Post-peasant Memories: Populist or Communist Nostalgia

Populists’ Nostalgia

Elsewhere in former communist Eastern Europe since the end of state socialism, political mobilization has been concentrated around attitudes towards the communist past. In Slovakia, the source of the major arguments for this case study, Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar (1991–1992, 1992–1994, and 1994–1998) was frequently accused by his opponents of manipulating popular nostalgia for communism. While analysts attempted to find various names for his “politics of the past,” including accusing him of ethno-nationalism or national-populism, Mečiar skillfully invented an original mobilization, not necessarily reflecting a communist heritage per se but rather what I aim to describe here as a post-peasant people’s economy: the tacit alternative knowledge of how society operates regardless of political-economic regime or the claims of professional ideologues or analysts.

Following the deep structural reforms towards economic and political liberalization under Prime Minister Mikuláš Dzurinda (1998–2006), the socialist heritage was given a completely negative connotation by the dominant representatives of the post-Mečiar regime. This negative attitude towards socialism also paved the way for the legitimization of Slovakia’s EU integration, climaxing in the successful accession of May 2004. As this paper argues, a significant part of the population nevertheless kept its understanding of how society supposedly operates, regardless of the European project. The nostalgia for a people’s economy is therefore the invention of skillful populist politicians—such as Vladimír Mečiar or the major inheritor of his support base, Róbert Fico—who exploit the ambivalent and under-recognized effects of communist modernization in creating what I define as post-peasant social base. ¹

Róbert Fico has been the longest serving Prime Minister of Slovakia (2006–2010 and 2012–present), a young nomenklatura cadre and post-communist nominal social democrat, who made himself proudly known for not remembering the events of the November 1989 revolution that swept away the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Fico’s party deputy and former Speaker of Parliament Pavol Paška did remember the November 1989 revolution very well because he was, in his own words, laying tiles in his flat’s bathroom. ² In the opinion of the influential media and political opponents, both of these politicians aimed to shake the positive legacy of the 1989 Velvet Revolution and to signal their negative—or at least indifferent—attitude to the Velvet Revolution to those among their electorate who found themselves either disadvantaged after socialism or were directly nostalgic for state socialism. In my opinion, however, these politicians’ symbolic reservations about the changes of 1989 were also tied to what most of their voters were nostalgic about in entirely non-political ways. Paška’s bathroom memory shows what always mattered for the majority of people under socialism: the informal making of a livelihood by using one’s own skills or someone else’s skills via social networks. It is this longing for a people’s economy that slogans of Róbert Fico such as “People Deserve Guarantees” (Ľudia si zaslúžia istoty!) appealed to— tacitly, rather than openly—in his winning campaigns. The attitude towards the communist regime, its politics and economy, plays a role only for a very minor group of voters.

In the opinion of Fico’s opponents, the 2012 campaign that brought him victory in the form of a single-party government was built upon nostalgia for the stability of the late socialist years. Fico’s and Mečiar’s opponents instead characterized the stability of late socialism in a negative way—as a sign of the pathology of normalization and the need to reform the state and economy. ³ Obviously, the late socialist period seemed more stable than the first post-socialist decade, but the rupture that would mark the moment from which nostalgia has been projected among a significant number of people might not necessarily fall in the historical year of 1989. The introduction of shock therapy began only in 1991, Slovak independence was declared in 1993, and the deepest reforms in the economy came only with the formation of the post-Mečiar grand coalition in 1998. Like Vladimír Mečiar, Róbert Fico has not revived the “good old communist days” in any straightforward way.

Róbert Fico has manipulated people’s economic nostalgia. This economy was possible owing to the particular effects of communist modernization. In other words, the electoral success of populists is based on mobilizing nostalgia related to socialism but not nostalgia for socialism itself. This nostalgia is based on a tacit knowledge of how the economy and politics supposedly operate. It is built around both people’s livelihood strategies of informality and mutual help, typical of late socialism, as well as on communist nationalist mythology about the independent state and the workers’ nations threatened by capitalism. In countries like Slovakia, the parents of today’s seniors were actual peasants who experienced collectivization and whose children moved to just emerging industrial centers. Formally showing all the characteristics of modernity—increasing urbanization, technical modernization, and development of a state welfare system—Slovak society remained socially and culturally close to the village. I argue that contemporary populist leaders such as Róbert Fico, Viktor Orbán, or Jarosław Kacyzński are exploiting the nostalgia for this “post-peasant” model of a people’s economy, as this model is available for nostalgic appropriation regardless of the actual attitude of particular populist leaders toward the communist period. Before I return to this argument, I present a case study of a commemoration of a controversial communist politician that shows two dominant competing elite attitudes toward the communist past that generally miss this people’s economy perspective on nostalgia.

Biľak’s Bust Controversy

In February 2015, two artists from Košice, the center of Eastern Slovakia, sprayed indelible red paint and wrote the word “pig” (sviňa) on a recently erected monument in the central square of Krajná Bystrá, a village in north-east Slovakia. The newly erected monument displayed the bust of Vasil Biľak (1917–2014), the leading proponent of normalisation in Czechoslovakia in the period following the invasion of Warsaw Pact armies into the country in August 1968 and suppression of the democratization of the communist regime, known as the Prague Spring. Biľak was a native of the village who went on to become the leading representative of what was characterized as “neostalinist dogmatism.” Most of the Slovak communist representatives actually came from villages or towns, as there were few larger industrial centers in the country. Biľak is considered to be the best known and the one particularly responsible for the official letter inviting foreign Warsaw Pact armies to “pacify communist counter-revolution” in August 1968.

The artists, facing trial for property damage in consequence of their act, characterized the paint on the monument as symbolizing “the blood of the victims of the [Warsaw Pact armies] invasion.” The Institute of National Memory also expressed their protest against the monument, claiming that “twenty five years since the end of communist totalitarianism the monuments commemorating unpunished members and exponents of criminal organizations as was apparently the case of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and Communist Party of Slovakia” are “a mockery of the communist regime’s victims.” ⁴ The historians of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, the most prominent national research institute, also expressed their protest against the erection of the monument for Vasil Biľak.

On 21 August 2016, a group of demonstrators led by Alojz Hlina, a Member of Parliament and future leader of the Christian Democratic Movement (one of the oldest post-1989 political parties in the country), known for organizing unorthodox happenings, decided to organize performances marking the 47th anniversary of the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies. Among other destinations, the participants decided to visit Krajná Bystrá and discuss with locals the crimes of their fellow native, Vasil Biľak. They travelled with an exclusive prop, a decommissioned tank towed on a trailer. There were dozens of counter protesters, predominantly old, waiting at the village square holding red carnations, the famous flowers of May Day parades and other communist rituals, ready to defend the bust of Biľak against the planned defamation. They passionately shouted at the incoming activists, “Shame on you!” ⁵

Alojz Hlina was planning to install on the monument a translation of the invitation letter to Moscow that Biľak had signed. “No entry” tapes and the counter protesters nevertheless prevented his plan. One of them explained that they were comrades who had come to commemorate the birthday of their deceased compatriot, even though Biľak’s actual birthday had already passed on 21 August, the date of the 1968 Warsaw Pact armies’ invasion. As Hlina explained to the counter activists, the story of the letter was “a story of betrayal. When our man betrayed our people and alien people came here and shot our people.” He did not want to discuss whether Biľak had helped Eastern Slovakia or not—many locals believe he did—but he wanted to stress that for traitors there should be no memorials.

It turned out that the plot in the village center where the bust was erected was owned by the municipality but had been rented to the counter protesters, and thus was private property. The protesters called the police, complaining that the counter protesters were restraining their freedom of movement and assembling in public areas guaranteed by the constitution, but this did not make the counter activists leave the square. In the quarrel that unfolded, the protesters argued that the greater part of the nation had suffered because of Biľak, and the counter protesters claimed that this was a lie. An older defender argued that Biľak “secured jobs at least in fifteen factories for five thousand employees. You all have taken these jobs from us to the West.” As a proponent of the communist regime underlined, Biľak “gave jobs to people and a decent life,” while now people have to travel abroad for work and suffer.

The co-organizer of the event, the artist Peter Kalmus, argued that the counter activists were “stalinist-brezhnevist orthodox communists,” who excused crimes and that no dialogue was possible with them. Even former communists such as the leader of the Prague Spring Alexander Dubček were not proper communists for them, he said. Mr. Kalmus mentioned that it turned out the majority of counter activists were not locals but came from the nearby cities of Stropkov and Prešov. The documentarist then interviewed a teenager who supported the counter activists, who said that Biľak was “a tailor by training, was very good in his craft, and helped this region.” Only under socialism did the region receive some help, the teenager underlined. An older lady said, “Vasil Biľak is an honest person who had an abnormally great share in the development of Eastern Slovakia. He has been and he will remain an exemplary positive figure.”

Months before the tank exhibition, Peter Kalmus had to be protected by the police after he was attacked by a local who learned that the artist was responsible for defacing the bust. On another occasion, the activists were banned from lighting candles commemorating the victims of the Warsaw Pact invasion next to the monument. The artists faced accusations in court for supposed damage to property—that is, the bust—belonging to the Communist Party of Slovakia. By May 2016, the district court announced its decision that the artists had violated the law but they had not committed a criminal act. This decision was considered in the press as a moderate victory for the artists. Several nationwide politicians nevertheless became involved in the symbolic battle on the side of the activists, a petition supporting the act of the artists was initiated, and the police occasionally assisted in guarding the bust. ⁶ No publicly significant figure supported the counter protesters.

The conflict between the anti-communist artists and the counterprotest by local communists show the divided perception of the communist past among specific groups of people. The artists and protesters come from families with particularly harsh memories of Communism, and the counter protesters—the majority of whom were members of the Communist Party of Slovakia—had been clearly privileged under the socialist system. Although the rally was well covered by the media nationwide, the majority of locals as well as the wider Slovak public nevertheless do not share the passions of either of these memory camps. Before moving on to the details of what balances these conflicting ideological narratives of the communist past and what people are nostalgic about, the issue of selective modernization creating post-peasants shall be discussed.

The people in the peripheral parts of Czechoslovakia, and Eastern Slovakia in particular, have been ambivalent, especially about the last two decades of communism personified by Biľak, along with another Slovak, Czechoslovak President Gustáv Husák, a heavyweight symbol of normalization. In Slovakia, a far less straightforward coercion was applied in normalization process than was used, for example, in the Czech lands. The regional development of Eastern Slovakia progressed faster in the two post-1968 decades than anywhere else in the country. A new steel plant in Košice and other factories attracted thousands of workers for a good salary and other benefits. Košice, for example, grew in three decades from a city of 70,000 to a regional center of 240,000 inhabitants, primarily steel workers and their families. For people in the region, all this was achieved owing to the prominent position in Prague of their regional compatriot Vasil Biľak, and thanks to the communist policy of supporting underdeveloped–rural areas of the country.

A controversy similar to the one in Krajná Bystrá happened in May 2016 in the village of Veľký Lipník in the same part of north-east Slovakia. This one involved a direct confrontation between the artist Ľuboš Lorenz, known for the Bystrá case, who splashed (washable) paint over a recently installed plaque commemorating the high-ranking communist prosecutor Ján Pješčak, a native of Veľký Lipník and a convicted juridical murderer known for his role in political persecutions of communist opponents in the 1950s. The artist, Lorenz, was attacked by the thirty-year-old village mayor Peter Labant and in consequence had to be treated in hospital. As the mayor argued, he had proposed the installation of the plaque after mature consultation with his fellow citizens in the village. The high-ranking prosecutor in communist Czechoslovakia had supposedly helped build schools, apartments for teachers, a cooperative, and a health care center. The official justification for installation of the commemorative plaque by the mayor was as follows:

The installation of the plaque commemorating Ján Pješčak is a gesture of thanks made by the citizens of Veľký Lipník for his contribution to the liberation of the village and its development. It does not represent an evaluation of his activities during his lifetime in state positions. That is a historian’s job. I very much believe this is the opinion of the majority of village inhabitants. ⁷

A few days after the confrontation between the artist and the mayor, the plaque was destroyed. The perpetrator remains unknown. A blogger who follows the Biľak controversy and also attended the trial against the artists in the district court explained the Slovaks’ relation to their communist past in the following way:

This was a trial about whether Vasil Biľak and other communist (and fascist) fat cats can or cannot have monuments in Slovakia. It was a trial about whether Slovakia has or has not a historical memory. You know how it ended. Indifferent, so the common habit in Slovakia requires. ⁸

This ambivalence of the population in Slovakia with regard to communism is usually explained by the media and opinion leaders as either the general population’s lack of education in history or the result of a sort of communist bribery of the people: communists benefited Slovaks by increasing living standards just to convince them not to rebel against them. In a similar way, the dominant liberal intellectual discourse criticizes the ambivalent attitude of ordinary Slovaks towards the war-time Slovak Republic (1939–1945). Here the public intellectuals accuse people of forgetting about the Holocaust and other crimes committed by the representatives and ordinary people of the fascist regime, and for considering fascist-collaborator Slovakia (1939–1945) as an island of stability and prosperity in times of war. Artists such as Kalmus and Lorenz belong to those who are critical of forgetting past crimes and do not symbolically devalue only communist symbols, but also deface the commemoration sites of the World War Two Slovak Republic, an ally of Nazi Germany. In the village of Čakajovce, for example, the two artists, Kalmus and Lorenz, painted in purple the lips of the statue representing Jozef Tiso (1887–1947), president of the fascist Slovak Republic, who was hanged after being convicted as a war criminal.

The kind of nostalgia the majority of Slovak citizens have, therefore, is not necessarily a reflection of the “secure,” “stable,” and “prosperous” socialist years but a far more complex set of feelings and perceptions that has a lot to do with the long-term effects of an ambivalent modernization process, creating “post-peasants” and their views on economy and society as well as with the way populist politicians nurture nostalgia for this people’s model. This initial empirical section therefore has introduced the dominant contrasting narratives about communism in Slovakia and suggests that they do not sufficiently incorporate the actual everyday-economy representation of the past that people are nostalgic about. As I wish to show in the next section dedicated to workers, instead of the past of anti-communist protesters or communist regime devotees, the people are nostalgic about the rather complex popular economic model I see as related to a post-peasant condition.

Workers’ Memories of Socialism

In this section, I document the ways that nominally modern and urban employees refer to the late communist period in terms of socialization around their hobby plots and allotments, joint excursions to nature or a skillful way of “getting along with the system” while using informal networks of friends and family members that are hardly replicable today. ⁹

In February 2016, my friend Jaroslav (age fifty years) shared on his social media page the well-known photograph of Czechoslovak president Gustáv Husák that used to hang in every school classroom in 1975–1989. The photograph contained the following supposed quotation by Husák, written in the weird “Czechoslovak” language that the Slovak-born president was known for:

So what my children, are you doing better? Comrades, you are now not doing well. Under the leading role of Communist Party you were doing well. Everybody among you had everything and altogether you had nothing. But you were happy for it, anyway. Your G. Husák.

The photograph was authored by “fans of nostalgia from Levice,” a small city in south-western Slovakia, close to Jaroslav’s home village. During the socialist years, Jaroslav used to work as a lorry driver in the cooperative; now he travels for weekly shifts to the capital Bratislava in order to make a living driving a bus. He is happy to have his job, especially when compared to the poor prospects he faced in his native village. He is nevertheless not at all nostalgic for the socialist times—rather the opposite. In 1989 he was among the founders of the movement Public against Violence, the leading organization representing the Velvet Revolution of 1989 in Slovakia, and negotiated with the local representatives of the cooperative and the Communist Party. His parents, pensioners who still live in their large house built during the socialist conjuncture of 1970s, but that is nowadays expensive to keep up, are definitely more nostalgic. Jaroslav’s photograph, widely shared on social media especially by so-called “Husák’s children” (the baby-boom generation born and growing up in the 1970s and 1980s), nevertheless catches well the ambivalent nostalgia that most people have toward memories projected onto these later decades of socialism.

In 2015, one of my key informants (a forty-five-year-old manufacturing worker) posted a joke on his social media page. The joke, titled the “seven wonders of socialism,” claimed that under socialism, (1) everybody had a job; (2) even if everybody had a job, nobody worked; (3) even if nobody worked, the plan was 100% fulfilled; (4) even if the plan was fulfilled, there was nothing available; (5) even if there was nothing available, everybody had everything; (6) even if everybody had everything, everybody was stealing; (7) even if everybody was stealing, nothing was missing. The joke illustrates a mixture of rational calculation of the conditions available (shortage economy and corrupt state) and nostalgia for the relaxed work conditions, relative affluence, and a “good life” among workers under state socialism. It does not show any nostalgia for the socialist economy or politics, rituals or ideology, but for a particular knowledge and the virtue of life in socialism. As I argue in this article, this nostalgia for people’s economy is heavily related to the ambivalent effect of socialist modernization.

With the exception of those workers who were politically active in the Communist Party before 1989, the vast majority of workers in Slovakia do not want a return to the old communist system. This explains why workers today are receptive to those politicians who do offer them the expertise in material and symbolic world I characterize as post-peasant rather than socialist. This politicized nostalgia is usually encapsulated in the protection of family values, support of a way of life that once made living better, including the knowledge of how political and economic systems operate “between the lines,” how self-subsistence is important for families and the nation, and how informal patron–client networks help to make system work “our way,” in the butcher shop as well as while visiting the doctor. Social justice, human rights, or liberal democracy do not have much room in this integral world of a people’s economy. Slavenka Drakulić in her essay How We Survived Communism made a similar observation with regard to people’s economy and the lack of “big ideas” among post-peasants and their politicians:

Since there is no such thing as a self-sufficient communist household, you depend fatally on your neighbor for all kinds of favors, from borrowing coffee or sugar to washing, cleaning, or cursing politics—or getting your child enrolled in a better school. He or she will inevitably see you in your “around-the-house” clothes. Perhaps there is a good side to that; people don’t have any illusions about each other. (Drakulić 1991, 183).

The cooperative worker (age forty-three) I talked to in summer 2014 in eastern Slovakia who lived in a small socialist-era flat with one of his two daughters after divorcing his wife said:

[In socialism] we had . . . something to eat, someplace to live, the houses were built. Now the standard is higher. We have everything, color TV sets, computers in every flat . . . but everything costs more. We do not have the social security we once used to have (“nemáme istoty”). . . . Now everybody can say what he or she wants, but it is of no help. We can do whatever we want, but it does not make any difference, the others still decide.

A locomotive driver (age forty-three) presented the following memories of vocational training in socialism:

In the past more often excursions were organized, even brass bands used to play in the depot. . . . Saint Nicolaus [celebrations] took place right there. . . . Now too few people are in the depot, they do not work the way they should. It used to be a nicer life back then. I saw even older pictures [made in socialism, JB] . . . they went bathing, on excursions; they used to live like that.”

Another worker (age fifty-one) remembers:

The director came to work in a boiler suit in Saturday. He opened the trunk of his car, took out the goulash pot, meat, beer. Two from among us used to cook goulash and he worked with the others. . . . Today this would not happen.

The shop lady (age fifty-seven) extended her nostalgia for life as it once used to be:

We used to have a garden, dried hay. I had milk, butter, cream, farmer’s cheese, everything. . . . I was selling what I had left. We used to have pigs . . . so we did not need to shop for meat. The children grew up and I went to work. . . . We used to have security so that you would wake up in the morning and there was a job . . . children had school for free, healthcare for free. . . . Every year we used to organize Women’s Day, used to go for excursions several times per year, to the spa; trade unions used to pay for that; the children went to pioneer camp. . . . For us, the ordinary people who took care of the family and had our own priorities, not traveling or politics, communism was very good.

And finally, memories of a very recent socialist work ethic as expressed by a railway worker (age forty-three):

Now you must work more and more responsibly. Back then under communism one fooled about. Once I went to the switch room and came back after eight hours, nobody noticed. Now this is not possible. It was easy to go off the radar . . . but still good quality production was carried out, we had everything.

This handful of quotes from among five dozen interviews with workers I conducted between 2012 and 2014 in Košice and nearby towns and villages show the economic downturn their professions have gone through since the end of socialism. There have been accounts among workers stressing the rupture after socialism, the loss of prestige, increasing inequalities and even poverty. A closer look nevertheless also reveals what people are actually nostalgic about: nostalgia for family life, socialization at workplaces and after work, joint excursions, memories of a modest life without stress, ideas of home and self-sufficiency, all of which do not recall any direct link with the socialist economic or political system and ideology. On the contrary, as I argue in the remainder of this article, they revive romantic features attributed more to the country life of a peasant than of a modern socialist citizen.

This people’s economy nostalgia represents the alternative to the ideologically constructed economies and politics of socialism and postsocialism. The popularity of this nostalgia today is impossible without considering the role of populist politicians in reflecting a people’s economic model and further nurturing it. As I show throughout this article, this nostalgia is projected onto socialism, but is not necessarily of socialism. More importantly, there are—certainly in the case of Slovakia and other formerly agrarian countries that undertook technical modernization of the communist kind—agrarian rather than socialist-modernist parameters of the people’s economy that people are nostalgic about.

Ambivalent Normalization

In spring 2016, I noticed a frequent sharing of the following status on social media among my Slovak friends. Even the highly commercial Fun radio, popular among the country’s youth, copied the status into its news section. ¹⁰

Congratulations! To all of us who are around thirty or forty years old and older. According to contemporary rules and bans we, the children born in the 1970s and 1980s and earlier, would have had no chance to survive. Our children’s beds were painted by paints containing lead. We did not have any safe bottles for medicine, no safety devices for doors and windows were available. When we used to ride a bike or a scooter we did not wear helmets. We used to drink plain water from the hose, not from plastic bottles. We ate bread and butter, drank lemonades with sugar content and still were not obese, as we used to run around outside. We used to drink from one bottle and we all survived it somehow . . . we used to ride down the hill just to realize we forgot about the brakes. . . . Early morning we used to go playing outside and came home only when lights went on. Our parents were worried but there were no mobile phones. . . . We did not have any PlayStations, Nintendos, . . ., no ninety-nine TV channels, no surround-sound, computers, chatrooms, or internet. We had friends outside and we found them by ourselves! We fell down the tree, broke an arm or leg, cut ourselves, knocked out a tooth, but nobody was sued for these accidents. These were injuries but nobody was responsible for them but us. We fought with our fists, got black eyes, but learned how to overcome them. We played with tennis balls, sticks, and ate grass, particularly curly dock. Even though others warned us, we never cut out an eye. The last thirty years has seen an explosion of new ideas. We had freedom and responsibility instead, we learned how to behave and manage. Congratulations! Pass it on to your status if you experienced this great good fortune!

This status found resonance with late communist generations but it might easily be applied outside of the communist context. The memories of a healthier and more carefree childhood nevertheless remind us what people are actually nostalgic about when ignoring the reality of pollution from heavy industry, inadequate public services, a shortage economy nurturing corruption, and general distrust of the state and society under socialism. Instead, a sort of reliance on friends and community life not at all related to modern conditions and socialist ideology is the major object of nostalgia. In the shortage economy of socialism, pensioners usually helped their children, houses were built using the reciprocal assistance of friends and family members because official services were hard to afford or were of extremely poor quality. Boys served in the compulsory army service for two years. After returning home, they usually got married immediately. Women had their first child most frequently at the age of twenty-one. Nothing of the current extension of youth well beyond the age of thirty was known among the baby boomer parents of the 1970s and 1980s. The nostalgia of socialist generations reveals a romantic representation of the premodern condition, with the importance of family ties, self-subsistence, and connection to nature, the phenomena I analytically define as post-peasant. In other words, technically modern and urban socialist society unintentionally valued agrarian habits and representations, and an informal economy was necessary for the survival of this post-peasant economy.

Twenty percent of Czech high school students think it was better before 1989 than it is today and one-fifth of them do not think there is a difference between today and what used to exist under socialism, as shown in research from 2010. ¹¹ In 2015, Slovak Public television introduced its annual most successful documentary series, made mostly by directors in their forties called Fetishes of Socialism. The series portrays rather sympathetically the most desired socialist consumption products. Several other amiable critiques of socialism found their way into feature films, and especially well-known is the wave of Czech and Slovak feature comedies (Pelíšky/Cosy Dens 1999, Pupendo 2003, Muzika/Music 2007, and others) that portray everyday life in socialism while using a kind of nostalgic humor.

There are widespread myths circulating nowadays among generations without direct experience of socialism. These younger people tend to entirely forget what the older generations remember, for example, that the beneficiaries of socialism were predominantly those who had access to scarce commodities and services. The butcher, grocery salesman, taxi driver, or car mechanic enjoyed particular prestige and affluence among the “ordinary” professions, along with the officially esteemed heavy industry workers, miners, and soldiers. Some medical doctors and socialist managers, not to speak of members of the party establishment, made up the privileged elite. Generations growing up in late socialism recall their stays at communist pioneer camps that were meant to prepare pupils for life in communism but instead nurtured peer networks and informal social skills. The Czech sociologist Ivo Možný (1991) famously explained how families originally dispossessed of private property by the communists in the 1950s in fact colonized the state in late socialism for their own benefit.

In 2009 the Czech daily MF DNES summarized the most frequent misjudgments about socialism when compared to post-socialism, such as supposedly low prices and the conviction that everybody received an equal share under socialism, that everybody supposedly had work and security back then, that food was healthier, especially because the growers, restaurants, and vendors did not follow the call for profit and so on. That roads were supposedly safe back then while today the news show people dying in accidents every day is another popular misperception contrasting with actual statistics. There was supposedly no lavish spending back then and people were more environment-friendly, says another myth. No catastrophes took place under socialism, and pensioners supposedly lived better than they do now, etc. ¹²

The Czechoslovak normalization (1969–1989) was the period of unofficial agreement between the regime and the population. In exchange for relative material prosperity, the ideas of the Prague Spring of 1968 such as democratization or the modest turnaround of the command economy were strongly suppressed. The historians Kevin McDermott (2015, 19) and Michal Pullmann (2011) question the “totalitarian paradigm”—which has depicted socialism as the dark ages—as exaggerating the role of the state and its apparatus and being “inattentive to micro-level functioning” of the system.

The Slovak experience with normalization was more ambivalent than the Czech one (McDermott 2015, 162), as normalization also meant the bureaucratization of Slovakia under the changes of federalization, which meant that tens of thousands of Slovaks realized their upward mobility (ibid., 164). In the Czech lands, the persecution of Prague Spring proponents was more thorough, and the increase in living standards that spilled over to poorer Slovakia was already past its peak in the Czech lands in the 1980s. Normalization brought about maternity leave and family assistance; assistance to single parents and disabled or orphaned children; subsidies for nurseries, school meals, and children’s clothing; and low-interest loans for newly-weds to assist with accommodation and furniture. Very few Czechoslovaks lived below the poverty line, and women’s job prospects increased. There was almost no inflation, and combined with stable prices, all basic commodities were available (ibid., 159–60). In particular, the price of beer was kept level, a fact recognized as a political tool used by the normalization regime (Bútora 1989). This agreement generated almost no public discontent. The escape to the privacy of family and friends was the desired option (Možný 1991; MacDermott 2015, 161), The country cottage became the most common escape strategy in the 1970s and 1980s, not only because rural areas were free of party propaganda and police surveillance. What is nevertheless important to remember is the fact that the changes of modernization, such as those in the areas of housing and mass (over)consumption, did begin in socialist times (see Podoba 2015), in the overwhelmingly agrarian setting.

The historian and political scientist Juraj Marušiak (2010, 199–200) argued that “considering the positive or at least conformist attitude of a substantial part of the population, the communist past was well incorporated into Slovak political tradition.” According to Marušiak, Slovak political elites refused the ideological side of communism, including atheism, but at least verbally “accepted values such as social egalitarism, etatism, distrust towards civil society, a preference for authoritarian solutions, anti-minority attitudes, intolerance of alternative versions of the good life and indifference to the crimes of the former regime.” As Marušiak (2010, 199–200) further reminds, these parameters are continuous characteristics of Slovak political culture also with regard to other autocratic regimes, especially the regime of the Slovak Republic (1939–1945), but also the older regime of Hungary within the Habsburg Empire.

In the remaining part of this article, I will attempt to conceptualize this nostalgia originating in socialism by connecting the people’s economy with populist mobilization. Socialist modernization created the people’s economy I call post-peasant: modernist ideology and large-scale technical modernization went along with nurturing informal networks, familism, and even a high level of self-subsistence. The unity of peasants and workers—the most famous official example of which was the heavy support for folklore as mass entertainment, not mentioning plebeian rural nationalism as the dominant narrative of communist Slovakia—made even the public representation of the “people’s culture” in socialism look agrarian! The nostalgia for the people’s economy has been further picked up by reactionary politics after the fall of socialism.

Rustic Nostalgia

In order to mark the departure point for post-peasant nostalgia, I recall the following personal experience. I was a child in late socialism and my father took me to see my maternal grandparents—former peasants who had been forced to collectivize and since then had made their living as agricultural laborers. By the time of our visit, they were pensioners. We found my grandfather cutting the old wooden loom into pieces in his house’s summer kitchen. My university-educated father who grew up in the village saw my grandfather’s act as a sign of ignorance about one’s ancestors, and as the destruction of a traditional artefact, and said the loom should have been given to a museum instead. The grandfather replied that there were hundreds of unused looms around the village, and that there was no room in museums for all of them. In my grandfather’s opinion, he was destroying something nobody among us would ever need again. The kind of nostalgia my father felt when seeing the destroyed loom marks the beginning of the post-peasant situation in the perspective of this paper. By destroying looms across the country under socialism, modern Slovakia was in theory leaving behind its agrarian past. Nostalgia for this loss nevertheless only began, and remained, as rural, and not socialist. As I therefore stress in the concluding part of this article, connecting this rustic nostalgia with political mobilization is a particularly powerful basis for politics in Eastern Europe.

Svetlana Boym (2001, 7) defines nostalgia “as a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.” Nostalgia appears to be “a longing for a place, but it is actually a yearning for a different time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams” (2001, 8). The promise of rebuilding the ideal home lies at the core of many powerful ideologies, she continues, “tempting to relinquish critical thinking for emotional bonding” (ibid., 9). Boym differentiates between restorative and reflective nostalgia. While restorative nostalgia stresses home and “attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home” (ibid., 13), reflective nostalgia thrives on longing itself and “delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately” (ibid., 13). Without a clear demarcation between the two, the rhetoric of restorative nostalgia is “about universal values, family, nature, homeland, truth. The rhetoric of reflective nostalgia is about taking time out of time and about grasping the fleeing present” (ibid., 14). I assume that nostalgia of a reflexive kind is generated by a longing for people’s economies under socialism. This nostalgia acts more restoratively when taken up by reactionary politics.

As Dominic Boyer (2010, 18) mentions, nostalgia today is not a longing for socialism per se but “a desire to recapture what life was at that time.” Although Boyer diagnoses the popularity of nostalgia in Eastern Europe as a sign of external influence over Eastern Europe and as a possible way to make claims for future self-determination (ibid., 25–26), my perspective highlights the autochthonous origin of nostalgia for a people’s economy and the employment of this particular nostalgia by skillful politicians. Maria Todorova (2010, 7) mentions that it is not only longing for security, stability, and prosperity but for a particular sociability and dignity vis-à-vis the life since socialism that even people who opposed the communist regimes are longing for.

Maya Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko (2015) stress that “both the meaning and significance of nostalgic practices only emerge from within the larger field of political possibility.” They warn of “assuming inherent political meanings or implications” in post-socialist nostalgia and of the assumption that “every reference to the past is indeed a nostalgic one. . . . Reactionary politics is able to appropriate nostalgic sentiments to its own interests” (Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2015, 64–65). The authors argue (ibid., 84), in the case of nostalgia for Kádárism in Hungary (the period between the early 1960s and 1989, also known as “goulash communism”), that it can only be successful politically if it is constructed “explicitly as non-political.” As I argue throughout this paper, it is not nostalgia for communism but nostalgia related to times in communism, developed in the setting I define as post-peasant. Populists mobilize the longing for a harmonious past that is often misleadingly or inadequately characterized as nationalist or ethnic.

Chris Hann (2015a) has demonstrated the need for collective memory analyzed over a longer period than socialism itself. While political entrepreneurs in Hungary such as Viktor Orbán have idealized a pre-socialist past, at the micro level of the village, the nostalgia for the later decades of socialism nevertheless remains strong even though, owing to what Hann explains as a strong attachment to the ideals of private property, the locals do not want to acknowledge it publicly. As with Hann focusing on village memories, so I think villagers’ nostalgia has a material basis. Hann says that it is the concept of peasant property that prevents contemporary villagers from openly praising their socialist upward mobility in Hungary (2015a, 111–12). His two informants, one a winner and the other a loser of post-socialism, share relatively positive opinions about the last decades of communism in Hungary, arguing that they are going beyond an economistic perspective, overwhelmed by the nationalist narrative. There is a private nostalgia for Kádárism, as the period of Hungarian communism under the leadership of János Kádár (1912–1989) is called, even though official memory prevents its public commemoration, writes Hann. Although I am generally sympathetic to Hann’s call for a larger picture and agree with the economic origin of nostalgia attributed to (though not necessarily of) socialism, I see this nostalgia as agrarian rather than socialist, and it does not particularly include the issues of private property and upward mobility but a far more complex set of post-peasant parameters, at least in the case of Slovakia.

In my book (Buzalka 2007), I identified patterns of the anti-modernist movement emerging from post-socialist transformation and called it “post-peasant populism.” As I have argued, this post-peasant populism is not about the peasantry; rather, it can be defined as a type of modern political culture based on a non-urban social structure and imagined rurality. It is opposed to capitalist, cosmopolitan, and secular worldviews and life-styles, and it offers an alternative “moral” model for economic development. Chris Hann (2015b) has argued about “the spatiotemporal imaginary of postsocialist villagers” in Hungary that feeds “reactionary populism.” This is close not only to Boym’s restorative nostalgia but to another concept of politics we need to employ in the analysis of nostalgia that I call “post-peasant integralism.” I borrowed “integralism” as conceptualized in the work of Douglas Holmes (2000) who applied it to the new wave of reactionary politics in Western Europe. I argue that this integralism of the post-peasant basis causes nostalgia to emerge on a societal scale. The role of populist politicians in making this specific rustic longing for a people’s economy important is essential.

Conclusion

This article was built on the basic premise that modernity begins in the country, and we need to keep in mind this broader legacy of the countryside for modernization. In Slovakia and most of Eastern Europe, industrialization started in overwhelmingly agrarian situations and under state socialist planning and coercion. Despite significant and fast development—or perhaps because of this particular development—even the late socialist decades did not allow the entirely “modern” condition to flourish.

I presented the nostalgia behind an apparently controversial village commemoration over the legacy of communist leaders in order to look under the surface of the contradictory commemoration of state socialism as either a positive or negative past. I offered a perspective on heavy industry workers, a group of employees who experienced a major loss of prestige and decline of social status after socialism, in order to present their nostalgia as showing more than the usual picture of workers as “victims of post-socialism.” I stressed that their nostalgia was for the model of livelihood I have analytically characterized as post-peasant. Reactionary politics works well with the feelings the transformation of agrarian societies brought about.

In order to understand the present role of nostalgia—and memory politics more broadly—in Slovakia and Eastern Europe, I therefore argued against the primary perception of communist memory as either nostalgia for social security or the “dark ages” of anti-communist narratives. I suggested that we look deeper into people’s everyday economic models, and their transmission and/or reinvention by contemporary populism in order to understand the present-day role of nostalgia. I argued for a fuller understanding of the ambivalent role that communist modernization had in developing a specific model of the people’s economy that is widely remembered regardless of or as an unintended consequence of communist modernization, further mobilized nowadays by skilled populist politicians. Communism as an economic or political regime, system, or idea is not the subject of people’s nostalgia. Instead, there is an understanding of everyday economy and socialization around this economy that I characterize as post-peasant that many people have been really nostalgic for.