Czech dissent, Jonathan Bolton argues in this ambitious and thoughtful book, needs rescuing not just from its detractors but from its eulogizers as well. Both sides portray the dissidents as an isolated, minute counter-elite, defined either in terms of human rights activism (“the Helsinki narrative”) or as theorists of civil society alternatives to the Communist systems (“the parallel polis narrative”), but neither perspective does justice to the complexity and diversity of dissent in Czechoslovakia. The problem has been exacerbated by the backshadowing often present in discussions of the impact of dissent in bringing down Communist rule, as these tend to assume that getting political results was a major motivating factor for the dissidents. This, Bolton shows, was not necessarily the case.
Bolton welcomes the recent trend to question the understanding of Communist rule under “normalization” as resting only on repression and popular apathy and to study everyday life and the...