For at least a century binary oppositions of alienation and intimacy have informed Western theories of how political orders disempower or empower their subjects to public critical discourse. We have seen how some Czechoslovaks, in varying degrees of dialogue with this North Atlantic intellectual heritage, deployed similar thinking to mobilize revolutionary protest in 1989. The most famous name that many participants and observers gave to events in the former Czechoslovakia, the Velvet Revolution (Slovak: Zamatová revolúcia), carried the dual meaning in Slovak and Czech of soft, tactilely comforting cloth and the adjective “tender”: tender in means, but also in the end of infusing society with more tenderness. The Velvet Revolution's goals of toppling the KSČ's hold on state power emerged in part through other longings to imbue social relations with more gentle sentiments.

This chapter casts a critical eye on how Slovaks, Czechs, and Western observers understood the emotional, sentimental, or affective component of interpersonal interactions to buttress a political order during Slovakia's (and the former Czechoslovakia's) transition from Communist rule. More specifically, it looks at the popular diagnoses and social realities of how alienation and intimacy work through Slovak educational settings and society.