Parallel Polis

The parallel polis is the term used by Czechoslovak dissidents, most notably the philosopher Václav Benda, to describe a self-organized society of independent culture, education, and civic life that existed beneath and beside the communist state, refusing either to storm it or to fully withdraw from it. It is not a synonym for underground resistance; it is a claim that a genuine human community can be constructed in plain sight, on the state's own territory, without asking its permission.

Picture a regime that has nationalized the printing press, the university, the concert hall, and the classroom. The obvious response is either armed revolt or quiet despair. The parallel polis proposes a third option: build your own printing press, university, concert hall, and classroom anyway, in living rooms and barns and mimeograph runs of two hundred copies, and dare the state to notice that you no longer need its version of reality.

A polis built in defiance of tanks still needs a landlord, a mimeograph machine, and a friend who won't inform on you by Tuesday. The idealism of the parallel polis was never naive about its own fragility—it simply refused to let fragility be the last word.

Origins of the Term

Václav Benda coined "parallel polis" in a 1978 essay written in direct dialogue with Charter 77, arguing that dissidents should stop treating their independent activities as isolated acts of protest and start treating them as the scaffolding of an entire counter-society—with its own economy of samizdat literature, its own schools taught by professors banned from universities, its own art exhibited in private apartments. Where Havel's "living in truth" describes an internal stance, the parallel polis describes what happens when thousands of people take that stance simultaneously and start building institutions around it.

How It Differs From Adjacent Ideas

Why "Parallel" and Not "Opposition"

The word choice matters. An opposition defines itself against the regime, accepting the regime's own terms of political combat. A parallel structure defines itself by simply existing elsewhere, alongside the official world, uninterested in seizing its levers. This is what allowed Charter 77's signatories—phenomenologists, expelled communists, rock musicians, theologians—to cohere without a shared program: they were not agreeing on what the state should become, only on the fact that a truthful life could be lived now, regardless of what the state was.

Core Features, at a Glance

• Voluntary, not conspiratorial — participants signed their names; the polis was not a secret cell.
• Institution-building, not sloganeering — underground universities, private theatres, independent publishing.
• Prefigurative — it enacted the free society it wanted rather than waiting to legislate one.
• Cross-ideological — it welcomed Catholics, Marxist revisionists, and liberals under one roof of shared practice.

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The Standing Objection

Critics, then and now, have asked whether a parallel society that never contests state power is simply a comfortable alibi for those who can afford exile from official life—a "secular sainthood," as the source essay on Charter 77 puts it, available mainly to the protected and the already prominent. The Czechoslovak regime tolerated the parallel polis for years precisely because it remained small, articulate, and containable. Its eventual significance came less from its size than from the fact that, when the state's legitimacy finally buckled in 1989, a functioning alternative network of trusted people and institutions was already standing there, ready to receive the collapse.