Propaganda stories in Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s: Believe it or not?

The collapse of the communist totalitarian regimes in Eastern and Central Europe and the end of the Cold War is one of key historical milestones in the history of the 20^th century. However, the process itself and the consequences differed immensely from state to state: e.g., from peaceful so-called Velvet Revolution in former Czechoslovakia to the brutal civil war in former Yugoslavia. Our aim was to analyze the preconditions of the political and societal change in the Czechoslovak media – were there any signs of the change? How did the ruling party present the Soviet perestroika, which signalized a step towards democratization? The nomenklatura (ruling elite) was rather surprised by Gorbachev’s plans and feared the resemblance with the Prague Spring 1968. Nevertheless, they had to comply with the official Soviet dictate. We used Wodak’s discoursive–historical approach to analyze official propaganda reports and press agency news. We found that the Czechoslovak official nomenklatura used several argumentation and persuasive strategies to present perestroika not as a political change, but as an ongoing path towards Communism. Perestroika was presented as an accelerated path towards a classless society, however, the words were often vague or meaningless. We show that the nomenklatura welcomed perestroika verbally, but the disparity between the words and actions was omnipresent. Citizens could “read between the lines”, which meant that they revealed inner inconsistencies and problems of the regime from discoursive strategies. The aim to communicate perestroika thus served merely as an evidence of the inner disintegration of the system.