Czechoslovakia and Its Totalitarian Legacy

The attempt of the Czech research psychologists (described in Chapter 8) to transfer the Anglo-Saxon concepts and measures of moral integrity to the Czech and Slovak environment, is being juxtaposed to the Czechoslovak communist and post-communist history, permeated with ambiguous sense of morality. The chapter provides detailed account of the Czechoslovak State Security structure and activities, as well as the insufficient post-communist state efforts to deal with its aftermath. It reveals some astounding facts about the destruction of the relevant data and inaccessibility of legal corrections of the perpetrators. Through several narratives, it shows the relativity of individual, as well as collective, ethos under the circumstances where rule adherence, mostly regarded the main source of moral integrity in Western societies, lost any plausible meaning. Explicating a hardly believable political course adopted via democratic means just some three decades after the communist regime fall, it cautions against the rule adherence testing methods in the “state run as a corporation”.