I began to research Stalinist history in 1992 and I interviewed many witnesses. Some stories haunted me. Josef Lesák, for instance, told me how StB (the political police) let his newborn baby die in 1948 while his wife was interrogated in the room next door; she could hear her son howling but was not permitted to nurse him until it was too late. Lesák and many other victims appear in the documentary film I prepared for Česká televize in 1996.

In the same film, Jiří Pešek, a student in 1956, recounts the following story: President Novotný was told by a student that nothing like the Hungarian revolution could ever take place in Czechoslovakia because, she said, “Češi jsou známi jako knedlíkový národ.” (“Czechs are known as a dumpling nation” — that is, known to be about as courageous as a dumpling.)

I expected strong pushback at this anecdote; instead, I received many letters of thanks from viewers. It was then only seven years after 1989: people remembered well mass accommodation to the communist rule and resented the post-communist attempt to present them as nothing but victims and heroes. Today, although the perspective I take in my historical work remains very similar, I get indignant messages from young pundits such as this one: “Socialism = poverty + violence. Under socialism everyone was like Jean Valjean in the galleys.” Which memory is more “authentic”? The answer is: both are sincere, but they primarily testify about the atmosphere in which they were produced. The more time passes, the more collective memories are reconstructed in accordance to the present political and intellectual climate. This is why the quality of memory politics is crucially important.

What happened? Michal Pullmann, who is the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and a historian of the normalization period in Czechoslovakia, recently published an interview in which he reminded that the Czechoslovak communist regime had enjoyed a stable and genuine level of popular legitimacy. He was attacked in the press by Michal Klíma, who is chairman of the Board of Compensation of the Holocaust Victims. Klíma opened his open letter to Pullmann on a “personal note”, i.e. “Your father was a prominent member of the normalization communist regime. He worked in the secretariat of the Comecon in Moscow and thus you enjoyed privileged conditions.” I publicly denounced this as a personal attack worthy of the communists themselves, moreover wholly ignorant of the historical works Michal Pullmann was referencing. In turn, Michal Klíma gratified me with a long open letter in English on his Facebook profile. He assumed, and this is a discussion that was repeatedly taken up by his supporters on social media, that someone like myself, who doesn’t share his interpretation of history, cannot possibly speak Czech: “My dear Muriel Blaive, … I fully understand that Czech is not your mother tongue and that for that you do not fully understand what I wrote in the commentary against which you argue. I recommend you to ask someone to get you correct translation to your mother tongue so you understand the difference what I wrote and what you thought, I wrote. … You argue against my presumed saying that Pullman's father was ‘prominent normalizer’. I didn't write that. I wrote, that he was ‘prominent of the normalization communist regime’. I hope you feel the difference.”