members of the intelligentsia joined
the ranks of manual laborers.
In the mid-1980s, the technical intelligentsia--directors and
deputy directors of socialist enterprises, chairmen of
agricultural cooperatives, and managers of retail shops, hotels,
restaurants, services, and housing--occupied an ambiguous
position in the decision-making hierarchy. On the one hand, their
jobs often demanded considerable technical expertise; on the
other hand, decision making in all sectors had a political
component under communist rule. The technical intelligentsia had
to reconcile the requirements of technical efficiency with those
of political orthodoxy. From the KSC's perspective, the problem
was to ensure a politically reliable corps of technical experts.
Throughout the 1970s, those selected for political compliance
(versus training or expertise) predominated among the technical
intelligentsia. When a party functionary was unable to meet the
demands of his or her position, the custom was to call in a
technical expert (even if not a party member) for assistance. KSC
hard-liners consistently blocked efforts to reinstate reformist
managers deposed after 1968.
Calls for more efficient management and periodic
"reassessments" of managerial personnel accompanied changes in
the ranks of the technical intelligentsia. In 1980 Federal
Finance Minister Leopold Ler suggested that failure to meet
production goals would be reflected in bonuses given to
management and went so far as to intimate that managers might be
dismissed for ineptitude. There was a concerted effort on the
part of officialdom to make clear to managers that simple
political compliance--adequate to ensure one's employment in the
early 1970s--would have to be accompanied by efficiency in
production in the 1980s.
Czechoslovak party officials have had a long history of
suspicion of higher education, blaming it for ills as diverse as
labor unrest and youth's lack of socialist idealism. Research
scientists, to judge from the remarks of D.R. Prochazka, director
of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in the early 1970s ("I
would purge even Einstein if he were a reformist"), have not
fared much better.
Data as of August 1987
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