CZECHOSLOVAK NORMALISATION VS. CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL MEDIA: IDENTIFYING THE IDEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE MARKERS

Abstract

Background. Czechoslovakia belonged among the countries that fell into the sphere of the Soviet influence in the wake of WW2. In the Eastern Bloc, all aspects of public life were controlled by state institutions, including literature and publishing. This paper consists of two parts. Firstly, it presents research dealing with the literary paratexts pertaining to fiction translated from English into Slovak and published during the normalisation period. The goal was to explore the ideological discourse in the selected material and identify Soviet propaganda. Secondly, it explains how the same methodology can be used to identify contemporary Russian propaganda on the Internet.

Methods. This paper combines translation historiography and material research. In the first part, discourse analysis was performed on 100 samples of paratexts. The method of analysing ideological discourse markers is subsequently transposed to a new context, i.e., contemporary propaganda on the Slovak social media with the purpose to illustrate how current Russian propaganda affects not only the virtual environment, but also physical reality in Slovakia.

Results. The presence of ideological markers in the normalisation paratexts peaked in 1977, which correlates with Charter 77, an informal civic initiative against normalisation practices. The results of the second part of the presented research show that contemporary Russia successfully uses the same persuasion techniques as during the existence of the Soviet Union. The content found in the samples can be easily traced back to the “alternative” media outlets, some of them demonstrably funded by Russia. However, in the online era, dissemination of false information and propaganda is much faster, which poses a global security risk for democracy and human rights.

Conclusions. As the Globsec survey (Szekers 2021) has shown, Slovakia is the most vulnerable EU country when it comes to falling for disinformation. The presented method of ideological discourse marker analysis could be helpful in terms of propaganda identification. The Internet requires a completely new skillset to sift through the vast amount of information that may or may not be credible.