Using press photographs, publications and public monuments, this dissertation examines Czechoslovakia's post-war development, the period of the Prague Spring and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet and the Warsaw Pact forces. Additionally, this study traces the way the Prague Spring and the 1968 invasion were recuperated during Czechoslovakia's 1989 Velvet Revolution and beyond. The reading of the archival material is rooted in an understanding that each object is a product of complex institutional transactions, social practices and ideological assumptions. While most studies treat archival material from the Communist era as simply the result of repressive propaganda, this dissertation investigates how the enlistment of this material by the apparatus of the state produced its own unique forms of knowledge and subjectivities. Deploying Michel Foucault's archaeological approach, this study examines not only the internal consistency of the archive but also how it defines what counts as a meaningful statement in a given historical context and how moments of traumatic rupture exceed the frame of the archive's coherence.

The introductory chapter outlines theoretical hypotheses that lay the groundwork for the dissertation's case studies. A key part of this chapter is to re-consider the notion of collective memory as a theoretical model for understanding a specific historical event. The second chapter examines the various systems of control that shaped the Czechoslovak Communist media, specifically the press. The analysis offers a genealogical study of the Soviet media coupled with a consideration of its historical and legislative evolution. The third chapter examines the way public spaces function as mechanisms for composing memory, spatiality and subjectivity. The fourth chapter deals with memorials, their deployment, social function and their appropriation during the 1968 invasion. The fifth chapter juxtaposes two publications, a pro-Soviet text and a dissident Czechoslovak magazine, analyzing specific rhetorical strategies deployed by the press to produce an interpretation of the 1968 invasion. The sixth chapter deals with the politics of recollection and with the apparatuses that enlist memory in the service of specific historical and ideological narratives.