Through a peephole: Vladimír Karbusický, the secret police and the scholarly ethos in socialist Czechoslovakia

ABSTRACT

The main goal of the article is to expose how the Czechoslovak state socialism shaped scholarly habitus through various mechanisms, institutions and policies, especially through the intrusion of the secret police into the scholarly world. The article is informed by the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and presents a case study focusing on the ethnographer Vladimír Karbusický. In the 1960s, Karbusický was under surveillance by the State Security, the secret police of the socialist Czechoslovakia. His surviving dossier from the State Security archives allows us to see precisely how exactly the actions of the State Security diminished the autonomy of the scholarly world, influenced career paths and contributed to the formation of academic habitus. At the same time, the dossier, which emerged as part of the effort of the state to maximize its control over society, can be also used as evidence of the persistence of (surviving) academic autonomy and the concomitant scholarly ethos. This suggests that the socialist state of Czechoslovakia under the hegemony of its Communist Party may have not been entirely successful in its policies to control society.

KEYWORDS:

• state socialism
• secret police
• Pierre Bourdieu
• field theory
• Czechoslovak ethnography and folklore studies

Acknowledgements

I am immensely grateful to two anonymous reviewers, Marek Havlík, Johana Wyss, Karel Šima, Kristýna Hejzlarová and Eva Hrabáková who patiently read various drafts of the manuscript and gave me valuable comments. Shortcomings of the present version are mine only. Proofreading and editing was kindly performed by Jarka Stuchlíková and Lidia Maile. I would also like to thank Jan Němec from the State Regional Archives in Litoměřice for helping me with my almost detective work behind this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The amount of literature does not allow me to offer an all-encompassing review, but the contributions to the ‘multiple temporalities’ debate from 2007 serve to illustrate the point very well (Hann 2007).

2 I prefer to use the terms ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ although I am aware that the label is itself contested and that many scholars prefer ‘communist’ or ‘communism’ instead when speaking of Czechoslovakia or other countries of the former Eastern Bloc. However, there are good grounds for using either terminology. The ‘communist’ terminology is justified by the fact that the state was exclusively ruled by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia which strove to establish communism, the supposed ultimate stage of the historical process. Nonetheless, from the contemporary perspective, the period of 1948–1959 was understood as the building of socialism, and the following period of 1960–1989 as the socialist, not communist, stage (Sommer, Spurný, and Mrňka 2019, 76–78).

3 Further referred as to the field of ethnography.

4 Bourdieu makes a distinction between autonomous and heteronomous fields, but I prefer to speak of higher and lower degrees of autonomy.

5 The efficiency of working class origins as a kind of capital and the presence of the working class habitus in socialist academia has been a subject of an engaging research (e.g. Connelly 2000; Zysiak 2019). It also opens another avenue of research which considers the presence of what Bourdieu and Passeron termed primary habitus (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990, 42) in socialist academia. My research, on the contrary, is interested in secondary habitus a structure of dispositions instilled on individual scholars in the process of their continuous socialization within academia.

6 It is important to stress that I speak of explanatory strategies rather than of theories. Sometimes, we find these strategies cheek by jowl. On page one, the author assures the reader of the omnipotence of the socialist state, on page two the author presents a case of a successful defiance to the omnipotence.

These two strategies are interesting also in a completely different register. It is not by accident that many who prefer the first strategy recruit from those who were marginalized in the socialist era or who emigrated. The second strategy, on the contrary, is usually put forward by those who practiced official science under socialism and who perhaps feel the need to exculpate themselves from the fact that they practiced official science in the socialist era.

7 This argument as well as this paper is related only to science practiced at official institutions of research and higher education and is not related to the dissidents (e.g. Woitsch 2016, 11).

8 This distinction between the private persona and the public façade in conceptualizing the life during socialism has an important bearing on the theory of intersubjectivity and the theory of mind (Ssorin-Chaikov 2008; Verdery 2018).

9 Gottwald was the first communist president of Czechoslovakia. Nejedlý was the chief communist ideologue and a minister in the 1940s and 1950s.

10 A fitting example in Marxist-Leninist natural science is the once popular Lysenkoism (Olšáková 2014, 194–200).

11 A similar situation obtained in art. Decades before the communist ascent to power, Czechoslovak avantgarde authors toyed with the idea of dissolving the autonomy of art by subjecting it to the needs of the people (Ort 2016, 151–166). In this sense it is interesting to note that both certain Marxist and certain liberal economic currents strive to dissolve the autonomy of the field of art (as well as of other fields); Marxists measure art by its conformance to the needs of the people, economic liberals by demand. It is hence interesting to note Calhoun’s depiction of Bourdieu as defending republican values by insisting on the autonomy of fields as against both Marxist and economic liberals (Calhoun 2013, 50ff).

12 This argument is related to but distinct from the argument of the weakness of East European socialist states put forward by Verdery and others (Verdery 1991, 74–87).

13 The biographic sketch is based on Brouček and Jeřábek (2007:, 108–109) unless indicated otherwise.

14 The term národopis (lit. to write about nation, or nations) has a somewhat complicated history. After the communist coup in 1948, young Marxist-Leninists viewed národopis as a discipline with bourgeois roots and they aimed to transform it into a Soviet-style ethnography. This disciplinary break proved to be only partly successful. Early in the 1950s, Czechoslovak ethnography (etnografie) was merged with folklore studies (folkloristika) and some disciplinary institutions acquired the modifier of ethnography and folklore studies (e.g. the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore Studies). The term národopis designated a university degree, it was used as an overarching term which accommodated its two branches – ethnography and folklore studies, and some institutions continued to use the term (Balaš 2020, 13–19). Czechoslovak ethnography should not be confused with the recent ethnography trends in anthropology related to the ontological turn. For some accounts on the history of národopis and ethnography, see Grill (2015) and Herza (2019).

15 For the full bibliography of Vladimír Karbusický, consult (Reittererová, Toncrová, and Uhlíková 2010).

16 The numbers in brackets refer to the page numbers in Karbusický’s file (archival number 587840, 1. zvláštní odbor MV) which is available in the Security Services Archive (Archiv bezpečnostních složek). Most documents are one sided, therefore I mostly cite from odd pages.

17 German revanchism was one of the persistent themes in the socialist Czechoslovakia. It worked under the assumption that the Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia after WW2 sought to return to the country and claim their former possessions and territories. The revanchist aspirations of the expellees were expressed in their establishing Landsmannchaften (homeland associations) which were supported by the official FRG politics. FRG was seen as striving for the reacquiring of the interwar territory of Germany, therefore it was depicted as continuing German imperialism and Nazism. Here, the question is not to what extent German revanchism existed as a real political force, but German revanchism as a principle of the Czechoslovak view on international politics at the time. As such it can be identified as giving reasons for surveillance or propaganda. The state published numerous propagandist brochures and books which warned against the revanchism or organized Operation Neptune (cf. Anon 1959; Šnejdárek 1963; Bittman 1992; cf. Olšáková 2014, 355).

18 Emigration – leaving the republic (opuštění republiky) was considered a crime by Czechoslovak socialist legislation.

19 According to the dossier, this move made Heilfurth suspect of whether the two are not actually agents. At the same time, the State Security expected that the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND) would attempt to recruit both men (105). Here the dossier appositely expresses the cold-war logic.

According to the on-line records of the Security Services Archive, there are no traces of Sirovátka having been an agent of the State Security. In a reply to my request (č. j. ABS 1309/2021), the Archive identified Karel Fojtík as a confidant (důvěrník) of the State Security, but his file did not survive.

20 This course of action seems to be at odds with the stance taken by Katherine Verdery in her work on Romanian Securitate. Following Bakhtin’s work, she writes: ‘ … the work of the [Securitate] file is to decontextualize those other voices and subject them to a single dominant interpretation … ’ and ‘the effectiveness of the file in its context lies in its goal of reducing the variety of meanings in the multiple voices it contains so as to leave only one interpretation: the target’s identification as an enemy.’ (Verdery 2014, 52, emphasis original). She gives examples from her own surveillance files which show how the Securitate were changing their interpretation of her action as to fit her action into the image of enemy. This changing interpretation is in greater detail described in her later book (Verdery 2018).

Though Verdery writes only about the Romanian secret police, it is evident that her generalizations are meant to have wider implications for secret police surveillance in socialist regimes. However, apart from Karbusický, we may find other counterexamples which cast doubt on Verdery’s approach. There is a record that another ethnographer, Alena Plessingerová was in 1969 in contact with a British citizen, for which she was put under surveillance. However, when the operatives found out that the British citizen was 81 years old, they filed a request to stop the surveillance and archive the dossier (archival number 8066, I. Správa MV, p. 17).

This points to a tension within Verdery’s work which is on the one hand perceptible to the complexities of surveillance and the realities of state socialism, but which, on the other hand, presents some absolutist claims.

21 See Voříšek (2012) on the resurgence of Czechoslovak sociology in the 1960s as well as similar articles by Karbusický’s colleagues who also reacted to the resurgence (Tůmová 1964; Holý and Stuchlík 1964).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded with the “Support for the Long-Term Conceptual Development of the Research Organization RVO: 68378076, Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences.”