Anthropology of East Europe Review 32(1) Spring 2014 69 

Czech Political Prisoners: Recovering Face. By Jana 
Kopelentova Rehak.  Lanham: Lexington Press, 2013.  157 pp. 
Bibliography.  Index.  Photographs. $80.00, hardbound. 
Karen Kapusta-Pofahl Ph. D. Washburn University 

 

Czech Political Prisoners opens with a series of twenty photographs of elderly men and 

women, sitting portrait-style, gazing straight into the camera lens with expressions that range 

from proud to weary to demure.  With this introduction, anthropologist Jana Kopeletova Rehak 

delves into the oft-overlooked experiences of the victims of the Stalinist-era Show Trials in 

Czechoslovakia in the 1950s.  The political prisoners (Mukls and Muklyněs) experienced the 

highly publicized trials for alleged treasonous behavior in the wake of the Soviet-backed 

Czechoslovak Communist party consolidation of power in 1948.  In this period, hundreds of men 

and women were arrested, tried, and sentenced to time in work camps, or even death.  Then, in 

the wake of de-Stalinization in the early 1960s, they were released back into society—freed, but 

still stigmatized.  After the events of 1989, Mukls continued to commemorate their experiences 

and searched for state acknowledgement of their suffering.   

Rehak’s data comes from a variety of sources collected between 1995 and 2004.  While 

the backbone of the ethnography consists of the life histories of sixty-seven Mukls, Rehak also 

incorporates participant observation of commemorative events and informal meetings, interviews 

with Mukls’ spouses and children, archival sources; Mukls’ own published reflections, and a set 

of intriguing photographic portraits of Mukls and Muklyněs1 she took herself.  The author’s 

attention is focused on Mukls living in Prague.  As the Mukls’ narratives unfold, sites in and 

around the city take on a sinister cast as they become places of disruption of the fabric of social 

life and sites of what Rehak calls “state violent ritual” (2013:14).  State violent ritual, such as 

imprisonment, torture, and scripted, self-incriminating public trial, Rehak argues, is a rite of 

passage from ordinary citizen to Mukl, which entails new subjectivity and new social 

connections.  

The book is organized thematically into two parts: Losing Face and Reclaiming Face.  In 

the first section, Rehak frames the process of becoming a Mukl through three stages: arrest, 

interrogation, and trial.  The second section includes recollections of life in the labor camps in 

the 1950s, experiences of return to society in the 1960s, and the post-1989 politics of 

reconciliation, interwoven with ethnographic accounts of the annual commemorations of the 

Confederacy of Political Prisoners at a former labor camp site.  In addition to analyzing the 

creation of Mukl subjectivities, Rehak also argues for the centrality of the concept of kinship to 

Mukls’ experiences and identities—in both the ties that are severed within the nuclear family 

through arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment, and those that are created through the forming 

of solidarity among Mukls who survived torture and life in the labor camps, which was 

maintained long after being released. 

The narratives evoke the brutality and betrayals of being designated as a threat to the 

state in deeply personal ways.  Mukls’ accounts tell of being taken away, held in isolation, and 



Anthropology of East Europe Review 32(1) Spring 2014 

 

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tortured until their captors were satisfied that they were sufficiently broken to stand trial.  Rehak 

makes connections between Mukls’ social and physical isolation, within which prisoners were 

held with the notion of “nakedness and loss of the sense of vision” on multiple levels (2013:46).  

She argues that while the prisoners experienced Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life” in the 

camps, they also recount having had a kind of freedom to associate with intellectuals and artists 

among their fellow prisoners that was ironically revoked upon their release.   

In the wake of the events of 1989, Rehak discusses Mukls’ attempts to have their 

suffering recognized by the post-socialist state, as well as their continued working to maintain 

and define Mukl kinship.  One element of this process that I found particularly fascinating was 

the use of the state police archives to define the criteria for official Muklhood as represented by 

membership in the Confederacy of Political Prisoners.  Rehak presents abundant information 

demonstrating that many Mukls were forced to confess to activities they did or did not commit 

while being interrogated.  In addition, they recount instances of their interrogators writing up 

falsified accounts and confessions to be placed in prisoners’ files.  Despite this, and despite a 

general sense of society-wide distrust for the Communist party, when archives were opened after 

1989, people looked to those files for the truth about who had collaborated with the regime and 

who had stood firm.  Rehak writes, “The archive, materialized in written form, remained the 

location of fictive political power in the 1990s, understood by the general public as a place of 

moral truth” (2013:43).  As a result, Rehak demonstrates, some Mukls who had been considered 

part of the Mukl family before 1989 were not recognized in the post-socialist era.   

In this work, Rehak manages to weave the theories of heavy-hitters like Gorgio Agamben, 

Michal Taussig, and Alan Feldman into elements from Mukl narratives in a way that both 

elucidates their experiences and lends depth and clarity to complex concepts.  Beside her ability 

to present Mukls’ stories in a vivid and compelling way, this ability to engage ethnographically 

with these theories is a significant strength of this work.  

Several themes introduced by Rehak would have benefitted from further development.  

For instance, the concept of “gendered pain” (2013:51) addresses gendered approaches to coping 

with pain, gendered humiliation during torture, and sympathy for the pain of the opposite sex.  

The author presents descriptions of interrogation as de-feminizing and hyper-sexualizing, but an 

analysis that is more detailed would shed more light on these intriguing phenomena.  

While her approach to theory could make this work accessible to advanced undergraduate 

students, her organizational approach decentralizes information about political and social 

circumstances of the 1950s in a way that may make it difficult for a novice to follow.  This 

makes the work less accessible to general readers and more geared toward an expert audience.  

Anthropologists of politics, law, conflict, and post-socialism will find this ethnography to be a 

thought-provoking, empathetic, and poignant contribution to scholarship on political prisoners, 

suffering, and identity. 

                                                             
1 Per author’s usage, I will employ the term Mukl when referring to political prisoners of both 

genders collectively.