Proč tak snadno... Některé rodinné důvody sametové revoluce – Možný Ivo (2022)

This Czech-language sociological essay, written during the history-making months of 1989 and 1990, appears in its fourth edition thirty-two years after it was first created. It tells how the despotic socialist state first expropriated the family, and therefore the private sphere of life, in the 1950s, only to find that the family eventually colonised the state. The essay takes readers into the thinking of the transformative period in which it was written and offers explanations that remain valid for the deepest causes of the old regime’s collapse: the private aspirations and forced strategies of very different groups of nameless social actors, both below and above, which ultimately meant that almost no one remained interested in preserving the regime. In a substantial foreword to the second edition, the author commented on subsequent developments: “We slipped out of socialism so easily because capitalism had already been prepared for us within it. We are adapting to capitalism so painfully because ours had already been prepared within it.” For the third edition in 2009, he added a shorter foreword relating the text to the current state of national memory: Do we know more after twenty years, or have we also forgotten what we knew twenty years ago?