Abstract
Martin Štoll’s Television and Totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia is a much-welcomed contribution to the history of television outside the anglophone world. It adds to a body of work that has addressed the role of television in Eastern Europe during the Cold War and under socialism. The book adopts a range of perspectives, providing its readers with a close look at the processes of technical innovation, struggles over political control and how television evolved as a cultural form. Within these wider perspectives we are introduced to a great number of topics, from descriptions of the early buildings and facilities of Czechoslovak Television (CST) to efforts to continue broadcasting during the 1968 occupation as well as careful and detailed biographies of television personalities. The book is divided into three parts (in addition to the introduction): a prelude providing the prehistory of television in Czechoslovakia; a main act consisting of eight chapters covering television under communism; and a coda describing the birth of a public service broadcaster.
A recurring argument in the literature on television history (and media histories more generally) in (post)socialist Europe is that it is crucial to acknowledge the cultural nuances and differences both between countries and over time. In the concluding chapter, Štoll notes that the history shows that Czechoslovak television was far from being a ‘monolith in its relationship to the ruling powers’ (p. 242) and, in order to depict the nuances, he has gone into great detail in describing the historical developments from the early days of television to the fall of communism. This is the great strength of the book, as well as its greatest weakness. The detailed account is invaluable in that it provides knowledge about persons, events and episodes most of us have not been acquainted with previously but at the same time the attention to details, to persons, to events and so on is rather disparate and scattershot and thereby obscures the overall narrative. In short, the ambition to provide a full and complete history of Czechoslovak television, acknowledging the efforts of a very large cast of inventors, engineers, producers, and other television personnel, to some degree obscures the larger narrative.
It is striking, at least to this reader, how some of the episodes and events presented in the book seem familiar from other histories of broadcasting, both in nearby countries but also in unexpected places. For instance, in a chapter on the prehistory of television we learn about the importance of radio amateurs and the attempts of the state to interfere and control radio distribution. Similar, albeit not identical, tendencies were found elsewhere, for instance in the US where radio amateurs struggled with commercial interests over control of the radio waves. One wonders what the similarities were in these two situations which were, at least on the surface, seemingly worlds apart. In a different context, Michelle Hilmes (2012) has shown how the perceived difference between the commercial broadcasting system in the US and the British model of public service is a lot more entangled than is often assumed. Similarly, in exploring the transnational relations of CST it may well be possible to challenge and widen our understanding of television in Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European countries beyond the strict division imposed by the idea of the Iron Curtain. Štoll mentions a number of contacts between Czechoslovak television personalities and foreign colleagues, both outside and inside Eastern Europe, and again it would be interesting to learn more about those interactions, how they influenced (or not) the development of CST.
Recent research into ‘television beyond and across the Iron Curtain’ (Bönker et al., 2016), and the cultural Cold War more broadly, has forcefully argued that evidence of cross-border broadcasting, programme exchanges and cooperation challenges the idea of two distinct and isolated spheres, even changing the metaphor to that of an ‘Airy Curtain’ (Badenoch et al., 2013). In a passage early in the book the author describes Soviet Union satellite states as a ‘hermetically sealed bloc’ (p. 9). There is a tendency throughout the book to argue along these lines, telling a very polarised story, with ‘television people’ trying to defend their right to their own production and the political powers doing their best to restrict it. The book provides some examples of autonomy on behalf of television, for instance in an episode describing the role of CST’s fourth director Jirî Pelikán and his relation to the political powers (pp. 168ff). The author here notes that Pelikán’s international experience opened up the possibility of imagining a different order of things, a different way of organising television and challenging the political echelons. The episode is interesting and shows that the relation between the political and the professional is not static and locked into given positions, but rather elastic and up for negotiation. However, examples such as this could be more thoroughly integrated into a larger narrative of the social history of television in Czechoslovakia.
Towards the end of the second part, the book moves closer to the programmes being produced and broadcast. In chapter 12 we are introduced to series such as The Thirty Cases of Major Zeman (1976–1979), The Cottagers (1975) and The Woman Behind the Counter (1976). They are presented in the context of normalisation during the decades following the Prague spring in 1968. Štoll identifies and categorises programmes in different groups according to their functions, some being ‘direct politicization’ (p. 204), that is straightforward propaganda and praise for the communist party, while others, he considers, served a function of depoliticization. A third category is described as metaphorical, with political meanings hidden between the lines of the plot. When arguing for the second function of depoliticization, Štoll aligns himself with Paulina Bren (2010) and her account of Czechoslovak television under normalisation in which she also discusses and problematizes the relation between everyday life and a privatised citizenship.
Television and Totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia offers an impressive, almost encyclopaedic, account of Czechoslovak television in this period, while leaving further room for interpreting and contextualising the many findings of the book in relation to the larger social history of television. It would, I think, be very rewarding to bring this book, and Štoll’s future work, in closer conversation with the growing and exciting literature on television history and culture on Eastern Europe.