A ‘Golden Twenty Years’, or a Bad Stepmother? Czech Communist and Post-Communist Narratives on Everyday Life in Interwar Czechoslovakia

The article deals with the narratives on the First Czechoslovak Republic in the Czech communist and post-communist public discourse. It is argued that the attitude to the First Republic played an important role in the political history of the Czech society in the second half of the twentieth century. The article shows that the negative narratives on this period were of key importance for the legitimisation of the communist regime whilst the positive narratives were an essential component in the discourse of anti-communists, supporters of the democratic reforms and the dissident movement in the 1970s and 1980s. The 1989 revolution was interpreted both as the return to the success of the First Republic democracy and economic system, and as the imagined return from the East to the West.