Czechoslovakia Behind the Curtain: Life, Work and Culture in the Communist Era

During the Cold War, the West tended to paint communism with a broad brush, defining it simply as all that was evil about the Eastern Bloc and presuming it was more or less the same everywhere. Yet culture and geography contributed to different forms of communist society in different places. Drawing on interviews with nearly 100 former citizens, the author describes day-to-day life in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Their recollections paint a more complex picture of the life on the other side of the Iron Curtain, from the beginning of Soviet control in 1960 through the 1990 formation of the democratic Czech Republic.