Imaging the Other Side of the Iron Curtain: Then and Now. Oral History Research Conducted in Eastern Slovakia

Abstract

For forty years, the Iron Curtain was a symbol of a Europe divided between Soviet and Western influence. Powers on each side of the border invested huge efforts into creating ideologically motivated images of the Other. The article presents the outcomes of biographical research which offers an insight into how aged people in Eastern Slovakia remember their pre-1989 perceptions of the Western Block and how they think of life in the West today, focusing on the main element of their memories in this respect – emigration. It is the outcome of a broader oral history project being conducted in Slovakia since 2017, aiming to obtain and analyse current images of socialism, as communicated today by the generation of witnesses who were living their adult lives during the period spanning between the 1960s and the 1980s; and understanding the relations between the current attitudes and values of the respondents and their experience of life in state socialist regimes.