History Politics Economy Industry Agriculture Foreign trade Transport Education Demographics Government structure Health and social welfare Mass media Resource base Religion Society Czechoslovakia, of all the East European countries, entered the postwar era with a relatively balanced social structure and an equitable distribution of resources.
There were well-known distinctions, explained below, between: In 1984 workers made up about one-half of the economically active population and were beneficiaries of policies geared toward maintaining the people's standard of living.
According to many observers, Czechoslovakia's internal stability rested on an unspoken bargain between workers and the ruling KSC: relative material security in return for acquiescence to continued Soviet domination.
At many enterprises, instead of streamlining operations and dismissing employees whose job performance is unsatisfactory, managers merely shift workers to other positions or juggle employment statistics[citation needed].
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, the proportion of Vietnamese workers, brought in by the allied government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, grew rapidly.
By the end of 1982, there were approximately 26,000 Vietnamese workers in Czechoslovakia, about 0.3% of the total manual work force, including apprentices.
This represented a dramatic change from the First Republic with its politically active middle-sized farmers, small landholders, and differentiated labor force.
One result of increased incomes and improved rural living conditions was a rise in the educational level of the agricultural labor force.
By convention, Marxist theorists subdivided the intelligentsia into: The year 1948 saw a turnover in civil service personnel (especially the police) and a substantial influx of workers into political and managerial positions.
The upheaval of nationalization and collectivization efforts that went further than anywhere else in Eastern Europe, coupled with two currency reforms, signaled a flux in economic fortunes during the first decade of communist rule.
The purges included technical and managerial personnel, as well as writers, artists, and KSC members active in the reform movement.
Calls for more efficient management and periodic "reassessments" of managerial personnel accompanied changes in the ranks of the technical intelligentsia.
There was a concerted effort on the part of officialdom to make clear to managers that simple political compliance—adequate to ensure one's employment in the early 1970s—would have to be accompanied by efficiency in production in the 1980s.
As for the country's creative intelligentsia the KSC takeover ushered in the era of Stalinist socialist realism in Czechoslovakia's arts.
It was a movement with strong overtones of Russian chauvinism and a deep anti-Western bias evident in a readiness to denounce anything remotely cosmopolitan as bourgeois, decadent, or both.
A blind optimism coupled with revolutionary fervor are the key components of this "aesthetic," portraying life as it should be according to Marxist theory, rather than as it actually is.
The congress declared that "literary and artistic production is an important agent of the ideological and cultural rebirth in our country, and it is destined to play a great role in the socialist education of the masses."
Karel Gott, a popular male singer, recorded a song portraying a conversation between a casual lover and his sweetheart that was banned from radio and television.
In particular, the regime found the personal habits of many members of popular musical groups too divergent from socialist ideals and subjected them to considerable harassment.
In the middle to late 1970s, there was a semithaw: the authorities permitted purged writers to recant and, after a proper measure of self-criticism, publish again.
Those writers who wished to publish successfully at home kept to safe territory—science fiction, World War II novels, fantasy, and children's literature—all noncontroversial, basically apolitical genres.
Because "normalization" was characteristically milder in Slovakia, writers were sometimes able to publish works in Bratislava that the Prague censors found unacceptable.
Historically, the right to form associations was first won in 1848, although the Habsburgs, realizing that they had opened a Pandora's box in their ethnically diverse empire, revoked it soon thereafter.
The regime particularly favored the Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship League, though its rank-and-file membership declined as a result of a surge of anti-Soviet sentiment after the 1968 invasion.
Cultural societies for German or Hungarian minorities were acceptable, but religious organizations faced significantly greater restrictions.
Any association that might play a role in politics or the economy (that could however remotely or tenuously be construed to threaten KSC domination) was out of the question.
The reform movement's potential was nowhere more threatening to the hegemony of the party than in the population's persistent demands for more truly representative organizations in every area of life.
The employment of the vast majority of married women of child-bearing age has favored three-generation extended families, in which grandparents (especially grandmothers) have helped women deal with the often conflicting demands of work and child upbringing: In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the number of marriages in Czechoslovakia declined while the number of divorces increased.