Collaboration Under Communism – In Between Opportunism, Identity, and Ideology

This paper unwinds the place of collaborators and informants within Communist Czechoslovakia (1948-1989) and discusses how and why subsequent transitional justice measures fell short in dealing with collaborative acts and the harms these acts inflicted. During the Communism the state proclaimed ideology of ‘strength in unity’ was accompanied by systematic repression and persecution, whose leitmotiv was to generate fear, distrust, withdrawal, fragmentation, and competition among individuals. Following the 1989 ‘Velvet Revolution, Czechoslovakia underwent a transition to liberal democracy and market economy. Officially implemented lustration laws purged individuals affiliated with the regime from official functions. While a handful of (alleged) Secret Police (StB) agents was prosecuted, many secret agent files were ‘accidentally’ destroyed in the early 1990’s, and a private newspaper published a leaked ‘unofficial’ list of tens of thousands of names of alleged collaborators for everyone to see. All in all, ‘dealing with the past’ re-generated fear, mistrust, withdrawal, fragmentation, and competition. The focus of this project is on the salience of ideology, political identity, and simple opportunism in collaboration in Communist Czechoslovakia and in subsequent transitional justice. We construe many acts of informing to police as non-ideological acts of conversation, social navigation, and opportunism. What does that suggest in terms of how to transition from such periods? What should transitional justice look like for collaborative acts that trigger great harm to others but are motivated not by ideology or political identity but rather by pettiness, convenience, opportunism, material acquisition, jealousy, and selfishness? How do opportunists interface with transitional justice? Collaboration may be more continuous than discontinuous: acts of ‘problematic’ collaborative support of authoritarian regimes may hinge upon similar techniques of social navigation (including by the very same individuals) as do subsequent acts of ‘salutary’ collaborative support of transitional justice frameworks paradoxically within often destructive and punitive neo-liberal market regimes.