Unintended Solidarity and Resistance in Prisons and Their Legacy After 1989

• In Event: Counterintuitive Communism: Unexpected Outcomes of State Socialist Policies

Abstract

Political prisoners in the late 1940s and early 1950s represented a diverse group, encompassing a range of political and religious persuasions, as well as varying cultural and social backgrounds. Following their release in 1989, many of these individuals nostalgically recollected their time in captivity, characterizing the period as one of solidarity and understanding.

This paper aims to explore and analyze the unintended consequence of communist repression, namely, the fostering of solidarity and resistance among political prisoners in Czechoslovak prisons, and the consequential impact of these shared experiences of imprisonment and subsequent persecution after release on the formation of an identity as a political prisoner, who, far from being merely a victim, became the first fighter against communism. The consequences of this unintended result were subsequently manifest in the efforts put by these political prisoners after 1989 to influence the politics of memory and enshrine in the law the existence of a "third" anti-communist resistance, with the aim of affirming their social and moral position within society.

Author

• Klara Pinerova, TU Dresden (Germany)