Abstract
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The interest in the making of socialist man and woman—or, put differently, in subject-formation—by the Soviet political regime has now sustained its central position in the interdisciplinary literature on socialism for several decades. It inspired at least two generations of researchers. Explored earlier through the prisms of culture, consumption, gender, and everyday life, the question of Soviet subjectivity has recently extended to urban form, planning, design, and construction. The vision of Soviet power as something monolithic, coherent, and well-informed gave way to an understanding that state policies were often improvisations and that even the self-appointed revolutionaries did not quite know what socialism was. 1
Three recent books can be read along these same lines: Gregor Thum’s Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wroclaw During the Century of Expulsions, Katherine Lebow’s Unfinished Utopia: Nova Huta, Stalinism and Polish Society, 1949-1956, and Steven E. Harris’s Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin. There are differences, of course, in the way the authors approach the subject. If Thum places the primary emphasis on the changing national identity of a place and its residents, Lebow’s emphasis is on labor. After all, Nova Huta was an urban center next to steelworks and one of the locations for the workers’ mobilization in the 1980s. Harris anchors his interest in Soviet subjectivity in housing, the evolving notion of “home,” and its realization under Khrushchev’s reforms. What unites the three books is a creative use of diverse sources from state archives to personal memories, from which we learn about the uprooting and relocating people for purposes of nation building, class friction among subsets of the population in a classless society of equals, and innovation in the design and construction of housing, meant to restore the “normality” of family life. These studies will undoubtedly enrich any course syllabus in urban and Soviet history as fine examples of methodological honesty and reflexivity.
Uprooted is an English translation of the German-language original first published in 2003. In more than four hundred pages excluding notes and references, the book meticulously reconstructs the remaking of German Breslau into Polish Wrocław after the city was transferred to Poland in 1945. One would expect that territorial gains in the West came as a positive development in the nation that had been repeatedly split between two larger political entities, Germany and Russia. Yet the annexation of Silesia together with the cities along the Baltic coast came at the cost of losing Kresy, Wilno, and Lwów in the East—areas which, Thum argues, traditionally had deeper significance for Polish national identity. The pro-communist Polish government had to cover up for the glaring loss in the East. (This may explain why so many artifacts were transferred to Wrocław from Lwów and installed there as pieces of street furniture.) That, together with the legacies of Hitler’s racial policies, led to ethnic redistribution in the region and motivated Breslau’s rapid Polonization.
The course that changes took resulted in a peculiar outcome: while the urban landscape of Wrocław seemingly returned to the pre-war look of Breslau, the city’s demographic makeup had irrevocably changed. Following the decision of the Potsdam conference, all Germans were exiled and replaced with ethnic Poles. Thum plays on this paradox in which a place comes back while its people do not, and poses a genuinely interesting question: “How could any place survive the loss of local knowledge . . . , of traditions expunged from one day to the next?” (p. 1) This is by no means a rhetorical question and as the narrative unfolds, this puzzle takes on a new formulation. The emphasis shifts from the place to the humans. How could vengeful looting vandals, haunted by a sense of impermanence, turn into respectable citizens, eventually accepting the city and making it their home? Thum makes it clear that the recovery of the historical architecture and the medieval “feel” of the city were tightly connected to the city’s becoming Polish. The book depicts this process step by step, in an impressively detailed way (at times, testing the reader’s patience), from the first days of repossession marked by looting to the recent period of political transformation associated with historical recovery. At first, rebuilding the historic center was a collective practice through which Polish migrants acquired their roots in Wrocław. Symbolically charged sites like cemeteries, monuments, and memorials were eradicated in the effort to rid the city of its German identity. Fifty years later, bringing to the surface previously suppressed layers of history functions became a matter of local identity and pride, as much as politics. The decentralization of political and public life in Poland opened up fissures in local histories, and in Wrocław, spurred a public debate about the rightfulness of territorial repossessions and their meaning as a historical past for the local community.
In spite of its intense focus on one city, the story that the book tells is epic. This sense is achieved not so much through the incredible detailing of the narrative and diversity of sources, and not only through the narrative’s sweep across time, as the broad perspective and the diverse scale of political institutions, from a neighborhood in the city to international arenas of political decision making and back again to the city. This epic sense comes at a cost. It is possible to be more apprehensive than enthusiastic about the amount of material presented in the book, which achieves its extraordinary factual precision at the price of delivering more general points, offering broader comparisons and drawing useful conceptualizations. For example, to reveal the inconsistency in popular history written about Breslau in the postwar period by Polish academics, Thum dives, in the chapter “Mythologizing History,” into the Polish Piast history of the tenth century and produces his own historiography of the bishopric. He takes a similar approach to the Prussian dominance in the region in the eighteenth century. However interesting, these historical accounts feel more like a diversion from the examination of history and identity politics in Wrocław and do not serve readers interested in urban space.
Thum’s bibliography includes many notable theoretical works, and he himself outlines fivefields to which his book is a contribution. However, empirical parts of the book underutilize the theoretical and generalizing potentials of these fields. Although a chapter title on “imagined tradition” invokes the famous notion of “invented tradition,” Thum does not pause to reflect on his alteration of Hobsbawm’s celebrated phrase or explain his motive for substituting “invented” for “imagined.” In the end, why do two apparently similar phenomena—“mythologizing history” and “imagining tradition”—warrant two separate and lengthy chapters? A repeated reading led me to conclude that the difference is in the object of analysis: one chapter deals with the new historiography and another with urban space. The latter was a canvas and an expression of the former. Wrocław was indeed a striking case of nation building, but was not it also a great example of the imperial expansion of the Soviet Union echoed in the transformation of Prussian Königsberg into Russian Kaliningrad? That said, Uprooted still stands as the first and a tremendously rich account of German expulsions and the remaking of postwar cities in East Central Europe.Some guidance from the author would help the reader to see a bigger picture and not wonder whether two extensive descriptions were warranted.
Themes of uprooting and emplacement in postwar Poland continue in Unfinished Utopia: Nova Huta, Stalinism and Polish Society, 1949-1956, by Katherine Lebow, a historian of modern Europe and a Holocaust researcher. Southeast of Wrocław, on the Vistula River, just a few kilometers from Kraków, the new Communist government of Poland embarked on another project of city building: the construction of Nova Huta. Today, appearing more as a “suburb” to Kraków, Nova Huta initially was positioned as its opponent, an “antidote” to its “unhealthy” atmosphere of intellectual refinement. As if opposing the lore of Kraków’s history and excellence in architecture, the new city was built as an industrial town of the future, the satellite to the massive Lenin Steelworks. The speed of growth was one of its most fascinating features. Founded in 1949, Nova Huta became home to 100,000 people already by 1960, owing its rapid growth to migration from the countryside. Not articulated in the book in exactly this way, inhabiting Nova Huta represented a process of self-becoming, which, ironically, was that of unbecoming: unbecoming “rural.” For some Novohuchians, especially of the first generation, this self-building remained unfinished. “Workers’ hotels” with their low comfort of communal living could not offer the space appropriate for cultivating an urban class, and even when women’s dresses complied with urban fashions, cuts into their shins left by rubber boots betrayed their wearers’ social origins.
For the most part, Lebow confirms what we already know about the “system” and its teleology, the centralized decision making and the policies. Moving people and making them stay was messy and unpredictable, publicly celebrated achievements of collective labor concealed internal conflicts and competition, and the officially favored working class was pushed out of Kraków’s public spaces by the culturally more refined elite. Whatever the regime attempted was counteracted by spontaneous movements on the ground: a particular idea of domesticity provoked squatting in newly built apartments by young couples, the mobilization of youth through volunteer brigades bred gangs (the difficult to control junacy), and the Leninist model of cultural enlightenment produced outlandish and Western-oriented youth cultures. In short, modeling socialist life on the new ground opened up the fissures of the regime.
The narrative of Unfinished Utopia, which has been awarded numerous book prizes, including 2014 Barbara Jelavich Book Prize and 2013 Aquila Polonica, moves through three stages or argumentation: the origins, the execution, and the aftermath. The structure is in service of establishing a historical continuity, which valorizes endogenous factors and vernacular ideologies in shaping the project of Nova Huta. According to Lebow, despite its appearance in history as an imposed Soviet initiative, Nova Huta had its impetus in the plans of Polish military and economic experts even before the Soviet occupation. Turn-of-the-twentieth-century intellectuals and nationalists positioned the state as an institution best fit to lead the modernization of independent Poland. The interwar construction of the port city of Gdynia and development of the industrial triangle “COP” in Central Poland prepared visions, managerial cadres, and the trust among populations to support the Lenin Steelworks. The same attention to continuity and social organization motivated Lebow to link the paradoxes of the socialist industry building on the ground to the rise of the oppositional Solidarity movement.
The detour to the Second Polish Republic and to the nineteenth-century underscores the autonomy and autochtony of Poland’s route to industrial development without fully divorcing it from Stalinism’s external impositions. However, the reader may be disappointed not to find a more extensive discussion of the mechanisms by which influences of the Second Republic (in the figure of Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski or of the Warsaw Positivists of the early twentieth century) could reverberate through half a century and influence politics even after a regime change. A single section of the book cannot satisfy such interest, nor can a short discussion of urban planning and architecture in Nova Huta satisfy one’s curiosity about the actual building process and its physical outcomes. Just one example of where the account could be richer: one chapter brings up the fascinating story of Tadeusz Ptaszycki, who successfully supervised the reconstruction of Wrocław, won a closed competition to develop Nova Huta, and assembled an ambitious team of creative talents, many of whom would not be approved by the regime. One would expect that something innovative would come out of the cooperation of such talents. Yet, the way Lebow describes Nova Huta’s architecture makes it appear like nothing better than “regularity, converging perspectives and the semi-octangonal shape” common to all modern socialist cities (p. 33). 2 Socialist regimes could not fulfill promises that they made to their constituencies, a mismatch that turned out to be crucial in socialist politics. Steven Harris’s political and social history of the khrushchevka apartment complicates and nuances our understanding of the reforms of the 1960s by showing their broader origins in the Soviet understanding of citizenship rights, social sense of worth, forms of cooperation, property organization, and more. A focus on the everyday and the “mass” contrasts with Thum’s emphasis on military leaders, cultural elites, and decisions made by individual politicians, “who might, under the same circumstances, have made quite different decisions” (Thum, p. xvi). Communism on Tomorrow Street is not only a refreshing, methodologically sophisticated account of an infamous urban form with a bad reputation. It is also an interpretatively sensitive and conceptually innovative study of mass housing as an international form. It underscores the connection between Soviet mass housing and the worldwide effort to solve the “housing question,” thus challenging the conventional view of prefabricated building blocks as idiosyncratically Soviet.
Moving to a separate apartment, Harris aptly observes, was “the way most ordinary people experienced and shaped Khruschev’s thaw” (p. 1). Massive as it was, Khrushchev’s housing program was the first Soviet reform campaign that did not require, or result in, a widespread destruction of human life. Quite the opposite, it involved people trying new things and shaping their meaning. Architects and planners debated, criticized, and devised new apartment plans based on the principles of individual family occupancy. Inhabitants of the new apartments voiced their opinions on suitability of furniture designs at exhibitions. Urban dwellers complained to their district deputies and city officials and tested new lines of communication with various levels of state representation. The state and the society were choosing a different set of political and social means to engender change, although Harris is adamant in insisting that the change itself did not represent a break with Communist and revolutionary ideals. It revived and restated them in a new form.
Some of the most memorable pages involve a discussion of how and why apartments in the new housing became so small. Small size was the solution to communalization, more specifically, its prevention. The way to keep an apartment separate was to introduce “a norm of the minimum dwelling space.” Foldable and sectional furniture so favored today by residents of cities with expensive real estate has its origins here. It was introduced to make small apartments usable. Because such furniture was a novelty for urbanites of the USSR, pamphlets, exhibitions, magazine publications, and TV programming taught how to comfortably arrange the tiny separate apartment and construct a tasteful domestic interior. According to Harris, the problem with Khrushchev’s program was not its purposes or methods of execution. It was its failure to meet expectations that the program itself spurred. What was promised was impossible to find or purchase. Still, this particular failure is not to be confused with market failure, where shortages lead to illegal production, distribution, or acquisition. The problem in this case was political: the regime “produced post-Stalinist subjects who persistently came back to remind it that much remained to be done” (p. 306).
Not unlike the previous two books, Communism on Tomorrow Street gets into the interstices left by chaotic implementations of state policies. More so than the other two books, however, it uncovers the precise mechanisms by which statistics were manipulated and reporting gave reality to projections and models. Generous illustrations, which include section plans, tables, and photographs, help readers to accept the main point of the book: the khrushchevka gave millions and millions of Soviet urbanites a stake in Soviet socialism (p. 307).
The three books reviewed here are all fine contributions to the field of urban history, and the excellence of the research that informed them is a testimonial to the growing interest and expertise in the studies of Eastern European and Russian cities. I personally am looking forward, however, to the time when preoccupation with the “Soviet man” withers away, opening possibilities for new research agendas and new questions to be asked with this historical material.