Censorship in Czech and Hungarian Academic Publishing, 1969-89: Snakes and Ladders

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How did writers convey ideas under the politically repressive conditions of state socialism Did the perennial strategies to outwit the censors foster creativity or did unintentional self-censorship lead to the detriment of thought Drawing on oral history and primary source material from the Editorial Board of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and state science policy documents, Libora Oates-Indruchov explores to what extent scholarly publishing in state-socialist Czechoslovakia and Hungary was affected by censorship and how writers responded to intellectual un-freedom. Divided into four main parts looking at the institutional context of censorship, the full trajectory of a manuscript from idea to publication, the author and their relationship to the text and language, this book provides a fascinating insight into the ambivalent beneficial and detrimental effects of censorship on scholarly work from the Prague Spring of 1968 to the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Censorship in Czech and Hungarian Academic Publishing, 1969-89 also brings the historical censorship of state-socialism into the present, reflecting on the cultural significance of scholarly publishing in the light of current debates on the neoliberal academia and the future of the humanities.

Reviews

[T]he book unquestionably unpacks thoughtfully several aspects of censorship under state socialism to offer a balanced appraisal of how academic authors navigated the eras constraints, with insights into more recent worlds of academic publishing. It will enrich future work in this area. * Slavic Review *
Theoretically sophisticated and methodologically bold, this multivocal study engages with Czech and Hungarian scholars memories of censorship in the 1970s-80s. Besides offering a vivid reimagining of state socialist power relations, it raises questions about the ethics of knowledge production in academia more generally - a problematic within which Oates-Indruchova brilliantly situates her own study. * Katherine Lebow, Associate Professor of History, Oxford University, UK *
A meticulous study of the censorship of academic works in Soviet-era Czech and Hungarian academic publishing. What unfolds is a story partly of the mechanisms regimes generated to keep their ideology unchallenged, and partly of the authors strategies to circumvent them. The book ends with chilling suggestions that these battles did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but developed anew in current illiberal regimes. * Richard Dutton, Academy Professor of English, Ohio State University, US *

Author Bio

Libora Oates-Indruchov is Professor of Sociology of Gender at the University of Graz, Austria. She is the co-editor of The Politics of Gender Culture under State Socialism: An Expropriated Voice (2015), along with Hana Havelkov.