Communism, public space, and identity in Slovakia

People walk around monuments on a daily basis but sometimes they do not even notice them. The public does not always recognize memorials as symbols of a shared memory or as something that ultimately shaped their past and has an influence on their identity even in the present. These reminders of the past also referred to as narratives are often located on popular busy streets, in town squares, simply in spaces where they should be noticed. Nevertheless, people do not generally pay them much attention until these memorials are a subject of public discussion. Whether it is a question of removing, changing their location, or vandalizing them, people tend to become more aware of their presence and perhaps even the meaning behind them.

One of the prominent conceptual artists in Slovakia, Peter Kalmus received a two-month suspended sentence together with artist Ľuboš Lorenz for vandalizing a memorial of Vasiľ Biľak – a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (TASR, 2020). The interesting aspect of this case is that the Law of the National Council of the Slovak Republic on the Immorality and Illegality of the Communist System 2020, Art.125 s.7 (SVK) stipulates that: "It is prohibited to place texts, images and symbols glorifying, promoting or defending a regime based on communist ideology or its representatives on monuments, memorials and plaques" (Article 125, s. 7, 2020). This directly argues that communist symbolization should be prohibited in public spaces, but reality shows that Slovakia does not abide by this law. Instead, some members of the public feel a stronger inclination towards prosecuting individuals like Peter Kalmus for vandalizing these symbolizations. Such contradictory behavior begs the question of why constitutional law is overpowered by public sentiment. The relationship Slovak people have with communism and how the regime formed Slovak identity is curious, especially in relation to public space.

It is important to investigate the psychological aspects of Slovak identity – the sense of belonging, dignity and recognition if we wish to understand this nations’ stance towards its past and consequently the relation it has to the present state of public space. It seems that communism transpired very differently in each former Soviet Bloc state. Even in Czechoslovakia, the discrepancies in experiencing normalization between the Czechs and Slovaks are significant. There was a stronger reaction of dissatisfaction and rebellion from the Czechs than from the Slovaks after 1968. Feelings in Slovakia were a mixture of satisfaction, ambivalence, fear, carelessness, but also dissatisfaction. The goal is to understand these mixtures of feelings to discover what should be done in unique cases where the past is very dominant in the present and whether, the approach to moving on does require a change of public space. Perhaps it might even help better clarify who should be responsible for these decisions as the literature already often shows that such responsibility is often abused by people of power and importance. Therefore, a way to get to this goal is answering the big question: How did communism shape people’s attitudes towards communist monuments in Slovakia? The brief answer which will be further discussed throughout the thesis is: Slovakia utilizes public spaces primarily to remember the time of communism. Its volatile role created a strong hold over people’s behavior and stances towards themselves, and the outside world. In some ways, it is difficult for that hold to break because the regime is very much present in society today and even remembered with rosy retrospection. People have not strictly come to terms with what happened and how they behaved during the time between 1968 and 1989. This is observable even today precisely through the public space which rarely hit the spotlight in public discussions. There is no proper drive or representative actors who show interest in changing the narrative and overcoming the past thus, keeping the memory of the regime very much alive and preventing Slovakia from progressing forward in matters of social and political importance.

The role of communism within Slovak memory

The time of communism is remembered quite differently in Slovakia than it is in other satellite states especially because in Slovakia, communism marked the time of rapid economic, industrial and social development. The “modernization processes in Slovakia accelerated in the second half of the twentieth century, characterized by a rapid drain of people out of the agricultural sector and rapid industrialization” (Marušiak, n.d.). People suddenly felt a sense of agency because they had proper jobs and were more equal in their community. The state ensured that the people would be taken care of and people felt a certain stability despite not having personal freedom. It almost seems like the sense of security overpowered the need for freedom. Naturally, there was still heavy influence coming from the Czech Republic as many people travelled to Slovakia for work thus, Slovakia as a nation was still struggling to maintain its own idea of identity. Nevertheless, the way communism was being imbedded in the minds of the Slovak people was more positive compared to the rest of the Eastern Bloc because the people were far more ambivalent towards the events happening under their noses.

During the time of normalization, the communist regimes in the Soviet satellite states all followed the same pattern of political rule based on absolute power of the communist party and the secret police (Šimečka, 2017). They even utilized the same ideological language which included terms such as the proletarian dictatorship, democratic centralism, social realism and real socialism. Nevertheless, these regimes differed from each other because individual states had their own histories and behavioral characteristics based on the past experiences. Given that Slovakia endured decades of being the underdog and staying in line with what bigger states and more powerful authorities said, the experience of communism bared a very similar trajectory despite the country being part of Czechoslovakia. It all comes back to the historical context which shows that Slovakia was a young and small agrarian state. Firstly, Slovaks obeyed the instructions of the communists because unlike the Czechs, they were thankful for communism bringing significant modernization to the country. Secondly, the Slovak communists knew that the only way they could protect the small state was to protect the small elite which in turn had to promise the communist regime obedience (Šimečka, 2017).

This was not so difficult for the Slovak population because their obedience granted them many benefits of which the most important was safety. Obedience granted the people access to employment, their children were guaranteed a good education and those who represented the regime were granted a high status in society. One of the experts interviewed for this thesis gave a good example of how the system worked when she said:

“The benefit again was that people could carry on doing their jobs. My mother and aunt were translators, who translated amazing Russian literature to Slovak. My mother didn’t hand in her legitimization, she did what most of the others did. The committee did a background check and my mother could continue to translate quality literature. My aunt on the other hand was banned from translating when she handed in her legitimization and when they imprisoned her husband. And then the only thing she could do was translate under my mother’s name and the names of other translators” (Zora Bútorová, personal interview, 2022).

It seems that those who wanted to survive had to perceive the regime as black and white. If they wanted to be well off, do what they love and remain safe, they obeyed what the communists dictated. Naturally, the decision to go along with the regime was difficult, but not impossible to respect as it secured people’s lives. Even today, many people remember the regime with rosy retrospection. They remember the past more positively than the present because they think they were happier then and this brings them together. It is a collective memory for them, the time they knew they would be taken care of. Naturally, this is a strong force for a state where the sense of belonging or identity was not pertinent to its existence as a state. Moreover, that strong sense of nostalgia is not as present anymore since the world is far more polarized, divided and diversified. Many people, especially from the lower-class backgrounds feel dissatisfaction and romanticize the past because they also feel closely tied to their past. Communism had a strong influence over people then and it still has an influence over how people remember their past today.

Communism’s influence on social behavior and identity

Identity The current state of research related to identity formation as a sub-category of memory formation as well as its connection to the use of public space focuses on how past events are communicated throughout history and formed into common narratives which are then reflected in objects such as monuments, symbols, and literature (Assman, 1995). Most of the literature focused on collective memory shows that identity is emphasized by the importance of shared memories and unified images of the past. For the sake of this thesis, the focus is primarily on the relationship between identity and memory formation and the subsequent influence they have on each other. The definition of identity bears the following definition: it is the idea that a group of people share a unified and common image or perception of their past.

By sharing certain knowledge through cultural memory, people create unity and identify with each other while also being able to differentiate from those who do not share the same experiences (Assman, 1995). This allows them to create close ties and develop a shared history, and subsequently a common identity. However, the important thing that the literature shows is that constructing or reconstructing memory can only occur if it is related to knowledge of “an actual and contemporary situation” (Assman, 1995). What people go through in actual time can be related or compared to past events that resemble the present. The research conducted up to this point makes many claims about how collective memory is communicated through public space. Furthermore, the prominent theme within the literature also shows that public space can be misused and abused by politicians for their own agenda and for the purpose of changing historical and social narrative in their favor. However, all of these perceptions of individual narratives, past events and memories all depend on the people who live and remember them, as they are the ones for whom the public space was intended, thus the dependence stems from the question of national identity.

Perception of the past as extension of identity

The perception of the past and the responsibility people hold for its reality seems to relate very closely to people’s identity and culture. For some, the past is a concept that should be deviated from, as it serves to teach people lessons and learn from them in order to avoid mistakes in the future. For others, the past serves as a memory fondly kept and cherished. Of course, these two options also depend on what the past memory is. In some cases, the memory is a tragic event and people simply wish to move on from it. In other cases, the memory might bring back the idea of glory days or a time when people felt they had what they needed thus, they desire to relive it. Nevertheless, the amount and detail people remember directly relates to the nature of the event. As many psycho-analysts and psychotherapists have shown in the past, traumatic events often lead the individual or group to forget the event or at least forcefully keep it away from resurfacing in their minds (Kolk, 2015). Because of this phenomenon, it is difficult to plot the exact timelines and series of events of trauma which can be anything from personal loss, to genocide or oppressive regimes. In other cases, the experienced trauma may leave a country or people unable to move on or process the events.

2.2 Communism’s influence on identity development There is a common belief among the countries of the west that communist regimes were a barrier preventing states from developing into liberal democracies. However, the former Eastern bloc was not as convinced about the end of communism or the post-communist ideology for that matter. “The development of sites, institutions and processes devoted to remembering, commemorating and working through the Communist past, such as Institutes of National Memory, History Commissions, lustration bureaus, museums and commemorative memorials, were regarded by some elites as fundamental to the democratic re-education of post-communist societies” (Mark, 2010, p. xii). Central-eastern European countries which have overcome the communist regime and celebrated its downfall in the years 1989-1991 cannot all say they have come to terms with the collapse. The fascinating phenomenon behind this is precisely the idea that communism prevents most countries to move on to liberal democracy thus, showing that central-eastern European countries that have not yet overcome communist nostalgia and sentimentality are de facto not legitimate liberal democracies. This also indicates a lot about the countries’ identities.

Slovakia seems to be more of a hybrid regime – something between a liberal democracy and an authoritative regime. Slovakia is quite a diverse country in its differentiation of political and social groups thus, this may be another valid reason for the people’s inability to define their identity while also leaning more towards bonding over a shared past. There is a certain cognitive dissonance because those people who felt they had a great life during the regime were victims of totalitarianism. Nevertheless, they claimed that times were easier and more stable. People knew what to expect and had a lot more security in their job, housing and support from the state. They were being taken care of as the state owned everything thus, nobody felt they had to compete with their friends or neighbors. Essentially, people felt more equal to each other (Bútorová, 2019).

Additionally, the fact that the regime allowed for some people to rise through the ranks and gain higher status led them to gain a certain level of dignity. As Francis Fukuyama emphasizes in his work on identity, the former is very closely tied to the idea of dignity where the role of the state is to make its people feel recognized and appreciated.

“In the first place, identity so understood grows out of a distinction between one’s true inner self and an outer world of social rules and norms that does not adequately recognize that inner self’s worth or dignity. Individuals throughout human history have found themselves at odds with their societies. But only in modern times has the view taken hold that the authentic inner self is intrinsically valuable, and the outer society systematically wrong and unfair in its valuation of the former. It is not the inner self that has to be made to conform to society’s rules, but society itself that needs to change” (Fukuyama, 2018).

Furthermore, Fukuyama stipulates that “because human beings naturally crave recognition, the modern sense of identity evolves quickly into identity politics, in which individuals demand public recognition of their worth” (Fukuyama, 2018, p.18).

In addition to dignity, the communist regime emphasized identity through the concept of “groups” or collective action (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000). This is understood as “commonality, connectedness and groupness” of one community in which people share similar characteristics and partake in the same behavior or actions (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000). Slovakia during the communist regime fits quite well into this definition as the majority of the population partook in the same behavior and shared similar attributes related to their attitude towards the regime, their education and employment. However, another characteristic that bonded them was in fact the experience of the regime itself.

2.3 Identity development based on typology classification Any group that endures a totalitarian regime is bound to develop their identity based on said experience which in this case could be classified as traumatic. Raul Hilberg first proposed in 1992 three typologies for classifying participants and observers of genocide. There were the perpetrators, the victims and the bystanders (Hilberg, 1992). However, the typology was met with some criticism mainly due to its vagueness and lack of precise classification as people’s behaviors and participatory behaviors during genocide varied, so they likely belonged under more than one of the classifications. That is why two other classifications were added – helpers and beneficiaries. Later Sharlene Swartz proposed another two categories to broaden the classification. According to her typology, there are perpetrators, victims, bystanders, resisters and beneficiaries.

The first category, the perpetrators are those who directly committed an “illegal, criminal, violent, or evil act” (Swartz, 2016, p.152). In the context of Slovakia, these would be individuals who directly participated in the enforcing of communist policies, agendas, and who gave orders to authorities that surveilled citizens. These would be mainly the members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party between 1948 and 1989. Then there were the indirect perpetrators, which Swartz refers to as the implementers of injustice. These were the people taking orders from direct perpetrators to carry out illegal, criminal and violent actions, but also individuals who chose to collaborate with the police, and inform on their fellow citizens. Including soldiers, the police and members of the secret police, (ŠtB – Štátna Bezpečnosť), this group would also include ordinary citizens who did not want to fall to the regime, so they became the regime.

The victim category is complicated in the sense that the word itself carries a heavy and negative connotation. Nobody likes to be called a victim so, in some cases “the term survivor is preferred to the term victim, in order to remove this [blame the victim] association” (Swartz, p. 153). These group members are further categorized as leaders, resisters, survivors, and collaborators who went along with the actions of the communist perpetrators. This is why it is important to keep in mind that this typology is a range and the categories overlap. The most accurate definition for this group seems to be the dishonored, because these are people who were treated unjustly, their dignity was violated, and they did not receive respect or equal treatment from the regime (Swartz, p. 154). In Slovakia, these were people who were fired from their employment, their children were thrown out of schools and their reputation in society suffered because they were Christians or non-communist sympathizers. They allowed the regime to rule them and did not fight back. “This dishonor extends across generations as children inherit the physical impoverishment of their parents, missed opportunities due to poor quality education, and low levels of social and cultural capital” (p. 154). The interesting aspect of this category is that most of these people could also be considered as harmed or damaged but the same goes for the perpetrators in cases where their involvement was forced.

Those labeled as bystanders according to Hilberg are the people who often feel too powerless or insignificant to say something when they witnessed a crime or violent act being committed thus, they say nothing instead. They are silent or avoid the conflict at all. Swartz refers to these people as ostriches because it is as if they are burying their heads in the sand “to avoid what is going on around them (p. 154).

Unlike the victims, the resisters are those who implicated an active participation in going against the regime. They made the effort to show that they are more than the regime and that they want to see change. In Czechoslovakia, these would be the dissidents, vocal critics of the regime and those who followed them, like students who organized protests explicitly disagreed with how they were taught in schools. These people became the faces of the 1989 Velvet Revolution, those who took part in the protests of 1969 after the Prague Spring, and the Candle Demonstration in Bratislava in 1988. These were people who wanted to show that communism was actively going against human rights and democratic values.

Lastly there are the beneficiaries who often arise late during the time of struggle or after an oppressive regime or genocide has occurred. These are the people who received undeserved wealth in the form of high status, property, good education and strategic employment. They also receive “unearned privilege and a baseless sense of superiority” (p. 156). Beneficiaries during communism did not have to lift a finger to get where they or their children are today, because they literally benefited from doing nothing. They did not get imprisoned, they did not perpetrate crimes, and most importantly, they remained “ignorant or did not care to know from where your property, wealth, job and education came” (p. 156). In many cases, the beneficiaries are more present today than active resisters, victims or perpetrators because they tend to be the children of the other categories already mentioned. They may enjoy the riches that the previous generations were able to accumulate by being part of the regime and gaining more for themselves. These people may have nice apartments and other property that they otherwise would not be able to afford today. They may have also received a high level of education which in turn allowed them to reach high ranking positions in their employment.

Transferring formed identities onto future generations At the breaking point or generational divide, it becomes difficult to define the correct means of dealing with the past. As James Booth (1999) states in his article, “sameness of the country across time is grounded in its institutional and constitutional-normative continuity. Regime forms that break with that continuity also thereby cease to be "ours". They are not part of what "we"were and so are not the objects of public remembrance, of our collective memory of ourselves as we were… Most fundamentally, because we are not one with the perpetrators, because we do not share with them a political identity, we are not accountable for their injustices” (p. 250). Thus, when scholars speak about a collective identity, we have to keep in mind that even the authoritarian regimes which had control are a part of a state’s continuous political identity, so the memory of their actions cannot simply be thrown on to them but remembered as a part of a state’s past and its identity.

Naturally, states move on from one political regime to another and such political regime also carry their own political identity. However, this political identity spans over other dimensions including one that is territorial, ethnic, and one that is constitutional. While all three have an influence over the level or responsibility a new regime has for the past, in the case of Slovakia, the focus can be shifted more towards the constitutional dimension. The Law of the National Council of the Slovak Republic stipulates under article 125, section 7 that any symbol or representation of communism which celebrates or further propagates the regime and is displayed in public spaces is illegal:

"It is prohibited to place texts, images and symbols glorifying, promoting or defending a regime based on communist ideology or its representatives on monuments, memorials and plaques" (Article 125, s. 7, 2020).

In addition, the 2005 Criminal Code penalizes the support of parties and movements aimed at supporting fundamental rights and freedoms (Blaščák, 2017). The legislature in Slovakia suggests that the current regime has taken responsibility for actions which transpired during the past. Some would argue that staying in the same “territorial and ethnic range indicates that a political identity is still the same even when a new regime ensues, thus making that regime responsible for the past that has occurred in the region” (Booth, 1999). However, others would argue that once a regime adopts a “new constitutional framework and the people who previously adopted one political identity now have a new political framework are not responsible for the past” (Booth, 1999).

Here is where Slovakia becomes a unique case, because it seems to follow both premises. On the one hand, the legislative framework indicates that the state feels responsible for the past deeds of the communist regime. However, on the other hand, it seems that people who still identify with the past regime disregard past events, forget the crimes that have been committed, and go as far as wishing for the regime’s return. Perhaps the ideal situation would be one where the political community a country is centered in is treated as a continuous phenomenon which goes through various stages, but is still the “subject of attribution, responsible for the past, which belongs to it, and accountable for a future that is also its” (Booth, 1999, p. 249). For Slovakia the questions remains whether the feeling of responsibility for the past will be introduced to the people and in the end, how it will be reflected in the use of public space.

For that to happen, it is important to understand that people behave and say certain things depending on what group of people they are surrounded by (i.e., superiors, equals, subordinates). Therefore, it is crucial to understand certain hidden and public transcripts that decode and analyze the reason behind public defiance and resistance to domination. It is important to mention that even though the communist regime was authoritarian in nature and often threatened people with force or resorting to force, the representatives of the regime “maintained social peace over several decades” (Blaive, 2013, 75). People were in a sense willing to collaborate or accommodate the regime (Blaive, 2013). Studying these phenomena is best done through oral history.

The communists were able to legitimize their power through dominant discourse. Because of how the system was set out, what was said publicly by those in power was universal. Prior to 1989, the history of totalitarianism (another term for communism) in Czechoslovakia stressed “coercion at the cost of consent as the foundation of dictatorial regimes” (Kolář and Kopeček 2007, p. 220). All the historical reports focused on describing the people of the regime as victims and the victims themselves perceived themselves as such. The Czechs’ use of the word totalita “is understood as implying that Communist Party members and Secret Police collaborators were all guilty, and the rest of us were all innocent victims” (Blaive, 2013, p.77). It is important to distinguish the word totalitarianism from the word “totalita” as the latter is used by those who existed under the communist regime, not any other tyrannical or totalitarian political system. However, in contemporary history, the two words are used interchangeably even though totalita “has little in common with Hannah Arendt’s theory…especially as regards the population’s participation in the domination scheme” (Blaive, 2013, 78). This goes to show that using the word totalita is in support of people under the rule of communism not taking responsibility for their own actions, and blaming the regime itself. It was easier to blame the communist regime for interjecting in the Czech efforts to pursue a “national democratic identity” than to claim that communism was a very concrete part of Czech and Slovak history (Kolář and Kopeček 2007, p. 176). However, this is a gross simplification of the problem as a division of people into perpetrators and victims is inaccurate in all periods of communism whether that was the Stalinist, post-Stalinist era, the Prague Spring or normalization.

Nevertheless, people were collaborating on a daily basis with the secret police (ŠtB) and denouncing their own neighbors in order to keep themselves safe and gain more by secretly surveilling those around them (Blaive, 2013). They adapted to the term James Scott coined – public transcript and negotiated with the authorities to get what they wanted if they conformed to the regime. In a sense, these people were no longer a mere part of the system, because they had become pillars on which the system could function. They were simply becoming the regime (Scott, 1990). This made existence for regular people all the more complicated, because it was no longer about oppression from above like from the police or militia. Oppression became a practice among the people themselves as they spied and denounced each other for the sake of saving themselves and their family interests. These ordinary people were simply policing each other (Blaive, 2013). This likely had a strong impact on people’s psychology as they were stuck between existing as a collaborator and a resistor at the same time. However, there were perhaps even more roles at stake during the regime. Sharlene Swartz in her publication Another Country introduces five typologies of people who take part in an oppressive regime. She bases it on black and white citizens of South Africa during and after Apartheid when the narratives were unclear and people could not distinguish between who was responsible for what actions. These five typologies include perpetrators, victims, bystanders, resisters and beneficiaries (Swartz, 2016). Although communism had a differing trajectory than the South African apartheid, both regimes molded people who fit into these five groups. These five labels became the people’s psychological identifiers, the definition of who they were, the way they spoke and behaved.

There were some exceptions to the rule of people becoming the regime in Czechoslovakia. The city of Komárno is an interesting case in that the communist regime was received differently, more positively. Here, people saw the regime as a neutralizer between Hungarians and Slovaks because both countries were under the same political system. Anything negative that happened to either side of the border was blamed on the neighbors, not the regime and thus, having a resenting or loving relationship towards communism was not really apparent. Nevertheless, the memory of communism is remembered deeply. “It doesn’t only apply to the older generation which has the past rooted inside them due to the lived experiences, but also the following generations which to a certain extent also received a mark from socialism – whether that was through intentional passing of information in the family and community or even as a result of avoiding this topic and leaving an open space for people interpreting or better yet misinterpreting the myths about socialism” (Bútorová, 2019).

Identity shaping through public space Many scholars have delved into the topic of public space, its underlying meaning for history, culture and politics, and its implications for memory building. Public space can be utilized for political interest and manipulation of public narrative as is the case in many authoritarian and illiberal states. Political leaders will utilize public space to alter and manipulate public memory in order to further their own agenda (Forest & Johnson, 2011). By building monuments and memorials which represent their own ideologies, they are able to plant that same ideology in the public eye. It is a way for them to “gain symbolic capital – the prestige, legitimacy, and influence derived from being associated with status-bearing ideas and figures” (Forest & Johnson, 2011). It is firmly established that political figures will use the idea of forming monuments in order to gain control over the political and cultural narrative and subsequently shape national identity. However, it is also important to examine this phenomenon from the other side of the coin – national identity can also be the driving force of monument building and remembrance through the use of public space. As Jeffrey Alexander (2004) has stated, “monuments, museums and memorials are attempts to make statements and affirmations [to create] a materiality with a political, collective, public meaning [and] a physical reminder of a conflictive political past” (pp. 5-7). Thus, bringing up the notion of monument removal could be seen as an effort of erasing the past.

Many authors agree on the fact that erasing history by forceful removal is like trying to create a different history simultaneously. It is best “exemplified by the Soviet practice of airbrushing figures out of photographs when they fell from the Party’s favor. It is a top-down, imposed forgetting that serves the interests of the state or a narrow group. This type of forgetting can never be acknowledged – it relies on and enforces silence and conformity” (Forest & Johnson, 2018). There is a clear correlation drawn from these examples and that is that authoritative states are far more susceptible to such forced erasure and change of narrative. On the other hand, state functioning as a partial democracy or actual democracy are more transparent in regard to the use of public space. “The more democratic the state, the more private as opposed to official activity takes place. But second, these differences among regime types appear to be driven almost completely by differences in material action (monument creation and alteration) rather than discursive action (proposals to build monuments or threats to change or remove them)” (Forest & Johnson, 2011). This means that proper functioning democracies are more likely to utilize public space for remembrance through building up monuments, whereas, hybrid regimes often remain in the discursive sphere, merely speaking about the possibility of building up monuments. It seems that in Slovakia there is another angle which does not receive much attention. The discursive actions often are kept to a minimum. In other words, people do not tend to talk about monuments until it comes to a point where a monument might be taken down. In addition, this conversation tends to take a turn towards negative feedback and reluctance from the side of the people who are not familiarized with the idea of taking down monuments from the communist era.

Given that Slovakia is defined as a hybrid state, in other words something between a liberal democracy and an authoritative regime, the amount of actualized monument developments or destructions are lower than in either democratic or authoritative regimes. In hybrid countries in general, there is more talk about building or taking down monuments but less realization of such actions which could be due to the idea that a hybrid regime does not have as much control over the system as a democracy or dictatorship (Forest & Johnson, 2011). Another possible explanation for less action and more theorizing in hybrid states is that the state’s identity may not be as defined or concrete as in democracies and totalitarian regimes.

Today we see that conceptual artists are being sentenced for vandalizing monuments that represented communist individuals but in other cases, the public does not pay much attention to how public space is changed and whether monuments are removed or moved to other places unlike in other former Soviet Bloc states where there were mass removals of communist memorials and monuments ever since the regime collapsed. Slovakia did engage in monument removal during and after the fall of communism, but compared to other states, it was not country-wide or permanent. It seems like people still are not unified in their decisions on what to do with communist monuments. In Eastern Slovakia, i.e. Košice, Prešov, people are far more reluctant to remove them and feel injustice when people use monuments as a form of protest and vandalize them which all comes back to the type of narrative that carries on in these regions. The use of public space is a narrative approach to history, an approach which is most commonly controlled by the intellectual elite that is also responsible for the shaping of national identity (Bucur, 2001). The monuments in public space are telling a story, they do shape our identity, they are here for the living so the people can still see what history tells us thus, it is only natural that society has conflicting opinions on shaping public space.

CONCLUSION The approach society takes towards public space is crucial because it provides a channel for political, social and cultural communication within that society. What is present in public space is what society communicates about itself to the outside world. Indeed, public space is a form of narrative that tells a story about the identity of a state, of its people and especially of the people’s past. It’s a form of speech act thus when it is changed or remains the same, it sends a message to the outside world that the political or social climate is shifting.

With Slovakia, the curious trend was the lack of change within public space. It was important to delve into the reasons why people were so reluctant to change what the space around them said about their country. It turns out the answer in theory is simple but the emotions and cognitive processes behind it are far more complicated. In simple terms, Slovakia has not been able to overcome its past, the totalitarian regime took a toll on further political and social development in the country. However, deeper underneath the surface, the research shows that people have an extremely complex relationship with their past. They feel reluctant to talk about the time they all carried out immoral or even wrong actions for the good of their family and for the sake of safety. They had to let go of the bigger picture, of achieving a democratic society, a free community because they did not have a choice. Thus, instead of achieving a greater good, people were looking out for themselves which made it even more difficult for them to overcome the regime. Experiencing a trauma as intense as an oppressive regime leaves people wondering because even during the time the regime was in place, the ways in which people behaved were a grey area.

People were more comfortable to take action in the grey area because they knew they could benefit from it. Since most of the population did this, it was far more difficult to decide which people were responsible for the regime, in other words, who were the perpetrators of the reprimandable actions. This additionally led to people forgiving and forgetting actions they would otherwise punish people for and it became all the more difficult to deal with what the regime caused because there was nobody to put the blame on. Even in present day, people approach the past as something that they either feel strongly connected to and want to return to or they deny anything that happened thus, making it impossible to come to a conclusive result of how to overcome the past.

Such a destiny has proven to hold Slovakia back from upholding the standards of a liberal democracy. Because the state is settled in the past, the narrative unfortunately cannot move forward. There is no real platform for change and that is keeping Slovakia from proper state development. The country’s political system is heavily corrupted, and the social benefits citizens receive are behind the standard of a liberal democracy. One of the steps Slovakia could take in order to improve its people’s social standing and the overall functioning of the state is to begin a dialogue about the use of public space and its deeper meaning for the social and political setting in the state. Once people have a better idea of what the public space represents, especially the monuments placed in it, they will understand the deeper meaning behind the trajectory of history and why it is important to register public space as a narrative tool. On the one hand, it is understandable that Slovaks feed their nostalgia and remain connected to what happened in the past. On the other hand, it would be conducive to Slovakia’s future that people would be able to work with their nostalgia in order to limit their unwillingness to move forward and catalyze change.

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