Paper short abstract:

Social changes of socialist Czechoslovakia serve the starting point to understand the continuity of rural communities. Focus on principles persistent from pre-socialist times can also help to understand recent post-socialist nostalgia and higher conformity of rural people to the socialist regime.

Paper long abstract:

The interest in changes in social life in the late socialist Czechoslovak

countryside serves the starting point to understand some principles, on which

continuity of rural communities is based. The doctoral research inspired by the

principles of microhistory, the oral history method, the history of everyday

life and the symbolic anthropology theory, gradually led to focus on issues,

which overlap frame of the social life and the leisure time as general interest

of presented research. The necessity to focus on the principles of stability of

the rural society persistent from pre-socialist times became clear to

understand factors, which led to the relative higher conformity of rural people

to the socialist regime. It also offered the basis of understanding the recent

post-socialist nostalgia. In the paper, several statements claiming from the

research will be served and offered to a wider discussion about the present

impact of the transformation of the Czechoslovak countryside during the

socialist era involved not only by politics but also by the processes of

modernization.