Mastery and Lost Illusions: Space and Time in the Modernization of Eastern and Central Europe 9783110364316, 9783110364200

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Włodzimierz Borodziej, Stanislav Holubec, and Joachim von Puttkamer (Eds.) Mastery and Lost Illusions

Europas Osten im 20. Jahrhundert Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century | Schriften des Imre Kertész Kollegs Jena Publications of the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena Herausgegeben von/Edited by Włodzimierz Borodziej Joachim von Puttkamer

Band/Volume 5

Mastery and Lost Illusions | Space and Time in the Modernization of Eastern and Central Europe Edited by Włodzimierz Borodziej, Stanislav Holubec, and Joachim von Puttkamer

The Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena “Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. Comparative Historical Experience” at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena is an institute for the advanced study of the history of Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. The Kolleg was founded in October 2010 as the ninth Käte Hamburger Kolleg of the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF). The directors of the Kolleg are Professor Dr Włodzimierz Borodziej and Professor Dr Joachim von Puttkamer.

ISBN 978-3-11-036420-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-036431-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039918-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2014 Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag GmbH Rosenheimer Straẞe 143, 81671 München, Deutschland Ein Unternehmen von De Gruyter Typesetting: PTP-Berlin, Protago-TEX-Production GmbH, Berlin Printing and binding: CPI buch bücher.de GmbH, Birkach ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents Stanislav Holubec, Włodzimierz Borodziej, and Joachim von Puttkamer Introduction 1

Part I:

Key Perspectives

Joachim von Puttkamer Mastery of Space and the Crises of Modernity in Central and Eastern Europe 17 Jacek Kochanowicz A Moving Target or a Lost Illusion? East Central Europe in Pursuit of the West in Two Globalization Phases 31

Part II:

The Ruralization of Urbanization

Gábor Gyáni Image and Reality of a Splitting Country: The Case of Hungary

53

Martin Jemelka The Ostrava Industrial Agglomeration in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: Where the Urban Countryside met the Rural Town 71 Błażej Brzostek The Ruralization of Bucharest and Warsaw in the First Post-War Decade Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast Nowa Huta, Eisenhüttenstadt and Ostrava-Poruba in Early State Socialism: The Proletarianization and Ruralization of New Cities 121 Ivana Dobrivojević Changing the Cityscapes: The Ruralization of Yugoslav Towns in Early Socialism 139 Sándor Horváth Ruralization, Urban Villagers, and Perceptions of Migration in Hungary during ‘De-Stalinization’ (Budapest, Sztálinváros) 159

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vi | Contents

Part III:

Space and the Crises of Modernity

Ivan Jakubec Integration or Decentralization? The Construction of Railways and Waterways in Cisleithania 183 Jerzy Kochanowski The Sea(side) Borderland of Modernity: ˙ Rostock, Klaipeda, and Tallinn from the 1870s to the 1920s

205

Stanislav Holubec “We bring order, discipline, Western European democracy, and culture to this land of former oriental chaos and disorder.” Czech Perceptions of Sub-Carpathian Rus and its Modernization in the 1920s 223 List of Contributors Index 253

251

Stanislav Holubec, Włodzimierz Borodziej, and Joachim von Puttkamer

Introduction The experiences and perceptions of modernity in Eastern and Central Europe are a key focus of research at the Imre Kertész Kolleg. At our second annual conference in June 2012 we chose to focus on problems of modernity in twentieth-century Eastern and Central Europe. Contributors to the conference examined how spatial and temporal conditions and constraints shaped the region’s transformation from a rural to an urban, industrialized society in the course of this century.

I Defining Eastern and Central Europe How does one define a region with no clear-cut geographical borders? In the case of Eastern and Central Europe, a definition that takes account of both geography and history would seem to be the most plausible. According to Paul Robert Magocsi, this region is an aggregate of three geographical zones.¹ The first part, the northern zone, covers the central part of the European plain.² It is the watershed of the rivers that flow into the Baltic Sea (Oder, Vistula, Neman, Daugava) and includes the western half of Ukraine situated between the Carpathians and the Dnieper river. Historically, the sheer size and swampy terrain of the zone presented obstacles to communication, and its openness to the east left it vulnerable to invasion. Although culturally divided between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, the zone has a common cultural legacy in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The second zone, which Magocsi calls the Alpine-Carpathian zone, comprises the Pannonian Basin and the Bohemian Massif, as well as Slovenia, northern Croatia and northern Serbia. This zone roughly coincides with the territory of the former Habsburg Empire. Although Magocsi includes Austria in this zone, we decided not to include it in our analysis because its history after 1945 differs radically from that of the rest of region. In some parts of this zone, mountainous terrain and relative remoteness from the coast hindered communication with the outside world. The third zone, the Balkans or Southeastern Europe, is bordered in the south by the 1 Paul Robert Magocsi: Historical Atlas of East Central Europe. Seattle 1993. 2 The European plain is a much larger region, which is bordered by the Urals, the Carpathians, the Central European Highlands and the Pyrenees. Attempts by geographers to divide it into a North European and an East European plain reflect political and cultural rather than geographical divisions.

2 | Stanislav Holubec, Włodzimierz Borodziej, and Joachim von Puttkamer Mediterranean and in the north by the Kupa-Sava-Danube line, which roughly marks the limits of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To a far greater extent than in the Alpine-Carpathian zone, mountains hindered economic development here, and contrary to what modern maps might suggest, they isolated the zone’s inhabitants from the outside world. The Balkan zone’s proximity to Anatolia made it the first target of Ottoman expansion into Europe. However, in some cases the mountains proved to be a defence against invasion. Thus the north-western corner of this zone, which was cut off by mountains, was culturally orientated towards the Catholic Mediterranean (Dalmatia). And owing to its geography, Montenegro was the only Balkan state to maintain its independence from the Ottoman Empire, but it also entered the twentieth century as unique relic of the medieval world. Although Magocsi includes Greece in this zone, we decided to omit it from our considerations due to its early independence from the Ottoman Empire and its specific history after 1945. The roots of future development in all three zones can be found in their topographies. The physical features of the first two zones were conducive to the development of agriculture, while the very mountainous terrain of the Balkan zone explains why it kept its pastoral character. Geography also had a major impact on population development in the region. In late antiquity, the Balkan zone was more populated than the other two zones due to its proximity to the centres of the Roman and Byzantine Empires. However, as the agriculture of the northern and Alpine-Carpathian zones developed, their populations eventually surpassed that of the Balkans. Yet in the last 150 years, Southeastern Europe has caught up on the other two zones. Compared to the late eighteenth century, when the combined population of the northern and Alpine-Carpathian zones was about three times that of the Balkans, nowadays the ratio is almost 1 : 1. This is due to the delayed onset of demographic transition in Southeastern Europe and the greater potential for population growth in that zone. In examining efforts to overcome spatial constraints (large distances, mountainous terrain, lack of access to the coast, etc.) in the region, we concentrate on the development of a communications infrastructure. In Eastern and Central Europe this got under way much later than at the core of European modernity, and it presented more challenges due to geological conditions. As Ivan Jakubec notes in his article, the construction of canals and railways was more complicated in the Habsburg Empire than it was in Germany, and it was even more difficult in the Balkans.³ The inaccessibility of certain parts of Southeastern Europe was unique in Europe and as a result, a transport infrastructure was constructed much later

3 See the contribution by Ivan Jakubec to this volume.

Introduction

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in that zone. For example, Albania was only connected by modern roads to Greece and Serbia during the Austrian occupation from 1914 to 1918, and until 1986 it was the only country in mainland Europe with a railway system that was not linked to neighbouring countries.⁴ The history of Eastern and Central Europe as a region with a common fate begins with the breakdown of great empires (Ottoman, Russian, Habsburg and German) and the subsequent creation of nation states. This process started in the Balkan zone, the zone with the least socio-economic predispositions for it, but local elites quickly filled the vacuum created by the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. The process of nation-state building intensified in 1918; it was later boosted by waves of ethnic cleansing in the period from 1939 to 1946; and it culminated in the splitting of Czechoslovakia and the ethnic cleansing that accompanied the dissolution of Yugoslavia from 1991 to 1999. The region was the target of repeated imperial expansions after 1938, first by Nazi Germany and subsequently by the Soviet Union. The unprecedented suffering of the local population under Nazi and Stalinist domination has recently led one historian to speak of the region as “bloodlands”.⁵ As a satellite of the Soviet Union, the region became involved in an attempt to build a state socialist variant of modernity. After the collapse of the Soviet Union most of it was incorporated into Western economic and power structures and tried to adopt the capitalist form of modernity. Based on the region’s common history, we see the time frame of our analysis in a ‘long twentieth century’ stretching from the disintegration of the great powers and the first attempts to industrialize and urbanize in the 1880s to the integration of the region into broader European structures and globalization processes since the early 1990s. Finally, we need to define what we understand by the term modernization in the case of Eastern and Central Europe. While conscious of the limits of classical theories of modernization, we still find them appropriate to describe the processes that transformed societies in the late nineteenth century and made them what they are today. In this volume we ask what irreversible structural transformations shaped the region in terms of communications and living conditions. We also investigate the perception of urban areas by people from the countryside and the challenges they faced when adapting to urban conditions.⁶ As we know, in the 1890s most of the region’s inhabitants lived in rural areas that contrasted

4 The only connection to Podgorica in Yugoslavia was opened in the same year, but it was closed again from 1991 until 2003 and is nowadays only used for freight transportation. 5 Timothy Snyder: Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York 2010. 6 See the contributions to this volume by Ivana Dobrivojević, Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast, Sándor Horváth and Błażej Brzostek.

4 | Stanislav Holubec, Włodzimierz Borodziej, and Joachim von Puttkamer so starkly with urban settlements that one might speak about different worlds.⁷ Cities and towns were often seen as islands of modernity that threatened the countryside.⁸ Yet in fact, they contributed substantially to the integration of rural areas into the international economy.⁹ We should therefore question the blackand-white picture of rural and urban environments and stress the importance of transitional zones such as the industrializing mining region of Ostrava.¹⁰ Today’s Central and Eastern European societies are the product of twentiethcentury transformations. Most of the region’s inhabitants live in highly urbanized and consumerist societies characterized by a high level of mobility, phenomenal growth in communication technologies, and globalization in both production and consumption.¹¹ The contrast between urban and rural areas is nowadays less stark than it was in the past, not only due to technological advances, but also because the ethnic differences that once divided their respective inhabitants no longer exist. Before 1938 the German-Jewish population often set the tone in the region’s urban centres, while the countryside was dominated by ‘local’ Hungarians, Czechs, etc.¹² It would, however, be a mistake to overlook certain continuities in the development of this region, which are visible not only in the waves of globalization at the beginning and at the end of our time frame, but also in the repeated attempts to implement plans aimed at greater integration. The discussions of a DanubeOder-Elbe canal that started in the early 1900s continued between the wars and in the socialist and post-socialist periods, without any tangible advances being made.¹³ Indeed, the only signs of progress in this case are better simulations of future projects, with 3D computer models replacing the previous plans on paper.

II Modernity, time and space as categories in the social sciences Modernity, time and space are key categories in today’s social sciences. The adjective ‘modern’ comes from the Latin modernus, meaning contemporary, and was used in late antiquity to differentiate the Christian from the pagan (antiquus) peri-

7 See Stanislav Holubec’ contribution to this volume. 8 See Gábor Gyáni’s contribution to this volume. 9 See Jerzy Kochanowski’s contribution to this volume. 10 See Martin Jemelka’s contribution to this volume. 11 See the contributions by Jacek Kochanowicz and Joachim von Puttkamer to this volume. 12 See Gábor Gyáni’s contribution to this volume. 13 See Ivan Jakubec’ contribution to this volume.

Introduction

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ods, before resurfacing in eighteenth-century European discourse. The term modernité was probably used for the first time by Francois-René de Chateaubriand in 1849. ‘Modernization’ is a much more recent concept. It emerged in the first half of the twentieth century in the context of the structural functionalist paradigm in sociology. During the nineteenth century, the period from the sixteenth century onwards became known as ‘the modern era’ or ‘l’époque moderne’ in English and French (the divisions into early modern, classical modern and late modern came later). In many other languages, however, there is no direct translation of that concept. For example, the same period is called the Neuzeit in German, Новое время in Russian, Újkor in Hungarian, and Novověk in Czech. The term ‘modern’ refers exclusively to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, also known as ‘late modernity’. The concept of modern times was used widely in most European countries in the late nineteenth century, albeit in different contexts. For example, in Central Europe the term ‘die Moderne’ was used particularly in relation to art.¹⁴ The same term was later used to describe the industrialized and urbanized epoch in which we live, stressing its speed and mechanization, while also hinting at its dehumanizing aspects, superficiality, and frivolity. During the world wars and in the Stalinist period, at a time when modernization theories were being developed in the West in response to the socialist challenge, the term was not used much in Central and Eastern Europe. Thus, the industrialization of the region was not called modernization but ‘the building of socialism/communism’. The term entered the language of state socialism only in the 1960s in the context of discussions of the ‘scientific-technological revolution’ and ‘the need to modernize the material-productive base’. It is significant that none of the major social theorists of the nineteenth century (Marx, Weber, Durkheim) used the terms modernity or modern society. Although they are nowadays considered to be the main theorists of modernity, they actually preferred the notions of ‘progress’, ‘development’, and ‘change’. Georg Simmel, who spoke about die Moderne in the context of city life, was the only exception to this rule. The term ‘modern society’ finally made its way into the Western social sciences in the 1950s, where it was understood as the developmental stage reached by Western society in the nineteenth century in the course of industrialization, urbanization, rationalization, secularization, democratization, etc. At the same time, ‘modernization’ began to be used to describe the transition from pre-modern (traditional) to modern societies, particularly in rela-

14 Otto Brunner/Werner Conze/Reinhart Koselleck (eds.): Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. Volume 4, Stuttgart 1978.

6 | Stanislav Holubec, Włodzimierz Borodziej, and Joachim von Puttkamer tion to Third World countries. Walt Rostow’s essay The Stages of Economic Growth (1960), which assumed modernization to be a linear process that all regions went through, became a classic text of this period.¹⁵ Alexander Gerschenkron offered a similar interpretation of developments in Eastern and Central Europe, suggesting that economic ‘backwardness’ was an opportunity rather than a tragic fate. He was optimistic that less developed societies would be able to exploit the “comparative advantages” of being backward and develop faster than “advanced countries” if they implemented shrewd economic policies and managed to compensate for their shortcomings.¹⁶ The popularity of modernization theories was, however, quite short-lived. The idea that modernization would eventually come to the Third World was soon challenged by dependency theories. At the same time, the concept of the modern society was profoundly destabilized by arguments that stressed its recent transformations: the notion of the post-industrial society in economics (Alain Touraine, 1969)¹⁷ and the more culturally orientated concept of the postmodern society (Jean-François Lyotard, 1979).¹⁸ In response, die-hard advocates of the modernity concept insisted that the transformation of modern society could best be described using adjectives such as ‘reflective’, ‘radicalized’, ‘second’, ‘late’ or ‘liquid’. There was, nonetheless, broad agreement that Western societies had undergone deep social transformation in the 1970s, although it was still too early to affix a descriptive label to this process, since its main features were not yet completely clear. Ironically enough, the term modernity became fashionable once again in the late 1980s, at a time when theories of postmodernism were flourishing. This re-gained popularity was partly due to dissatisfaction with terms like ‘modernization’ or ‘capitalism’ as analytical tools. As a term, ‘modernity’ appealed more than ‘modern society’ because of its broader meaning, ambivalence, and multidimensionality.¹⁹ We can trace this terminological shift in the works of Anthony Giddens, the leading social theorist of our time, who used the words ‘capitalism’ and ‘advanced society’ in the titles of his books from the early 1970s, yet published a book in 1990 entitled The Consequences of Modernity.²⁰ 15 Walt Rostow: The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge 1960. 16 Alexander Gerschenkron: Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. A Book of Essays. Cambridge 1962. 17 Alain Touraine: La Société post-industrielle. Paris 1969. 18 Jean-François Lyotard: La Condition postmoderne. Rapport sur le savoir. Paris 1979. 19 Gerard Delanty: Modernity, in: George Ritzer (ed.), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Oxford 2007, 3072. 20 Anthony Giddens: Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber. Cambridge 1971; idem: The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies. London 1973; idem: The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge 1990.

Introduction

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Ultimately, the notion of a single modernity was questioned as Eurocentric and challenged by Shmuel Eisenstadt’s concept of ‘multiple modernities’. Eisenstadt argued that non-European societies were developing their own versions of modernity in a synthesis of European influences and native traditions.²¹ In the context of globalization theories, others spoke of ‘global modernities’.²² Discussions of modernity were influenced by two concepts, which while not very sophisticated in the scholarly sense, were so widely reflected in public discussions that they almost became self-fulfilling prophecies. In the wake of the events of 1989, Francis Fukuyama plumped for the idea of a single European modernity synonymous with liberal capitalism. For Fukuyama, the fall of communism demonstrated that there was no alternative to the Western path of development. His highly Eurocentric book gained currency in the climate of optimism immediately after the Cold War.²³ Samuel Huntington later suggested replacing the notion of modernity with the concept of multiple ‘civilizations’ all on a collision course with each other. His book had its 15 minutes of fame in 2001. While Eisenstadt acknowledges that different cultural spheres share aspects of a universal modernity, for Huntington globalization is not important. In his view, differences are what matters and conflicts among civilizations are inevitable.²⁴ Finally, we need to say a few words about our understanding of the categories of time and space. It has been argued that the social sciences heedlessly separated the categories of time and space in the nineteenth century, thereby depriving European thought of an enriching analytical perspective.²⁵ Modern historiography and sociology have tended to pay more attention to the category of time. All the major social theories of the nineteenth century are theories of social change that emphasize the temporal dimension of society. Examples include Durkheim’s alleged dichotomy between mechanical and organic solidarity, Spencer’s division between military and industrial societies, and the triads conceived by Comte (theological, metaphysical and positive stages), Weber (traditional, charismatic and bureaucratic authorities) and to some extent even by Marx (feudal,

21 Shmuel Eisenstadt: Die Vielfalt der Moderne. Weilerswist 2000. 22 Mike Featherstone/Roland Robertson (eds.): Global Modernities. London 1995. 23 Francis Fukuyama: The End of History and the Last Man. New York 1992. 24 Samuel Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York 1996. Quite recently, Göran Therborn compared the Huntingtonian fear of Arab fundamentalists in the USA with the fear of Italian anarchists one hundred years ago. Both groups were non-American and they used terrorism to achieve their goals. See Göran Therborn: The World: A Beginner’s Guide. Cambridge 2011. 25 Immanuel Wallerstein: The End of the World as We Know It. Social Science for the Twenty-First Century. Minneapolis/London 2001, 137–168.

8 | Stanislav Holubec, Włodzimierz Borodziej, and Joachim von Puttkamer capitalist and communist modes of production). From the 1970s on, the triads of the agrarian/industrial/post-industrial society and the pre-modern/modern/postmodern society were canonized in practically every social theory textbook. This approach, however, disregarded the experience of time at a micro level and failed to take account of time as a social construct rather than an objective process. Anthropologists cast light on the perception and experience of time by simple cultures (for example, the distinction between cyclical and linear time) and in so doing drew our attention to this aspect of modern society. Bronislaw Malinowski’s research on the perception of time by the natives of the Trobriand Islands (1927)²⁶ played an important role here, as did works by Claude LéviStrauss.²⁷ Thanks to phenomenological sociology, the notion that time is socially constructed gained broader acceptance, and sociology began to formulate different typologies of time or different modes of perceiving time based on age, gender, class, or culture. The advent of the modern era and the modern welfare state increasingly became associated with a perceived acceleration of time and the expansion of ‘leisure time societies’. In the postmodern era, time is said to be increasingly fragmented due to working time flexibility and the overabundance of information. According to Mark Fisher, postmodern time forfeits its linearity, becomes chaotic and breaks down into isolated moments.²⁸ The high modern optimism about an expansion of leisure time in the future has long subsided. And in his reflections on changing perceptions of time, Hartmut Rosa argues that capitalist society is accelerating towards catastrophic collapse.²⁹ Mainly confined to the field of geography in the nineteenth century, scholarly interest in the category of space only spread to the social sciences in the middle of the twentieth century. Questions of space were to the fore in the urban sociology of the Chicago School and in socio-psychological approaches to personal perceptions of immediate space (e.g. Erving Goffman’s personal territories and frontand back-stage).³⁰ Space also became an object of analysis at a more global level, for example, in the Wallersteinian triade of core/periphery/semi-periphery that emerged in the 1970s.³¹ At the same time, the ideas that space symbolically divided

26 Bronislaw Malinowski: Lunar and Seasonal Calendar in the Trobriands. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 57 (1927), 203–215. 27 Claude Lévi-Strauss: La Pensée sauvage. Paris 1962. 28 Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism: Is there No Alternative? Ropley 2009, 34. 29 Hartmut Rosa: Social Acceleration. A New Theory of Modernity. New York 2013. 30 Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York 1959. 31 Immanuel Wallerstein: The Modern World-System. Volume I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York/London 1974.

Introduction

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society based on class or taste (Pierre Bourdieu) and was structured by power and the desire to discipline individuals (Michel Foucault) came to prominence. As time increasingly came to be seen as socially constructed, the Marxian social theorist Henri Lefebvre came up with the idea of the social production of space (1974), where every mode of production creates its own space.³² Following from Lefebvre, David Harvey claimed that power manifests itself in the influence it has over the production of space. According to Harvey, capital has recently effected a “time-space compression” of the world, making it a place where information can cover vast distances in a fraction of a second.³³ The transportation of goods and humans in space remains, however, time-consuming. Indeed, it seems that the potential for accelerating the speed at which vehicles can travel has been exhausted in recent decades. Experiments with supersonic flight have come to nought, and today’s cars are no faster than they were two decades ago. If anything, they are slower because of traffic jams. The widespread preoccupation with questions of space and the birth of ‘social geography’ as a discipline in the 1970s are cited as evidence of the ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences. In the postmodern age efforts were made to overcome the aforementioned division of space and time and return to the category of timespace, which had been fashionable in the natural sciences since the theory of relativity. Manuel Castells’ concept of the globalized world is one example of attempts to synthesize the two categories in the social sciences.³⁴ Castells speaks about two types of space: the traditional space of places, which is increasingly being rolled back by the space of flows (e.g. the Internet, traffic and other communications). In the globalized world, our previous conceptions of time and space are no longer valid. Of all the theoretical reflections on time and space outlined above, the Wallersteinian triad in particular has shaped perceptions of Eastern and Central Europe. This region has typically been seen as the first periphery of the modern worldsystem, which supplied the core with grain and raw materials and depended on the core’s goods and capital since the sixteenth century. The Wallersteinian approach has been appropriated by many historians of the region (e.g. Ivan Berend, Andrew Janos) and was to some extent even inspired by the work of the Polish historian Marian Małowist. Recent studies have also explored the significance of Eastern and Central Europe as a symbolic space. As Larry Wolff and Maria To-

32 Henri Lefebvre: La production de l’espace. Paris 1974. 33 David Harvey: The Limits to Capital. Oxford 1982. 34 Manuel Castells: The Rise of the Network Society. Volume 1: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Cambridge 1996.

10 | Stanislav Holubec, Włodzimierz Borodziej, and Joachim von Puttkamer dorova have shown, the region has been important as the imagined Other of the West since the eighteenth century, and assumed differences in its time and space have been integral to Western perceptions of it.³⁵ The claim that time moves more slowly or doesn’t move at all in Central and Eastern Europe is an abiding motif in reports by Western visitors from the eighteenth century to the present. These reports suggest that everything takes too long here, that the locals are oblivious to time, and that visiting the region is like travelling back in time.³⁶ But time can also move faster here than in the West. Phases of apparent stasis are punctuated by feverish political conflicts, civil wars, and coups. From the Western point of view, the region’s spaces are also different. There is an emphasis on their vastness: gigantic socialist suburbs and industrial plants, the endless steppe and forests, and the huge distances between settlements. At other times, Eastern and Central European spaces are perceived as smaller than in the West: smaller towns, smaller countries, narrower streets, and many languages and religions crammed into a limited area.

III The Structure of the volume The conference highlighted the ambiguities inherent in the terms ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization’, and most papers focused on the difficulties of modernizing. Contributors devoted particular attention to islands of modernity in the region – ports, cities, new towns and transportation networks – and the role of the state in the modernization process. The specifics of socialist modernity and the contradictory effects of state socialist modernization were also addressed. Judging by the papers presented, it seems that most historians are reluctant to incorporate recent theoretical reflections on space and time into their work, preferring to use these categories in the traditional sense. However, this approach seems to be quite legitimate, because we need to know about the history of ‘real’ space and time before we can explore what that history has generated in terms of experience and the imagination of the region. The volume is structured around the opening two theoretical articles in part one. Part two focuses on urban-rural relations with an emphasis on state socialist industrialization, while part three examines the issues of modern in-

35 Larry Wolff : Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford 1997; Maria Todorova: Imagining the Balkans. New York 1997. 36 See Stanislav Holubec’ contribution to this volume.

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frastructural development (railways, waterways, harbours) and core-periphery relations. The first two contributions by Joachim von Puttkamer and Jacek Kochanowicz offer theoretical perspectives on modernization and modernity. Puttkamer analyzes the ‘mastery of space’ in the region and the role played by the modern state in this process. The nation state extends its citizens’ mobility by investing in infrastructure, yet it also binds the same citizens to a space defined by national borders, and sometimes even initiates their violent displacement (expulsions and transfers). In his reflections, Puttkamer considers the relationship between the modern state and violence, thus raising the question of a general crisis of modernity. Yet the evidence that post-communist societies are mastering space in the wake of political liberalization, globalization and the crisis of high modernity allows him to be moderately optimistic about the region’s future. Jacek Kochanowicz compares the effects of two globalization waves in Central and Eastern Europe, the first from the 1870s to the outbreak of World War I and the second after 1990. While the first wave was mainly fuelled by technological advances, the second is primarily a political project. In Kochanowicz’ view, Eastern and Central Europe were peripheral to Western Europe during both globalization phases. This becomes clear if we compare the region’s development with that of the major beneficiaries of each globalization wave: the US in the first and Southeast Asia in the second. As Kochanowicz shows, the differences between the two waves outweigh their similarities. The political contexts are different, as are the transformations they effected in the economy and social structures. Although both phases are marked by the ideological hegemony of liberalism, the contemporary zeitgeist is far less optimistic. Unlike Puttkamer, Kochanowicz is rather sceptical regarding the region’s economic future. In part two, Gábor Gyáni focuses on the gap between the image and the reality of rural and metropolitan life in Hungary in the first half of the twentieth century. This gap was widened by the division of Hungary in 1918, when the contrast between Budapest and the rest of the country became much more visible. Gyáni shows that the image of a divided country was very important in public discourse, because the urban-rural divide corresponded to some extent with the cleavage between the Jewish-German and Hungarian populations. Conservatives saw the cities as strongholds of Judeo-liberal tendencies that threatened to spread to the rest of the country. The spread of the one-child family trend to rural areas after 1918 was seen to exemplify this. Interestingly, the picture of 1960s Budapest drawn in Sándor Horváth’s article suggests that by that time the pendulum of Hungarian mainstream discourse had turned and rural habits were now being criticized in the capital.

12 | Stanislav Holubec, Włodzimierz Borodziej, and Joachim von Puttkamer Based on the example of the Ostrava industrial agglomeration in interwar Czechoslovakia, Martin Jemelka shows that the differences between urban and rural areas are not always as clear-cut as social theories would suggest. Due to a steady influx of migrants from the countryside between the wars, Ostrava was not a classical urban centre, but a place where urban and rural worlds coexisted. Many villagers were engaged in industry there, and city dwellers retained the customs they had brought from the countryside. Some villages kept their original character even as the city encroached upon them. Despite efforts to modernize the city, Ostrava’s inhabitants continued to idealize country life as the antithesis of life in their ‘inhospitable’ industrial city. Błażej Brzostek compares social changes and the perception of those changes in post-1945 Warsaw and Bucharest. The two cities are linked by narratives of destruction (the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the 1977 Bucharest earthquake) and the experience of state socialism, which led to the erosion of urban spaces and values in the wake of large-scale migration from the countryside. Brzostek discusses ‘ruralization’ as both imagined and real socio-economic change in the twentiethcentury development of both capital cities. The results of his analysis may come as a surprise: in the immediate post-war years Warsaw was rebuilt by its longstanding inhabitants, and it was only in the early 1950s that an influx of peasants shocked city dwellers and engendered a conflict that was belied by the regime’s insistence on the “unity of workers and peasants”. By contrast, Bucharest required hardly any post-war reconstruction, yet its cultural roots led visitors to perceive it as much more rural than the Polish capital. Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast compares the development of three ‘new cities’ established in the vicinity of large industrial complexes during the Stalinist industrialization period: Nowa Huta in Poland, Eisenhüttenstadt in East Germany, and Ostrava-Poruba in Czechoslovakia. Jajeśniak-Quast shows how the customs and values of the rural population often clashed with the authorities’ vision of a modern and civilized lifestyle. Unlike the picture of early socialist Yugoslavia painted in Ivana Dobrivojević’s article, one might get the impression here that Central European states were more concerned about improving people’s lives. Yet we should not forget that all three cities were intended to be shop windows of socialism. Life in other parts of Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia may well have been as grim as in 1950s Yugoslavia. Ivana Dobrivojević examines urban development in Yugoslav cities in the 1950s. After 1945, urban reality in Yugoslavia was marked by the persistence of pre-war structures, wartime destruction, and attempts to realize state socialist urbanization. Dobrivojević describes how the failure to provide adequate housing and other amenities for a massive influx of rural migrants led to the decline of urban middle-class culture. The values and lifestyles the newcomers brought to

Introduction

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the cities contributed to the ruralisation of urban environments. As in many other socialist countries, in Yugoslavia the state ruthlessly pursued industrial goals without sparing much thought for the quality of people’s lives. Like the foregoing contributors, Sándor Horváth explores the encounter between rural and urban cultures in the Hungarian cities of Sztálinváros and Budapest in the late 1950s. He shows how the socialist state contrasted allegedly ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ cultural practices and tried to rid the cities of elements of a quasi-rural culture. Consistent with the goal of eliminating the differences between the village and the city under communism, migrants from the countryside were supposed to abandon their rural ways. By highlighting the constant struggle between urban and rural norms, official discourse tried to represent the communist project as a modernist campaign and thereby legitimize deStalinization. In part three of the volume, Ivan Jakubec examines the difficulties encountered in the construction of railways and canals in the Habsburg Empire. As Jakubec shows, train routes were often determined more by ethnic divisions than by good economic sense, and the building of railways with private capital resulted in many redundant projects. Railway construction had both centralizing and decentralizing effects. While the expansion of the railway network led to greater integration within individual regions, it had a decentralizing effect on the empire as a whole. The construction of waterways proved more difficult to realize: a plan to canalize Cisleithania was abandoned due to lack of funds and the outbreak of World War I. Jerzy Kochanowski’s article compares the development of three Baltic ports – Klaipeda, Tallinn and Rostock – in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kochanowski shows how the success or failure of these ports in the nineteenth century depended on their railway connections to the hinterland. Later on, political changes played a role: after 1918, only Rostock remained in the same country; Klaipeda became the only significant harbour in Lithuania; and Tallinn went from being a secondary port in the Russian Empire to the most important port and the capital of Estonia. The new national economies were too small to generate faster growth, however. After 1941, all three cities shared the same fate: they were each drawn into the German war effort before coming under Soviet influence in 1944/1945. The development of the ports in subsequent decades may point to differences between the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’ empire. While Rostock grew to be the largest port in the GDR, the Soviet ports of Tallinn and Klaipeda remained trading places of secondary importance. After 1990/1991, the three port cities experienced a repeat of the interwar situation. Taking the example of Subcarpathian Rus in the 1920s, Stanislav Holubec focuses on an internal colonization project as an attempt to master space. He describes how the Czech authorities who came to the territory after 1918 portrayed

14 | Stanislav Holubec, Włodzimierz Borodziej, and Joachim von Puttkamer it and its inhabitants in a way that legitimized the annexation and modernization of Subcarpathian Rus by the Czechoslovak state. It was claimed that the Rusyns, the territory’s largest ethnic group, were the ‘Slavic brothers’ of the Czechs, who needed help to become civilized, ethnically conscious and ‘equal’ citizens of Czechoslovakia. The Czechs perceived other groups as hostile to this project: the Jews, Hungarians, communists, Ukrainian nationalists and the Greek Orthodox Church. Holubec shows that the Czechoslovak state, despite some noteworthy initiatives, did not have the resources to successfully implement its planned modernization project, and the territory’s remote location made its industrialization and urbanization impossible. The present volume is part of a series of publications by the Imre Kertész Kolleg on Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century that offers new insights into the comparative historical experience of Central and Eastern European societies. These publications aim to familiarize international audiences with the research carried out at the Kolleg, while also providing a publication platform for historians from Eastern and Central Europe (four contributors to this volume come from Poland, three from the Czech Republic, two from Hungary and one each from Germany and Serbia). Translations for the volume were provided by Anne Boden (Ivan Jakubec’ contribution), Evan Melander (Martin Jemelka’s contribution) and Aleksandra Michalska (Błażej Brzostek’s and Jerzy Kochanowski’s contributions). We would like to thank Anne Boden for editing the manuscript and Christian Werkmeister for formatting and standardizing all the contributions to the volume. Special thanks also go to Professor Lutz Niethammer, who helped us to develop the structure of the volume. Jena, February 2014

| Part I: Key Perspectives

Joachim von Puttkamer

Mastery of Space and the Crises of Modernity in Central and Eastern Europe Up in the Air is a novel by the American author Walter Kirn. The Hollywood adaptation that came out in 2009 casts George Clooney in the lead role and, unlike the novel itself, it was quite successful. Neither the book nor the movie has anything to do with Eastern Europe, but they have a lot to do with space and modernity. They inspire us to reflect on how we conceive of the mastery of space in historical research on the twentieth century.¹ The main character of Up in the Air is a businessman who is always on his way from one airport to the next. His job is to break the bad news that they have been fired to employees in downsized firms. He steps in for employers who are afraid of dissolving human bonds themselves, and the shedding of any kind of relationship to things or people develops into his own personal philosophy. His only goal in life is to collect one million frequent flyer miles (ten million in the film). The only thing that counts in the nomadic rootlessness of ‘Airworld’ is customer loyalty. George Clooney thus personifies an archetype of man in modernity. He pays a high price for extreme mobility, for the almost complete mastery of space and nature, which deprives him of all human relationships, and he deceives himself in trying to make a virtue of it. In the novel, the hero’s identity tends to slip away in a series of blackouts, and he utterly spoils an incipient love affair. In the film adaptation, the beloved woman drops him when he finds out that she is a married mother, and he has to face the painful truth that she only exploited him as an erotic distraction with no further obligations. Unlike other romantic comedies of its kind, Up in the Air does not have a happy end, yet it is still highly conservative in its promotion of traditional family ideals. George Clooney ends up disillusioned und utterly lonesome. Mastery of space as a core element of the modern human condition becomes rather discomforting in this reading. This plot neatly illustrates how changes in the man-to-nature relationship bear upon the man-to-man relationship. Mastery of space has indeed been central to theories of modernity and modernization. It is a major aspect of the technological mastery of nature and of the human mastery of the physical environment, which has sparked intellectual reflection on modernity and progress since the late eighteenth century. In this context, Kant and Condorcet emphasized the need to control a territory by means of political organization and legislation. Reason

1 Walter Kirn: Up in the Air. New York 2001; Jason Reitman: Up in the Air. DVD 2010.

18 | Joachim von Puttkamer would thus spur the progress of mankind towards morality and material welfare in a still belligerent world. Whereas Condorcet envisioned that the potential of technology was infinite, mastery of space early on introduced a finite element into reflections on the progress of reason towards a perfectly harmonious world.² The advent of railroads in the industrial age soon changed this perception. Mastery of space turned into the mastery of distance. Since then, it has allowed us to shrink even global distances almost to the point of irrelevance and has largely synchronized our world. We can physically travel to nearly any point on the globe within less than 24 hours, and the cost of shipping goods around the world has become largely irrelevant. The new means of telecommunication usually associated with the Internet allow us to be virtually present almost anywhere on this planet without leaving our offices. Our mastery of distance seems almost perfect. Anthony Giddens has perhaps most succinctly described the underlying process of abstraction from time and space as a radicalization of modernity in which social organization has become almost completely detached from its local context and has long begun to transcend even the framework of the nation state, thus extending into global dimensions.³ Serious doubts have been cast on the homogenizing and emancipatory promise of such developments. Economic historians and, most prominently, Immanuel Wallerstein have described the emergence of a new spatial inequality of global dimensions.⁴ At the same time, as we shall see, the declining relevance of physical distance supported a constructivist approach to space and territoriality and thus provided insights into the discursive dynamics of penetration, conquest, and subjugation. Mastery of space might therefore be a good starting point to re-think the notions of progress and modernity as they are applied to our understanding of Eastern Europe, since, despite all their detractors, these notions seem to be deeply ingrained in our perceptions of the region. There is no need to repeat all the objections to the modernization paradigm, which have been directed variously against its concept of linearity and its teleological dimension, against the rigid dichotomies of tradition and modernity, against its Western ethnocentrism, which defines everything else as backward, and against its focus on structures and its neglect of historical agency.⁵ But why then has the vocabulary of modernity and modernization not disappeared from

2 Stephen Lukes/Nadia Urbinati (eds.): Condorcet. Political Writings. Cambridge 2012, 1–147; Immanuel Kant: Zum ewigen Frieden und Auszüge aus der Rechtslehre. Kommentar von Oliver Eberl und Peter Niesen. Frankfurt am Main 2011, 7–66. 3 Anthony Giddens: The Consequences of Modernity. Oxford 1990. 4 Immanuel Wallerstein: The Modern World System. Four volumes. Berkeley 2011. 5 Hans-Ulrich Wehler: Modernisierungstheorie und Geschichte. Göttingen 1975.

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research on Eastern Europe in the twentieth century? A notion of modernity still informs current debates on statehood and violence in Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, and it is obviously central to the concept of ‘high’ or industrial modernity and its crisis since the 1970s. The mastery of space does not figure prominently in these debates, though it does inform the research agenda on twentieth-century Eastern Europe in manifold ways, and it might help to understand and explain the resilience of modernist terminology.

I Space, modernity, and the state in Eastern Europe One of the major turns in recent historiography on Eastern Europe has been the spatial turn. In a survey of current research published in 2007, Benjamin Schenk rightly pointed out that this spatial turn can actually be seen as a rather unspectacular derivative of the cultural turn. A given geographical space and its natural conditions do not predetermine the history of peoples and societies. Rather, it is human beings who shape space by creating infrastructures and symbolic orders.⁶ Modernity in this respect can be understood as a specific Western perception, which can be traced all the way back to the Enlightenment. Until today, the notion of ‘us’ and ‘them’, of modernity and backwardness, lies at the core of our perception of Eastern and Southeastern Europe.⁷ The discomforting potential of this insight has been a driving force in historical debates on Eastern Europe for the last two decades, and these debates are unlikely to cease in the foreseeable future. The discussion of mental maps and the spatial imagination has been equally crucial to our understanding of the nation state and its formation. Peter Judson’s path-breaking work on the Habsburg Monarchy has given us tremendous insights into the way German, Czech and Slovene nationalists conceived of national mobilization as a struggle for the national territory at its linguistic frontiers. Peter Haslinger and Stefan Troebst have demonstrated that the political stability of empires and nation states very much hinges on how they manage to develop a co-

6 Frithjof Benjamin Schenk: Das Paradigma des Raumes in der Osteuropäischen Geschichte, in: Zeitenblicke 6 (2007), 2, at: http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2007/2/schenk [last accessed on 9.10.2013]. 7 Larry Wolff : Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford 1997; Maria Todorova: Imagining the Balkans. Oxford/New York 1997.

20 | Joachim von Puttkamer herent and convincing territorial idea. The failure of interwar Czechoslovakia to firmly include the Slovak lands in its national imagination might be a case in point.⁸ The incongruence of the Hungarian state and the Hungarian nation has sustained an element of uncertainty in the respective discourses.⁹ In this vein, the concept of lieux de mémoire as developed by Pierre Nora can be understood first and foremost as an attempt to decipher the way in which the territorial space of the nation state has been filled with identity sites that reinforce its claims to be a historically legitimate political entity.¹⁰ But when transferred to Central and Eastern Europe, the concept was quickly transformed into an instrument to demonstrate the various interrelationships and overlaps in claims to the memory of contested spaces.¹¹ Geographical maps illustrate in a most tangible way the close link between these discussions of the symbolic organization and perceptions of territorial space on the one hand and its active mastery by means of communication and bureaucratic control on the other.¹² For almost a century, the ascendancy and decline of territoriality, as Charles Maier has argued, played a key role in the organization of society, following the idea of a national space filled up and energized by means of railroads and a bureaucracy that unleashed and controlled industrial power.¹³ At first glance, there appears to be no significant difference between emerging nation states and expanding empires in their penetration of peripheries. The latter have been addressed thoroughly in what is termed ‘New Imperial History’, which is exemplified by Benjamin Schenk’s research on the history of railways in imperial Russia or the comparative study of European empires by Jörn Leonhard and Ul-

8 Pieter M. Judson: Guardians of the Nation. Activists on the Language Frontier of Imperial Austria. Cambridge 2006; Stefan Troebst: ‘Intermarium‘ and ’Wedding to the Sea‘. Politics of History and Mental Mapping in East Central Europe, in: European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire 2 (2003), 293–321; Peter Haslinger: Nation und Territorium im tschechischen politischen Diskurs 1880–1935. München 2010. 9 Máté Zombory: Maps of Remembrance. Space, Belonging and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe. Budapest 2012. 10 Pierre Nora (ed.): Les Lieux de Mémoire. Three volumes. Paris 1986–1998; Hagen Schulze/Etienne François (eds.): Deutsche Erinnerungsorte. Three volumes. München 2001. 11 Hans-Henning Hahn/Robert Traba (eds.): Deutsch-polnische Erinnerungsorte. Two volumes. Paderborn 2012–2013; Matthias Weber/Burkhard Olschowsky/Ivan A. Petranský/Attila Pók/Andrzej Przewoźnik (eds.): Erinnerungsorte in Ostmitteleuropa. Erfahrungen der Vergangenheit und Perspektiven. München 2011. 12 Jörn Happel/Christophe von Werdt (eds.): Osteuropa kartiert – Mapping Eastern Europe. Münster 2010. 13 Charles S. Maier: Consigning the Twentieth Century to History. Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era, in: American Historical Review 105 (2000), 807–831.

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rike von Hirschhausen. This research has revealed the continental empires of the nineteenth century to be ‘nationalizing empires’. But the penetration of imperial peripheries was highly ambivalent, since in pushing towards integration by means of infrastructure, it also deepened cultural fragmentation and mobilized centrifugal forces.¹⁴ At the same time, authors such as Vejas Liulevicius and Ulrike Jureit have addressed the dynamics of the German spatial discourse in the wake of the First World War and its radical biopolitical implications, which lay at the heart of the war of annihilation that Nazi Germany fought in the East.¹⁵ In terms of territorialization, mastery of space in Eastern Europe – at least north of the Carpathians – quickly prompted instability and violence. These historical debates are based on the claim that the modern state should be understood as a socio-spatial organization, whose autonomous agency in regulating power relations and penetrating society by means of infrastructure depends on its control over territory.¹⁶ This theoretical approach has been reflected in historical research, most prominently in the debates on mass violence and ethnic homogenization. In his masterly discussion of the origins and effects of ethnic violence and expulsions in Europe since the late nineteenth century, Philipp Ther has argued that there is a direct link between modern statehood and forced migration. Ther focuses less on the ideas of ethnic homogeneity and the nation state as the driving forces behind expulsion than he does on the administrative capacities of the state apparatus in planning and executing forced migration, ranging from statistics on bureaucracy to railways and other forms of mass transportation.¹⁷ Here Ther follows a path that has already been staked out by Michael Mann – the title of whose book he alludes to – and Norman Naimark, among others.¹⁸ In his focus on infrastructure, Ther is only somewhat more cautious than some of his

14 Frithjof Benjamin Schenk: Travel, Railroads, and Identity Formation in the Russian Empire, in: Omer Bartov/Eric D. Weitz (eds.), Shatterzone of Empires. Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands. Bloomington 2013, 136–151; Jörn Leonhard/Ulrike von Hirschhausen (eds.): Comparing Empires. Encounters and Transfers in the Long Nineteenth Century. Göttingen 2010. 15 Vejas G. Liulevicius: War Land on the Eastern Front. Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I. Cambridge 2000; Ulrike Jureit: Das Ordnen von Räumen. Territorium und Lebensraum im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Hamburg 2012. 16 Michael Mann: The Autonomous Power of the State. Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results, in: John A. Hall (ed.): States in History. Oxford/New York 1986, 109–136. 17 Philipp Ther: Die dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten. “Ethnische Säuberungen“ im modernen Europa. Göttingen 2011. 18 Norman M. Naimark: Fires of Hatred. Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge 2001; Michael Mann: The Dark Side of Democracy. Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge 2005.

22 | Joachim von Puttkamer predecessors when it comes to the questions of whether to include the genocide against the Armenians in his story and how to deal with the Holocaust. Ther’s argument can be directly linked to Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust with its famous metaphor of the gardener, and to his subsequent book, Modernity and Ambivalence.¹⁹ The latter work extends the argument that the Holocaust was essentially a modern phenomenon to Stalinism. This has provoked intense debate, as evidenced in the works of Jörg Baberowski, who responded quite enthusiastically to Bauman’s argument at first.²⁰ By contrast, Stefan Plaggenborg has insisted that Stalinist violence was anything but modern, since it was rooted in the practices of the Russian Civil War, focused on discipline rather than the elimination of ambivalence, and ultimately turned against its own protagonists, thus losing its focus on a foe who was perceived to be essentially alien.²¹ One might add that Stalinist terror was of a much cruder bureaucratic nature than the annihilating violence of National Socialism, even though basic bureaucratic procedures in Russia fostered the same notions of legitimacy and compliance among victims that Bauman so vividly describes in the case of the Holocaust. In his most recent book, Jörg Baberowski distances himself from his previous line of argument. He now interprets Stalinist violence as essentially anti-modern, since it unfolded in a space where previous state structures had allegedly been destroyed and replaced, if at all, by the Communist Party, a willing tool in the hands of a mass murderer. Thus Baberowski conceives of the modern state as an intermediary between the ruler and the oppressed, which channels and controls violence and prevents the ruler and his henchmen from unleashing uncontrolled violence against the population.²² Baberowski’s argument has been sharply criticized in German academia mainly because of the way he decontextualizes violence, suggesting that it is essential to human nature and therefore needs no further explanation.²³ For Baberowski, violence inevitably unfolds in spaces that are devoid of state struc-

19 Zygmunt Bauman: Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge 1989; idem: Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge 1991. 20 Jörg Baberowski: Der Rote Terror. Die Geschichte des Stalinismus. München 2003. 21 Stefan Plaggenborg: Experiment Moderne. Der sowjetische Weg. Frankfurt am Main/New York 2006, 121–177. 22 Jörg Baberowski: Verbrannte Erde. Stalins Herrschaft der Gewalt. München 2012. There is a faint allusion to Montesquieu’s view of traditional estate institutions as intermediate powers and safeguards of liberty here, which Baberowski doesn’t seem to be aware of, but that is a different matter. 23 Osteuropa 4 (2012).

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tures (staatsferne Räume).²⁴ What should concern us here is not so much the problematic nexus between space and violence, but the notion of modernity that lies at the heart of this debate. At its core, this is a debate on whether the modern state as we know it is essentially rooted in practices of mass violence, i.e. whether modernity controls violence or breeds it (or both). Zygmunt Bauman is very much aware of the disturbing character of this argument. His line of thought shatters the presumption that modernity is intimately linked to any sort of progress if it results in genocidal mass murder. In this respect, ‘liquid modernity’ does not offer much relief. Thus the notion of modernity is integral to historians’ discussions of the nexus between state bureaucracy and mass violence in the first half of the twentieth century, and Central and Eastern Europe became its most prominent and gruesome theater. Spatial considerations do play a role in these debates, even though the notion of space has been watered down to become a metaphor for administrative and bureaucratic control. But it still remains closely linked to an active mastery of space by means of transport and communications, which is so central to the state that it also makes sense to speak of modern states in the case of Central and Eastern Europe. Notions of modernity also figure in other scholarly debates that are less concerned with infrastructure and bureaucratic control, and more focused on the cultural mapping of space by means of urban planning and urban development, territorial exploration and travel. At the turn of the twentieth century, cities such as St. Petersburg, Budapest, Warsaw, Prague, and – famously – Vienna were seen as laboratories of urban modernity, which were not only emulating Paris, London, or Berlin, but were also probing social and intellectual trajectories of their own.²⁵ Aside from modernist architecture and housing, it might suffice to mention the first electric underground railway on the continent, which was opened in Budapest in 1896 as a most visible harbinger of the new Hungarian millennium.²⁶

24 The concept itself can be traced back to Felix Schnell: Räume des Schreckens. Gewalt und Gruppenmilitanz in der Ukraine 1905–1933. Hamburg 2012. 25 Karl Schlögel: Jenseits des Großen Oktober. Das Laboratorium der Moderne. Petersburg 1909– 1921. Berlin 1988; Péter Hanák: Der Garten und die Werkstatt. Ein kulturgeschichtlicher Vergleich Wien und Budapest um 1900. Wien/Köln/Weimar 1992; Gábor Gyáni: Identity and the Urban Experience. Fin-de-Siècle Budapest. Boulder 2004; Carl Schorske: Fin-de-siècle Vienna. Politics and Culture. London 1979. 26 John Lukács: Budapest 1900. A Historical Portrait of a City and its Culture. New Haven 1988, 43–44.

24 | Joachim von Puttkamer Socialist urban planning quickly picked up on this and radicalized its powerful visions of a radicalized modernism.²⁷ Such visions of urban modernity denied and concealed the reality of impoverished masses pouring in from an increasingly overpopulated countryside. Yet elements of rural traditionalism remained highly visible in the cities of Eastern and Southeastern Europe well into the middle of the century, as some contributions to this volume amply demonstrate. These “peasant urbanites”, as Andrei Simić first called them, brought an element of familiar social cohesion to the cities and introduced a notion of ruralism to the urban sphere that smacked more of backwardness than of proletarian poverty.²⁸ Along the lines sketched out by Alexander Gerschenkron, the notion of imbalance persists in the urban history of Eastern Europe, as opposed to the allegedly normal trajectory of urban development further west. In fact, urban modernism and mastery of space were projected back onto more remote areas by means of exploration and travel. By their very nature, these activities transcended neatly delimited statehood early on, attaining imperial dimensions. This development was pushed to its limits by expansion into largely uninhabitable areas such as the polar regions in the early twentieth century and outer space after World War II. The exploration of the cosmos during the Cold War is a special case, since the close link between the technical mastery of space and utopian enthusiasm for a bright future in a socialism that was expanding its physical potential towards infinity is clearer here than in any other field.²⁹ Space mania coincided with the advent of consumerism in the Soviet Bloc in the late 1950s. Space znachki, pins and stamps, conveyed a vision of modernity that glossed over persistent shortcomings at a time when an urban lifestyle was within reach of most of the population for the first time.³⁰ In this respect, the pioneering char-

27 Monika Rüthers: Moskau bauen von Lenin bis Chruščev. Öffentliche Räume zwischen Utopie, Terror und Alltag. Wien 2007; Thomas Bohn (ed.): Von der ‘europäischen Stadt’ zur ‘sozialistischen Stadt’ und zurück? Urbane Transformationen im östlichen Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts. München 2009. 28 Andrei Simić: The Peasant Urbanites. A Study of Rural-Urban Mobility in Serbia. New York 1973. 29 Eva Maurer/Julia Richers/Monika Rüthers/Carmen Scheide (eds.): Soviet Space Culture. Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies. Basingstoke/New York 2011; Asif A. Siddiqi: The Red Rockets’ Glare. Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957. Cambridge 2010; Klaus Gestwa: Polarisierung der Sowjetgeschichte. Die Antarktis im Kalten Krieg, in: Osteuropa 2–3 (2011), 271–289. 30 Cathleen S. Lewis: From the Kitchen into the Orbit. The Convergence of Human Spaceflight and Khrushchev’s Nascent Consumerism, in: James T. Andrews/Asif A. Siddiqi (eds.), Into the Cosmos. Space Exploration and Soviet Culture. Pittsburgh 2011, 213–239.

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acter of exploration corresponded to the development of tourism from an elite pursuit to mass recreation in more familiar regions. The latter also fulfilled major propaganda functions in socialist Eastern Europe from the 1960s onwards, since it indicated both an opening to the world and the prospect of leisurely recreation within a fulfilled working life for all members of society.³¹ Having displayed its genocidal potential in Central and Eastern Europe, mastery of space also served to propagate the brightest of futures. If we understand the imaginary and infrastructural mastery of space and distance as a key feature of modernity, it certainly makes sense to speak of the states that exercised such mastery as being modern – in Central and Eastern Europe as much as anywhere else – regardless of the obstacles they had to overcome due to often adverse topographic and climatic conditions.

II The crisis of modernity At a time when the mastery of space was visibly pushed to its extremes, doubts began to be raised as to the limits of progress and modernity. As in the Western world, an element of environmental protection had been inherent in tourism in Eastern Europe, beginning with the efforts to preserve the mountainous landscape of the Carpathians in the late nineteenth century. With its bias towards large-scale industry and huge hydro-electric power plants, socialist planning, even when it claimed to protect nature against the exploiting forces of the market, was not well disposed to environmental discourse. From the 1970s onwards, environmental concerns began to be voiced by experts and oppositionist groups throughout Eastern Europe, most prominently in the Baltic republics and in Hungary, before the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl in 1986 put these concerns firmly onto the agenda.³²

31 Anne E. Gorsuch: All This is Your World. Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin. Oxford/New York 2011; Anne E. Gorsuch/Diane Koenker (eds.): Turizm. The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism. Ithaca/London 2006; Włodzimierz Borodziej/Jerzy Kochanowski/Joachim von Puttkamer (eds.): ‘Schleichwege’. Inoffizielle Kontakte sozialistischer Staatsbürger zwischen 1956 und 1989. Köln/Weimar/Wien 2010. 32 Horst Förster/Julia Herzberg/Martin Zückert (eds.): Umweltgeschichte(n). Ostmitteleuropa von der Industrialisierung bis zum Postsozialismus. Göttingen 2013; Klaus Gestwa: Die Stalinschen Großbauten des Kommunismus. Sowjetische Technik- und Umweltgeschichte, 1948–1967. München 2010, 500–556; Osteuropa 4 (2006).

26 | Joachim von Puttkamer The emergence of an environmental debate raises the question to what extent not only mastery of nature, but also mastery of space can be linked to current debates on the crisis of industrial modernity and the advent of postmodernism since the 1970s. So far, this debate has barely touched on Eastern Europe and on the transformations that have taken place since the revolutions of 1989. Influential synthetic works by Ivan T. Berend, Andrew C. Janos, and others have addressed the issue as to whether the failure and collapse of communism has thrust Eastern Europe back in its long-standing efforts to catch up with the West and assigned it once more the status of an economic periphery. Thus, they stay within the framework of an undogmatic modernization paradigm.³³ Other authors such as Hartmut Kaelble or Andreas Wirsching have argued rather for a process of convergence, with Eastern Europe gradually catching up with the West. Yet they do not deny obvious drawbacks and unresolved problems.³⁴ When addressing Eastern Europe’s path to modernity, we should keep in mind that Western industrial modernity has itself been in the midst of a profound crisis since the 1970s and may even have come to an end. From a German perspective, this debate has been sparked by the concept of ‘high modernity’ developed by Ulrich Herbert, Lutz Raphael, and Anselm Doering-Manteuffel.³⁵ These authors argue for a sea change in perceptions of modernity linked to the oil crisis, the huge impact of new technologies on everyday life and the organization of labor, the erosion of social planning and engineering, a critical awareness of the environmental risks of industrial development, and the predominance of postmodern discourse. There is indeed much to support the argument that high, industrial modernity may have come to an end. Aside from general reflections on economic development patterns and the fear that new peripheries might emerge, notions of space are not central to this debate, and they do not fit easily into the picture. Yet a cursory glance at the development of communications and transportation provides some insights into a twisted process, which can best be described as a consecutive layering, where innovative drives help to cover up, if not to overcome, previous shortcomings. In so doing,

33 Iván T. Berend: Central and Eastern Europe 1944–1993. Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery. Cambridge 1996; Andrew C. Janos: East Central Europe in the Modern World. The Politics of the Borderlands from Pre- to Postcommunism. Stanford 2000. 34 Hartmut Kaelble: A Social History of Europe, 1945–2000. Recovery and Transformation after Two World Wars. New York 2013; Andreas Wirsching: Der Preis der Freiheit. Geschichte Europas in unserer Zeit. München 2012. 35 Ulrich Herbert: Europe in High Modernity. Reflections on a Theory of the 20th Century, in: Journal of Modern European History 5 (2007), 5–21; Anselm Doering-Manteuffel/Lutz Raphael: Nach dem Boom. Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschichte seit 1970. Göttingen 2008.

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they create amalgamations of (presumed) modernity and backwardness, yet without the alluring image of substitution that Gerschenkron proposed in the 1950s. In transportation, the mastery of space seems to have progressed substantially, but perhaps not as rapidly as one might have expected.³⁶ A case in point is private car ownership, which increased rapidly throughout most of socialist Eastern Europe from the 1970s onwards, but continued to lag behind the West.³⁷ Andrew Janos has provided statistical data that shows a further 20 per cent increase in privately owned motorcars in all Eastern European countries in the period from 1990 to 1994, at a time when the consumption of basic foods was declining at almost the same rate.³⁸ Whereas the number of political borders has increased, border controls have been reduced to the bare minimum, at least within EU member states, as has the administrative control of travel in the post-Soviet space. In the 1990s, travelling through Eastern Europe by car or by train was an encounter with the contradictions between the old and the new. For some time, no travel report was without remarks on the uneasy coexistence of modern limousines and horse carts on the roads of Eastern Europe, especially in the Balkans.³⁹ A network of cheap bus connections radiated out from Eastern Europe, mainly transporting migrant workers to the more prosperous regions of the West. Bus stations and bazars became the makeshift junctions where the hidden paths across the former boundaries of Cold War Europe became visible and interrupted communications were reestablished.⁴⁰ To add some personal experience: the most comfortable sleeping-car I ever travelled in took me from Bucharest to Budapest in the summer of 2007. Just outside the Romanian capital the train was stopped for nearly six hours because of construction works. Even today, a railway trip in Eastern Europe sometimes seems like a journey in a time machine. In the Czech Republic, as in other former socialist countries, investment in railway infrastructure has decreased since the collapse of communism. The priority given to East-West routes in road and railway construction plans has yet to yield anything like the expected results.⁴¹

36 Ralf Roth/Karl Schlögel (eds.): Neue Wege in ein neues Europa. Geschichte und Verkehr im 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main 2009; Peter Simonson/Janice Peck/Robert T. Craig/John Jackson (eds.): Handbook of Communication History. London/New York 2012. 37 Lewis H. Siegelbaum: Introduction, in: idem: The Socialist Car. Automobility in the Eastern Bloc. Ithaca 2011, 1–13, 8–9; idem: Cars for Comrades. The Life of the Soviet Automobile. Ithaca 2008. 38 Janos, East Central Europe, 415. 39 Richard Wagner: Der leere Himmel. Reisen in das Innere des Balkans. Berlin 2003, 315. 40 Karl Schlögel: Europa in Bewegung. Die Transformation Europas und die Transformation des europäischen Verkehrsraumes, in: Roth/Schlögel, Neue Wege, 29–46.

28 | Joachim von Puttkamer Similar processes can be observed in telecommunications. Again, I can only draw on personal experience, without any claim to substantial research. I first learned about electronic mails from fellow PhD students in St. Petersburg in the 1990s. In the following years, friends of mine in St. Petersburg made a fortune by providing large parts of Northern Russia with Nokia cell phones. In 2009, students in Perm introduced me to a future where scholarly literature would only be available via the Internet, since public libraries throughout Russia simply did not have the money to buy relevant scholarly literature. And it was Włodzimierz Borodziej who taught me how to write an SMS. Eastern Europe was hurled into an age of electronic telecommunications at a time when Christian Schwarz-Schilling was still trying to push for a network of copper cables as the future of telephony in Germany. According to the statistics of the International Telecommunications Union, in 2003 the percentage of mobile phone subscribers in the overall population was almost 77 per cent in Hungary, 78 per cent in Estonia, and a phenomenal 96 per cent in the Czech Republic. The same data shows a comparable 78 per cent of mobile phone subscribers for Germany and a mere 69 per cent for France. The picture is similar for the Internet: 31 per cent of Czechs and 44 per cent Estonians had access to the Internet at a time when this was true of 47 per cent of Germans and just 37 per cent of the French population.⁴² Yet, in the aggregate statistics, Central and Eastern Europe as a whole still lagged behind Western countries, and if we were to contrast Poland or Bulgaria with Sweden and the United Kingdom, the findings would be quite different. But there was no longer a uniform divide between East and West. Privatized communication services, it appears, have largely evened out the differences between West and East, differences that are still glaring in the public sector. As I mentioned at the outset, the revolution in telecommunications is central to the mastery of space in our present world. At the same time, it is one of the fundamental changes that historians have situated on the threshold between industrial modernity and the postmodern era. As far as we can tell, it is a key element in the process of bringing Western and Eastern development within Europe more into line, in a gradual convergence that we hesitate to call the overcoming of backwardness. At a time when modernity as a normative concept seems to be slipping into the past, it has left historians with a terminological apparatus that is not easy to cast off.

41 Wolfgang Kaschuba: Europäischer Verkehrsraum nach 1989. Die Epoche der zweiten Globalisierung, in: Roth/Schlögel, Neue Wege, 175–194. 42 http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/at_glance/E2_EuropeICTIndicators_2200.pdf [last accessed on 9.10.2013].

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III Conclusion Mastery of space lies at the core of social organization in our present world, in Eastern Europe as much as anywhere else. At the oldest periphery of the industrializing Western world, it has displayed its most disturbing and its most promising features. As we have seen, mastery of space is not confined to communication and infrastructure, exploration and travel. We now know that in this respect it is a finite process, and this finiteness is one of the elements that mark the shift from a modern to a postmodern world. Thus, it defies the modernist notion of progress, which has left us with a powerful terminology that is not easily discarded. The question whether we live in a modern world, or whether modernity is actually a historical epoch we are slowly but surely leaving behind us, still remains unsolved. Only the teleological edge has been softened, and with it the notion of modernity’s homogenizing and emancipatory potential. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the historiographical debates outlined above operate with somewhat blurred and ill-defined understandings of modernity. But at least they might teach us to tread carefully and to make explicit, when speaking of modernity, whether we wish to interpret historical findings on the modern state as challenges to a modernity still believed to shape the present, or whether we are referring to high modernity as an epoch beginning in the 1890s and ending in the early 1970s. And they might teach us that the things we describe as modern might be thoroughly incompatible and point in very different directions. Theories of modernity and postmodernity might prove inconclusive on where to position Central and Eastern Europe in this respect, but they are helpful in clarifying the subtext that underlies interpretations of the region’s trajectories in twentieth-century history. In the motion picture mentioned in the introduction, the main character faces the prospect that his travels will be replaced by videoconferencing. Telling people via a screen that they will be laid off is so heartless that even George Clooney has second thoughts. Paradoxically enough, this change would have allowed him to change his lifestyle and seek the family life he secretly longs for. At its peak, mastery of space offers new and unexpected opportunities. It is not a one-way track to alienation.

Jacek Kochanowicz

A Moving Target or a Lost Illusion? East Central Europe in Pursuit of the West in Two Globalization Phases East Central Europe may be close to Western Europe in terms of geography and culture, but it is far removed from the West in terms of economic development. This tension poses a constant challenge, which has been particularly acute since the onset of the industrial era. In the past, East Central European countries reacted to this challenge with a mixture of resignation and a frenzied determination to catch up, often attempting to speed up economic development through statist policies. Paradoxically, however, the real boosts to economic development actually occurred under more liberal market regimes, particularly at the end of the nineteenth century and at the turn of the twentieth century – during two waves of globalization. Both globalization waves had a significant impact on East Central Europe. In both cases, the outcome is open to debate. Did globalization facilitate the convergence of the region with Western Europe, its main frame of reference, or did it petrify its peripheral position? In this article, I compare how the two waves of globalization affected East Central Europe in order to better understand the waves themselves and the long-term economic and social evolution of the region. East Central Europe is understood here as the region comprising Bohemia, Hungary, the Polish Kingdom (the Russian partition), Galicia (the Austrian partition), and the Province of Posen (the Prussian partition) in the period before 1914, and the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia in the period after 1989. Thus, I do not consider those parts of the old PolishLithuanian Commonwealth that were incorporated into the Russian Empire after 1795 and into the USSR after 1939. I also exclude the Baltic States and Southeastern Europe with its different (Byzantine and Ottoman) cultural and political legacies.

I The challenges of backwardness The territories of what is now called East Central Europe were late starters in the civilizing process. The establishment of settled agriculture, the crystallization of political power, the beginnings of recording and transmitting information in writing, and the adoption of Christianity can be traced back to roughly one thousand

32 | Jacek Kochanowicz years ago.¹ Since then, East Central Europe has been ‘backward’ in relation to southern and Western Europe, where similar processes began much earlier.² In the last millennium, East Central Europe was also a late starter when it came to adopting technological and social innovations in agriculture (three-field rotation) and urban development in the Middle Ages, and industrialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The question of whether it was poorer than the West in per capita terms in pre-industrial times is another matter, since at that time the majority of the population in all parts of the world lived at subsistence level.³ It is likely that it was poorer. According to Angus Maddison’s calculations, the gap in per capita GDP between Western and Eastern Europe (including not only East Central Europe, but also Southeastern Europe and the territories that belonged to the USSR after the Russian Revolution) was already visible at the beginning of the modern era.⁴ It is true that due to less efficient agriculture, East Central Europe had a lower population density than the West, and its level of urbanization was also significantly lower because of its less developed crafts and trade. In the words of Jerzy Kłoczowski, East Central Europe was a younger sister who was learning from her older sibling, Western Europe. For Andrzej Wyczański, the region’s pattern of development in the sixteenth century resembled a ‘catching up’.⁵ Indeed, from the time Christianity was adopted, cultural patterns, social institutions, and technological innovation were largely imported from the West. We see this in the appropriation of urbanization patterns, three-field rotation, and nineteenth-century industrialization. Local lords and rulers invited people with capital and skills, while migrants from the West looked for new opportunities in the East. Germans, Italians, the Dutch, Scots, Jews, and others became important mediators of ideas and innovations, spurring on developments in East Central Europe.⁶ Yet despite attempts to copy the West, East Central Europe remained dif-

1 For a description of ‘barbaric Europe’, see Karol Modzelewski: Barbarzyńska Europa. Warszawa 2004. 2 For a comparison of economic structures in early modern Europe, see Marian Małowist: Wschód a Zachód Europy w XIIIXVI wieku. Konfrontacja struktur społecznogospodarczych. Warszawa 1973; Jean Batou/Henryk Szlajfer (eds.): Western Europe, Eastern Europe and World Development. Collection of Essays of Marian Małowist. Leiden 2010. 3 See Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie: L’historie immobile, in: Annales E.S.C. 3 (1974), 673–92; Gregory Clark: A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton 2007. 4 See Angus Maddison: The World Economy. Paris 2006, 126. 5 Jerzy Kłoczowski: Młodsza Europa. Europa Środkowo-Wschodnia w kręgu cywilizacji chrześcijańskiej średniowiecza. Warszawa 1998; Andrzej Wyczański: Dogonić Europę, czyli Polska w czasach Zygmunta I (1506–1548). Kraków 1987. 6 Charles Higounet: Les Allemands en Europe centrale et orientale au Moyen âge. Paris 1989.

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ferent for at least one important reason – the emergence and crystallization of second serfdom, which made its institutional, economic, and social structures visibly different from those in the West.⁷ Thus, the social structure of the Kingdoms of Poland and Hungary (and, to a lesser extent, Bohemia) was marked by the presence of a politically strong nobility, a peasantry subject to far more restrictions than its counterpart in the West, and a relatively weak urban sector. The large number of Jews was another regional specificity that was to have important consequences for economic and political developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While developmental disparities were relatively minor in the pre-industrial era, the gap widened immeasurably in the nineteenth century, in the period of “modern economic growth”, i.e. growth based on the systematic application of scientific knowledge to production.⁸ During the industrial revolution, Western Europe and its overseas offshoots parted ways with the rest of the world in the context of the ‘Great Divergence’.⁹ The gap in per capita GDP between “the West and the Rest” increased dramatically, and this gap persisted until at least the second half of the twentieth century, when some newly industrialized countries managed to leave the periphery.¹⁰ For the last two centuries, Eastern Europe as a whole has belonged to the rest, with a per capita GDP close to the world average and similar to that of Latin America, another peripheral region in the world economy. Western Europeans already perceived the eastern part of the continent as backward in the age of Enlightenment. For the eighteenth-century philosophes and travellers, the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth epitomized barbarity in contrast to the civilized West.¹¹ When this contrast became more pronounced with the increased pace of development in Western Europe in the

7 Peter Gunst: Agrarian Systems of Central and Eastern Europe, in: Daniel Chirot (ed.), The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe. Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century. Berkeley 1991, 53–92. For a dissenting view that denies the universality of second serfdom, see Markus Cerman: Villagers and Lords in Eastern Europe, 1300–1800. Basingstoke 2012. 8 Simon Kuznets: Modern Economic Growth. Rate, Structure, and Spread. New Haven 1966; Joel Mokyr: The Gift of Athena. Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy. Princeton 2002. 9 Kenneth Pomeranz: The Great Divergence. China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton 2000. 10 Alice H. Amsden: The Rise of ‘the Rest’. Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Countries. Oxford 2001; Maddison, The World Economy, 126. 11 Larry Wolff : Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford 1994.

34 | Jacek Kochanowicz next century, Eastern European elites increasingly felt left behind.¹² Politicians, economists and publicists engaged in lively debates about what could possibly be done to speed up their countries’ development and bring their level of civilization on a par with the West. Influenced by the German economist Friedrich List, many of them doubted the wisdom of letting things be governed by free markets alone and believed that the state should play an active role in promoting industrialization. Usually, these ideas were linked to broader issues, particularly the project of nation building. Some of them were implemented, the most notable Polish examples being the development of heavy industry in the Polish Kingdom in the 1820s and the establishment of the Central Industrial Region a hundred years later.¹³ These policies, known today as economic nationalism, were typical of the whole of East Central Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and, in particular, in the interwar period.¹⁴ The communists who ruled the region since the end of World War II introduced radical industrialization policies. Paradoxically, however, economic growth was strongest not at the time these policies were being advocated, but rather when economic life unfolded under a liberal, free market regime, as was the case in the two waves of globalization I will examine below.

II The first wave of globalization In this article, economic globalization is understood as the worldwide process of integrating markets – including markets for commodities and the factors of production (capital and labour).¹⁵ Globalization is characterized by the conver-

12 Janusz Górski: Polska myśl ekonomiczna a rozwój gospodarczy 1807–1830. Studia nad początkami teorii zacofania gospodarczego. Warszawa 1963; Maciej Janowski: Inteligencja wobec wyzwań nowoczesności. Dylematy ideowe polskiej demokracji liberalnej w Galicji w latach 1889– 1914. Warszawa 1996; Jerzy Jedlicki: A Suburb of Europe. Nineteenth-Century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization. Budapest 1999; Joseph Love: Crafting the Third World. Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil. Stanford 1996. 13 Jerzy Jedlicki: Nieudana próba kapitalistycznej industrializacji. Warszawa 1964; Marian M. Drozdowski: Polityka gospodarcza rządu polskiego 1936–1939. Warszawa 1963. 14 Thomas David: Nationalisme économique et industrialisation. L’expérience des pays de l’Est (1789–1939). Genève 2009; Jan Kofman: Economic Nationalism and Development. Boulder 1997; Henryk Szlajfer: Economic Nationalism and Globalization. Lessons from Latin America and Central Europe. Boston 2012. 15 What follows in this paragraph and the next is based on Stephen Broadberry/Kevin H. O’Rourke (eds.): The Cambridge Economic History of Europe. Volume 2: 1870 to the Present. Cambridge

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gence of prices on these markets, and it may also lead to the convergence of other economic variables, such as real wages or per capita GDP. The process of globalization is facilitated by technology, in its capacity to cut transportation costs and aid communication, and by the removal of tariff protection and barriers to the movement of capital and labour. The current globalization phase – the term widely used since the mid-1980s – prompted economic historians to look for its precedents. Faraway places were already linked by trade in antiquity and the Middle Ages, and European overseas expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to an international division of labour, with more developed European “core” countries specializing in manufacturing and the “peripheries” supplying them with raw materials.¹⁶ But it was the revolution in transportation and communications after the industrial revolution that made global trade in commodities, mass migration, and instant communication possible, thereby transforming globalizing processes. Globalization in the modern sense of the term started in the mid-nineteenth century with mass Irish migration to the United States in the 1840s and the transatlantic cable laid between England and America in 1851. The year 1870 has often been pinpointed as the beginning of this epoch, because the effects of technological changes were clear at that point. The outbreak of World War I brought processes of world market integration to a halt and ushered in a period of ‘deglobalization’. After the war, attempts to rebuild the international economy failed due to the Great Depression.¹⁷ Markets were fragmented throughout the interwar period and it was only after World War II that reglobalization processes began. The communist world was, however, excluded from these processes until the collapse of state socialism in the early 1990s. In the second half of the nineteenth century globalization was driven by technology and innovation on many fronts.¹⁸ In contrast to the British industrial revolution of the eighteenth century – the result of the entrepreneurial activities

2010; Ronald Findlay/Kevin H. O’Rourke: Power and Plenty. Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium. Princeton 2007; Jeffrey R. Frieden: Global Capitalism. Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century. New York 2006; and Kevin H. O’Rourke/Jeffrey G. Williamson: Globalization and History. The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy. Cambridge 2000. 16 On the core-periphery perspective, see Immanuel Wallerstein: The Modern World System. Volume I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the 16th Century. New York 1974. 17 For an analysis of the failures to restore economic integration between two World Wars, see Charles H. Feinstein/Peter Temin/Gianni Toniolo: The World Economy between the World Wars. Oxford 2008. 18 See Findlay/O’Rourke, Power and Plenty; David Landes: The Unbound Prometheus. Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. Cambridge 1969.

36 | Jacek Kochanowicz of men of practice – technological change was to a large degree the consequence of institutionalized and systematic scientific research.¹⁹ The mass production of steel revolutionized construction, transportation, and machine building; coal supplied energy and chemicals; and electricity followed as a result of technological breakthroughs. Economies of scale and new technologies made plants bigger, and this in turn led to changes in the way business was organized and financed. Large firms were organized as joint stock companies, and banks assumed a new and important function in the financing of investments.²⁰ The new industrial powers – the USA and Germany – outpaced Britain in industrial output. Industrial production was highly concentrated. In 1914 four countries – the USA, Germany, Great Britain and France produced 70 per cent of the total global industrial output.²¹ They were followed by Russia and Japan – the only non-European country to undergo significant industrialization in the nineteenth century. Technological progress revolutionized transportation and communications. Freight costs decreased dramatically due to the replacement of sail by steam and the increase in the capacity of ships.²² Railways transformed overland transportation, and the electric telegraph furthered the integration of financial markets. Indeed, without these improvements in transportation and communications, globalization would have proceeded much more slowly. Thanks to the transportation revolution, international trade grew, but its structure was highly asymmetrical. While the USA and Western European countries specialized in manufacturing, Asia, Latin America and Africa provided raw materials and agricultural products. The USA represents a special case, because even though its industrialization was rapid, it remained one of the principal world exporters of grain. In contrast to overseas trade in the medieval and early modern period, when Europe only imported what it could not produce at home (spices), she was now also importing goods that were cheaper to produce in other parts of the world. That threatened local producers, particularly farmers, and thus had significant social and political consequences. The factors of production, labour and capital, also became more mobile. Europeans had already settled in other continents before the industrial revolution, but with improvements in maritime transportation, migration from Europe to the New World acquired a mass character. At the turn of the twentieth century, annual mi-

19 See Douglas C. North: Structure and Change in Economic History. New York 1981, 171–186; Mokyr, The Gift of Athena, 75–104. 20 Alfred Chandler: The Visible Hand. The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge 1977; idem: Scale and Scope. The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. Cambridge 1990. 21 Arthur Lewis: Growth and Fluctuations, 1870–1913. London 1978, chapter 1. 22 See Findlay/O’Rourke, Power and Plenty, 381–383.

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gration from Europe to America reached one million.²³ Capital also moved from the industrial core to the periphery, especially to the New World, where land and resources were abundant. The construction of railways played a huge role in this process, as they were needed to import foodstuffs and raw materials. In 1913, railways accounted for 40 per cent of British overseas investment.²⁴ The industrialization of the West accelerated its economic growth. The gap in per capita GDP between the West and the rest widened dramatically in the context of the Great Divergence. Markets became increasingly integrated, as evidenced by the convergence of prices, but disparities in per capita GDP, real wages, and standards of living remained. The West’s technological advantage translated into military and political advantages, allowing Europeans to strengthen their positions in Asia and Africa and extend colonization. The entangled processes of economic and political domination were legitimized by the imperialist ideologies of the ‘white man’s burden’ and the mission civilisatrice, the task of bringing the standards of European civilization to savage peoples and making them convert to Christianity. While imperialist ideas became part of the official ideologies of Western countries, with an emphasis on the benefits of spreading Western influence as far as possible, the same notion of imperialism was interpreted in a different way by the Marxists. For Lenin, imperialism was the final stage of capitalism, a system doomed to ultimate collapse.²⁵ Technological change had far-reaching social and political consequences for the Western world. It accelerated the process of urbanization. Modern towns of the industrial era were not only large; they also enjoyed the fruits of progress such as sewage systems, a fresh water supply, gas street lighting, electric tramways, and in some cases an underground transportation system. The occupational structure also changed, with more and more people moving from agriculture to manufacturing. Societies increasingly acquired a mass character, as class divisions replaced the older distinctions based on hereditary status. With the spread of primary education, most people were now literate, at least in urban centres, and the printed press became an important medium of public communication. Urbanized mass society produced new kinds of political organizations, parties, and trade unions. Political mobilization led, in most Western countries, to the extension of franchise, which in turn increased the influence of ordinary people on the political process. New ideologies – socialism in various forms and nationalism – were behind this mobilization. 23 Ibid., 407. 24 Ibid., 409. 25 See Patrick Wolfe: History and Imperialism. A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism, in: The American Historical Review 2 (1997), 388–420.

38 | Jacek Kochanowicz Social change had political consequences that affected the workings of the economy. The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of liberal, free trade ideas, exemplified by the repeal of the Corn Laws by Britain in 1846 and generally low tariffs. Things changed when European producers began to feel threatened by cheap grain imports from overseas, which precipitated an agrarian crisis in 1873.²⁶ Some countries, especially Germany, reverted to using tariffs to protect their agriculture. At the same time, following Friedrich List, support for tariff barriers as a means of protecting nascent industries grew in many countries that were latecomers to the industrialization process.²⁷ Western developments had a significant impact on East Central Europe. However, the various regions were affected in different ways, one reason being that they belonged to three different empires, the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, and the Prussian/German Empire. Due to railway construction, East Central Europe was drawn into the global economy, but its constituent parts remained isolated to some degree due to rising tariffs in the last quarter of the century. In assessing the effects of Western industrialization on East Central Europe, Berend and Ránki talk about “the industrial pull” of Western Europe.²⁸ A rapidly developing Western Europe, whose population increased almost fourfold in the nineteenth century, needed food and raw materials. Eastern Europe became one of its main suppliers, with regions such as the Hungarian Plain or the Province of Posen (formerly Polish and now Prussian) becoming cases in point. From the middle of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of World War I, Hungarian exports of grain increased twelvefold, and Hungary became one of the world’s biggest wheat and flour exporters.²⁹ Industrialization already got under way in East Central Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century, usually within the framework of landed estates (food processing and metallurgy based on coal deposits). The industrialization process gained pace in the second half of the nineteenth century, extending to many different sectors, from textiles to mechanical and electrical engineering. Profiting from the Hungarian specialization in wheat, Budapest became a huge centre for flour milling. Bohemia was the most industrially advanced region.³⁰ The Polish Kingdom, which was incorporated into the

26 Juliusz Łukasiewicz: Kryzys agrarny na ziemiach polskich w końcu XIX w. Warszawa 1968, 9–32. 27 See David: Nationalisme économique. 28 Ivan T. Berend: History Derailed. Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century. Berkeley 2003, 167. 29 Ibid. 30 David F. Good: The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1750–1914. Berkeley 1984, 129–135.

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Russian customs area in 1851 and benefited from protective Russian tariffs since 1877, could take advantage of the huge Russian market.³¹ As a consequence, the textile industry boomed in Łódź and the surrounding area, heavy industries developed in the coal-rich Dąbrowa Basin, and a whole host of industries mushroomed in Warsaw. The Kingdom became, for a while, the second most important industrial region of the Russian Empire after Moscow.³² This industrial development relied heavily on foreign know-how and foreign capital, even in the case of Bohemia.³³ Entrepreneurs from Western Europe – primarily from Germany – brought new technologies to East Central Europe. Business life was also modernized through the introduction of joint stock companies and modern banking, following the example set by the West.³⁴ Thus institutional innovation accompanied technological change. While capital flowed inward, the reverse was true of labour. Parts of East Central Europe – particularly Galicia and the Polish Kingdom – suffered from rural overpopulation and peasants sought new opportunities as seasonal workers in Germany or left Europe to settle in the Americas. The period from 1870 to 1914 saw considerable economic growth and a rise in standards of living in East Central Europe, as evidenced by a rise in the population and data on nutrition and other indicators of living standards.³⁵ However, as the quantitative research on this part of the world is less advanced than it is in the case of many Western European countries, it is difficult to say to what extent there was a divergence or convergence of per capita GDP or real wages between the two parts of the continent at this time. While there is no doubt that the region developed economically during the first wave of globalization, it remained backward, peripheral, and underdeveloped (with the exception of Bohemia, perhaps). The majority of the population still comprised traditional, poor peasants, who eked a living from semi-subsistence farming. They suffered from rural overpopulation and were of-

31 Andrzej Jezierski: Handel zagraniczny Królestwa Polskiego 1815–1914. Warszawa 1967, 72–100. 32 Ireneusz Ihnatowicz: Przemysłłódzki w latach 1860–1900. Wrocław 1965; P. Laszczenko: Historia gospodarcza ZSRR. Volume II. Warszawa 1956, 159–60; Irena Pietrzak-Pawłowska (ed.): Uprzemysłowienie ziem polskich w XIX i XX wieku. Wrocław 1970; Wiesław Puś: Rozwój przemysłu w Królestwie Polskim 1870–1914. Łódź 1997. 33 See Berend: History Derailed, 135–136; Richard R. Rudolph: Banking and Industrialisation in Austria-Hungary. The Role of Banks in the Industrialisation of the Czech Crownlands, 1873–1914. Cambridge 1976, 63–65. 34 Rudolph: Banking and Industrialisation; Irena Pietrzak-Pawłowska: Królestwo Polskie w początkach imperializmu, 1900–1905. Warszawa 1955, 186–214. 35 Michał Kopczyński: Wielka transformacja. Badania nad uwarstwieniem społecznym i standardem życia w Królestwie Polskim 1866–1913 w świetle pomiarów antropometrycznych podoborowych. Warszawa 2006, 123–129, 189–190; Tadeusz Sobczak: Przełom w konsumpcji spożywczej w Królestwie Polskim. Wrocław 1968, 53, 73, 110–111.

40 | Jacek Kochanowicz ten landless. While certain industries were technologically advanced, their share in the economy was much lower than in the West.³⁶ Thus, fast modernization in conditions of relative backwardness brought considerable social change, but it also meant that East Central Europe retained its specificity. The large cities – Budapest, which according to John Lukacs reached its apogee in the year 1900, Prague, and Warsaw – modernized in the Western way, with the beginnings of urban public transport and other elements of modern infrastructure.³⁷ The population of these cities grew considerably, and city planning and architecture was modelled on the West. While the majority of the urban population remained poor and often lived in appalling conditions, more and more members of the middle classes could enjoy the benefits of technology such as running water and electricity in their homes. The development of industry resulted in the growth of the modern working class. The middle classes, which included many foreigners and Jews, were also on the rise. Until the Napoleonic Wars, Jews operated in a social niche and were treated as a separate legal group. After the emancipation, many of them assimilated. Persecuted in Russia, they enjoyed better conditions in the Habsburg Empire, and even in the Polish Kingdom.³⁸ Having been restricted to a narrow range of commercial and banking activities for several centuries, Jews had developed skills and connections that allowed many of them to advance economically under the liberal capitalist conditions of the second half of the nineteenth century.³⁹ The countryside modernized more slowly. Despite the legal emancipation of the peasantry, the landowning class continued to play the dominant social and cultural role. Some landowners – more in the Austrian empire than in the Polish Kingdom – modernized their estates, but many vestiges of feudalism remained. As I already mentioned, most peasants stayed poor, but their way of life changed due to access to modern technology and advances in hygiene and literacy.⁴⁰ The

36 See Ivan T. Berend/György Ránki: The European Periphery and Industrialisation. Budapest 1982, 144. 37 See Judit Bodnar: Fin de Millénaire Budapest. Metamorphoses of Urban Life. Minneapolis 2001; Hanna Imbs (ed.): Miasto i kultura polska doby przemysłowwej. Przestrzeń. Wrocław 1988; John Lukacs: Budapest 1900. A Historical Portrait of a City and its Culture. New York 1988; Stefan Kieniewicz: Warszawa w latach 1795–1914. Warszawa 1976. 38 Artur Eisenbach: The Emancipation of the Jews in Poland, 1780–1870. Edited by Antony Polonsky, translated by Janina Dorosz. Oxford 1991; Jerzy Tomaszewski (ed.): Najnowsze dzieje Żydów w Polsce w zarysie (do 1950 roku). Warszawa 1993. 39 Jerry Muller: Capitalism and the Jews. Princeton 2010. 40 See Maria Krisań: Chłopi wobec zmian cywilizacyjnych w Królestwie Polskim w drugiej połowie XIX – początku XX wieku. Warszawa 2008.

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rise of literacy and social awareness among the peasantry were important factors in the rise of peasant political parties, which became major players in Polish and Hungarian politics after World War I. As in the West, social change brought new forms of political activity, although in the German Rechtsstaat and in constitutional Austro-Hungary the conditions for political parties were very different from those in the Polish Kingdom, which was part of the autocratic Russian empire and subject to decades of repression after the failure of the 1863 insurrection. As in the West, socialist ideas were popular in East Central Europe. However, especially in the last decades of the century, nationalist sentiment grew and was increasingly imbued with anti-Semitism.

III The second wave The latest wave of globalization – in contrast to the previous one – is driven more by politics and ideology than by technology.⁴¹ Its beginnings can be traced back to the attempts in the immediate aftermath of World War II to reintegrate Western Europe’s highly fragmented economies through various agreements, starting with the establishment of the Bretton Woods system in 1944. The story of European integration, from the early 1950s to the Maastricht Treaty, can be interpreted as a series of steps leading to deeper transnational economic cooperation. Efforts to facilitate international trade through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, 1948), which was replaced in 1995 by the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the creation of various local trading zones played a similar role on a global scale. However, a large part of the world – the Soviet Union and the countries under its political domination, as well as China and other communist countries in Asia – did not participate in these developments. Indeed, one of the aims of communist parties was to make the countries under their rule independent from the ‘imperialist’ world and based on a planned economy. State socialist countries engaged in their own kind of cooperation, partly moved by political motives, as was the case with the help the Soviet Union extended to China until their split. In Europe, the USSR and its satellite countries founded the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (1949) to facilitate ‘socialist economic cooperation’. Globalization, as two historians noted, was “split in two”.⁴²

41 See Findlay/O’Rourke, Power and Plenty, 502. 42 Jürgen Osterhammel/Niels Petersson: Globalization. A Short History. Princeton 2003, 113–140.

42 | Jacek Kochanowicz Until the 1970s, the process of globalization was also shaped by the economic ideology of the day in the West and in the Third World. In the former, the notion of the mixed economy prevailed, with state intervention targeted to a great extent at post-war reconstruction and, later, at achieving sustained economic growth and full employment. To realize these aims, nation states resorted to planning, partial nationalization, and currency devaluations. At the same time, many Third World countries pursued policies of import substitution industrialization in an attempt to leave the periphery of the global economy. The 1970s were a watershed due to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the oil shocks, and stagflation in Western Europe. In the West, there was a shift from the once dominant Keynesian economic model of relying on a mixture of markets and state intervention to neoliberalism, with Nobel prizes in economics for Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Freedman symbolizing this turn. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher supported an economic policy that attempted to implement the neoliberal creed, according to which the state was a problem, not a solution, with its overblown structures and self-serving activities hampering economic growth. These new policies aimed to deregulate economic activity, to privatize (in those countries, which like Britain, had a sizable public sector), to reduce social expenditure, and to encourage more openness in world trade. Due to the resistance of powerful interest groups, neoliberal policies were far from consistent. The agricultural sector in both the USA and Europe was largely exempt from them. The same prescription was presented to developing countries, many of which – particularly in Latin America – struggled with inflation and mounting foreign debt in the 1970s. At the end of the 1980s, these prescriptions were dubbed the “Washington Consensus”.⁴³ In addition to government policies, parallel economic and technological processes sped up globalization. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed the emergence of newly industrialized countries in Asia and Latin America and, as a consequence, the start of deindustrialization in the West. At the same time, many firms operating in more than one country ceased to identify themselves with a particular national home and acquired the character of transnational corporations. Their production strategy consists in seeking the most suitable environment (cheap labour) for a given phase of production and relocating plants according to changing conditions. Containerization and the introduction of very large ships led to a decrease in freight costs, albeit far less spectacular than that experienced after the conversion from sail to steam in the nineteenth century.⁴⁴ The really dramatic decrease 43 John Williamson: What Washington Means by Policy Reform, in: idem (ed.), Latin American Adjustment. How Much Has Happened? Washington 1990, 7–20. 44 See Findlay/O’Rourke, Power and Plenty, 502–505.

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in costs occurred in air travel, making the mass movement of people possible. Last but not least, the revolution of data processing and transmission, and in particular the invention of the Internet made it possible to coordinate production processes on a global scale and also changed how financial markets function.⁴⁵ While it is hard to summarize the social and political consequences of the present wave of globalization in just a few words, we can say that it has been advantageous for some regions of the developing world (particularly China), largely due to the relocation of industrial production there. At the same time, inequalities within and between countries increased.⁴⁶ In the core countries, deindustrialization led to the stagnation of real wages for large groups of workers on the one hand, and a high return to financial capital and the most talented and creative individuals working at the top level of the service industries (inventors, programmers, financial analysts, lawyers, top managers, etc.) on the other. On the periphery, the economic success of industrial or service-providing regions – for example, South East China and Bangalore in India – is not matched by a similar development in the rest of those countries. However, even in the wealthy regions of countries on the periphery, the incomes of the most successful workers and members of the middle class are far below of those of their Western counterparts. In the core countries, deindustrialization and rapid technological progress, combined with the partial dismantling of the welfare state under fiscal pressure, also brought about far-reaching changes on the labour market: a drastic reduction in job stability, rising unemployment (in Europe, particularly among the young), and the proliferation of ‘trash jobs’. These socio-economic changes lie behind various forms of discontent, expressed in anti-globalization movements and populist ideologies and movements, often targeted against immigrants. However, these movements are much less structured than the social movements that arose during the first wave of globalization, organized in the form of political parties along socialist, nationalist, or agrarian lines. Under the conditions of Bauman’s liquid modernity, the crystallization of class-like structures is less likely than it was in the Fordist industrialization of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁴⁷ New media of mass communication – above all the Internet – make swift political mobilization easy, but the forces that would keep the movement alive for longer are weak.

45 For an analysis of the far-reaching consequences of the Internet see Manuel Castells: The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford 1996. 46 See Branko Milanovic: Globalization and Inequality. Cheltenham 2012; idem: The Haves and the Have-Nots. A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality. New York 2011. 47 Zygmunt Bauman: Liquid Modernity. Cambridge 2000.

44 | Jacek Kochanowicz Various types of discontent as well as the present economic crisis raise the question whether the current wave of globalization will last much longer. The present situation is sometimes compared to the Great Depression, which shook beliefs in the sustainability of the capitalist economy and strengthened economic nationalism.⁴⁸ Indeed, the crisis unfolding since 2008 is the most serious shock to the world economy in the last eighty years. However, it is less severe in terms of output and employment losses, and societies are better prepared to address its consequences, at least in the short term. It certainly raises the issue of the architecture of global financial markets, as the present crisis is primarily financial in character.⁴⁹ At first glance, it seems that East Central Europe only jumped into the globalized world after the demise of communism in 1989. It can be argued, however, that the process started much earlier. Firstly, because the ideal of a separate, autarkic development was never realized. Communist countries were dependent upon Western technology, which they imported throughout their short history by legal and illegal means. Secondly, some of them (the USSR included) had to import grain due to their inefficient agriculture. Thirdly, after two to three decades of relatively high growth, the economies of communist countries began to stagnate. One way their leaders attempted to overcome this was through reforms guided by the idea of market socialism. Another tactic was to borrow from the West in order to import both capital and consumer goods. The inability to service and repay these debts was one of the many reasons for the ultimate collapse of communism. Thus the decline and collapse of communism cannot be attributed solely to the internal dynamics of state socialism; it was also part of broader global developments. The disintegration of political structures in the Soviet empire between 1989 and 1991 allowed East Central European countries to pursue their own policies. Just as Latin America had been guided by the Washington Consensus, the reforms they implemented in the wake of the communist collapse were inspired by the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism.⁵⁰ The debt trap in which post-communist countries found themselves left them with little choice but to pur-

48 On the lessons to be learned from the interwar backlash against globalization, see Feinstein/Temin/Toniolo: The World Economy, 191–193. 49 See Barry Eichengreen/Bokyeong Park (eds.): The World Economy after the Global Crisis. A New Economic Order for the 21st Century. Hackensack 2012. 50 For a comparison, see Joan M. Nelson (ed.): Intricate Links. Democratization and Market Reforms in Latin America and Eastern Europe. San Francisco 1994. For an overview of the East Central European transformation, see Anders Åslund: Building Capitalism. The Transformation of the Soviet Bloc. Cambridge 2002; Daniel Gros/Alfred Steinher: Economic Transition in Central and Eastern Europe. Planting the Seeds. Cambridge 2004.

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sue the strategies suggested by the IMF. The institutional structure of the emerging East Central European capitalism has been shaped by the interplay of internal politics, the process of implementing the acquis communautaire, and history – local cultures and traditions, producing local variations of global capitalism.⁵¹ Comparing developments across the post-Soviet world, we see that East Central European countries (together with the Baltic states) have been the most successful in terms of economic growth and overall modernization, perhaps also in terms of the relatively low social cost of the transformation. Within Europe, however, their position remains peripheral and is likely to stay so, despite symptoms of convergence with Western Europe in terms of per capita GDP. The success of these countries can be attributed mainly to cheap labour and foreign investment. And imported technology and European funds have been the drivers of the modernization process, with relatively little input from locally produced innovations. In terms of their social and political effects, the beginnings of the transformation – in Ralph Dahrendorf’s words, a “crossing [of] the valley of tears” – were painful, due to the initial decrease in output, unemployment, poverty, and rising social inequalities.⁵² In the long run, standards of living improved and local middle classes emerged, but significant inequalities remained.⁵³ Despite initial pessimistic forecasts, East Central European countries have been relatively successful in terms of installing liberal democracy as the political system, but populism seems to be an important dimension of their political landscape.⁵⁴

IV Comparing the two waves The short descriptions of the two waves of globalization and their impact on East Central Europe invite some comparisons. Let’s start with the economic aspects of both globalization waves. In both periods, physical distances shrank, due as much to advances in communications as to developments in transportation. In the nineteenth century, the main advances in communications were the expan-

51 See Dorothe Bohle/Béla Greskowits: Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery. Ithaca 2012; János Mátyás Kováca/Violetta Zentai (eds.): Capitalism from Outside? Economic cultures in Eastern Europe after 1988. Budapest 2012. 52 Ralf Dahrendorf : Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Warsaw. New York 1990. 53 OECD/Michale Förster (eds.): Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries. Paris 2008. 54 See Juan Linz/Alfred Stepan: Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. Baltimore 1996.

46 | Jacek Kochanowicz sion of the modern postal service and the electric telegraph. Today, we can point to mobile phones and the Internet. In transportation, the present-day equivalents of the railways and steamships of the late nineteenth century are cheap flights and buses for people, and containers and modern logistics for freight. These developments facilitated long-distance, international trade in commodities, as well as the movement of people. During both globalization phases the international monetary regimes – the gold standard at the turn of the twentieth century and floating exchange regimes with no currency restrictions today – facilitated international trade and movements of capital. In both cases, we can observe increased international movements of the factors of production, capital and labour, with capital moving from the centre to the periphery and labour going in the reverse direction. In the present wave of globalization, parallel to the movement of private capital there are also transfers of funds from the European Union to our region. As far as labour is concerned, large westward migrations of people from East Central Europe were witnessed at the end of the nineteenth century and after 1989. The two globalizations saw massive technology transfers from the West to East Central Europe, affecting a broad range of industries, from agriculture and mining to manufacturing industries and services. In each case, technology transfers boosted economic growth, leading to an overall rise in standards of living and modernization. Both globalization waves resulted in transfers of institutional arrangements and organizational structures from West to East. Corporations and modern banking came to East Central Europe for the first time in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and for the second time a century later in the 1990s. In the case of the latter globalization phase, the implementation of the acquis communautaire represented another form of institutional appropriation. The ideology that explained and justified the changes occurring in both globalization waves was liberal (neo-liberal in the present wave of globalization), although recent economic liberalism is probably more radical than that of the late nineteenth century. In both cases, the economic regime became capitalist. Never in their history were the countries of East Central Europe as capitalist as they are today, except perhaps in the late nineteenth century. Despite rapid development during both globalization phases, East Central Europe remained peripheral to the West in two important aspects. First, per capita GDP remained significantly lower. Nowadays, we can observe a process of convergence between Western and East Central Europe (closing the gap in terms of per capita GDP) in the case of some countries. It is difficult to tell to what extent this was also the case during the first wave of globalization. Still, the gap remains large now and it will become more difficult to narrow as time goes by. To narrow it, East Central European countries need to move closer to the technological frontier, and introducing more advanced technologies is difficult. Second,

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despite urbanization and the rise of local metropolises during both globalization phases, centres of finance or supra-local knowledge did not develop in the region. The stock of knowledge and the level of human capital remain far below those in the West. While stressing the ways in which the two waves of globalization impacted similarly on East Central Europe, we should not forget significant differences. I would like to mention some that I find particularly important. At the end of the nineteenth century, there was only one centre of the industrialized world: the West, i.e. Western Europe and its offshoots. Today, there are also booming industrialized economies in Asia (and, increasingly, in Latin America). While these countries may not be cultural or political models for East Central Europe, their presence in the global economy presents a new challenge, particularly since they are more technologically advanced than East Central Europe. At the end of the nineteenth century, globalization was accompanied by industrialization in East Central Europe. While it was on a much smaller scale than in the West, this was the most intense phase of industrialization before the next wave under state socialism. By contrast, the period after 1990 witnessed a partial de-industrialization, in terms of the share of manufacturing in GDP and the share of the manufacturing labour force in the total workforce. In all East Central European countries the majority of the workforce is now employed in services. The political context is also different. In the second half of the nineteenth century, all of these countries were parts of empires, the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, and the Prussian-German Empire. Some of these empires, particularly the Prussian-German and the Russian Empires, were increasingly turning from liberal economic policies to protectionism in an attempt to partially shield their markets from the impact of the world economy. By contrast, the region is now made up of several independent nation states, all of which have open economies. All of them, including the largest – Poland – are too small and too weak to independently pursue economic policies that could offset the potentially negative effects of globalization. Turning now to social and political effects, in both periods, globalization and economic development brought social change – the partial disintegration of previous social structures, social reconfiguration, and new types of social tension. However, these changes were different in each period, because in each case the point of departure and the overall context were different. In the late nineteenth century, social change occurred on two main fronts. There was a passage from an ancien régime type of society based on status to a more democratic and capitalist society based on class distinctions. At the same time, there was a shift from an agrarian society to an early industrial society, as evidenced by migration to the cities and urbanization. Both these processes were cut short by World War I. As both

48 | Jacek Kochanowicz had started later than in the West, the social structures of East Central Europe retained a number of peculiarities, in particular the relative weakness of the urban classes, the relative importance of the rural sector – the peasantry and the landed classes – and the specific role played by the Jewish minority. The emancipation of the peasantry and an attendant reduction in the gentry’s privileges were the most important social changes, given the still predominantly rural character of East Central European societies. As a result, the peasantry was to become one of the most important collective political actors at the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the interwar period. The Jews were a relatively small minority, but they played a very important role in business and the professions. Thus, on the verge of World War I, East Central Europe had a hybrid character in terms of social structure. The emergent capitalist order coexisted with elements of the rural world. The bourgeoisie comprised mainly immigrants from the West and other ethnic minorities, especially the Jews. For East Central Europe, the current globalization wave is characterized by de-industrialization and the emergence of a kind of a post-industrial society. I say a kind of because it is built on an economic structure that is relatively backward in comparison to the West, particularly in terms of technology, institutions, and human capital. There is also a transition from an artificially egalitarian state socialism to ‘hybrid capitalism’ with significant social inequalities. All these developments are taking place under conditions of “liquid modernity”, which is characterized by such fast-paced technological, economic and social change that there is no time for social structures to crystallize and solidify. Thus, while inequalities have arisen throughout the region, the class structure is not comparable to that which existed at the end of the nineteenth century, where one could very easily distinguish between the peasantry, the industrial working class, the middle classes, the haute bourgeoisie, and the landed classes. Today, the picture is much more blurred, and the predominance of the service sector, high unemployment, and employment instability do not further class consciousness or class solidarity. Individualization, the ever-increasing division of labour, increased specialization in economic life, and identity politics (based on gender, ethnicity, etc.) all hinder class-building and the construction of a common identity. Social change also proceeds differently today due to new forms of social communication. In the emerging mass society of the late nineteenth century, the printed press was the main vehicle of mass communication. Political parties used it to popularize their ideologies and discursive patterns and it thus played an important role in the crystallization of the class structure. In today’s world, the influence of the printed press is waning. The Internet has now taken over from print media, leading to the emergence of what Manuel Castells has called “the network

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society”.⁵⁵ As a horizontal, rather than a vertical means of communication, the Internet may be considered to be more democratic than print media. Its potential to mobilize is also high, as borne out by the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, or the anti-Putin movement in Russia. At the same time, the Internet primarily facilitates the formation of short-term networks and does not help to create the lasting social structures with which we are familiar from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The differences described above are reflected in ideologies formed then and now. At the end of the nineteenth century in East Central Europe, the emerging liberal capitalism competed – as it did in the West – with conservatism and various brands of socialism, which were adapted to local conditions. Nationalism was another ideology of that era, which had also been imported from the West. It was not anti-capitalist per se, but attempted to define and delimit a national community – from which the Jews were excluded – and viewed economic life from the perspective of national interests. Unlike nineteenth-century globalization, the current wave of globalization – while some aspects of it are increasingly contested, particularly since the outbreak of the financial crisis – has not brought about intellectual and ideological projects that offer solutions to pressing problems or alternatives to neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism is certainly not uncontested. It is accused of unleashing destructive forces, particularly insecurity and social inequalities. Since the financial crisis began, there have been calls for a return to increased regulation, especially of the financial markets, Keynesian pro-growth economic policies, and income redistribution, largely by means of progressive income taxes. Thinkers such as Michael Walzer or the late Tony Judt advocate reinventing social democracy.⁵⁶ But it is not clear how national governments can implement such strategies in the context of open economies. A lack of coherent ideological projects in the West and in East Central Europe fosters various kinds of populism.

V Concluding remarks A comparison of the impact the two waves of globalization had on East Central Europe reveals a number of similarities in their economic aspects, such as the in-flows of capital and technology, the out-flows of labour, and the overall acceler-

55 Castells, The Rise. 56 Tony Judt: Ill Fares the Land. New York 2010.

50 | Jacek Kochanowicz ation of the development process. But the waves differ in one important way: while the first was characterized by industrialization, the second witnessed a process of de-industrialization. This explains the different social and political outcomes of each of these waves in East Central Europe. While the first contributed to the crystallization of the class-like social structures characteristic of early capitalism, the second seems to have led to the more fluid social configurations characteristic of the post-industrial period. Each of the waves of globalization accelerated development in this part of Europe and (probably) put it on a trajectory of convergence with the West. However, the developmental gap has yet to be closed and it remains the main challenge faced by societies in the region, so close geographically and culturally to Western Europe. The West has been continually present in East Central Europe’s history in two ways. First, in the last Millennium it was the region’s principal source of cultural, institutional, and technological transfers, starting with the introduction of Latin Christianity. Second, since at least the period of Enlightenment, and certainly since the beginnings of the Great Divergence, the West has been a frame of reference, a challenge, and a project to be realized. East Central Europeans want to become like their counterparts in the West. The present fixation with convergence is the most recent incarnation of this desire. Convergence is, however, difficult to achieve. To do so, East Central Europe would have to change from a net importer of ideas and capital to a net exporter of them. It would need to have universities comparable to those in Scandinavia and a business sector similar to that of Austria. At the same time, the West is itself in doubt as to how its economy should be organized, how its democracy should work, how its citizens should be made to participate in common projects, and so on and so forth. Thus East Central Europeans are far from clear about what vision of the West they would like to realize.

| Part II: The Ruralization of Urbanization

Gábor Gyáni

Image and Reality of a Splitting Country: The Case of Hungary In this article I examine how fundamental social differences were expressed in both real life and in the contemporary social imaginary in Hungary from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Here image and reality partly coincided and partly diverged. In two steps I show the significant role played by the awareness of a huge contrast between the city and the countryside, between rural peasant and urban bourgeois milieus, in the life of a modernizing country. After discussing the conceptual history of the modernization process in Hungary, I turn to the spread of the one-child system, which was for many an excuse to condemn the modern bourgeois spirit held responsible for this demographic behaviour. In order to demonstrate the profound effect rapid urbanization had on the real and symbolic processes of social polarization, I will focus on the metropolitan development of Budapest and some reactions to it.

I Modernization/embourgeoisement: history as discourse The bourgeois development of Hungary went through several phases, repeating in a short time the development patterns of the West. It entailed firstly a fundamental legal transformation, which amounted to the creation of bourgeois property rights. It also entailed the emergence of a market economy and the declaration of the legal equality of all citizens (including the emancipation of the Jews). This process was complemented by the formation of the liberal constitutional government (in 1867) based on voting rights that were restricted to a small, mainly propertied elite and the more well-to-do strata of society. It all began in the 1830s with István Széchenyi’s ‘civilization project’, an initiative to modernize the country. In the beginning, this necessitated a decidedly cultural (educational) embourgeoisement, since according to Count Széchenyi, public culture and reason would be the basis for the happiness and welfare of all members of the nation.¹ His programme was soon completed by the legal emancipation of the serfs. In addition to personal freedom, they were granted full ownership of the lands they

1 András Gergely: Széchenyi eszmerendszerének kialakulása. Budapest 1972, 151.

54 | Gábor Gyáni had previously cultivated. In 1833 Lajos Kossuth asked: “may one allege without any partiality in the nineteenth century that there is no need to change and improve a constitution that preserves both property rights and ancient traditions, and in which out of ten million people, no more than sixty thousand are considered to belong to the nation?”² The bourgeois transformation project reached a critical phase in 1848 when the political efforts to establish unrestricted bourgeois property rights and their concomitants finally bore fruit. Following the defeat in the 1848/1849 War of Independence some, though not all of these rights were strengthened in the context of Habsburg neo-absolutism. The word embourgeoisement (polgárosodás), which was used to describe modernization, emerged as a neologism at that time. It was first used by the poet János Vajda in the 1860s. In Hungary, Vajda wrote in a pamphlet published in 1862, the term civilization (civilizálódás) had become fashionable, but it was only Hungarian that had such a definitive and all-encompassing word for it – embourgeoisement (the German equivalent would be Verbürgerlichung). At the same time, Vajda invested the expression with a somewhat broader meaning. In most cases, he argued, civilization meant education, but education was not always equivalent to embourgeoisement. Thus, he too stressed the sanctity of property rights, the cult of work, and not least, the rule of law and the triumph of individual achievement over birth and hereditary status.³ Around the time of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, the basic legal institutions that would later provide the framework for a capitalist transformation already existed. This transformation gained pace in the context of industrialization, which began in the 1880s. When the Habsburg Monarchy collapsed in the aftermath of World War I, the country was still in the midst of a process of westernization. The question is, however, whether the process of embourgeoisement in Hungary was successful or not. Opinions are divided on the matter. Those who claim that the process was incomplete have always been the loudest. They argue that the survival of several ‘feudal remnants’ was integral to Hungarian capitalist development. They thus create the impression of an incomplete bourgeois development by using the feudalization thesis to explain many aspects of modern Hungary’s historical development. The main representative of this point of view in contemporary Hungarian historiography was Péter Hanák (1921–1997). He painted a picture of a polarized society, with the old Hun-

2 Gábor Pajkossy (ed.): Kossuth Lajos. Budapest 1998, 29. 3 János Vajda: Polgárosodás, in: János Miklóssy (ed.), Vajda János összes művei VI. Politikai röplapok, Budapest 1970, 84.

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garian estate-based class, including the aristocracy and descendants of the bene posessionati (middle-sized nobility), on the one side, and an emergent bourgeois society with an haute bourgeoisie and an entrepreneurial middle class on the other side. The conversion of the nobility into a middle class in nineteenth-century capitalist society was, Hanák argued, characterized by the survival of the modes of behaviour and the value system of the landed gentry. In Hanák’s view, this resulted in the gentrification of elements that should really be regarded as ‘bürgerlich’. Hanák described how an extensive salaried class emerged as the state bureaucracy absorbed elements of the economically declining nobility. These were soon to form the core of a decidedly gentlemanly middle class that was recognized as such even by contemporaries. These deficiencies in the formation of the middle class were exacerbated, Hanák maintained, by the fact that large parts of the new entrepreneurial and professional class were not ethnically Hungarian, since they had been recruited from the rapidly assimilating Jewish population, the domestic German population, and other immigrants. However, their gradual integration into modernizing Hungarian society was not seamless and they continued to occupy an inferior position, both politically and culturally.⁴ This view has recently been challenged by several scholars investigating the social history of both state bureaucracy and the middle classes of a more bourgeois type. In the late 1980s György Ránki (1930–1988) already argued along these lines in his contribution to an edited volume on the nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie: “Even if all of these non-Jewish bourgeois officials and intellectuals lacked the appropriate ‘bourgeois ethos’, they cannot be left out of any structural analysis of the Hungarian Bürgertum.”⁵ Ránki’s still very tentative claim has since been vindicated by much new empirical evidence. It was revealed that the salaried classes were by no means completely dominated by descendants of the former gentry. Both central government bureaucracy (the ministries) and the officer corps of the army seemed quite open to the sons of truly bourgeois groups. This lends credence to the assumption that these two segments of the middle class, although more or less dependent on the state, were demonstrably closer to bourgeois elements than they were to the once-privileged

4 Péter Hanák: Ungarn in der Donaumonarchie. Probleme der bürgerlichen Umgestaltung eines Vielvölkerstaates. Wien 1984, 362–374. 5 Jürgen Kocka (ed.): Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich. München 1988. Cited from the English-language version of his contribution to the aforementioned volume: György Ránki: The Development of the Hungarian Middle Classes. Some East-West Comparisons, in: Jürgen Kocka/Allan Mitchell (eds.), Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Oxford 1993, 439–455, 451.

56 | Gábor Gyáni landed gentry. A statistical analysis of movement into the ranks of various professional groups underlines the significant role played by the Bürgertum in shaping the social profile and the outlook of the urban middle classes.⁶ If we examine not just the salaried classes employed by the state and the local (county) authorities, but also the other half of the middle class, the Bürgertum, we are forced to revise established ideas about the emergence of the middle classes (embourgeoisement) in Hungary. In particular, today’s disputes over Jewish embourgeoisement and assimilation explore the many internal contradictions and the inadaptability of the dual structure concept that underlies these ideas. This concept was first elaborated by Ferenc Erdei in the 1940s when he argued for a clear division of Hungarian society into two opposing structures. Erdei called the first of these co-existing structures “historical national” society and the second “modern bourgeois” society. Each of the two structures constituted a more or less discrete entity, with an elite, a middle class, and a lower class. As Erdei saw it, only the working class (the industrial proletariat), which formed Hungary’s lower classes in the first half of the twentieth century, had no counterpart on the “historical national” side. In his scheme, the peasantry constituted a third, feudal-like society below both the historical national and modern bourgeois societies. In the modern bourgeois society, the elite and the middle class did not emerge from the traditional Hungarian elite and middle class (the former nobility), but mostly from recent immigrants, including Jews from the western and eastern provinces of the Habsburg Empire, Germans and other ethnic groups. Erdei suggested that business was a way of life for Jews and they had made middle-class and professional careers for themselves within the framework of enterprise.⁷ In the last few decades, however, the feudalization thesis has been challenged by a new concept, which is informed mostly by social history. Sometimes labelled revisionists, its proponents György Kövér and Gábor Gyáni raise serious objections to the historicized image of fin-de-siècle Hungary, where feudal attributes are alleged to have prevailed. Based on growing empirical evidence, these historians reject the idea that a dual society existed at that time (or even afterwards) in Hungary, represented on the one hand by a backward, traditional and ethnically Hungarian society dominated by the Christian aristocracy and the salaried

6 János Mazsu: The Social History of the Hungarian Intelligentsia, 1825–1914. New York 1997; Tibor Hajdú: Tisztikar és középosztály. Ferenc József magyar tisztjei. Budapest 1999; Gábor Benedek: A bürokratizáció történetéhez: az 1853–1854. évi definitív rendezés személyi következményei, in: György Kövér (ed.), Zsombékok. Középosztályok és iskoláztatás Magyarországon a 19. század elejétől a 20. század közepéig. Társadalomtörténeti tanulmányok. Budapest 2006, 235–254. 7 Ferenc Erdei: A magyar társadalom a két háború között, in: Valóság 5 (1976), 41.

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middle class – the gentry per se – and a modern, progressive, Jewish-dominated bourgeois society on the other.⁸ The debate, however, is ongoing, as seen in the latest reaction to the ‘revisionist’ view. Describing the protracted disputes over the feudalization thesis in relation to Hungary’s road to modernity, Balázs A. Szelényi finally concludes that “there was [. . . ] a duality to Hungary’s middle class which also had an ethnic base. But this duality between the Gentleman Christian middle class – as it was called – and the liberal Jewish middle class did not represent a struggle between a backward, feudal force on the one hand and a progressive, modernizing one on the other. Both segments of Hungary’s ethnically fragmented bourgeoisie were modern, but they were traveling on very different trajectories.”⁹ When describing Hungary’s modernization process, it is useful look at the social imaginary and the social history dimension. Here, however, the retrospective view demands analytical criteria with which to assess and interpret the past. In the case of the social imaginary, both description and analysis should remain close to the primary context of past events. So, what one identifies as understandings of, polemics and fantasies about the former social world reflects the perceptions, rationalizations and experiences that informed the everyday acts of historical actors.¹⁰ However, the hierarchy of multiple social positions constituted by wealth, status and power, and the social practices subsumed under the category of social history, cannot always be reconstructed with reference to contemporary perspectives.¹¹

II Reactions to demographic change and the growing urban-rural divide Before discussing the various aspects of the disjunction between social reality and the social imaginary in interwar Hungary, some basic facts should be mentioned. The country suffered huge demographic and territorial losses due to the 8 Gábor Gyáni: Történészdiskurzusok. Budapest 2002; György Kövér: A felhalmozás íve. Társadalom–és gazdaságtörténeti tanulmányok. Budapest 2002; Gábor Gyáni/György Kövér/ Tibor Valuch (eds.): Social History of Hungary from the Reform Era to the End of the Twentieth Century. New York 2004. 9 Balázs M. Szelényi: The Failure of the Central European Bourgeoisie. New Perspectives on Hungarian History. New York 2006, 157. 10 On the notion of social imaginary see: Sarah Maza: The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie. An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850. Cambridge 2003; Charles Taylor: Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham 2004, 23–30; Miguel A. Cabrera: Postsocial History. An Introduction. Lanham 2004. 11 Miles Fairburn: Social History. Problems, Strategies and Methods. Basingstoke 1999.

58 | Gábor Gyáni redrawing of its borders dictated by the Treaty of Trianon. This amounted to a loss of 71 per cent of Hungary’s territory, with a corresponding loss of 64 per cent of her population. This drastic demographic change fuelled great anxiety about the gradual depopulation of the country. From the beginning of the 1920s, the spread of the one-child system, common not only among the urban middle classes and the elites but also among the rural peasantry in particular regions, stirred passionate debates in Hungary. Discussions of the one-child system portrayed the decrease in population as the ‘fate of the nation’ and suggested that it signalled the coming death of the nation. More than the birth control practised by many members of the urban middle and upper classes, it was that practised by sections of the peasantry that prompted such a bleak view. Populist writers concerned with village life (Lajos Fülep, János Kodolányi and Gyula Illyés) attributed the same social importance to this practice as they did to the unfair distribution of land.¹² A way of life pursued by some peasants was now being approached from a purely nationalist viewpoint. The many facts on the birth control practices of the urban (middle-class) population prompted much less public anxiety, because urban dwellers were not seen to represent the true Hungarian (Magyar) nation. This belief was based on the fact that a large part of the middle-class population of Budapest and many other provincial cities (especially those beyond the Great Plain) comprised recently assimilated Jews, Germans and other non-Magyars. This created the impression that the contemporary urban population was not truly Hungarian.¹³ By contrast, the peasantry, which had also begun to practise artificial birth control extensively, represented for many the biological foundation of an ethnically Magyar population. However, public discourse on the one-child system was not a true reflection of Hungary’s contemporary social and demographic development. One may refer here to the overall process of ‘demographic transition’, which peaked in Hungary at the turn of the twentieth century and came to a standstill in the interwar period.¹⁴ This ultimately led to a drastic reduction in fertility rates in the early 1930s, at a point when the populists were paying greater attention to these demographic issues.¹⁵

12 Ildikó Vásáry: The Sin of Transdanubia: The One-Child System in Rural Hungary, in: Continuity and Change 3 (1989), 429–468. 13 Gábor Gyáni: Budapest Beyond Good and Evil, in: The Hungarian Quarterly 46 (2005), 68– 81; idem: Migration as a Cultural Phenomenon, in: The Hungarian Historical Review 3–4 (2012), 284–290. 14 László Katus: A demográfiai átmenet kérdései Magyarországon a 19. században, in: Történelmi Szemle 2 (1980), 270–289. 15 Gyáni et al., Social History of Hungary, 272–276.

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The social imaginary of the time believed that the one-child system adopted by the peasantry was proof of the decay of the nation. This was contradicted by the scholarly view that the changes in Hungarian society were in fact part of a European-wide modernization process. It is thus not surprising that the negative assessment of the peasants’ ‘modern’ demographic behaviour was linked to an anti-Western, anti-liberal attitude. The change in the image of the West was partly due to Hungary’s disillusionment with Europe and the West in general; they were held responsible for the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy and the resulting dismemberment of historic Hungary. To quote László Németh, one of the most influential ideologues among the populist writers, Eastern Europe “is simultaneously our own fate and our own opportunity”, because it was this region of Europe – and not the crisis-ridden West – that was the best prepared and the most likely to develop a feasible model of economic, social and political reform for itself.¹⁷ For Németh, Eastern Europe denoted the area between Germany and the Soviet Union, including the Balkans. Another populist sociologist expressed the same view in his discussion of the one-child system. Imre Kovács claimed that the “new law” was not due to economic factors and the issue of inheritance, but rather to the distortion of the whole moral universe in peasant society, which resulted in one child per family, or not even one.¹⁸ With its moralizing tone, this social commentary on peasant birth control failed to acknowledge the effect of macro-processes on declining fertility rates. Image and reality thus parted ways, even if the sociologists among the populists Table 1: Fertility rates (in thousands)¹⁶ Years 1874–1875 1886–1890 1901–1905 1921–1925

Budapest

Hungary (including Budapest)

44.2 35.2 29.3 18.9

42.8 41.4 37.0 29.4

16 Sources: Tamás Faragó: Budapest népességfejlődésének vázlata (1840–1941), in: Statisztikai Szemle 4–5 (1995), 375–391, 381; László Katus: A demográfiai átmenet kérdései Magyarországon a 19. században, in: Történelmi Szemle 2 (1980), 270–288, 272; István Hoóz: Népesedéspolitika és népességfejlődés Magyarországon a két háború között. Budapest 1970. 17 Cited by Miklós Lackó: Népiek tegnap és ma, in: idem, Sziget és külvilág. Válogatott tanulmányok. Budapest 1996, 177–178. 18 Imre Kovács: A néma forradalom. Budapest 1989, 89.

60 | Gábor Gyáni were intent on revealing traditional, and sometimes anachronistic, rural social relations.¹⁹ There was in fact a huge social and mental gap between the city and the village (including the farmstead) in every imaginable sphere of contemporary life. The gulf between the two was further widened by images of the peasantry and the bourgeoisie. As a result, both groups came to be seen as culturally and ideologically exclusive social constructs: bourgeois individualism was considered to be the antithesis of peasant collectivism. This imagery underlay the scholarly concept of the dual social structure, a concept that formed the basis of political programmes and rivalling ideologies. The latter manifested themselves in the constant struggles between the populists and the urbanists in the 1930s and 1940s. The heated debates between the two camps must be seen in the context of the huge socio-economic disparities and differences in mentality that shaped and defined contemporary Hungary. There was, for example, a disproportionate spatial distribution of the population between the capital city and the countryside. The fact that over 10 per cent of Hungarians lived in Budapest, with less than 20 per cent residing in provincial cities, was thought to explain the hydrocephaly that was then considered an apt metaphor to describe the place of the capital in the country. However, one has to admit that the population distribution between Vienna and Austria (after the Paris Peace Treaty) was even more disproportionate. To make matters worse, Budapest’s elite, middle class, petty bourgeoisie and modern industrial proletariat had no true counterpart in Hungary’s rural population. Moreover, Budapest and the Hungarian provinces (including most of the provincial cities) found themselves at very different developmental stages and were vastly different in terms of their economic, social, political, cultural and intellectual milieus. This had already been the case at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, when Budapest set off on a path of modern metropolitan development. The situation, however, worsened after the fall of the Habsburg Monarchy in the light of hard (demographic) facts, but also because of the way Budapest started to be viewed officially. As a consequence of the counter-revolutionary hysteria and the virulent anti-Semitism that swept the country after the collapse of the four-month-old Soviet Republic in the summer of 1919, Budapest was denounced as a “sinful city” by Miklós Horthy, then commander-in-chief of the national army. This label stuck to the capital throughout the ruling period of the Horthy regime (1919–1944). It was a radical re-assessment of what in fact had been an urban development of staggering proportions since the Compromise (1867), which embraced every conceivable

19 Gyula Borbándi: Der ungarische Populismus. München/Mainz 1976.

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manifestation of being a Budapester, whether in politics, behaviour, or even language. The prevailing interwar discourse on Budapest was thus shaped to a large extent by the claim that the ‘natural’ non-Hungarianness of the cosmopolitan metropolis within Austria-Hungary had soon been effaced by the Magyarizing influence of a country that had now become a sovereign nation as a result of the Trianon decision in 1920. The sharp contrast between the capital city and the countryside was further underlined by the underdeveloped infrastructure of the provincial cities. The process of urbanization had always been largely shaped and even dictated by Greater Budapest, the population of which was 1.6 million at the beginning of World War II (18 per cent of the entire population). Towns and cities in rural regions saw little growth at that time. The largest provincial urban centres of post-Trianon Hungary (Debrecen, Pécs and Szeged) could not develop into real metropolises, because they were surrounded by agrarian farmsteads.²⁰ The majority of Hungary’s population (two thirds) lived in villages and farmsteads, with almost 30 to 40 per cent residing in villages.²¹ Apart from the demographic factors mentioned above, Budapest and the countryside (including many provincial cities) represented sharply contrasting social and mental domains. This followed in part from the fact that Hungary had not yet evolved into a truly industrialized nation, but remained a largely agricultural economy. Nearly half of the population was still engaged in farming in 1941. The agricultural economy, which was closely tied to the villages, the farmsteads, and the provincial cities located on the Great Plain, continued to be characterized by large estates and a myriad of tiny peasant landholdings. After the land reform of 1920 the latter increased even further in number.²² This situation led to an extremely unequal distribution of wealth, which was out of synch with the European norm. According to some contemporary calculations, one fifth of all income was earned by just 0.6 per cent of the Hungarian population, with barely more than 44 per cent of income distributed among more than four fifths of the population. By contrast, in Germany at around the same time the top 0.7 per cent of the population earned 50 per cent less than its counterpart in Hungary, and, as a consequence, the absolute majority (nearly 90 per cent) of the population had access to almost two thirds of all wealth.²³ It is true, however, that many neighbouring countries (the Balkan states and even Czechoslovakia) also

20 See Gábor Gyáni: Az urbanizáció társadalomtörténete. Tanulmányok. Kolozsvár 2012. 21 Gyáni et al., Social History of Hungary, 279. 22 Ibid., 297–302, 405–406. 23 Ibid., 292.

62 | Gábor Gyáni experienced extreme income disparities at that time.²⁴ In Hungary, the most obvious inequalities manifested themselves in agrarian society and placed the city and the village at opposite ends of the social hierarchy. Given these socio-economic circumstances, it is no wonder that such a polarized image of the urban and rural worlds emerged. But that’s not the whole story. When ethnic nationalism began to attract growing support in the 1910s, a close link was established between racism and nationalism. This was a key factor in the generation of specific images of the city and the village. Collective identities have always been tied to particular places. The best example of this is national identity, a construct closely tied to a given territorial unit in the state-building process. The great role played by the notion of homeland in defining the nation (or nationhood) in terms of territory testifies to the great symbolic and political weight that geography can have in this development. Modern nationalism strengthens the relationship between man and space by suggesting that individuals belong to specific places.²⁵ This was also the case in an age when the movement of people and ethnic groups reached massive proportions in Europe. At the same time, social integration based on a movement towards national homogeneity also peaked. These parallel developments – the propagation of national identity and increased social and physical mobility – were somewhat paradoxical.²⁶ The modern political, socio-economic and cultural community represented by the nation state per se is a territorially bound unit. In building a modern nation state, the aim was first and foremost to create an ethnically and politically homogeneous modern society, bound together by legal equality and a shared sense of belonging. All this was complemented, however, by the appropriation of the physical environment, which was transformed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into a distinctively national territory, ruled and administered by a single sovereign nation state. The politics of naturalizing the territorial claim to the nation amounted to exercising uncontested rule over the area of a nation state, thereby ascribing a specific (national) meaning to it. This has often been accomplished through cultural activities (including the arts and the sciences): “Who, more than poets, musicians, painters and sculptors, could bring the national ideal to life and disseminate it among the people?”²⁷

24 For a general European overview of contemporary income distribution patterns, see Béla Tomka: Social History of Twentieth-Century Europe. London 2013, 104–105. 25 Charles S. Maier: Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era, in: American Historical Review 105 (2000), 807–831, 814. 26 See Gyáni, Az urbanizáció társadalomtörténete. 27 Anthony D. Smith: National Identity. London 1991, 92.

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Thus in the context of constructing the nation state, large-scale migration, which was seen to have a negative impact on national integration, led to a social imaginary in which the metaphor of rootlessness remained powerful, thanks in part to the vibrant nationalist discourse at that time. When the capital city embodied by Budapest was thought to represent an alien, non-native place that was foreign to allegedly authentic Hungarian life and dominated by immigrants and ethnically alien elements (Jews, Germans and other non-Hungarians), the image of a split nation developed. The voice of ethnic nationalism can be heard in the decidedly anti-urban statements that began to dominate public discourse as late as the interwar period.

III Metropolitan development The socio-demographic development of Budapest Before attempting to assess contemporary public discourse, one should consider the way in which historians have explained the social and mental development of Budapest from the moment it became Hungary’s capital city in the 1870s. Metropolitan development was fuelled by rapid demographic growth, which even contemporaries compared to the growth rate in American urban centres. In 1869 the population of the three cities (Pest, Buda and Óbuda) was 280 000. By 1880 it had grown by almost 100 000. Due to immigration, this growth continued over the following two decades, with the result that Budapest’s population exceeded 600 000 by the mid-1890s, climbing to almost one million by the late 1910s. Thus, in the course of the quarter of a century after 1870, the population of Budapest almost doubled due to immigration that was unparalleled in contemporary Europe. The major beneficiary of that immigration – Pest – was the real engine of metropolitan development in terms of both demographics and the economy.²⁸ For several decades Pest had been an important mercantile city. Buda, however, had previously only stood out as an administrative centre. Óbuda was a typical lowlands agricultural town. In the context of unification it was decided that Buda would take on the role of a residential centre, thereby losing its previous importance. Nevertheless, a number of central state administrative bodies continued to be located in the vicinity of Buda Castle. The core of the modern eco-

28 Tamás Faragó: Budapest népességfejlődésének vázlata (1840–1941), in: Statisztikai Szemle 4–5 (1995), 375–391.

64 | Gábor Gyáni nomy was concentrated in Pest, where the majority of the flour mills were located – the first beacons of modern industry in Hungary.²⁹ Around the turn of the century, heavy industry, in particular mechanical engineering and the iron and steel industry, took the lead. Furthermore, due to the constant need to service the rapidly growing population, the food industry also remained an important economic sector. So in many ways, the demands arising from swift urbanization spurred industrial development. The dire need for housing and public construction work was met by the building and building materials industry, while the iron and steel industry and the heavy engineering sector fulfilled the demand for new railways. Budapest was admired by citizens and visitors alike for its spectacular and rapid transformation. The list of structures built within just a few decades in order to meet the requirements of a capital city include Andrássy Avenue, which was spectacular even by European standards. It became famous for its neoRenaissance palaces designed along the lines of historicism and for some of its public buildings (the Műcsarnok (Art Gallery) built in 1877; the old Academy of Music built in 1879; and the Opera House built in 1884). Still, the most obvious sign of large-scale urbanization was the extensive building of residential housing. In the 1870s and 1880s two thirds of all new buildings were blocks of flats, and this number later increased even further. Relatively few slum clearances were carried out for the sake of creating space for new buildings, which in most cases were four- or five-storey blocks of flats.³⁰ Therefore, it is no wonder that from the moment Budapest set off on the path of modern development – a process that has been a motor for Hungary over the last century and a half – two distinct social groupings, the entrepreneurial (and managerial) segment of the middle and upper classes, and the industrial working class, determined its character. Around the time of unification, but also in the decades that followed, the emerging economic elite documented in the regularly compiled lists of the 1 200 biggest taxpayers included many of the wealthiest landlords. The elite of a society tells us a lot about the entire society. The role of mobile capital proved to be decisive in defining this elite, which was mainly made up of crop and animal merchants, architects, building entrepreneurs, factory owners, the wealthiest landlords, and the aristocracy with extensive lands

29 Judit Klement: Gőzmalmok a Duna partján. A Budapesti malomipar a 19–20. században. Budapest 2010. 30 Péter Hanák: The Garden and the Workshop. Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest. Princeton 1998, 3–43; Gábor Gyáni: Parlor and Kitchen. Housing and Domestic Culture in Budapest 1870–1940. Budapest/New York 2002; idem: Identity and the Urban Experience: Finde-Siècle Budapest. New York 2004.

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in the countryside.³¹ This shows how the capital inevitably became the centre of the Hungarian upper middle class. But the middle and the lower middle classes were also represented here in large numbers. They were concentrated especially in the entrepreneurial sphere and the intellectual professions. In addition to intellectuals, they included a large number of clerical workers employed by central government (ministries) and the business sector (white-collar workers in private enterprises). The sharp contrast between the capital city and the countryside is illustrated by the fact that at that time one quarter of all Hungarian physicians lived in Budapest, even though the city was home to just five per cent of the country’s population.³² This indicates the high level of metropolitan medical services on the one hand, and the lack of such services in the provinces on the other. Finally, at the very bottom of the social structure, the proletariat, which constituted the majority of the population, also made its way into the metropolitan and seemingly bourgeois world of Budapest. The almost exclusive concentration of the industrial working class in Budapest was another sign that the capital had been and remained the sole stronghold of capitalism in Hungary. Budapest, the metropolis created by an incessant flow of immigrants, was thus a conglomerate of many diverse traditions and influences. At the time the city was being unified in the 1870s, a long-standing German cultural tradition set the tone.³³ Yet within a very short period of time, a massive tide of Hungarianspeaking newcomers arrived. There is no doubt that this linguistic shift was the key to the Magyarization of Budapest. Until 1840 the country’s official language had been Latin, although German had been the language of local administration in Pest and Buda, because the residents of both cities had been German speakers.³⁴ This started to change around the middle of the century, as the ability to speak Hungarian had been a central demand of Hungarian nationalism from the 1830s onwards. However, it was only after 1867 that Hungarian became the official language in all parts of the country, including Pest and Buda, later (1873) Budapest. Bilingualism or even multilingualism was thus commonplace in the contemporary urban public sphere. After some initial steps, in 1872 the Metropolitan Board of Public Works (Fővárosi Közmunkák Tanácsa) introduced man-

31 Károly Vörös: Budapest legnagyobb adófizetői 1873–1917. Budapest 1979. 32 Magyar statisztikai évkönyv 1912. Budapest 1914, 78–81. 33 Tamás Faragó: A főváros népe: sokszínűség és beolvadás, in: Gábor Gyáni (ed.), Az egyesített főváros. Pest, Buda, Óbuda. Budapest 1998, 75–111. 34 Vilmos Heiszler: Soknyelvű ország multikulturális központja, in: Budapesti Negyed 2 (1994), 5–22.

66 | Gábor Gyáni datory street-naming. From that time onwards the streets had to bear Hungarian names.³⁵ This extraordinary linguistic, ethnic and confessional heterogeneity and the brisk homogenization that followed at the end of the nineteenth century are widely acknowledged. However, opinions differ on the nature of this process. Furthermore, after 1920, instead of viewing the Magyarization of Budapest as a positive development, some found it partly or wholly objectionable. The aforementioned “sinful city” slogan, which gained currency at that time, expressed this disgust in no uncertain terms. Turning now to the mass culture of the city, one can see the co-existence of various subcultures in continual interaction and their gradual integration, albeit not entirely free of contradictions.³⁶ In the decades leading up to 1900 the urban bourgeois (Biedermeier) culture of the established ethnically German petty bourgeoisie coexisted with the Hungarian culture of the recently arrived Magyar petty bourgeoisie and a working class rooted in the peasantry in what was, already in the 1870s, a heterogeneous mass culture – and a linguistic hotchpotch as well. This was rounded out by the predominantly Germanic industrial working-class culture of other immigrants (in some cases native Hungarians who had worked abroad) and the separate culture of the Jewish petty bourgeoisie, which had streamed continuously into the country from the 1840s onwards. The growing Jewishness of the city was due to the rapid increase in the number of ‘Israelites’ in the city and their growing presence in the sphere of mass culture.³⁷ Today, some historians are even tempted to talk about an “invisible Jewish Budapest”, a new kind of public space or culture “that could not openly be acknowledged [by contemporaries] as Jewish but that, nevertheless, functioned as the source of an unmistakably urban Jewish subculture and identity.”³⁸ Mary Gluck, however, admits that the discursive world of humour and popular entertainment created by this public culture “with its playful and transgressive cultural forms, never displaced or seriously threatened official or respectable Jewish Budapest, which was based on the abstract ideals of national liberalism and Enlightenment rationality. [. . . ] Middle-class Budapest Jews [. . . ] continued to live double lives as patriotic

35 Szilvia Andrea Holló: Hősök és mondák az utcanévadásban, in: Tamás Hofer (ed.), Magyarok Kelet és Nyugat közt. A nemzettudat változó jelképei. Budapest 1996, 222. 36 Károly Vörös: A művelődés és a kulturális élet alakulása Budapesten 1873–1945, in: Tanulmányok Budapest Múltjából 20 (1974), 97–107; Gyáni, Identity and the Urban Experience, 173–187. 37 This term was used to describe religious Jews in censuses. 38 Mary Gluck: The Budapest Flâneur: Urban Modernity, Popular Culture, and the “Jewish Question” in Fin-de-Siècle Hungary, in: Jewish Social Studies 3 (2004), 18.

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citizens and as ironic flâneurs. In fact, the two realities mirrored each other, like parallel universes in a science-fiction narrative.”³⁹ From about the millennium (1895) onwards, the kaleidoscopic product assembled from these elements was gradually transformed into a modern metropolitan bourgeois (or petty bourgeois) public culture now based fundamentally on ‘Hungarian’ culture. In the meantime, a proletarian class culture was taking shape, also forged in Budapest. In the interwar years, mass culture gained a firm footing in Budapest with the modernization of the media. Its social reach was spectacularly expanded, with Budapest’s public culture, which catered mainly to petty bourgeois tastes and expectations, exerting a great hold on newcomers from the provinces and on the industrial working class and the urbanized petty bourgeoisie. Moreover, this mass culture increasingly undermined the distinctively working-class culture that had emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, and had initially constituted a kind of counter-culture. Through the agency of mass culture then there emerged an entity that was held to be ‘typically Budapestian’ and which, in the end, steamrolled any resistance put up by the various sub- and counter-cultures based on ethnicity or class. Admittedly, older traditions and local peculiarities did not completely wither away, but the earlier conspicuous diversity of codes and frames of reference clearly diminished. Everything that has been touched on up to this point is virtually self-evident in the context of prolonged metropolitan development.

Budapest and its discontents I would now like to compare historians’ perceptions of this metropolitan development with how it was assessed by contemporaries immersed in the nationalist anti-urban discourse. But before describing that discourse, I should say something about how historians describe the countryside, the true counterpart of the city.⁴⁰ The modernization process in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to the development of an agro-industrial economy. Census data from 1920 in relation to the occupational structure of Hungary shows how far the Hungarian economy had advanced in that direction. The absolute majority of the population (55.7 per cent) was engaged in agriculture, with 30 per cent involved in industry and commerce, and slightly less than 10 per cent in white-

39 Ibid., 19. 40 The following argument is based on: Gyáni et al., Social History of Hungary, 290, 406.

68 | Gábor Gyáni collar professions and the civil service. Yet, as testified by the last census taken in 1941, Hungary had not evolved into an industrialized nation by the beginning of World War II, as 49 per cent of the population was still employed in the agricultural sector. Given the persistence of a basically agricultural economy, the land-ownership structure did not change substantially. The majority of landowners were landowning peasants and there were huge disparities in the distribution of land. Every third person lived in an independent household, where a farm, a shop, or an artisan workshop formed the basis of the family’s livelihood. The proportion of self-employed people was even higher (42 per cent of all earners), although many of them were not really independent, since they were also forced to perform wage labour in order to survive. As a result of the 1920 land reform, the number of peasant landowners with fewer than one hundred Hungarian acres almost doubled, as did the number of those who owned tiny plots (less than three Hungarian acres). The bulk of these new peasant owners formed part of an extensive agrarian semiproletariat numbering over one million, which was self-sufficient in name only. All this seems to suggest that re-peasantization was prevalent at that time and contributed more to traditionalism than to social and economic innovation. The widening gap between the city (the bourgeois domain) and the agrarian hinterland was thus a shared social experience for many. Let’s turn now to the discourse that foregrounded the vision of a split country. László Németh, the well-known novelist and essayist who was deeply concerned about the fate of the Hungarian nation, was shocked when he experienced (as the school doctor of a junior secondary school in Buda) the reality of the “flotsam and jetsam” of the Budapest lower classes. In a book about his experience, he wrote that “our school [. . . ] is attended by the children of those who have been tossed this way and that in the course of the modern-day Great Migration” and concluded “it does not take too much intelligence to find an explanation for the Magyarization [of schools] in the post-war (and in part, also pre-war) engulfment. The catchment area of our school in the seventies and eighties was still Germanspeaking, with the Magyar nation supplying fifty per cent before the war and now eighty or ninety per cent (for certain).”⁴¹ The continuous monitoring of the homogenization that accompanied Magyarization between the two world wars was something of a national pastime, particularly among those who were connected in some way with a school and its pupils. Sándor Karácsony, a legendary educationalist and psychologist, also considered it important to write down his views on the hotly disputed question of a “Hun-

41 László Németh: A Medve utcai polgári. Budapest 1943, 33–35.

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garian Budapest” (the title he gave to his article). “At the start of the last century, Budapest was still a German-speaking city; indeed, even in the mid-nineteenth century much German speech was heard in the streets, and any Budapester who attempted to speak Hungarian did so with miserable results. [. . . ] These days, [however] Budapest is Hungarian. It speaks Hungarian and feels Hungarian. It may speak differently from, and not feel quite the same as Debrecen or Dévaványa or the Bugac plain; nevertheless, it is Hungarian. Yet, how could this modern miracle have happened, one wonders?”⁴² Karácsony argues that it happened, first and foremost, because the provincial Hungarian population found a home for itself in Budapest: “The Hungarian peasantry made Budapest Hungarian.” Furthermore, he adds the somewhat curious explanation that, as Budapesters, these Hungarian newcomers “are all the more Hungarian [because] their souls [. . . ] by a strange but understandable and natural contrariety, to their dying day feel an aching homesickness and pull towards home, to the countryside, the open air, the village, the puszta.”⁴³

IV Conclusion The two contrasting images of Budapest cited above show the significant role the social imaginary played in placing the city (Budapest in particular) and the countryside at opposite ends of Hungary’s social and mental hierarchy. The image of a polarized society that became so prevalent in public discourse at the beginning of the twentieth century had always been closely correlated with the ethnic makeup of society. It derived from an identification of the city (and the bourgeoisie) with Jewishness (and sometimes with Germanness) in sharp contrast with the alleged true Hungarianness of the countryside (the village and the peasantry). The metaphoric use of terms such as Jewishness and Jewification (of the big city, the metropolis) sometimes reflected the genuine experiences of many people in the countryside. The alien bourgeois (metropolitan) world that gave rise to the widespread use and acceptance of the metaphor of rootlessness in connection with it was often perceived in the context of the manifold lifestyles, the great diversity, and the tremendous material and other disparities that characterized Hungary at that time. From the external perspective of the provinces and some social substrata, Budapest’s Jewishness was not simply a conviction, but an every-

42 Sándor Karácsony: Ocsúdó magyarság. Budapest 1942, 312. 43 Ibid., 316.

70 | Gábor Gyáni day experience of obvious otherness. It was thus a clear manifestation of how, where and to what extent social otherness could be experienced in a way that contributed to the creation of the image of a fundamentally split country. In a case where the social imaginary, the product of contemporary historical agency, shapes and even determines the scholarly conceptualization of the past, one should be wary of accepting the feudalization thesis and the dual society construct at face value, as both tend to exaggerate the split in Hungarian society at that time. Both theories reflect a plainly normative approach. The main problem with this is that not even the pattern of bourgeois development in the West, which is frequently contrasted with the Hungarian (Eastern and Central European) modernization pattern, meets the requirements of the model.⁴⁴ Furthermore, the recent emergence of the notion of multiple modernities puts the whole issue – including backwardness and the normal pattern of an ideal modernity (and modernization) – in a totally new light.⁴⁵ In trying to assess the conceptual heritage with which one is always confronted in one’s research on the social, mental and political history of modern Hungary, the focus should be placed on the unique combination of old and obsolete social structural elements with the modern. The ‘normal’ pattern is thus revealed to be an incessant adaptation and readjustment to the swift and incalculable transformation of internal and external conditions. This insight may indeed bring us closer to a much better understanding of the specific trajectory of Hungary’s history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

44 See Arno J. Mayer: The Persistence of the Old Regime. Europe to the Great War. New York 1981; David Blackbourn/Geoff Eley: Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Oxford 1984. 45 The rich theoretical literature on the concept of multiple modernities is linked to postcolonialism, originating in Edward W. Said’s Orientalism, which was first published in New York in 1979. It has been enhanced by subaltern studies by scholars from India. On the whole concept, see the issue of the journal Daedalus on Multiple Modernities, Daedalus 1 (2000).

Martin Jemelka

The Ostrava Industrial Agglomeration in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: Where the Urban Countryside met the Rural Town Our parents came from the countryside, thus from a rural environment, and came into an urban environment, where they adapted quickly – whether in the workplace or to the circumstances of life in a colony. It was easy for them to draw on their experience in the countryside to cultivate a garden or field, and to raise small, domesticated animals. Although they adapted quickly in the town, my parents still had a certain sense of solidarity in the family they had brought with them from the country. They very quickly became involved in colony life, and my father became a functionary, an organizer, and a very esteemed person generally. Yet despite this, the bonds were not severed with their places of birth or previous residence, because siblings stayed behind with whom they remained in contact.¹

I Introduction In general, traditional historical and sociological definitions of the town, the countryside and their interaction do not adequately describe the situation in industrial regions – especially centres of the coal and iron industries – which are usually geographically and geomorphologically wedded to an older agricultural hinterland. In the Ostrava industrial agglomeration² (the Ostrava-Karviná coalfield³), the most extensive industrial region in the Czech lands, in the Upper

1 Milík Gaj: Všecko mělo svůj smysl a jedno zapadalo do druhého, in: Martin Jemelka (ed.), Lidé z kolonií vyprávějí své dějiny. Ostrava 2009, 246–290, 285. 2 Milan Myška: K vymezení ostravské průmyslové oblasti, in: Český lid 53 (1966), 121–133; Olga Skalníková: Problém Ostravska jako průmyslové oblasti (příspěvek ke studiu vytváření novodobé etnografické oblasti), in: Český lid 60 (1973), 358–365. The Ostrava industrial agglomeration developed without regard to state, administrative, or ethnic borders as an industrial region with a high concentration of industrial plants and workers’ colonies. The communities of Moravian and Polish (Silesian) Ostrava, Vítkovice, Petřvald and Karviná became the core of the Ostrava industrial agglomeration, and two further settlement centres emerged: Moravian (Greater) Ostrava and Fryštát (Karviná). In scholarly literature, the concept of the Ostrava industrial agglomeration is used to designate either the entire Ostrava industrial area or only its western settlement agglomeration located roughly on the territory of today’s Ostrava. 3 The Ostrava-Karviná coalfield is the economic designation for the Czech part of the Upper Silesian Coal Basin (Ostrava-Karviná Coal Basin), the most extensive coal basin in the Czech

72 | Martin Jemelka Silesian industrial area in what is now Poland, and in Germany’s Ruhr Valley and Rhineland, coalfields connected with the steel or chemical industries were preceded by agrarian regions, the residues of which harkened back to a preindustrial era. It was precisely in these regions, which often lay on state borders, that processes of modernization, industrialization and urbanization assumed acute forms.⁴ In Ostrava and the Ostrava region, a developing urban world of rapidly expanding industrial communities and transportation networks contrasted sharply with the agrarian world, which persisted in remnants of older agricultural enclaves, social life, and modes of behaviour that betrayed the rural origins of most migrants to the area.⁵ Chronologically circumscribed by the two world wars, this article focuses on the completely undifferentiated industrial-agrarian form of this agglomeration. Like other European industrial regions, Ostrava and the Ostrava region transcend standard historical, sociological and urbanistic definitions of town and country. If a settlement unit with more than 2 000 inhabitants can be considered a town, then 13 of the 33 communities that are today part of Ostrava already exceeded this threshold before 1930 without acquiring the status of a town.⁶ Furthermore, in Ostrava and its industrial agglomeration, administrative development lagged behind spatial, economic and social reality. Even in this industrial region with significant shuttle and seasonal migration, population or administrative boundaries were not considered a sign of urban settlement between the world wars. Nor is it possible to consider the dissemination of urban culture and

lands. Geomorphologically, the basin is divided into a western (Ostrava) and an eastern part (Karviná). 4 For details of Ostrava’s border status, see: Karel Jiřík (ed.): Dějiny Ostravy. Ostrava 1993, 492– 604. Between 1742 and 1920, today’s Ostrava was essentially a border town, because the Oder river separated the communities west of Moravian Ostrava from those on the territory of Prussia. Today’s municipal districts of Ostrava-Antošovice, Hošťálkovice, Koblov, Lhotka and Petřkovice were located on German territory until 1920. Ostrava became a border town once again in 1938, when the western communities of today’s Ostrava were annexed by Germany. 5 Jürgen Reulecke: Geschichte der Urbanisierung in Deutschland. Frankfurt am Main 1985, 45. 6 Jiří Musil: Co je urbanizace, in: Pavla Horská/Eduard Maur/Jiří Musil, Zrod velkoměsta: urbanizace českých zemí a Evropa. Praha/Litomyšl 2002, 9; Jiřík, Dějiny Ostravy, 272–273, 363, 492–604. The integration process on the territory of today’s Ostrava saw several waves in the years 1924, 1941, 1957, 1960, 1966, 1975 and 1976. On 1 January 1924, so-called Greater Ostrava was created by merging six communities. On 1 July 1941, the Statutory City of Ostrava was formed from the communities of Greater Ostrava and other communities on the Moravian and Silesian sides of the Ostravice river. Integration continued even after the Second World War, and today there are 33 communities on the territory of the Statutory City of Ostrava with 305 970 registered residents (as of 1 January 2013).

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values as symptomatic of an urban character in this case, because the region was subordinated to the dictates of industrial production (localization of industrial production according to the availability of raw materials and energy) and controlled by industrial enterprises in many areas of human life (labour law, corporate social policy).⁷ The Ostrava industrial agglomeration never acquired a fully urbanized form (especially in its eastern part, Karviná), and in its agrarian residues, workers’ colonies and ‘iron-tilling villages’ (kovorolnické vsi – special settlement forms with a semi-urban or semi-rural character), an organized urban form of human coexistence was never realized.⁸ It is precisely the remnants of agricultural production and the rural way of life in an otherwise urbanized environment that this text addresses in the case of the Ostrava region.

II Ostrava and the Ostrava region in the epoch between classical and socialist industrialization Like other future Czech industrial centres, Ostrava was still an agrarian region at the beginning of the 1830s. Before 1835, the only coal mining carried out there was irregular surface extraction of no great economic significance.⁹ The transformation of the agrarian region with its moribund textile industry can be attributed to a project to build a railway line between Vienna and the Galician town of Bochnia. Established in 1828, the Rudolf Ironworks (later Vítkovice Ironworks) was to become the main supplier of track and carriage axles and ultimately the main driver of industrialization in the future Ostrava industrial agglomeration. From the 1840s on, the Vítkovice Ironworks consumed most of Ostrava’s coal, the extraction and industrial consumption of which rapidly transformed the western part of the Ostrava-Karviná coalfield. The latter received a further boost to industrialization with the completion of the railway line from Vienna to Moravian Ostrava-Přívoz (1847) and Bohumín (1848). (Despite better geological conditions, the eastern part of the coalfield only industrialized three decades later, after the construction of a railway connection to Košice.) Thus the beginnings of the Ostrava region’s dynamic transformation into an industrial centre with a growing number of factories and inhabitants, an increasingly dense settlement network, and shuttle and seasonal migration can be traced back to the early 1850s. Initially, workers were 7 Musil, Co je urbanizace, 11. 8 Reulecke, Geschichte der Urbanisierung, 7. 9 Tomáš Pavlica: Ostrava ve světle odhadních operátů stabilního katastru v roce 1843, in: Ostrava: sborník příspěvků k dějinám a výstavbě města 8 (1975), 403–420.

74 | Martin Jemelka drawn from the rural population of Ostrava’s hinterland. Later they came from the Cieszyn region, and from the 1880s increasingly from Polish Galicia.¹⁰ In the mid-1840s the main engines of industrialization were the Rothschildcontrolled Vítkovice Ironworks and the Kaiser Ferdinand Northern Railway, whose capital the Rothschilds also controlled and which invested in anthracite coal extraction in addition to railway transport. The year 1873 was a milestone in the capital concentration of Ostrava’s industry. It was in that year that the Jewish businesses owned by the Gutmanns and the Rothschilds founded the Vítkovice Mining and Iron Corporation, combining anthracite coal extraction with coking and the use of coal in metallurgical production. By that time, however, the Ostrava region was already established as an industrial region centred on coal mining, iron production and coking. The company town of Vítkovice lay at its heart. Its industrializing influence extended 30 kilometres to Štramberk near Kopřivnice, where limestone was extracted for metallurgical production. The eastern part of the Ostrava-Karviná coalfield only began to emerge as part of the Ostrava industrial agglomeration shortly before the economic crisis of 1873, when the process of urbanization – launched in the western part of the coalfield in the mid-1850s – was initiated in the eastern part of the area as well (the towns of Bohumín and Fryštát). The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a chemical industry in the Ostrava region, and after 1885 smaller engineering plants also began to develop. Before the First World War, the Ostrava industrial agglomeration was the largest Czech producer of high-quality black cokeable coal. However, due to a marked caking property, this coal was unsuitable for use in heating (since the end of the nineteenth century, that task had fallen to lower-quality black coal from Upper Silesia, which was also easier to extract). By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Ostrava region had already witnessed a rapid increase in employment, a wave of migration from Galicia (1885–1900), and a period of unprecedented demographic growth (1891–1900). In the last decade of the nineteenth century alone, the population in the judicial districts of Bohumín, Fryštát and Moravian Ostrava grew by 64 per cent to 87 000, and by 1900 the entire Ostrava industrial agglomeration had a total of 216 000 inhabitants. The urbanization of the region also accelerated at the turn of the century. While in 1869 it had comprised just six communities with over 2 000 residents, by 1910 eight of the fourteen communities in the Moravian Ostrava judicial district had more than 2 000 inhabitants and 80 per cent of the agglomeration’s total population lived in

10 Dan Gawrecki (ed.): Průmyslové oblasti českých zemí za kapitalismu (1780–1945). Volume I. 1780–1918. Opava 1987, 49–54.

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communities with more than 5 000 inhabitants. By the time the First World War broke out, Moravian Ostrava was not just an important industrial centre, but also a political one. Yet it continued to lag behind the region’s older urban centres in the tertiary sector and especially in the cultural sphere.¹¹ This gap was exacerbated by the Czech-German-Polish conflict. Due to the militarization of heavy industry, the war transformed what is today Ostrava into a military zone. While the mining and metallurgical industries initially experienced an unprecedented boom, by late 1917 growing resource shortfalls, technological obsolescence, an exhausted workforce and a burgeoning strike movement were impinging on the daily operations of industrial enterprises.¹² The Ostrava region recovered relatively quickly from the post-war economic depression, the disputes surrounding the demarcation of new state borders in the west and east of the Ostrava industrial agglomeration (1918–1920), and the deportation of German- and Polish-speaking populations with no claim to Czechoslovak citizenship. Despite economic swings, the Ostrava industrial agglomeration saw continual growth in production, with peaks in 1929 and 1937. A marked concentration of capital and production made the Ostrava region the most important producer of black coal in interwar Czechoslovakia (80 per cent). And despite the initial loss of an extensive internal market, Ostrava’s large industrial enterprises were able – through technological modernization and rationalization – to export to foreign markets, including the Balkans and the USSR. Notwithstanding systematic rationalization (closures of old mining plants) and a steady decline in the number of jobs in mining, employment growth in the Ostrava industrial agglomeration was second only to the capital Prague. Between 1902 and 1930, the number of jobs grew from 100 000 to 152 000, most significantly in the metal production, construction and chemical industry segments. In 1930 in the judicial district of Moravian Ostrava – the most industrialized part of the region – 47 per cent of the workforce worked in metal processing plants and 11 per cent were engaged in coal mining; in the Silesian Ostrava district, 71 per cent of the workforce was employed in the mining industry.¹³ The most dynamic and visually most striking transformation was the emergence of so-called Greater Ostrava as an administrative, cultural and political centre, which, however, still trailed behind other Czech towns of a similar size

11 Jan Steiner: Hospodářský vývoj průmyslových oblastí českých zemí v období první republiky, in: Dan Gawrecki (ed.), Průmyslové oblasti českých zemí za kapitalismu (1780–1945). Volume II. 1918–1938, část 1 – hospodářský vývoj. Opava 1991, 256. 12 Gawrecki, Průmyslové oblasti, 243–248. 13 Steiner, Hospodářský vývoj, 168–173.

76 | Martin Jemelka and economic significance from an administrative point of view.¹⁴ Greater Ostrava was transformed into a building site for public edifices, power plants and sanitation infrastructure. In addition to many new schools, the following buildings were constructed in Moravian Ostrava: a crematorium (1925), a new municipal slaughterhouse (1927), a public swimming pool (1929), a reconstructed hospital (1937) and, most importantly, the New Town Hall (1930), the largest local administration building in the Czech lands. However, the construction of communal housing did not proceed as rapidly – between 1918 and 1938 just 64 residential buildings with 1 042 apartment units were built – and most residential buildings were constructed at the behest of industrial plants.¹⁵ Yet in terms of the extent of its water and sewerage systems, the city led Prague and Brno by a wide margin, with 99 per cent of all buildings connected to a water supply and 95 per cent linked to sewerage networks. While investment in public works quickly made Moravian Ostrava the third-richest city in the country, by 1935 it was also the most indebted municipality in Czechoslovakia.¹⁶ Although interwar Ostrava remained a bastion of the industrial working class¹⁷ and a model of communal development, it had one of the highest rates of tuberculosis and alcoholism of any Czechoslovak city. By the outbreak of the Second World War, however, Greater Ostrava had developed into a large city with a range of banks, department stores, administrative buildings and churches, as well as a dense municipal transport and suburban railway network, and a steadily growing population. The process of urbanization in the Ostrava industrial agglomeration thus peaked between the two world wars and made Greater Ostrava into a true metropolis of Czech Silesia and northern and north-eastern Moravia.¹⁸ The German and Polish annexations, which in early October 1938 heralded the approach of the Second World War, suddenly transformed Greater Ostrava into a border city immediately neighbouring the German Reich (thirteen communities in what is today Ostrava were then located on German territory) and Poland. The important railway connection via Bohumín to the eastern part of the industrial area and on to Slovakia was located on German and Polish territory, and when the Protocol on the Border in Cieszyn Silesia was signed on 23 November 1938,

14 Jiřík, Dejiny Ostravy, 280. 15 Ibid., 289–304. In 1921, there were 4 654 residential buildings in Moravian Ostrava with 22 451 apartment units; in 1930, there were 5 521 buildings with 28 590 units. 16 Jiřík, Dejiny Ostravy, 275–280. 17 In 1930, 62 per cent of the economically active population of Moravian Ostrava worked in industry, while in the neighbouring district of Silesian Ostrava this figure was 71 per cent. 18 Jiřík, Dejiny Ostravy, 271–304.

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Ostrava became a haven for Czech and German refugees from what had become Polish Cieszyn Silesia. Furthermore, 15 coalmines, which accounted for 57 per cent of the coalfield’s production, were now located on Polish and (after 1 September 1939) German territory. When Moravian Ostrava was occupied by Germany on 14 March 1939, the Vítkovice Ironworks and shortly thereafter the Kaiser Ferdinand Northern Railway were aryanized (Reichswerke Hermann Göring) and became a pillar of heavy industry under Nazi administration. In 1941, 97 per cent of the coke, 70 per cent of the black coal, and 67 per cent of the pig iron produced in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia came from the Ostrava industrial agglomeration. The peak of the wartime industrial boom came in 1944, when the foundations were laid for the so-called Southern Plant¹⁹ and the Ostrava region reached new heights in the extraction and production of iron and steel.²⁰ Ostrava, the population of which crossed the threshold of 200 000 inhabitants on 1 July 1941 after a further migration wave, was liberated in late April 1945 after heavy fighting. Following a period of rapid post-war renewal, Ostrava embarked on a two-year economic plan (1947–1948) towards socialist industrialization.²¹

III The Ostrava region: A century-old destination for the rural population For more than one hundred years – from the 1850s until the beginning of the 1970s – the Ostrava agglomeration was a favoured destination for economic migrants. Initially, the region attracted the rural population of the nearby Opava, Cieszyn and Sub-Beskidian regions. They were joined in the 1850s by Czech – and to a lesser extent Prussian – mining engineers and technical officials, and the first merchants from the ranks of the Moravian and Eastern Hungarian Jews. From the 1860s until the turn of the century, however, a wave of Galician migrants altered the social and ethnic fabric of the Ostrava region in an unprecedented way. In the history of Galician migrations, the Ostrava region played the role of the closest industrial centre, where the pauperized, mostly illiterate and easily exploited Galicians were confronted for the first time with the world of industrial

19 Südbau. This was re-named Nová huť Klementa Gottwalda after the Second World War. See Dagmar Jajeśniak-Quast’s contribution to this volume. 20 Vilém Plaček: Ostravský kamenouhelný revír v době nacistické okupace, in: Ostrava: sborník příspěvků k dějinám a výstavbě města 4 (1967), 45–81. 21 Jiřík, Dějiny Ostravy, 352–367.

78 | Martin Jemelka work and the dangerous spoils of the modern industrial society. Among others, the Galicians suffered from psychological problems due to the strenuous work underground and the continuous operations of the smelteries and ironworks. It was not easy for them to forget the cyclical time of seasonal agricultural work in traditional Galician society.²² Galicians and the inhabitants of the eastern regions of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (Bukovina) were again driven into the Ostrava industrial agglomeration by the First World War. In the autumn of 1914 alone, over ten thousand people fled to Moravian Ostrava from those areas.²³ Even between the two world wars, Greater Ostrava continued to be a destination for many people from the countryside. However, these migrants now had to negotiate new state borders and new social and political circumstances, which made foreigners of roughly one tenth of the Moravian Ostrava district’s inhabitants. In 1921, the largest proportion of people without Czechoslovak citizenship in the entire Republic of Czechoslovakia (25 per cent) lived on the territory of the Ostrava-Karviná coalfield.²⁴ In the 1920s and 1930s, Greater Ostrava’s population grew not only as a result of integrating the surrounding communities, but also due to a new wave of migrants. These new migrants came mostly from rural parts of inner Moravia, Silesia and north-western Slovakia, but also from what is now Bulgaria. Two waves of refugees from the Cieszyn region played a tragic role in the history of migration to Ostrava: the first in 1919 after the cession of part of Czech Silesia to Poland, and the second after the Polish and German occupation of Cieszyn and Opava in September 1938 following the Munich Agreement. The German and Polish occupations prompted large population shifts. State employees were the first to leave after the Munich Agreement, followed by ordinary workers. For them, Ostrava was not a place of urban socialization, but rather the closest sanctuary and the first stop on the road to a new livelihood in the interior

22 Blanka Pitronová: Haličské migrace na Ostravsko, in: Studie o vývoji průmyslu a průmyslových oblastí 7 (1979); idem: Haličané na Ostravsku v 2. polovině 19. Století, in: Ostrava: sborník příspěvků k dějinám a výstavbě města 14 (1987), 86–117, 94: “the Galician migrations to the Ostrava region were characterized by huge fluctuations, which makes it utterly impossible to estimate the number of Galicians who came here for work. [. . . ]. The 1900 census, in which a total of 52 456 citizens native to Galicia were registered in the Moravian Silesia and Fryštát districts, thus captured only the momentary situation [. . . ] in the winter [. . . ], when seasonal workers, whose number in the Moravian Silesia district alone was estimated at 5 000 persons per year, were not present.” 23 Blažena Przybylová: Uprchlíci z Haliče na Ostravsku a jejich repatriace po ukončení Velké války, in: Ostrava: příspěvky k dějinám a současnosti Ostravy a Ostravska 24 (2009), 135–154. 24 Michal Sojčák: Nabývání československého státního občanství v letech 1918–1935: na příkladu politického okresu Moravská Ostrava, in: Ostrava: příspěvky k dějinám a současnosti Ostravy a Ostravska 24 (2009), 155–184.

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of Czechoslovakia – soon to become the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.²⁵ In addition to imperial Germans who worked in public and private administration and in aryanized enterprises, citizens of Germany’s allies, and prisoners of war, the war years also brought a variety of citizens of the Protectorate to Ostrava. The latter were either forcibly employed or sought to dodge forced labour in Germany.²⁶ The Holocaust and the Second World War deprived Ostrava of 8 000 Jews, some 25 000 Ostrava Germans, several thousand citizens from among the ranks of the politically, racially or ethnically persecuted, the victims of bombardments in August 1944, and those killed in the battles for liberation in the spring of 1945. Ostrava’s post-war renewal and subsequent socialist industrialization made the Ostrava industrial agglomeration an attractive destination once again (especially the socialist towns of Havířov and Ostrava-Poruba). The new ethnic minorities included ‘democratic’ Greeks and Macedonians (in 1958, approximately 6 000 of them lived in Ostrava), Eastern Slovak Roma (in 1980, 5 281 Roma lived in Ostrava, making it the third-largest Roma community in Czechoslovakia; the figure is approximately six times higher today), and Vietnamese, the first of whom appeared in Ostrava’s industrial plants in 1956 (Ostrava’s Vietnamese community numbers more than 2 531 inhabitants today).²⁷ Slovaks from non-industrial regions of eastern and north-eastern Slovakia predominated. The first Slovaks began to appear in the Ostrava region in the mid-nineteenth century in connection with a crisis in the Slovak mining and ore industries. Further Slovak migration was prompted by the completion of the Košice-Bohumín Railway (1872) and the establishment of Czechoslovakia (1918). The number of Slovaks in interwar Greater Ostrava can only be estimated (in 1930 there were 1 429 persons of Slovak origin in the Mora25 While there were 9 000 registered refugees in Moravian Ostrava in November 1938, this number had climbed to 24 000 refugees by June 1939. See Aleš Homan: Moravská Ostrava jako útočiště uprchlíků z německého a polského záboru na podzim 1938, in: Ostrava: příspěvky k dějinám a současnosti Ostravy a Ostravska 21 (2003), 221–239. 26 Šárka Glombíčková: Výchova k řádné práci podle německého vzoru: pracovně-výchovné tábory na území Ostravy v době nacistické okupace, in: Ostrava: příspěvky k dějinám a současnosti Ostravy a Ostravska 24 (2009), 41–63. 27 Angela Botu/Milan Konečný: Řečtí uprchlíci: kronika řeckého lidu v Čechách, na Moravě a ve Slezsku 1945–1989. Praha 2005, 215, 248–252, 313–314, 338, 342; Martin Jemelka: Ostravské dělnické kolonie na cestě od firemních sídlišť k sociálně vyloučeným romským lokalitám (1954– 1989), (forthcoming); idem: Ostrawskie kolonie robotnicze na drodze od osiedli firmowych do socjalnie wykluczonych osiedli romskich (1954-Ű1989), in: Szyszlak, Elźbieta – Szyszlak, Tomek (eds.), Kwestia romska w kontekście bezpieczeństwa wewnętrznego i międzynarodowego państwa. Wrocław 2013, 59–79; Ivan Motýl: Tavicí tyglík na řece Ostravici (osudy etnických menšin v Ostravě), in: Ivo Kaleta/Monika Horsáková/Pavel Hruška/Petr Hruška/Jan Malura (eds.), Bílá kniha ostravské kultury: 17 příběhů z ostravské kulturní historie. Ostrava 2009, 186–202.

80 | Martin Jemelka vian Ostrava political district, accounting for one per cent of the population), but in 1941, for example, the Vítkovice Ironworks employed 700 Slovaks, so their number was not insignificant. Most Slovaks came to the coalfield in search of work after the Second World War, however. Between 1960 and 1986, 38 000 people came to the Ostrava industrial agglomeration (in 1950, 9 477 Slovaks lived in the Ostrava district, and by 1980 their number had risen to 20 537).²⁸ From the mid-nineteenth century until 1972, Ostrava’s population grew as a result of the integration of neighbouring communities and the migration of people from rural parts of Austria-Hungary and its successor states, including Czechoslovakia. We can only speak of natural population growth from the beginning of the 1970s. Ostrava was the fastest-growing city in the Czech lands in the period between 1950 and 1970.²⁹ In the century from 1870 to 1970 Ostrava and its industrial hinterland absorbed various dialects, traditions, lifestyles, stereotypes and attitudes as a result of the arrival of people of diverse linguistic, cultural, political and ethnic backgrounds. Despite all its social and ethnic conflicts, Ostrava was one of many European industrial melting pots where a rural population was confronted with modern industrial society, consumer behaviour and new values. For providing it with a steady supply of labourers, Ostrava rewarded rural regions with social and political emancipation (interwar social democratic and communist organizations in rural communities), the rapid spread of consumer goods (mainly by means of an active cooperative movement), and knowledge of new construction methods – which quickly transformed the architectural form of Galician and (between the world wars) eastern Slovak communities.³⁰ A special opportunity for Ostrava’s population to ‘flee to the country’ and transplant its urban values there came in the years immediately following the Second World War, when several hundred Ostravians – mainly new pensioners and individuals approaching the end of their working life – participated in the settlement of the Moravian and Silesian border regions following the deportation of the German population. Thus, after two or three generations, the descendants of rural migrants returned to the Jeseník, Fulnek and Krnov areas, where they applied the experiences gained through urban socialization to a rural environment.³¹ 28 Radim Prokop/Jiří Kovář: Slovenské obyvatelstvo v ostravské průmyslové oblasti, in: Ostrava: příspěvky k dějinám a současnosti Ostravy a Ostravska 16 (1993), 55–89. 29 In 1950, Ostrava had 215 791 inhabitants; by 1980, this number had risen to 322 073 inhabitants. 30 Francziszek Bujak: Maszkienice, wieś powiatu brzeskiego. Kraków 1914, 37. The first concrete cellar in Maszkienice, Galicia, was built in 1902 by a former worker at a brick factory in Moravian Ostrava. 31 Martin Jemelka: Ostrava – město příchodů, in: Marina Feltlová/Radovan Lipus (eds.), Ostravské příchody: příběhy, osudy, cesty. Ostrava 2011, 5–16.

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IV Transformations of the industrial landscape Although Ostrava lacks the typical star-shaped structure of other European cities formed by railway networks, the railway spurred industrialization and urbanization in this region too. The construction of freight railways in the second half of the nineteenth century was essential for the development of local ironworks. The Ostrava industrial agglomeration also had a system of mining railways and sidings, which connected all the mines in the western part of the coalfield to the main railway line.³² In 1905, the mining railway had 34 kilometres of lines with 27 sidings.³³ Factory railways and industrial sidings marked the landscape of the Ostrava industrial agglomeration to a far greater extent than passenger railway lines. The latter only really began to serve a transport function in the first half of the 1920s, when passenger railway stations were built in most communities. Before the outbreak of the First World War, however, the area between Svinov, Bohumín and Doubrava already boasted a dense railway network by means of which thousands of rural migrants came in search of work.³⁴ Intensified passenger transport by rail in the years immediately after the First World War facilitated frequent trips home to the migrants’ native villages and greater interaction between towns and villages in the Ostrava industrial agglomeration. The completion of the tramway and local railway systems and the introduction of the first bus lines in the late 1920s and early 1930s also strengthened communication links between the industrial centre and its hinterland.³⁵ The pinnacle of transportation development was reached in 1935 with the first regular flights between Prague and Ostrava (an airport was built in the agricultural community of Hrabůvka).³⁶ The impact of this on shuttle migration was, however, minimal. At the beginning of the 1930s, 17 000–19 000 people were commuting daily to Moravian Ostrava from all of the surrounding districts with the exception of Český Těšín. Commuting to work was part of everyday life in the region.³⁷ The most audacious (and unrealized) plans to transform Ostrava’s industrial land-

32 Gawrecki, Průmyslové oblasti, 239. 33 Josef Hons (ed.): Čtení o Severní dráze Ferdinandově. Praha 1990, 116. 34 Jan Hříbek: Rozvoj železnic a územní rozsah ostravské průmyslové oblasti do 1. světové války, in: Slezský sborník 66 (1968), 164–181. 35 Karel Zmija: Doprava a komunikace v Ostravě, in: Ostrava: sborník příspěvků k dějinám a výstavbě města 13 (1985), 283–284. 36 Jiřík, Dějiny Ostravy, 306–307. 37 Steiner, Hospodářský vývoj, 165–168.

82 | Martin Jemelka scape foresaw the construction of motorways between Plzeň and Moravian Ostrava (1938) and between Brno and Moravian Ostrava (1941)³⁸, as well as a project to build an (Elbe-)Oder-Danube canal, the beginnings of which can be traced back to the first years of the twentieth century.³⁹ Between the world wars, when most of the route for the planned Oder-Danube canal was on Czechoslovak territory, the project was initially impeded by the newly drawn borders and a lack of capital, and later by an economic crisis and the breakdown of Czechoslovak-German relations. Although the canal, which would have transformed Greater Ostrava into an important port, played a key role in planning the future of Ostrava’s industry (importing Swedish ore, exporting Ostrava black coal), even under the Protectorate its construction stalled despite interest on the part of the German authorities in the Reich and Ostrava’s militarized industry.⁴⁰ Just as the railway had symbolized the industrialization and urbanization of the Ostrava industrial agglomeration at the turn of the twentieth century, the face of interwar Ostrava was changed and modernized by electricity, which after the First World War spread from industrial plants, public buildings and streetlights to workers’ colonies and most new buildings in the hinterland. Local mines and ironworks were already electrified at the end of the nineteenth century and began to supply residual electricity for public lighting and local lines before the First World War (in 1910, 90 per cent of Moravian Ostrava’s public lighting drew electricity from factory power plants).⁴¹ Shortly after the First World War, newly constructed workers’ houses and older workers’ colonies were connected to the electricity supply, and by the 1920s most newly built homes in the more rural parts of the Ostrava industrial agglomeration did not lack electricity either. While the speed with which urban communities in the Ostrava industrial agglomeration were electrified highlights differences between its urban and rural communities as regards their rate of modernization, by virtue of its decentralizing effect, electrification definitely contributed to improving standards of living in suburban and rural communities in the Ostrava region.

38 Leopold Jančar: Výstavba dálnice na Ostravsku, in: Ostrava: příspěvky k dějinám a současnosti Ostravy a Ostravska 24 (2009), 349–352. 39 For details, see Ivan Jakubec’ contribution to this volume. 40 Andělín Grobelný: Projekty odersko-dunajského průplavu a československo-německá jednání v meziválečném období, in: Ostrava: sborník příspěvků k dějinám a výstavbě města 10 (1979), 312–334; idem: Úvahy o projektech trasy odersko-dunajského průplavu na Ostravsku v době nacistické okupace, in: Ostrava: sborník příspěvků k dějinám a výstavbě města 12 (1983), 159–165. 41 Oldřiška Nejedlá: K počátkům důlního elektrárenství v OKR, in: Slezský sborník 71 (1973), 103; Gawrecki, Průmyslové oblasti, 247.

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In addition to the benefits of a transportation network and electrification, the interwar period also brought environmental problems, particularly to the urban population of the Ostrava industrial agglomeration. While rural communities far away from the centre of the industrial area were not greatly affected by pollution, from the end of the nineteenth century the heart of the industrial area was afflicted with an ecological burden, as evidenced by irreversible geomorphological changes (heaps of extracted stone with coal residues, sumps, lagoons of stagnating water in topological depressions following mining activity, etc.), air contaminated with waste products, and polluted waterways as a result of hydroelectricity generation.⁴² At the end of the nineteenth century, the Lučina, Opava and Ostravice rivers, as well as smaller waterways, brooks and mill gullies were already called “fetid gutters” by the Ostrava press across the political spectrum. For the most part, however, the emissions of industrial enterprises were not a target of public criticism between the world wars. Even former residents of interwar Ostrava who deny that there were significant ecological problems in the city between the world wars recall that windows had to be cleaned frequently due to the dirt from the emissions of mining companies.⁴³ With the exception of the Karolina industrial site, which combined mining operations with coking and chemical production, the emissions of industrial factories were perceived as a normal symptom of industrial production, not as a problem worthy of public discussion. Town councillors had already protested against the ecological burden of the Karolina Coking Plant in the mid-nineteenth century, but they were ignored in the face of the dictates of industry.⁴⁴ It was only at the close of the socialist epoch, in 1989, that the coal refinery of the Karolina Coking Plant was finally demolished. In the twentieth century, industrial emissions widened the gap between polluted industrial Ostrava and the ecologically less impacted countryside in the hinterland. Moreover, the noise of continuously operating industrial plants and the endless clamour of electrical mining equipment also polluted Ostrava’s environment. Local teachers even complained that their pupils were distracted by the ubiquitous din of factory machinery.⁴⁵ It is no wonder that in interwar regional

42 Milan Myška: Uhelný průmysl a počátky devastace životního prostředí na Ostravsku, in: Rozpravy Národního technického muzea v Praze: Studie z dějin hornictví. Volume 17, Praha 1985, 112–113. 43 Jemelka, Lidé z kolonií, 517. 44 Miloslav Kroček: První důlní exploze a první důlní škody v Moravské Ostravě, in: Ostrava: sborník k dějinám Ostravy a Ostravska 24 (2009), 493–510. 45 Fond: Měšťanská škola chlapecká Moravská Ostrava – V. okres, Kronika občanských škol chlapecké a dívčí v Moravské Ostravě v V. okresu ‘na Hlubině’ in: Archiv města Ostravy (inv. č. 1, karton č. 1), 16–17.

84 | Martin Jemelka literature the ever-present noise of the mining operations, the stench of the chemical plants and the fumes from the smelteries and ironworks evoked the image of a ‘black Ostrava’ in contrast to the idyllic, ecologically unsullied countryside.

V Agriculture in the town, industry in the countryside The spatial dictates of situating production and extraction operations in the immediate vicinity of raw materials and energy sources meant that fields and fishponds in the Ostrava region were already being replaced by production facilities with road and rail connections in the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet agriculture did not completely disappear, even at the very centre of the Ostrava industrial agglomeration. Although statistics suggest that agricultural production receded into the background in the professional structure of Ostrava’s population from the 1890s onwards, particularly in the districts of Moravian and Silesian Ostrava, old maps and the memories of Ostrava’s residents suggest otherwise.⁴⁶ While in 1930, agriculture as a profession sustained only one per cent of the inhabitants of Moravian Ostrava and two per cent of the inhabitants of neighbouring Silesian Ostrava, extensive undeveloped plots of marginally fertile and in some cases even contaminated soil at the very centre of the city were used for small-scale supplemental agriculture or for cultivating vegetables and fruit.⁴⁷ All households in workers’ colonies had a vegetable garden, and the residents of the colonies even had rented plots for cultivating vegetables and grain to make bread. Milík Gaj (1931–2005) described the situation during the 1930s in the Šalomoun Colony in Moravian Ostrava, approximately one kilometre from the city’s main square, as follows: Each employee of the pit or coking plant was automatically entitled to a field. For a small fee, the pit even provided a plough and horse to break the ground. The plots were seeded with grain or partially with potatoes and other vegetables. The pit also organized the scything of the rye or barley. There were four barns in

46 Myška, K vymezení ostravské, 131. In 1900, in the political district of Moravian Ostrava with 87 126 inhabitants, just 5.35 per cent of the economically active population earned their living in agriculture (68 per cent worked in industry), while in the neighbouring district of Místek, 37.4 per cent of the economically active population worked in agriculture and 45.5 per cent in industry; Steiner, Hospodářský vývoj, 158–163. 47 Jiřík, Dějiny Ostravy, 307–315.

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the fields between the colonies of Šalomoun and Hlubina, and there were threshers and winnowers in those barns. The barns belonged to various factories – one to the Hlubina mine, the second to the Karolina Coking Plant, the third barn belonged to the Šalomoun pit and the fourth barn belonged to the electrical switchboard.⁴⁸ Small-scale agriculture and the cultivation of vegetables were not limited to dedicated land in the workers’ colonies and their surroundings, but also included undeveloped parcels of land in residential developments, as was the case with the expansive gardens of the Bulgarian farmers who dominated Ostrava’s fruit and vegetable market from the 1920s to the 1960s.⁴⁹ Especially during the Great Depression and the Second World War, when a rationing system and stricter controls on domestic animal breeding were introduced, the importance of supplemental agriculture increased. “We often had up to 40 rabbits!” recalls Milík Gaj of the Protectorate years.⁵⁰ Small-scale agriculture also helped the residents of Ostrava’s workers’ colonies from the countryside to acclimatize to the industrial environment. However, the authorities put an end to it at the beginning of the 1960s, when they banned domesticated animal breeding and vegetable cultivation in workers’ colonies. Working-class pensioners in the colonies were loath to give up their small fields and farms. At the beginning of the 1960s it was still the case that “any miner who doesn’t have a field or garden will try to acquire a piece of land anywhere to farm the soil.”⁵¹ But agricultural production in industrial Ostrava was not just the domain of workers with vegetable gardens and small fields on land purchased by industrial enterprises; it was also pursued by urban communities in order to supplement the slowly developing food industry, which had to supply two hundred thousand inhabitants with food.⁵² In addition to operating a municipal slaughterhouse and the Central Dairy in Přívoz (1924), in 1926 the authorities in Moravian Ostrava

48 Gaj, Všecko mělo svůj smysl, 248. 49 In 1921, when the Moravian Ostrava cadastral territory comprised 775 hectares, the residents of the five local mining colonies cultivated approximately one tenth of that area. See Statistický lexikon obcí v Republice Československé: úřední seznam míst podle zákona ze dne 14. dubna 1920 čís. 266 Sb. zák. a nař., II – Morava a Slezsko. Praha 1924, 97; Martin Jemelka (ed.), Ostravské dělnické kolonie I: závodní kolonie kamenouhelných dolů a koksoven v moravské části Ostravy. Ostrava 2011, 218–219, 253–254, 288–298, 340. The five mining colonies boasted 2.24 hectares of vegetable gardens. 50 Gaj, Všecko mělo svůj smysl, 248. 51 Jitka Noušová: Bydlení horníků na Ostravsku a v OKR, in: Olga Skalníková (ed.), Ostravsko. Praha: ÚEF ČSAV. Unpublished manuscript 1968, 1–2, 32–39. 52 In 1930, the Ostrava industrial agglomeration had 194 246 inhabitants, while Greater Ostrava’s population was 125 304 persons. See Jiřík, Dějiny Ostravy, 307–315.

86 | Martin Jemelka began to lease the former Rothschild manor in Hošťálkovice, on whose pastures it kept more than one hundred dairy cows to produce milk for Ostrava’s hospitals, orphanages and poorhouses.⁵³ Between 1919 and 1932, the town of Mariánské Hory also owned and operated a farmstead with land and cattle.⁵⁴ While the communal farmsteads, vegetable gardens and rented plots were reminders of the Ostrava industrial agglomeration’s agrarian roots in the interwar period, small industrial plants in rural communities were unmistakeable signs of the region’s new industrial face. The industrialization of the previously agrarian region gave rise to so-called ‘iron-tilling villages’, which I examine more closely below, and dotted the entire Ostrava industrial agglomeration with mining plants and industrial enterprises in smaller communities, which were linked by waterways to coal deposits and energy sources. Fourteen of the agglomeration’s thirtyseven mining plants (as well as eight coking plants and three mining power stations) were located in rural communities in 1929, and of the thirty-three communities that today constitute the Statutory City of Ostrava, only twelve were without an industrial plant.⁵⁵ The establishment of mines and smaller production plants in related industrial sectors (engineering plants, chemical plants, brick factories, etc.) radically changed rural communities in the Ostrava region. Industrialization recast the socio-professional structure of the population (the phenomenon of iron-tilling) and the form of the communities (workers’ colonies and districts); it improved the transport situation in the region by linking communities to key railway lines and roads; and in many cases it led to an utter transformation of the original rural societies as a result of economic migration. This was especially striking in the eastern part of the region, where Galician migration in the last decades of the nineteenth century transformed the previously Czech communities into Polish-speaking villages, which supported Poland’s territorial claims after the First World War. However, rural communities with remnants of agricultural production maintained their traditional socio-economic functions vis-à-vis urban communities during the interwar years and played the role of food suppliers to the urban population. Communal and factory markets were still supplied with small domesticated animals, eggs and dairy products by rural vendors, who were still regular visitors to urban markets even after the Second World War:⁵⁶

53 Ibid., 275. 54 Antonín Barcuch/Eva Rohlová: Místopis starých Mariánských Hor (pokračování), in: Ostrava: příspěvky k dějinám a současnosti Ostravy a Ostravska 23 (2007), 230. 55 Kamenouhelné doly ostravsko-karvinského revíru. Moravská Ostrava 1929, 9–10; Jiřík, Dějiny Ostravy, 492–604. 56 Skalníková, Problém Ostravska, 358–365.

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My brother and I used to walk to Mariánské Hory every day, where our grandmother would arrive from Velká Polom to deliver milk. She had two horses and would ride from Velká Polom all the way to Mariánské Hory, to roughly the place where the House of Energy stands today. Grandmother would arrive alone and she would have a jug of milk. She started in Hulváky and sold milk along the way. Not to shops – she had her own gig. People just walked up with their little pots. She had the appropriate measuring glass and just dipped into the jug, poured and collected the money.⁵⁷

VI Workers’ colonies From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, workers’ colonies, the company housing estates of local industrial plants, were among the most visible manifestations of industrialization in the Ostrava industrial agglomeration. Most of these colonies were established by mining and metallurgical companies.⁵⁸ The ‘cottage housing’ typical of industrial regions in Western Europe was also common in the Ostrava region before 1900. Rather than barrack-style housing, semi-detached and quarter-detached houses (for officials and workers respectively) became the most common types of company housing. This was a conscious social strategy on the part of the management of industrial plants, which aimed to facilitate the acclimatization of migrants from rural areas. Shortly before 1900, a new type of housing began to be built for workers and officials in the Ostrava industrial agglomeration: two- or four-storey residential buildings with eight or twelve apartment units accessible by a central staircase or outdoor gallery. This accommodation, which included essential farming land, conformed to the requirements of modern sanitation, and its exterior was urban rather than agrarian in character. These buildings were the most common type of worker housing until the Second World War, when multi-storey blocks began to appear in Ostrava and its industrial agglomeration, often forming new areas in workers’ colonies (e.g. the so-called Old and New Šalomoun Colonies in Moravian Ostrava).⁵⁹ While these newly built workers’ colonies were not without farmland, the anthropological type of the working-class family home with a garden receded as contemporary urbanistic trends gained greater currency. The construction of workers’ housing in the interwar years culminated in several workers’ housing

57 Gaj, Všecko mělo svůj smysl, 273. 58 Martin Jemelka: Z havířských kolonií aneb Jak se žilo havířským rodinám. Ostrava 2008, 5–6. 59 Idem: Na Šalomouně: společnost a každodenní život v největší moravskoostravské hornické kolonii (1870–1950). Ostrava 2008, 37.

88 | Martin Jemelka estates built in the spirit of garden cities, such as the Forest Settlement of Hohenegger Mine in Karviná (1914–1922), the Anniversary Colony of Zárubek Mine in Ostrava-Kunčičky (1928–1941), and the Anniversary Colony of the Vítkovice Ironworks in Ostrava-Hrabůvka (1921–1950). But even these modern workers’ colonies retained a semi-rural character, and they kept their residents in touch with the natural world through the presence of farmland. In the context of the expropriation of farmland at the beginning of the 1960s and the deterioration of existing housing, young families and even working-class pensioners, for whom the semiurban/semi-rural way of life in the workers’ colonies was an advantage, ultimately began to abandon them.⁶⁰ Ostrava’s workers’ colonies, however, were not merely the victim of socialist urban planning and the ideology of socialist cities. The first serious plans for the across-the-board demolition of workers’ settlements – at least in the vicinity of what is today the centre of Ostrava – were already hatched between the two world wars, for example, when work commenced on designs for the multi-storey Na Šalomouně estate.⁶¹ The widespread perception of older workers’ colonies as out of date in the rapidly transforming urban organism of Greater Ostrava is clear in the Silesian Ostrava City Council’s dispute with the Anthracite Coal Mines and Coking Plant in Silesian Ostrava, which planned to renovate the Kamenec Mining Colony. Kamenec was one of the most antiquated workers’ colonies in Silesian Ostrava, and the City Council rejected the proposed reconstruction project on the grounds that the colony should be replaced with multi-storey buildings commensurate with contemporary communal and private development projects. The enterprise got its way, however, and Kamenec was reconstructed between 1923 and 1937 as a rural settlement of single-storey buildings in closed blocks. Thus, the rural appearance of the mining colony jarred with the surrounding urban development until the late 1960s, especially when the New Town Hall – interwar Ostrava’s most representative communal building – was built across the river in Moravian Ostrava in 1930.⁶² While workers’ colonies with their antiquated infrastructure and poor roads increasingly contrasted with their more urban surroundings, the social structure

60 J. Š.: Vidíte, jak se za ty roky dostane člověku ostravská mluva do krve? in: Jemelka, Lidé z kolonií, 515–516: “Living in a colony is still better than living in a panel housing estate. What do you want to do in a panel housing estate? And especially in the winter! I’d feel like a caged tiger. Don’t come to me with a panel housing estate, Jesus Christ! After all, a person needs movement and has to have some interests, don’t you think?” 61 Jemelka, Na Šalomouně, 34–36, 141, 244. 62 Martin Jemelka: Kamenec, in: Martin Jemelka (ed.), Ostravské dělnické kolonie II: závodní kolonie kamenouhelných dolů a koksoven ve slezské části Ostravy. Ostrava 2012, 495–524, 505–506.

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of such colonies and the circumstances of the people who lived there rapidly approached the population profile and lifestyles typical of the more urban parts of Greater Ostrava. Between the world wars, workers’ colonies were no longer as socially and professionally homogeneous as they had been before 1918; the ratio of males to females evened out; employment among women rose sharply, as did the literacy of the entire population; and the structure of households and families – including the number of children – was comparable to that in the city centre. In the population structure of workers’ colonies, people born in or near the colonies soon outnumbered people from rural districts. Around the time of the First World War, a stratum of patrician residents emerged in the colonies, which was not only a guarantor of social control, but also the motor of a thriving communal life. There was probably no mining colony on either bank of the Ostravice river whose residents were not organized into trade unionist, political, philosophical, cultural, physical education or sports organizations. Indeed, many of these organizations were based in the colonies themselves, thus bringing city and colony residents together and sometimes even extending across regional boundaries.⁶³ While the residents of Ostrava’s workers’ colonies were already well aware that the quality of the housing stock there was becoming antiquated in the interwar years, they appreciated the communitarian way of life in the workers’ colonies, the affordability of company housing in comparison to rents in communal or private residential buildings, and their semi-rural character with the best of both urban and rural worlds. The fact that the colonies’ roads were not used by public transport meant that children could play on them safely and the era of street socialization (Strassensozialization) was thus extended.⁶⁴ The modern world penetrated Ostrava’s colonies gradually, mainly in the form of consumerist leisure activities (many working-class households owned a primitive radio receiver by the end of the 1930s) and increasingly frequent changes in ready-made apparel. During the interwar years the colonies opened up not only to the urban environment with which they were to merge, but also to the rural environment to which they mediated modernizing trends through family ties. On the one hand, workers’ colony residents were spending more and more leisure time outside of the colonies in the municipal library, at the theatre and at sport and recreational amenities,

63 Martin Jemelka: Společenský, spolkový a politický život v Šalomounské kolonii v Moravské Ostravě (1873–1945), in: Ostrava: sborník k dějinám Ostravy a Ostravska 23 (2007), 326–359; Martin Jemelka: Spolkový a společenský život v Hlubinské kolonii v Moravské Ostravě, in: Jakub Macek (ed.), Člověk – kultura – media. Ostrava 2011, 4–13. 64 On the topic of street socialization, see, for example, Imbke Behnken/Manuela du BoisReymond/Jürgen Zinnecker: Stadtgeschichte als Kindheitsgeschichte: Lebensräume von Großstadtkindern in Deutschland und Holland um 1900. Opladen 1989, 11–13.

90 | Martin Jemelka and on the other hand thanks to better public transport and shorter working hours they were also spending more leisure time in the countryside, be it with relatives or in company sanatoria.⁶⁵ Before the outbreak of the Second World War, Ostrava’s workers’ colonies formed a connecting link between the metropolitan environment of Greater Ostrava and its rural hinterland. In the autumn of 1938, following the annexation of Czech Cieszyn Silesia, workers’ colonies absorbed thousands of refugees from the annexed territory, together with local schools and Sokol Houses. After the Second World War, by contrast, many families left workers’ colonies in Ostrava for the border regions, where still occupied and already abandoned German farmsteads awaited new settlers.⁶⁶ Ostrava’s colonies played the role of paternalistic housing estates, whose population was to be (re-)socialized and ultimately assimilated once again after 1955 when the first Eastern Slovak Roma – whose presence led to the era of statist paternalism – began to appear in Ostrava’s workers’ colonies. In the last third of the twentieth century, rural Roma from settlements in eastern Slovakia thus – as the residents of soon to be demolished or still extant workers’ colonies – underwent a process similar to that undergone by the first generation of residents of Ostrava’s colonies, for whom the company housing estate was a space of civilization and acculturation along the lines of corporate paternalism.⁶⁷

VII Iron-tilling villages Ostrava’s iron-tilling villages (kovorolnické obce) – rural communities whose residents worked in industrial plants and tilled small plots at the same time – have not received much scholarly attention. Yet it was these very iron-tilling villages that represented an important transitional type of human settlement in the process of the Ostrava region’s industrialization and urbanization. They had one foot in the traditional agrarian hinterland and the other in the industrial world of modern society. Iron-tilling villages were thus a product of the interaction between the industrial centre and its agricultural hinterland. The character of agricultural communities in the vicinity of today’s Ostrava, whose population worked on local estates belonging to aristocratic families en-

65 Gaj, Všecko mělo svůj smysl, 266–267. 66 Ludmila Kleinová: Když jablko, tak rajské, když nevěstu, tak z Prajské, in: Jemelka, Lidé z kolonií, 375–376. 67 Jemelka, Ostravské dělnické kolonie na cestě od firemních sídlišť, (forthcoming); idem: Ostrawskie kolonie robotnicze na drodze od osiedli firmowych, 59–79.

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gaged in the coal and iron industries (the Larisch-Moennichs, the Rothschilds, the Wilczeks), began to change from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The structure of settlement was transformed under the influence of industrialization and urbanization, and villages that had formerly been based solely on agriculture became involved in the mining and metallurgy industries. Simple one-street villages expanded in all directions. Houses were often built along roads leading to fields or neighbouring communities, and villages thus acquired the shape of a star or cross with their core in the old village square. In villages with extensive accommodation for workers or even workers’ colonies, new centres of settlement emerged with their own civic amenities. Between the world wars, new rural centres also developed along roads and railway lines (Hrušov, Krásné Pole, the surroundings of Třinec, the Cieszyn region), mostly to the consternation of farmers, who resisted the construction of workers’ cottage housing outside the original core of the rural community. Workers’ colonies (Kunčičky, Michálkovice, Radvanice) were a particularly visible intervention into the everyday lives of rural communities. The residents of these colonies – unlike the more conservative country folk – were more inclined to choose modern interior furnishings for their homes, in the spirit of bourgeois households. Thus, after 1900 the interiors of workers’ homes in colonies located in towns and in the countryside did not differ significantly.⁶⁸ The definitive transformation of the agricultural hinterland of today’s Ostrava came between the world wars with the land reform and the transformation of Greater Ostrava into a regional capital and an important administrative and cultural centre of the Moravian-Silesian Region. Improvements to the local transport network played a major role in this process, with tramways and local railways forming the basis of the municipal public transport system.⁶⁹ The expansion of municipal and suburban public transport not only shortened commute times for the residents of Ostrava’s suburban communities, but also had an impact on the development of small industrial enterprises in iron-tilling villages. The greatest industrial investment of the interwar years was made in the iron-tilling community of Třebovice, where construction began in 1931 on a steam power plant, which was built there due to the proximity of a railway connection, coalmines and the Opava river. The plant – Czechoslovakia’s largest steam power station – was completed in 1939 and expanded between 1950 and 1955.⁷⁰

68 Ibid., 1–2, 32–39; Jitka Noušová: Bydlení v Ostravsko-karvinském revíru: materiálová zpráva z výzkumu, in: Časopis Slezského muzea B 14 (1965), 64–66; idem: Bydlení horníků na Ostravsku a v OKR, in: Olga Skalníková (ed.), Ostravsko. Praha 1968, unpublished manuscript, 1–2, 32–39. 69 Jiřík, Dějiny Ostravy, 597–599. 70 Ibid., 603.

92 | Martin Jemelka While an improved transport system certainly tied the iron-tilling villages in Ostrava’s hinterland to the centre of the Ostrava industrial agglomeration, the land reform also supported the development of small-scale agriculture, accelerated the rate of construction, and – until the imposition of socialist collectivization – preserved social relationships in these communities. The land reform was introduced on the territory of today’s Ostrava in two waves between 1921 and 1928 and affected land belonging to the estates of several aristocratic families. In certain communities, the parcelling out of large estates was a fundamental impulse for construction. In Antošovice, for example, seventeen houses were built between 1921 and 1940 as a result of the land reform, and the number of residents there grew from 142 people in 1921 to 230 in 1940.⁷¹ Interwar development on the territory of iron-tilling villages, whose residents brought knowledge of modern construction technologies and materials from Ostrava’s urban districts, significantly improved the quality of rural housing, whether in new workers’ villa districts, cooperative districts, or districts built with the financial assistance of an employer. Private housing remained an unaffordable dream for many workers, however. While the Silesian Building Code dating from the end of the nineteenth century permitted them to build in almost any location, speculation in real estate had driven up the prices of building land to dizzying heights. The land reform freed up the real estate market, however, and together with greater knowledge of modern construction technologies, this contributed significantly to the improvement of housing in rural Ostrava. However, the better-quality housing in the new rural developments owned by workers and iron-tillers only deepened the differences between them and the rural population engaged in agriculture – between the world wars this was limited to livestock production (flax production ceased) and lagged increasingly behind agricultural production in traditional agrarian regions. Despite all the efforts to modernize agriculture, the Ostrava region remained technically antiquated and socially conservative until the peak of collectivization in the second half of the 1950s.⁷² While only six communities in what is now Ostrava were not affected by a wave of immigration in the decades around 1900 (Antošovice, Krásné Pole, Martinov, Proskovice, Pustkovec and Výškovice), even these communities had a pronounced iron-tilling character between the world wars, because they were dominated by workers in Ostrava’s mining, metallurgical and chemical industries who also engaged in farming activities. After the Second World War, the history of these

71 Ibid., 492–493. 72 Jitka Noušová: Bydlení horníků na Ostravsku a v OKR, 64–66; Antonín Robek: Výzkum způsobu života a kultury horníků v Doubravě, in: Radostná země 5 (1955), 30–32.

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and other communities was significantly affected by the deportation of the German population, the aforementioned departure of Czech citizens for the border regions, and the construction of huge industrial plants. In Bartovice, for example, 49 houses were demolished to create 207 hectares for the construction of Nová huť after 1949. The redevelopment of Poruba as a socialist mining city for 150 000 residents after 1951 is an isolated case. As Czechoslovak ethnologists investigating communal life in this model socialist city pointed out in the mid-1960s, however, the residents of so-called Stará Poruba (Old Paruba) continued to embrace a conservative way of life typical of traditional rural society.⁷³

VIII The literary image of Ostrava and the Ostrava countryside The current media image of ‘black’ Ostrava as an industrial city of coal, iron and steel and strenuous, monotonous labour was created around the time of the First World War in the press and in the fiction of the journalist, writer and playwright František Sokol-Tůma (1855–1925) and his contemporaries.⁷⁴ The writer and playwright Alois Mrštík (1865–1921) wrote the following description of the city in August 1896: Ostrava is a ghastly monster, a hell of the nineteenth century. Day in and day out, it gobbles up all those heaps of black meat and day in and day out it heaves out twice as much. At that moment it is pathetic. At night, like an antediluvian monster, it spews out sulphur and fire through a thousand nostrils and writhes frantically towards the heavens in myriad flaming tongues. I would like to deport all the Czech Oblomovs into its belly, and myself as punishment, at least once a year for a month. It’s no wonder that Franck’s lungs began to ache in Ostrava. I felt anxious there.⁷⁵

Two months earlier, Alois’s brother, Vilém Mrštík (1863–1912), also a man of letters, characterized Ostrava in similar terms:

73 Vanda Tůmová: K rodinným tradicím na Ostravsku – děti v rodině, in: Český lid 56 (1969), 201–210. 74 For more on this issue, see Martin Jemelka: Ostravské dělnické kolonie optikou krásné literatury: od obžaloby kapitalistického systému po obhajobu starých časů, in: Pavel Kladiwa/Aleš Zářický (eds.), Město a městská společnost v procesu modernizace 1740–1918. Ostrava 2009, 80– 102, 373–374, 390–391. 75 Rudolf Havel/Ladislav Kuncíř: Nedosněné sny: korespondence bratří Mrštíků. Praha 1978, 81.

94 | Martin Jemelka It was early evening when I arrived in Moravian Ostrava. I had already heard much about that horrible city with two worlds, with what lives above ground and debauches at the expense of those who languish beneath it. [. . . ] but when the train arrived and all around that forest bristled, huge like poles of smokestacks stretching into the sky, as though embedded into a single mass of coagulated smoke, one was startled by this bleak picture of the places from whence, like the stench of corpses in a graveyard, rose a disgusting, suffocating cloud of coal. [. . . ] A ghastly place. Huge graves of living people, a molten throat in the image of Baal, into whose insatiable jaws several victims are placed each day. [. . . ]. It is enough to inhale just a few breaths of this horrid air, which sustains everyone in this complex of countless shafts, and the soul powerless in its protest flees from the clamorous roar of factory whistles, the rumble of carts, the thundering of wheels, and seeks a nook where it can arrange and appease everything within itself – and it cannot find one.⁷⁶

The concepts of hell, fire, smoke, sulphur, an overwhelming stench, darkness, smokestacks, rumbling and roaring, and the world above ground and beneath it became obligatory components of accounts of the Ostrava milieu, and we still encounter them in more recent contributions to the tradition of the Ostrava novel. In addition to detailed descriptions of the atmosphere of Ostrava, as well as the city’s workers, industrialists, or dubious figures on the fringe of society, the contrast journalists and writers drew between the metropolitan industrial centre and the idyllic rural surroundings untouched by modernization played a key role in shaping the literary and media image of Ostrava and the Ostrava region in the pre-war and interwar periods: When a lad from the mountains or a village somewhere finds work in a smeltery or a mine, it’s as if they’d conscripted him. He can’t return home every day if he’s from somewhere near Cieszyn or Frýdlant – and so he comes home every now and then, depending on when he has time off. And when he comes home and they ask him where he lives, he says: “Where else but in barracks!”⁷⁷

Ostrava was compared with American cities. Its ‘American’ features were seen in the utilitarianism of industrial labour and business and in a sort of freedom of thought, tolerance and openness to everything new, which was attributed to the high proportion of migrants in the city. Thus, in his articles from the years 1934 to 1938, the radio reporter, journalist and writer Josef Filgas (1908–1981) described Ostrava as an eternal vagabond that never sleeps, as a city of abandoned mines, slag heaps, dumps, drinking holes, pawn shops, houses of ill repute, forgotten workers’ canteens, of people on the fringe of society, taxi drivers and people seek-

76 Vilém Mrštík: Cesty do Ruska: listy z Nižního Novgorodu 1896. Praha 1992, 8–11. 77 Josef Filgas: Zapomenutá Ostrava. Ostrava 2007, 162.

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ing work and passing time in cinemas during the economic crisis.⁷⁸ While the city’s recent electrification was a symbol of its modernization, the forest on the periphery of the city was one of the last witnesses to its agricultural character. While writers tended to describe the countryside at the foot of the Beskid Mountains in idyllic terms, emphasizing the simplicity, moral clarity and patriarchal order of traditional rural society, in the socialist press, the countryside in the hinterland of the Ostrava industrial agglomeration and further afield was the butt of criticism at the end of the nineteenth century and between the world wars. On the pages of Duch času, a social democratic periodical published between 1899 and 1938, the rural communities of the Ostrava industrial agglomeration were criticized regularly for their alleged clerical reactionism, insufficient organization of the rural workforce, and encouragement of a nationalist struggle with Germans and Poles. Appeals to follow the ideals of the Socialist International alternated with ridicule of bigoted Catholics and obstinate Lutherans, not to mention criticism of the religious conflicts with a nationalist background that broke out in the Ostrava region in the early 1920s in connection with the establishment of national Churches and a growing atheist movement.⁷⁹ The conflict over Cieszyn Silesia that broke out in the period from 1918 to 1920 and again from 1938 to 1939 turned the countryside into a battlefield on which the fate of the Ostrava industrial agglomeration was decided. During the disputes over Cieszyn Silesia, Ostrava’s Czech-language press across the political spectrum helped revive anti-Polish feeling and stereotypes of Galicians. For rural Galicians, the Ostrava region had been a promised land since the 1880s – whether they had settled in Ostrava or spent a short time there before returning to Galicia or emigrating to the United States. The Galicians and their rural origins became the object of an indiscriminate media campaign in Ostrava at the very beginning of the twentieth century, when the economic crisis at the end of 1900 put them out of work. As an ethnically detached group (unlike the German-oriented Galician Jews), they became the target of a fierce nationalist struggle. Prominent Ostrava periodicals of liberal, Christian-social and socialist persuasions decried widespread Galician illiteracy, the violent crimes allegedly perpetrated by young unemployed Galicians, the ethnic detachment of Galician

78 Ibid., 104. 79 Moravian Ostrava was an interwar centre of Czechoslovak atheism, while neighbouring Silesian Ostrava and Radvanice were centres of Spiritism. See Martin Jemelka: The Social Democratic Atheist Movement in Interwar Ostravsko, in: Lukáš Fasora/Jiří Hanus/Jiří Malíř (eds.), Secularization and the Working Class: The Czech Lands and Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century. Eugene 2011, 174–192.

96 | Martin Jemelka migrants, and the alleged bigoted Catholicism of Galician women.⁸⁰ In 1901, the writer Antonín Hořínek (1879–1960) described Galicians in the same spirit as the daily press.⁸¹ In his novella, an uneducated and naive Galician youth – a devoted Roman Catholic – is cast into the whirlwind of big city life and its political squabbles. He subsequently abandons the faith of his forefathers and succumbs to alcohol. In a novel by František Sokol-Tůma, the Galician countryside is represented by Germanized, greedy and intolerant Galician Jews on the one hand, and poor, uneducated and easily manipulated rural Galicians on the other.⁸² In the interwar years, references to Galicia, Galicians and the Galician countryside in the press and in works of fiction provoked a mixture of pity and abhorrence. Galician Jews were the targets of everyday anti-Semitism before they were transported to concentration camps in October 1939.⁸³ Cultural and linguistic differences remained until the end of World War I, when the dissolution of Austria-Hungary and the post-war issue of state citizenship placed Ostrava’s Polish-speaking Galicians under pressure to assimilate in the young Czechoslovak Republic. If at the turn of the twentieth century Ostrava and its surrounding industrial communities were a place for social advancement for Galicians, and if Galicians were at that time seen by the local population as an uneducated and politically unconscious slave labour force, after the First World War Ostrava became a space of rapid assimilation for Galicians, who increasingly reminded Ostravians of the young republic’s post-war ethnic and territorial disputes. None of the locals doubted the significance of Galician labour migration, however; the Galicians were too deeply rooted in Ostrava’s everyday reality and in the imaginary world of the social novel.⁸⁴

80 Hana Šústková: Haličské imigrační vlny do Moravské Ostravy a jejich odraz na stránkách českého denního tisku a krásné literatury na počátku 20. století, in: Pavel Kladiwa/Aleš Zářický (eds.), Město a městská společnost v procesu modernizace 1740–1918. Ostrava 2009, 71–79. 81 Ostravsko-přívozské noviny 6.01.1901, č. 1, 1: “Hundreds and hundreds of workers, who arrived here from distant Galicia without money but with their souls still intact, will find their ruin in the mud of vice. The plague of distilled spirits, which perhaps thrives more here in the Ostrava region than anywhere else, casts hundreds and hundreds of families into poverty and want, fills the jails, murders the body and soul, enslaves the people and turns them into hyenas – monsters, from whom decent people flee [...] for fear of being roughed up.” 82 František Sokol-Tůma: V záři milionů. Moravská Ostrava 1913. 83 Mečislav Borák: Transport do tmy: první deportace evropských Židů. Ostrava 1994. 84 Jiří Stano: Křížová cesta tří Františkánů. Praha 2001.

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IX Conclusion Between 1918 and 1945 the Ostrava industrial agglomeration – the third-largest industrial agglomeration in the Czech lands after Prague and Brno – underwent another transformative wave, which turned it into a major industrial, cultural and, to a lesser extent, administrative metropolis. In this period, the process of urbanization in the Ostrava industrial agglomeration was completed; the local coal, metallurgy and iron industries were reorganized and modernized; and Greater Ostrava was transformed into a vast construction site for public buildings and communal infrastructure. The city’s population continued to grow as a result of the integration of nearby communities and the migration of people from rural areas, whose social and cultural orientation and customs found expression in the cultural fabric of the agglomeration. Not even the enthusiastic optimism that accompanied socialist industrialization after 1947 eliminated the proclivity of Ostrava’s workforce for rural living in workers’ colonies. The demolition of the latter was carried out for reasons of sanitation and – from an ideological perspective – in order to banish the most visible remnants of capitalist social policy from the Ostrava region. In the context of the post-war housing crisis and impetuous socialist industrialization, however, the workers’ colonies came to accommodate a disparate mix of people including working-class pensioners, young families waiting to be allocated an apartment, and – from the 1950s – Roma migrants from eastern Slovakia. While there are still workers’ colonies in Ostrava and they are still occupied, collectivization in the second half of the twentieth century dealt a fatal blow to the last remnants of private agricultural production in the Ostrava agglomeration. However, neither collectivization nor the cessation of small-scale farming in the city in the first half of the 1960s could eradicate the agrarian influences of most of Ostrava’s residents. In the last third of the twentieth century, undeveloped areas in tenement and panel housing estates were still being used to cultivate ornamental plants as well as vegetables; balconies in some panel buildings were transformed into improvised gardens with small domesticated animals; and, as in other large cities in post-war Czechoslovakia, there was a hunger for allotments in garden colonies. While the haphazard expansion of the road and public transport networks eliminated the spatial differences between the industrialized and the rural landscapes of the Ostrava industrial agglomeration, the post-war departure of Ostravians for the border regions after the deportation of the German population, and the mass construction of cottage settlements in the nearby Beskid Mountains redirected the attention of many Ostravians to the surrounding rural hinterland and its recreational potential. Even today, in the context of continuing de-urbanization in the Ostrava industrial agglomeration and the search

98 | Martin Jemelka for alternative food sources in the face of the food industry’s dictates, the ‘flight to the country’ is not losing its romantic appeal in the imagination of Ostrava’s population. The interwar literary stereotypes of an idyllic countryside in contrast to the deracinated industrial environment of (post-)industrial Ostrava have been revived.

Błażej Brzostek

The Ruralization of Bucharest and Warsaw in the First Post-War Decade After the Second World War, Warsaw was “invaded by the sticks”. The capital came to be dominated by a “suburban rabble and real dirt poor people from the country”. These people did not know how to fit in in the city environment; they behaved “like Gypsies” and kept “potatoes in bathtubs and laundry in the washbowl and the toilet”. This is how the journalist Ewa Berberyusz remembers her city.¹ Similar descriptions can be found in sources from half a century ago and in present-day discussions on the state of the city. One of the main themes running through these descriptions is the migrants, who supposedly shaped the character of post-war Warsaw and continue to dominate the city. They are said to be the source of most of Warsaw’s problems. The unfriendly, even hateful discourse on migrants serves to set apart the group of people who define themselves as the true Varsovians, those born and bred in the city who have lived there for generations. They claim that they have continued to maintain an intimate relationship with the city, using certain codes and names, for instance, not accepting changes to street names “because it’s our city and we speak in our own way in it.” These ‘genuine’ inhabitants call themselves Varsovians (warszawiacy), while the migrants are called warszawianie.² From discussions of this kind – which Warsaw Internet forums are full of – a myth emerges. While rooted in Warsaw’s past, this myth is consistent with a universal pattern of urban anthropology. It is based on the criticism of the present-day metropolis as a product of transformations, which grew as a result of migrations that injected an element of wiocha, wsiowi, wsioki, wieśniaki, buraki, buractwo, chamstwo (the sticks, hicks, rustics, yokels, boors, the boorish, cads) into the city. The term warwsiowiacy (a combination of warszawiak – a person from Warsaw – and wsiowy – a hick) is also used. This criticism idealizes the old city as a reservoir of values, which although no longer visible in the public sphere, are kept alive by the exclusive group of people born and bred in the city. According to this myth, the tie with the city is genetic; it is produced through a relationship with Warsaw that goes back generations and is impossible to falsify. The myth is grounded in clear historical turning points, which allegedly separated the old city from present-day

1 Ewa Berberyusz: Moja teczka. Warszawa 2006, 102. 2 For details, see the relevant entry of the Internet dictionary Słownik języka polskiego: warszawianin, at: http://www.sjp.pl/warszawianin [last accessed on 27.12.2012].

100 | Błażej Brzostek Warsaw. They include the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 as a heroic culmination of the history of Warsaw up to that point, and the communization of Poland from 1945, during which Warsaw’s historical sites may have been rebuilt, but economic and social policies made it impossible to recreate the cultural fabric of the city. There is a belief that few true inhabitants of Warsaw survived in the wake of the war and mass migrations: “After the Uprising there were a few [Varsovians] left on the left bank and a few thousand on the right bank”; the “true inhabitants of Warsaw account for maybe 20 per cent [of the city’s population], while the rest are migrant cads”.³ The policy of the communist authorities, which was targeted at democratizing urban space and foresaw that “the people will enter the city centre”, reinforced this view. The universality of this kind of thinking, but also the specific culture of postcommunist Europe, seems to be illustrated by the mythical narrations of Warsaw and Bucharest. The publicist Constantin Olariu, who belongs to the same generation as Berberyusz, uses almost identical expressions. In his opinion, post-war Bucharest came to be dominated by people from the “country environment” with “Gypsy” customs, who didn’t wear shirts in the summer, lay for hours on the grass, and elbowed their way onto trams. The old “European and francophone city of the highest cultural rank” was filled with people who were not only ignorant of foreign languages, but also spoke a dialect – the same as that spoken by the party leader Nicolae Ceauşescu himself – which was scoffed at by the intelligentsia.⁴ We also find this vision in Internet discussions that are full of nostalgia for the lost city and harsh in their criticism of present-day Bucharest. The conviction that the city was infiltrated by a foreign element is common, as evidenced by the following quotes: “[. . . ] most problems are not caused by Bucharestians! Of about two million inhabitants, there are I think only 800 000 real Bucharestians”; “unfortunately, I do not know whether even ten per cent are true Bucharestians, the rest came from other places (when those industrial giants were being built)”; “Bucharest was a beautiful city until all the peasants came from the countryside to concrete barracks”.⁵

3 A może by tak Warszawa, at: http://forum.karawaning.pl/topic/12608-a-moze-by-takwarszawa/ [last accessed on 27.12.2012]; Krzyż i burza uczuć wokół niego... (1401), at: http://forum.interia.pl/krzyz-i-burza-uczuc-wokol-niego-tematy,dId,1127082 [last accessed on 27.12.2012]. 4 Constantin Olariu: Bucureştiul monden. Radiografia unei prăbuşiri (1940–1970). Bucureşti 2006, 229. 5 Venituri Romania, at: http://www.eva.ro/forum/viewtopic.php?topic=27717&forum=1&28 [last accessed on 27.12.2012]; Offseason 2010, at; http://www.onlinesport.ro/forum/showthread.php? t=533728&page=54 [last accessed on 27.12.2012]; http://forum.computergamep.ro/91politica/ 773687-provincialii-care-injura-bucurestiul/page-3.html [last accessed on 27.12.2012].

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In the same discussion, we also find the mythical figure of a real Bucharestian, an endangered species characterized by friendliness, hospitality, and civilized behaviour, and fundamentally different to the “fabricated” Bucharestian.⁶ Undoubtedly, this kind of discourse is typical of many twentieth-century cities. Yet the examples of Bucharest and Warsaw seem to represent a special case. They are both characterized by the following traits: a sense of a severed cultural continuity that increases the potential for idealizing the past; an extreme stigmatization of the countryside community; an anti-communism that informs the criticism of social and urban changes; and a prevailing tendency towards cultural exclusivism within a national group. These clues are as significant to a historian as they are to a sociologist or an anthropologist. They certainly deserve a comparative monograph. In this article, I will attempt to follow up one of the clues to explain why critical inhabitants ascribed ‘ruralization’ to both cities. It should be noted that they do not use the term, which is typical of sociological and anthropological studies, yet their reflections keep circling around it. We should also keep in mind that ruralization has two key meanings. It means the opposite to urbanization, i.e. the decrease in the size of cities as a result of a wave of migration to the countryside. In this article, I use ruralization in the second sense of the term, defined by Paweł Kubicki as a “process of carrying over peasant values and lifestyle to urban space as a result of mass migrations from the countryside to cities, with the simultaneous lack and/or weakness of social institutions, which made adjustment to the urban lifestyle and values of urban culture impossible.”⁷ In Romanian dictionaries it is put more succinctly. The verb a ruralisa means a da un aspect de sat (to give a rural appearance), which seems to give us a better sense of the aforementioned discussion in relation to Bucharest.⁸ The term ruralization seems to be one of the keys to understanding social change in twentieth-century cities, especially in regions with more recent urbanization and industrialization histories. Yet it must be used with caution. ‘Urban’ and ‘rural’ elements were not and are not totally separate, although certain ideas and patterns suggest that they are diametrically opposed categories. The development of large cities always entailed a combination of these elements, especially in new settlement areas. We see this in large urban centres in Africa and Asia. Equally, the ‘accelerated’ industrialization of Central and Eastern Europe in the second

6 http://forum.md/Themes/17024/308261 [last accessed on 27.12.2012]. 7 Paweł Kubicki: Nowi mieszczanie w nowej Polsce. Warszawa 2011, 17, footnote 3. 8 The verb a ruralisa is said to be a loanword from French, see: DEX Online, at: http://dexonline.ro/definitie/ruralisare [last accessed on 27.12.2012].

102 | Błażej Brzostek half of the twentieth century brought forth many examples of this phenomenon.⁹ There have been numerous sociological studies of migrants’ adaptation to urban life during the period of intense industrialization, which (in an apparent paradox) led to the appearance of ruralization phenomena.¹⁰ These phenomena included rural forms of cultivation and animal husbandry in cities, as well as certain kinds of behaviour (loitering on the doorstep, being loud, speaking dialect, breastfeeding in public, etc.). They were a feature not only of industrial development, but also of another kind of migration, for example, the re-population of the ‘Regained Territories’ – the areas of post-war Poland taken away from the Germans.¹¹ In the latter case, however, there was no strong group of long-standing inhabitants who could reflect on changes to the urban way of life. Nonetheless, the diaries of the excellent mathematician Hugo Steinhaus, who moved from lost Lwów to gained Wrocław, bear witness to the sense of discomfort felt by Wrocław elites when they encountered customs that were incompatible with their idea of an urban character.¹² Ideas of this kind are in fact the topic of this article. It does not contain data on the scale of migrations or the social make-up of Bucharest and Warsaw in the first decade after the Second World War. It does not examine the adaptation of migrants or attempt to recreate their view of the world. On the contrary, it focuses rather on the perception of elites, or people with a developed urban identity. As such, it will contribute to research on perceptions of the effects of establishing a communist regime. But these ideas were deeply rooted in the history of both cities, so when writing about more recent times, we cannot bypass certain issues tied to the past. The problem of ruralization in twentieth-century cities was based on a long tradition of differentiating between the urban and the rural. This tradition was shaped by various local conditions; it stemmed from the desire to establish the city as a separate legal, spatial and social entity.

9 See Kacper Pobłocki: Prawo do miasta i ruralisacja świadomości w powojennej Polsce, in: Marek Nowak/Przemysław Pluciński (eds.), O miejskiej sferze publicznej. Kraków 2011, 129–146. 10 Andrzej Sadowski: Przejawy ruralisacji miasta uprzemysłowionego (na przykładzie Białegostoku). Białystok 1981. 11 Włodzimierz Suleja: Historia Wrocławia. W Polsce Ludowej, PRL i III Rzeczypospolitej. Wrocław 2001, 14–15. 12 Hugo Steinhaus: Wspomnienia i zapiski. Edited by Aleksandra Zgorzelska. Wrocław 2002.

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I Antecedents Warsaw was founded at the beginning of the fourteenth century on the basis of German law. At that time, it comprised a network of streets running from a rectangular market square. In the following century, defensive walls with towers were built, as well as a Gothic town hall and a cathedral. Foreigners from the West viewed it as a city, although at the time of the Enlightenment its oldest part was described as a “common backwoods”.¹³ From the time it became capital of the kingdom at the end of the sixteenth century, Warsaw began to expand rapidly, turning into a city of the aristocracy and nobility. In 1784 it boasted 128 palaces and a considerable number of townhouses (881), but still more than twice as many mansions and wooden houses (1 875).¹⁴ Bucharest, the capital of a principality subject to Turkish rule, also conformed to the model of a randomly organized city, full of gardens and dominated by the nobility. It did not, however, have an old district, and even lacked a medieval “common backwoods”, which was considered a sign of an urban character. In Wallachia there was in fact no separate town law. Foreigners often perceived Bucharest as a huge cluster of villages.¹⁵ The city had no discernible plan; it lacked a market square, ramparts, dense development, cobbled streets, and public buildings. It had developed from a medieval târg – a trading place – into a spontaneous constellation of artisan and trading districts, called mahalale (at the end of the eighteenth century there were about 90 of them).¹⁶ For the most part, these mahalale were characterized by houses made out of wood and clay, which were placed around irregularly shaped squares (maidan) and along meandering streets (uliţă). On the threshold of the modern era, both cities, despite their differences, found themselves in a similar sociocultural context. They were both located in agricultural areas controlled by the nobility, where the peasants were tied to

13 This is how Louis de Jaucourt described it in the entry for Varsovie in Diderot’s famous Encyclopaedia. 14 Anna Berdecka/Irena Turnau: Życie codzienne w Warszawie okresu Oświecenia. Warszawa 1969, 36. 15 Simion Câlţia: Aşezări urbane sau rurale? Oraşele din Ţările Române de la sfârşitul secolului al 17-lea la începutul secolului al 19-lea. Bucureşti 2011, 31–76. 16 The term mahala (pl. mahalale) comes from the Turkish mahalle (borrowed from the Arabic, meaning vicinity). In Turkey, it also denoted an administrative unit, regardless of whether it was central or located on the outskirts of the city. It also referred to an urban character in general. From the mid-nineteenth century, with the progress of occidentalization and the emergence of modern city centres in the largest Romanian cities, the mahala began to acquire a negative connotation. See Simion Câlţia: Mahalaua, indicator al urbanităţii, in: Revista Istorică 1–2 (2010), 111–122.

104 | Błażej Brzostek the lord’s land (they were to be freed in the second half of the nineteenth century). The position of townspeople, many of whom were considered foreign in terms of nationality, was relatively weak. An urban identity was not yet rooted in the local cultures, which were shaped by the ideas of the nobility and a landed gentry averse to trade and the urban way of life. Nevertheless, both Bucharest and Warsaw were very significant agglomerations. They grew rapidly, continually improving their economic position (Warsaw would become the third largest production centre in the Russian Empire at the end of the nineteenth century) and political standing (Bucharest would become the capital of the newly independent Romanian State in the middle of the nineteenth century). These changes were tied to the incursion of Western-style modernization and the import of urban cultural forms, chiefly from France and Germany. A number of ‘little Viennas’ and ‘little Parises’ arose in Central and Eastern Europe at the time. Both Bucharest and Warsaw were labelled ‘little Paris’, a name that highlighted the alleged contrast between the city centre and the poorer outskirts and the countryside.¹⁷ Parallel to the ‘Europeanization’ of Bucharest, a city centre modelled on Western cities began to be built. In this context, the elements that had formerly characterized the city were increasingly seen in a negative light: the târg was considered a provincial hole, the maidan an unwanted wasteland (in contrast to the piaţă, a real square), and the uliţă a dirt road. The latter was being replaced by the stradă, a city street. This confirmed the break with the local version of urban life, implying that it was in fact rural.¹⁸ Hitherto considered an integral part of the city, the mahala began to be seen as the outskirts, a relic of ‘Oriental barbarism’. At a time when Romania was adopting Western laws and institutions, this is how elites in the young state tended to view their country’s past. In their vision, Romania’s ‘European’ capital was to be subject to urban planning, it would be embellished with boulevards, the façades of townhouses, and public buildings. In truth, only a small part of the city centre merited the title of ‘little Paris’, as Bucharest was still a cluster of settlements, very different from the Western urban ideal. Bucharest lacked significant industrial structures. It was made up of single-storey houses and lacked a clear border. In fact, it was continually absorbing the surrounding villages, turning them into its economic and service hinterland and drawing migrants, who built small houses for themselves and combined paid jobs with animal husbandry and small-scale farming.

17 Błażej Brzostek: À la recherche de la splendeur. Les aspirations métropolitaines de Bucarest et de Varsovie au XXe siècle, in: Revue Roumaine d’Histoire 3–4 (2009), 215–230. 18 On the evolution of Italian and Moldovan cities and on discussions of the extent to which they were urban see: Câlţia, Aşezări urbane.

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The speed of modernization in fledgling Romania resulted in cultural tensions which intensified over decades and led to permanent divisions in society. We see one of these tensions in the elites’ perception of the social masses, especially peasants, as something to be modernized, as ‘unwashed peasants’, for whom one had to pave the way to civilization. The “undisguised revulsion with the peasantry [. . . ] so exclusively Romanian and unheard of in the other Balkan discourses” arose.¹⁹ There was, however, some intellectual and political opposition to this line of thinking. Mihai Eminescu, considered a national bard, expressed this in radical terms. In his socio-political articles, he appeared to preach “love of the past” and fiercely opposed foreign influence, which for him was symbolized by a city full of “scum”.²⁰ This image of the city was characteristic of burgeoning nationalism. It was reinforced by the Romantic tendency to search for the truth among the common people. As Lucian Boia wrote, “the town came to seem a foreign excrescence on the healthy body of rural Romania, especially as urban communities were in fact largely foreign, or at least cosmopolitan.”²¹ The “healthy body” represented rural civilization, its supposed moral purity, settled character, attachment to the land, and resistance to outside influence. This mythology also reflected a desire to resist Western civilization, a desire that started to intensify in the mid-nineteenth century. It was bolstered by anti-urban and nationalistic ideologies imported from the West, such as the German völkisch movement, and gave rise to the image of a ‘parasitic city’, which became widespread in Romanian territories subjected to quasi-colonization as the exploited outskirts of the West.²² Deprived by the Russian authorities of the capital city status, Warsaw was developing into a large commercial and industrial centre and a focus of extensive migrations. The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the rapid construction of numerous multi-storey townhouses, which were few and far between in Bucharest. The peasants who came to the city urbanized quickly, entering the structures of the proletariat, abandoning many of their customs, and settling in tenement houses. They too began to feel an aversion to the world they had left behind. Proud of their advancement, they distanced themselves from ‘hicks’. Yet traces of rural culture were visible in the strong structures of help and solidarity that preserved the migrants’ regional and local ties.²³ In Warsaw, however, the

19 Maria Todorova: Imagining the Balkans. Oxford 2009, 47. 20 Kazimierz Jurczak: Dylematy zmiany. Pisarze rumuńscy XIX wieku wobec ideologii zachowawczej. Studium przypadku. Kraków 2011, 175–227. 21 Lucian Boia: History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness. Budapest 2001, 35. 22 Ilie Bădescu: Sincronism european şi cultură critică românească. Contribuţii de sociologie istorică privind cultura modernă românească. Bucureşti 1984, 52. 23 Elżbieta Kaczyńska: Pejzaż miejski z zaściankiem w tle. Warszawa 1999.

106 | Błażej Brzostek line between rural and urban was clearer than in Bucharest, although all urban forms seemed less ‘foreign’ there because a larger percentage of society actively participated in modernization. In the period between the two world wars, the population of Warsaw exceeded one million. However, large-scale migrations seemed not to change the city’s cultural character. At any rate, it is difficult to find references to such changes in the socio-political journalism of the time. It is possible that they were overshadowed by discussions of the so-called ‘Jewish issue’, which was the subject of political and economic tensions. Of course, urban contempt for the peasant – who was seen as a foreign element, which was, however, unable to influence the city’s character – was common among locals and foreigners alike. At the beginning of the 1920s, a visitor from France observed that the national costume could “at times” be seen in the Warsaw crowds.²⁴ Yet foreigners also reported about barefoot peasant women who came to the city to trade, and horse-drawn carts with bearded coachmen that reminded them of Russia.²⁵ Complaints about the provincial character of the capital, the appearance of which was still marked by “hick’s huts” (as the single-storey, often wooden houses in the centre were described) and “peasant carts loaded with stuff and junk”, frequently appeared in newspapers.²⁶ The city’s role was perceived from the standpoint of the duties of a capital and the prestige attached to it, so important in a young state. And the identity of the capital was to be expressed not only in its architecture and infrastructure, but also in a certain culture of everyday life. Complaints about peasant carts coexisted, however, with tendencies to idealize rural culture as opposed to an urban culture perceived as imperfect. The philosopher Alice Voinescu contrasted Romanian townspeople with Western townspeople and peasants, claiming “it is they [Romanian townspeople] whom I love and respect.”²⁷ The writer Maria Dąbrowska perceived Warsaw in a strikingly

24 Guibal-Roland: La vie polonaise. Observations d’un commerçant. Paris 1921, 3. 25 Moray McLaren: A Wayfarer in Poland. London 1934, 37–39. 26 Ferdynand Goetel: Pierwszy rzut oka na Warszawę, in: Adam Wincenty Englert/Juliusz KadenBandrowski (eds.), Jesteśmy w Warszawie. Przewodnik literacki po stolicy. Warszawa 1938, 31; Kurier Warszawski, 12.10.1938, 7; Kurier Warszawski, 5.08.1939, 5. 27 Voinescu considered everyday experiences in the streets and trams of Bucharest, ascribing the general impoliteness to “the instability of our petty bourgeoisie, the lack of continuity of tasks, the lack of a social framework that gives a person their place in the world without them having to fight for it [. . . ]. Real vulgarity exists only here: the infantile figure of a child in clothes that are too big for him, the forgotten hierarchy of values, egocentrism indicating a failure to discipline the spirit, backwardness and falsity. Above all, false freedom, false individualism. What do we want? That people take life more seriously. Like the peasants.” In Alice Voinescu: Jurnal. Edited by Maria Ana Murnu. Bucureşti 1997, 289–290 (9.10.1941).

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similar way: “In Poland, culture was only in the country, in both manors and village huts. Apart from a valuable handful of workers, our cities (partly because they were not ours) raised only a stinking rabble.”²⁸ Many Western observers were not impressed by the efforts of Warsaw and Bucharest to imitate metropolitan ways of life and were far more fascinated by the places in those cities where the remains of peasant cultural forms could be found. Bucharest was especially intriguing in this respect, as it was permeated with the semi-rural element of traders and migrants from various parts of the state, who kept their national costumes and customs. For Paul Morand, they were a peculiarity of Bucharest, reminiscent of the former character of Western cities.²⁹ Other visitors from France also betrayed a weakness for what was “Oriental and primitive” – aspects of folk culture visible on the streets, barefoot merchants, street grills, Gypsy orchestras – and what bore the “smile of the Orient” and “resist[ed] innovations”.³⁰ This was surely one variation of the neo-Romantic sentiment for the lost world of traditional communities. It was spurred on by popular intellectuals (Spengler, Shestov, Keyserling, Berdyaev), who believed that the crisis or fall of the West was the result of a crisis of spirituality in the modern world and talked about the need to seek out the old (at times Oriental) sources of religious and communal culture. These voices converged with the tensions in Romanian culture surrounding ‘imported’ values and ‘native’ values rooted in the local past, in peasant culture, and in Orthodox religiosity. There was a belief that the latter had to be called upon to protect the substance of the nation against the pathology of modernity.³¹ The cosmopolitan city was the epitome of this pathology. Nichifor Crainic, an ideologist of the far right, claimed that Bucharest was ceasing to be a “witness to the race” and condemned modernism as a “democratic style” that was “anonymous, international, disoriented, lacking moral character”.³² The peasant house was to be the architectural ideal, symbolizing a ‘national’ way of life. The interest in folk culture was not confined to politics; it was characteristic of a considerable part of Romania’s cultural and academic elites in the 1930s and manifested itself in the creation of an impressive heritage park with folk buildings in Bucharest. 28 Maria Dąbrowska: Dzienniki 1936–1945. Edited by T. Drewnowski. Warszawa 2000, 246–247 (20.12.1938). 29 Paul Morand: Bucarest. Paris 1935, 138. 30 G. Peytavi de Faugères: Roumanie, Terre Latine. . . . Paris 1929, 88–90; J. Seurre: En Roumanie. Second edition. Paris 1928, 21, 26. 31 Constantin Davidescu: Totalitarian Discourse as Rejection of Modernity: the Iron Guard, a Case-Study, in: Mihaela Czobor-Lupp/J. Stefan Lupp (eds.), Moral, Legal and Political Values in Romanian Culture. Washington 2002, 149–160, 151. 32 Carmen Popescu: Le style national roumain. Construire une nation à travers l’architecture 1881–1945. Rennes 2004, 290.

108 | Błażej Brzostek This did not mean that the discourse opposed to the rural aspects of urban life disappeared. It was well represented in the capital’s newspapers, including the leftist press, in the interwar period. Here rural features were seen to indicate a lack of civilization. The journalist Ion Tăutu associated the dirtiness of Bucharest with the habits of migrants from the countryside. According to him, it was a challenge to propagate a new kind of Bucharestian, somebody associated with “electric light and radiators, asphalt sidewalks, theatres and books”, who would lead the process of civilization in Romania.³³ The question “ce zic strainii?” – what will foreigners say? – was repeated in discussions in the press about the ugliness of the outskirts, full of shanties, half-naked children, and Gypsy camps.³⁴ In 1936 one journalist proposed that wide strips of greenery should be created along the road leading out of the city to hide the sheds.³⁵ Yet the city centre itself was a place where modern and rustic elements clashed. In 1933 it was calculated that there were ten thousand peddlers in Bucharest, mainly from Oltenia. They wore linen peasant clothes and often went barefoot. They carried yokes from which baskets of fruit or fish hung. Visitors from the West were drawn to their exoticism, but the local press was critical of them, seeing in them proof of an embarrassing lack of civilization. Journalists wrote about the “peasant fair” happening against the backdrop of modern architecture, the ragged people who were marring the “civilized” boulevards, and the “guttural, Negro cries” that gave the impression of “a fringe of the civilized world”.³⁶ After the establishment of a dictatorship by Charles II in 1938, it was hoped that authoritarian rule would bring order and the Oltenians would be “sent to the countryside to plow”.³⁷ The new mayor of Bucharest promised to introduce a “regime of order, honesty and justice”, including control over trade. Journalists praised efforts to drive peddlers off the sidewalks.³⁸ The clash of cosmopolitan and autochthonous ideas was one of the ideological and political tensions characteristic of 1930s Europe. In Warsaw and in Bucharest this tension was clear in the widespread conviction among elites that their respective capital cities were imperfect. For some, they were still too farremoved from the vision of a modern metropolis, in which the rural elements

33 Ion Tăutu: Stadiu dezolant, in: Gazeta Municipală, 19.01.1936, 1. 34 “Locuinţe la periferie”, in: Gazeta Municipală, 20.06.1937, 6. 35 M. Dragomir: Intrările în Capitală, in: Gazeta Municipală, 1.11.1936, 1. 36 Ion Tăutu: Cheresteaua obrazului, in: Gazeta Municipală, 5.01.1936, 1; Camil Baltazar: Câinii Capitalei, in: Lumea Românească, 17.11.1937, 3; idem: Oltenii continuă să sbiere ca şi înainte, in: Lumea Românească, 17.12.1937, 3. 37 Ion Tăutu: Despre lucruri mărunte din viaţa Capitalei, in: Gazeta Municipală, 18.08.1938, 1. 38 Instalarea nouilui primar general, in: Gazeta Municipală, 2.10.1938, 1; Arhimede Scriban: Trăiască generalul Dombrowski, in: Gazeta Municipală, 13.11.1938, 1.

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associated with provincialism and poverty would disappear. For others, these cities had moved too far away from the native folk traditions associated with rural life. Here we see the re-emergence of the nineteenth-century problem of the essential foreignness of the large city. The communist regimes that would settle on the ruins of Warsaw and among the motley buildings of Bucharest after the Second World War would impose new forms of describing and criticizing reality. Yet they would be informed by established references to the folk character of native culture, to the ‘foreignness’ of the capitalist city, and to the desired model of urban life and relations between the city and the countryside.

II Post-war transition “It is bewildering to experience a European city for a few days.” This is what the Warsaw art historian Jan Białostocki wrote about Prague in 1947.³⁹ The destruction suffered by Warsaw during World War II deprived it not only of ‘European’ features, but also of the very substance of a city. About 70 per cent of Warsaw’s buildings, especially in the centre, and most of its infrastructure were destroyed. Over half of its inhabitants were missing, killed, or displaced. An American officer felt as though he had entered an unreal world in Warsaw. Stumps of walls went on for miles and the people among them looked like groups of nomads, searching for traces of their forefathers’ civilization.⁴⁰ The people who arrived in Warsaw immediately after the war started to recreate the city before its material shell began to be rebuilt. Their lifestyles continued to betray rustic elements. They bred farm animals, carried water from the river, and when nature called, they went ‘among the ruins’ (the equivalent of ‘behind the barn’ in the countryside). Yet in the immediate post-war years, most of the people who arrived in the city were actually former inhabitants of the capital, for whom the idea of ‘Warsaw’ had a set, metropolitan meaning. The most enterprising among them began to recreate the features that went hand in hand with this idea, including cafes and restaurants with lavish interiors and menus, as well as luxurious shops, hidden amidst the ruins of buildings. This was not, of course, accompanied by a return to former customs, which were impossible to recreate in such straitened circumstances. There was a “universal tieless-ness”, and it became acceptable to enter high-class restaur-

39 Jan Białostocki: Drogowskazy praskie, in: Przegląd Akademicki 5–6 (1947), 8. 40 Irving Brant: New Life in Poland. London 1946, 17–19.

110 | Błażej Brzostek ants in clothes that would formerly have been deemed inappropriate.⁴¹ Traffic was chaotic.⁴² For many years, the streets were dominated by carts from the outskirts, which took away the rubble and delivered food to the city. Despite some damage caused by bombardments in 1944 and general poverty, Bucharest’s basic character had not changed. It had, as one Reuter’s correspondent reported, Parisian boulevards, large apartment buildings, multi-level garages, nice petrol stations, large cinemas, and neon signs.⁴³ The years 1945– 1948 witnessed the degradation of this heritage and the groups of inhabitants associated with it. The communization of Romania brought economic chaos, which affected the condition of the capital. At the beginning of 1947, Bucharest was deprived of grain and flooded with starving masses from Moldova. They had travelled in terrible conditions, many of them on the roofs of packed trains, from which frozen bodies were pulled down at train stations. There were apocalyptic scenes at Bucharest’s main station, where a crowd had set up camp. During an inspection in February 1947, sick people and corpses were found. There was also a typhoid epidemic in the city. Not cleared of snow, the footpaths and streets were full of holes, streetlamps and neon signs didn’t work, and packs of homeless dogs prowled the city. The socio-political press (especially the press opposed to the government) described these problems not as ruralization, but rather as the descent of ‘little Paris’ into the chaos of the pre-modern Oriental city.⁴⁴ There were complaints about impoliteness and anarchy, which were considered a legacy of wartime demoralization and the breakdown of social ties. The press wrote about people parking cars on the footpaths, dumping building materials, shaking out carpets and bedding from balconies, and trampling on the grass. It was also critical of people’s conduct in trams: “these days, no man lets a woman on first when boarding a tram, yet he still derides ‘equal rights’.”⁴⁵ To a certain degree, these complaints can be seen as a substitute for more overtly political topics that were already subject to strict censorship. This is especially true of the complaints made about young people not showing respect for their elders, not considering the other passengers in trams, and skipping queues in shops.⁴⁶ 41 Max Deauville: Pologne 1948. Bruxelles 1948; Aleksander Janta: Wracam z Polski 1948. Paris 1949. 42 A. C. Nor: Cesta do Polska. Praha 1947, 93–94. 43 Elisabeth Baker: Truce in the Balkans. London 1948, 151. 44 See especially the articles published at the end of 1946 and the beginning of 1947 by Ovidiu Ioanid, Ion Panait, and Tudor Teodorescu-Branişte in the Tribuna românească and Jurnalul de Dimineaţa. 45 Femeia, in: Tribuna Românească, 8.12.1946, 2; P. P. Stanescu: Inrădăcinarea obiceiurilor rele, in: Jurnalul de Dimineaţa, 19.06.1947, 1–2. 46 Mihai Carp: Tineret..., in: Jurnalul de Dimineaţa, 27.02.1947, 1.

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Such flouting of the rules of public conduct was surely a result of the political mood, which was increasingly hostile towards urban models, and the everyday hardships that forced people to abandon previous conventions. Annie Bentoiu recalls the appearance in 1947 of tens of grills with roasted corn, which “we all munched on happily, young and old, forgetting about the former customary ban on eating in the street.”⁴⁷ It is significant that various personal testimonies from the period highlight the gradual degradation of the city, while memoirs written decades later describe that time as the ‘good old days’. The writer and poet Costache Olăreanu recalls the clean trams in 1948 Bucharest: The vast majority of passengers were Bucharestians, that is people who knew the required rules of urban conduct from long ago, and they were very proud of living in the capital. Anyway, a provincial was immediately recognized, and it was a great shame if your origins were discovered. They were instantly visible in the shyness you demonstrated, in the way you stood in the tram, blocking the way, in the way you hurried to get off. The masses of people who invaded [a invadat] the city over the next few years would change the street scene and also make the real Bucharestians more provincial. Back then, the ‘atmosphere of Bucharest’ still existed, and you had a chance of being imbued with it if you imitated as closely as possible the way of speaking and the conduct of the people around you.⁴⁸

Memoirs of both cities portray the collapse of the old urban culture at the close of the 1940s. The spontaneous recreation of Warsaw after the war was brought to a halt by the ‘battle for trade’ (which destroyed the private sector), the intensification of ideological pressure, the introduction of a new work and pay regime, and the hardships of everyday life.⁴⁹ In Bucharest, the Stalinization campaign appears to have been more brutal. Paradoxically, the backdrop of a city that seemed to retain strong links with the past may have reinforced the sense that the new world was strange.⁵⁰ The collective emotions aroused were akin to ‘class hatred’ – the goal was to destroy property and take over comfortable apartments, depriving ‘blood suckers’ of their income. The owners of apartments, villas, and shops, as well as doctors and attorneys, who gave the city its character, were deprived of their income and property, arrested, or displaced. Those that escaped being arrested looked for second-rate, inconspicuous jobs in factories and offices or lived off the money they made from selling their books or trading on the talciok, a secondhand market.

47 48 49 50

Annie Bentoiu: Timpul ce ni s-a dat. Memorii 1944–1947. Second edition. Bucureşti 2007, 248. Costache Olăreanu: Poezie şi autobiografie. Micul Paris. Bucureşti 1994, 75. Stanisław Gieysztor: Moja Warszawa. Warszawa 2010. Bentoiu, Timpul ce ni s-a dat.

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III Stalinism It seems that the presence of peasants and peasant customs in the city was not an aesthetic or a political issue in the ‘transition period’ from 1945 to 1948, but it became significant on the threshold of Stalinism. At that time, the plebeian myth was intensified in propaganda, alongside a new narrative of the past and present of both countries. Peasant faces found their way onto banknotes, stamps, and the front pages of newspapers. Folk bands and shops selling products from the countryside were set up. On the other hand, with collectivization and the ban on private trading, Stalinism meant an end to the traditional way of life of the ‘people’ in both the countryside and in cities. In the autumn of 1947, the fact that women were still selling milk on the streets of Bucharest after the monetary reform (which deprived the population of its savings) was portrayed as a sign of the peasants’ trust in the new currency.⁵¹ Soon, however, the regime began to present its elimination of rustic elements from Bucharest as an achievement. To a large extent, this was the fulfilment of expectations from the interwar period. Peddling was fought against; street stalls were removed. Trading in sheep and grazing livestock on lawns and riverbanks was prohibited, with the aim of lending the city a “civilized” character.⁵² A French officer who visited Bucharest ten years later was struck by the “sad” look of the streets, from which the picturesque scenes he remembered from before the war had vanished.⁵³ The ruralization of cities was not compatible with the Soviet goal to consolidate large urban centres and urbanize the culture of the countryside. The experience of the USSR demonstrated, however, that the new urban policies, including housing and industrialization policies, resulted in the uncontrolled transformation of the character of cities, among them Moscow. This was not only due to large-scale migration. Many illiterate migrants from poor villages in central Russia came to Moscow in the 1920s, but this was not a new phenomenon. What was new was the way the city was organized. Settlement was now controlled by the city administration, leading to a gradual reshuffle of the population in former bourgeois districts. As early as 1917, the Bolsheviks had begun to re-settle bourgeois houses inside the Sadovoye Kol’tso with poor people. First and foremost,

51 Drapelul, 15.11.1947, 1. 52 V. Firolu: Plimbare prin Bucureşti . . . , in: Universul, 10.07.1948, 1–2; M. Sevastos: Civilizarea Capitalei, in: Universul, 11.07.1948, 1. 53 Jean-Noël Grandhomme: Dix jours derrière le Rideau de Fer. Le pèlerinage de Guy de Courson de la Villeneuve et des survivants de la Mission Berthelot en Roumanie en 1957, in: Revue Roumaine d’Histoire 1–4 (2000), 231–296, 288.

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this was a symbolic act, but it was also a sign of terror.⁵⁴ In the following decades, it became an element of bureaucratic practice. In 1928 a historian from Moscow claimed that this practice had introduced a rural way of life in the districts of large cities: the new inhabitants did their laundry in the bathtubs of luxury apartments, dried felt shoes on marble windowsills, and sat in front of elegant homes husking sunflower seeds.⁵⁵ This behaviour was publicly criticized for being unhygienic and abandoning the ideal of kulturnost’, the refined conduct that was supposed to be characteristic of the Stalinist era’s ‘new man’.⁵⁶ The 1930s saw a return to family-centred and urban public models in the USSR, which were, paradoxically, connected with the pathos of building a new world. The Stalinist system, which developed largely spontaneously in the USSR,⁵⁷ was introduced in Central and Eastern Europe around the year 1948 as a readymade product, a “script-like system” in a way.⁵⁸ The transformation of the respective capital cities was written into this script. Under the plans for the ‘socialist reconstruction’ of Bucharest and Warsaw from the years 1949 and 1952, both cities were supposed to become monumental urban compositions with modern public transport (metro), large industrial centres, and inland ports. Mass migration to these cities was also considered in the plans. Thus ruralization was taken into account, without referring to it as such. It was to be temporary, however. In Warsaw, ruralization was the subject of scholarly studies. In the early 1950s, studies on how people from the countryside lived in city apartments noted that they divided an apartment into a ‘black’ room, where they lived, and a ‘white’ room, which was representative and not used on a daily basis.⁵⁹ The so-called workers’ hotels, in which about ten thousand people lived in early 1950s Warsaw, were also analyzed.⁶⁰

54 Timothy J. Colton: Moscow. Governing the Socialist Metropolis. Cambridge/London 1995, 120– 122, 157. 55 Иван И. Шитц: Дневник „Великого перелoма“ (мaрт 1928–август 1931) [Ivan Shits: Dnevnik „Velikogo pereloma“ (Mart 1928–Avgust 1931)]. Paris 1991, 69 (2.11.1928). 56 See Sheila Fitzpatrick: Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Oxford 1999. 57 See Nicolas Werth: La terreur et le désarroi. Staline et son système. Paris 2007. 58 Hanna Świda-Ziemba: Człowiek wewnętrznie zniewolony. Problemy psychosocjologiczne minionej formacji. Warszawa 1998, 57–58. 59 Instytut Budownictwa Mieszkaniowego (ed.): Zmiany w zagęszczeniu mieszkań, liczbie i składzie ludności osiedla Muranów w latach 1950–1953. Zmiany w sposobie użytkowania mieszkań i organizacji życia mieszkańców Muranowa. Warszawa 1954. 60 Błażej Brzostek: Robotnicy Warszawy. Konflikty codzienne (1950–1954). Warszawa 2002, 164.

114 | Błażej Brzostek The influx of new inhabitants and temporary workers after 1950 meant that Warsaw came to be dominated by the customs and lifestyle of young people, mainly men from poor, rural regions of central Poland. Getting work rebuilding the capital was a considerable promotion for them. The young migrants, who often lived in workers’ hotels, did not usually want to be viewed as ‘new people’. While they were treated here as wsiowi (hicks), back home they were often seen as miastowi (city people). Most of them did not plan on returning to country life, which usually meant submission to the father, monotonous work, and a lack of money. The more ambitious or naive migrants who believed assurances that the University of Technology and the engineering profession awaited them, were at times disappointed. Yet the majority considered the bunks at the workers’ hotel to be a happy turn in their fortunes. The village reality, with its rhythms, customs, and religious conservatism was increasingly seen in a negative light. Many workers avoided visits home. For others, the opposite was true: visits to the countryside were opportunities to demonstrate the position they had acquired, their income, and their new clothes. With their first wages, the newcomers often bought a jacket, treated their friends to vodka, or went out ‘in the city’. Familiar with how young people socialized and celebrated holidays and wedding parties in the countryside, they transferred these customs to a reality of a different temporal order. As the inhabitants of a workers’ hotel in Warsaw said, “[w]e felt as though every day was a holy day, every day it was Sunday in the evening!”⁶¹ They tried to acquire ‘urban features’ (by buying suits and watches and going to restaurants), yet from the point of view of older Warsaw inhabitants, they were still hicks, and it seems that the old sense of superiority began to be coloured by anxiety and fear in the 1950s. Workers’ hotels were associated with drunkenness and brawls, and their inhabitants were viewed as potential criminals.⁶² Despite claims of an “alliance of workers and peasants” in official propaganda, city-dwellers in Poland usually had an aversion to the countryside.⁶³ In the Warsaw press at the beginning of the 1950s there are reports of waitresses “ignoring” clients dressed in ‘country’ fashions and a tram conductor insulting an elderly woman (“she told her that she probably rode a mule-drawn cart and now she’s riding a tram. When other passengers took the victim’s side, the conductor [. . . ] said: ‘These VIPs from the PGR [State Agricultural Farm]!”’).⁶⁴ Such

61 Czesław Czapów/Stanisław Manturzewski: Niebezpieczne ulice. U źródeł chuligaństwa. Materiały i refleksje. Warszawa 1960, 186. 62 Brzostek, Robotnicy Warszawy, 161–167. 63 Dariusz Jarosz: Pastuchy, okrąglaki, wieśniacy. Miasto peerelowskie i jego chłopscy mieszkańcy, in: Więź 5 (2007), 106–115. 64 Express Wieczorny, 31.10.1952, 5.

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incidents resulted from common beliefs and stereotypes. They were also fuelled by current difficulties – the scarcity of provisions, commuting, and low pay – for which city inhabitants blamed the population from the countryside (that was allegedly hiding food) and migrants from villages, who seemed to encroach upon the living space of those born and bred in the cities, ‘taking away’ the goods that belonged to them, and ‘pushing their way’ onto the trams and buses that were there to serve them. The distinction between city and country people could be totally conventional (the ‘country’ stigma was attached to people from the same social group) or based on differences in appearance (headscarves were associated with the countryside), behaviour, or language. Tensions of this kind had a special housing context. In the destroyed Warsaw the housing situation – already unsatisfactory before the war – was lamentable. This seemed to justify the strict accommodation regime introduced right after the war, which placed control over housing resources with the city administration. Rebuilding and expansion brought changes and hopes for an improvement in conditions. In Bucharest, on the other hand, building had stopped completely and control over building resources had a clearly repressive character. In the first decade after the war, changes were restricted to the existing housing space, the spatiu locativ, as hardly any new buildings had been constructed, although the population of Bucharest had growth by a fifth between 1948 and 1956 (from 1 to 1.2 million inhabitants).⁶⁵ In this context, established inhabitants feared evacuare, sudden eviction from their apartments.⁶⁶ Buildings were confiscated on a massive scale and people were resettled in an attempt to blur the social differences between the centre and the suburbs. This was made possible by the nationalization of most properties in Romania in 1950.⁶⁷ In Poland, things did not go so far, but properties were taken over by municipal governments, usually when their private owners were in debt and could not maintain them. In both cities the new housing policy was supposed to help transform the social map. In propaganda, these issues were presented as a matter of dignity, as the “the people entering the city centre”. In Warsaw, the building of new neighbourhoods in the heart of the city was said to make this possible. In Bucharest, on the other hand, ‘the people entered’ the old houses of the boyars and the townhouses built before the war.

65 In the period from 1948 to 1954 about 350 apartments were built each year, but in 1949 only 164 were allocated, and in 1951 only 40 were allocated, including 23 one-room apartments. See Anuarul statistic al oraşului Bucureşti. Bucureşti 1960, 37. 66 Pericle Martinescu: 7 ani cât 70. Pagini din jurnal (1948–1954). Bucureşti 1997, 68 (25.08.1948). 67 Nicolae Şt. Noica: Între istorie şi actualitate. Politici de locuire în România. Bucureşti 2003, 109–148.

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IV Continuity and change Set in 1950s Bucharest, Marin Preda’s novel The Great Loner opens with a scene in which two men from the countryside leave the former Royal Palace, now the Palace of the Republic, where sculptures made by one of them are being exhibited. The two men walk along the Calea Victoriei, the most prestigious street in the city before the war, which had once affirmed Bucharest’s status as a ‘little Paris’. It is now undoubtedly theirs. They decide to go to the restaurant Carul cu Bere, hoping to meet people from their part of the country there.⁶⁸ In the novel, Bucharest has become the possession of the ‘people’. This image of the capital, which was reinforced in official propaganda, is one of many images that cannot be categorized as either ‘true’ or ‘false’. Together, these images of the ‘people’s’ presence in Bucharest at that time amount to a paradoxical whole. One such image is that of peasants coming to Bucharest shops. In a way, this was a reversal of the role formerly ascribed to them as the sellers of goods produced in the countryside. Over the next few decades, this image was to resurface on many occasions. It was interpreted as a sign of the discrimination against this social class, which was now forced to come to the city for products that were not available in countryside, including bread.⁶⁹ However, it was also seen as a sign of class advancement and as a humiliating spectacle of ruralization.⁷⁰ For the correspondent of the French communist daily L’Humanité, who was covering the international Youth Festival in Bucharest in the summer of 1953, it was a sign of advancement. Delegates from France were shocked at the sight of barefoot peasant women on the streets of the city. Yet it turned out that the women were doing great shopping in the “always crowded” shops of the capital, and the lack of shoes was simply a habit from more destitute times.⁷¹ For the French writer, the news of crowds in shops was proof of the population’s considerable purchasing power. We find another image of the peasants in Bucharest during the Stalinist era in Pericle Martinescu’s diaries. Bucharest is portrayed there as the familiar patchwork of “monumental palaces and African mahalale”, which only acquired the shape of a ‘new’ city in propaganda. However, Martinescu noticed a new phe-

68 Marin Preda: Marele singuratic. Bucureşti 1972, 7–8. 69 Zbigniew Kwiatkowski: Bogactwo i dorobek, in: Życie Literackie 24.01.1965, 11–12. 70 In 1987, a Bucharest architect described with horror in his diary a scene in a clothes shop where peasants were trying on trousers, with several men in the same cubicle. See Gheorghe Leahu: Arhitect în ‘Epoca de aur’. Bucureşti 2004, 135, 16.06.1987. 71 Jean-Pierre Chabrol: Le Festival dans Bucarest où le soleil n’a que neuf ans, in: L’Humanité, 4.08.1953, 5.

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nomenon from the train when he was leaving the capital: extremely primitive settlements created by migrants from the countryside.⁷² A similar development can be seen in Warsaw, for example, in the emergence of the so-called wild districts on the outskirts, which were filling up with illegally built little brick houses. Some of the inhabitants came from the countryside. They took up employment in Warsaw, but continued to cultivate the land and breed animals. ‘Wild neighbourhoods’ provided a foothold in the city and were reminiscent of phenomena from the nineteenth century. In this respect, the great industrialization of the Stalinist era repeated a familiar model. It is worth adding, however, that the significant flow of people to the cities, which peaked in Poland between 1951 and 1953, was not only linked to the ruralization of those cities, but also to the urbanization of rural culture.⁷³ Contemporary propaganda overlooked abiding local structures and networks, the cultural continuity of the mahala in Bucharest and the extensive urban-rural outskirts in Warsaw. The extension of the administrative borders of Bucharest (1950) and Warsaw (1951) significantly enlarged the territories formally considered part of each capital, integrating the former outskirts that fell far short of the imagined ‘urban lifestyle’. In Bucharest, the old mahalale continued to thrive close to the heart of the city. The tradesman Gheorghe Florescu recalled his childhood in a trading and artisan district south of the city centre, a former mahala, which was inhabited by Romanians, Roma, Jews, Armenians, and Greeks and full of small houses with gardens. For the child, insults such as “you rustic” (to a Romanian), “yid”, and “Gypsy” were indicators of social divisions. As Florescu recalls, part of the district’s population tried to retain aspects of the old way of life despite the repressions. Oltenian traders, who practised their profession illegally, hung around the market hall (Traian Hall). Next to the hall was a cafe, where traders and militiamen met, which was surely significant for the persistence of trade. The market community, which Florescu got to know as he helped family members in the fruit and vegetable business, retained the culture of negotiating with producers and caring for the quality of products, and it was still used to fluctuating prices.⁷⁴ It was still a place where newcomers acculturated, thus representing a transitional zone between rural and urban worlds. The author of a monograph on Bucharest’s mahalale writes, however, that the mahalale had

72 Martinescu, 7 ani, 284 (6.06.1952), 337 (14.11.1952). 73 Dariusz Jarosz: Polityka władz komunistycznych w Polsce w latach 1948–1956 a chłopi. Warszawa 1998, 489–499. 74 Gheorghe Florescu: Confesiunile unui cafegiu. Bucureşti 2008, 22–29.

118 | Błażej Brzostek in fact conquered the city centre.⁷⁵ We can interpret this as the breakdown or destruction of an elite nineteenth-century model of a city centre, which was new and strange in Romania compared to earlier incarnations of the city. The communist government favoured the ‘European’ model of a city centre and continued to build townhouses with impressive façades, which were supposed to hide the smaller houses associated with the mahala. At the same time, however, differences in lifestyles, settlement patterns (not in government districts), and consumer habits (e.g. shopping, dining out) were eliminated. The city, whose separateness is particularly pronounced in states that are not highly urbanized, became the location of a kind of democratization of space. This was in fact one of the communists’ proclaimed political and social goals. Of course, this democratization was not supposed to bring about the ruralization of the city, but rather the urbanization of the countryside, i.e. changes in rural infrastructure and ways of life. In 1970s and 1980s Romania, this would be realized in the plans for ‘agrogorods’. Warsaw and Bucharest were not “invaded by the sticks” (both cities had been expanding even earlier as a result of mass immigration). Rather, the previously dominant perception of their urban character was effaced. From the point of view of former city elites, a cultural levelling took place, prompting a sense of alienation and a belief that the city had been ‘peasantized’. For Martinescu in his diaries, the fact that men and women were drinking beer from bottles on the streets was evidence of the demise of city culture (1952).⁷⁶ Beer stands on the streets of Warsaw made a similar impression on Varsovians. In Warsaw, drunkenness on the street, breastfeeding in public places, and certain features of dialect were also considered rural. Yet these perceptions reveal more about stigmatization than they do about social reality. From the mid-1950s, the state of public manners was criticized in both cities, with attention being drawn to the effects of migration. However, this did not change the prevailing tendency to view social transformations as desirable ‘democratization’. In Romania, the term ‘homogenization’ was also used in reference to the demand to efface social differences and make urban and rural lifestyles more alike. The traditional countryside was to disappear in the process of planned transformations. Yet, its culture, perceived as an important source of national culture, was subject to stylizing and dissemination through singing and dancing groups, performances, and television shows. At the same time, the model of an urban culture of everyday life – urbanitate – was popularized. In the Romanian socio-political press of the 1960s, this urban culture was juxtaposed with the neg-

75 Adrian Majuru: Bucureştii mahalelor sau periferia ca mod de existenţˇa. Bucureşti 2008, 96. 76 Martinescu, 7 ani, 291 (1.05.1952).

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ative models followed by migrants.⁷⁷ It was not the country origins of the newcomers that were the problem, but rather the bad environments in which they became entangled in the city. It was the space between the urban and the rural world that was perceived – in both countries – as an area of potentially undesirable phenomena. Neither the ‘city’ as a cluster of factories and a place for hard work and education, nor the ‘countryside’ as a reservoir of national traditions and virtues, was subject to much discussion. It was the in-between zone, the outskirts of the city full of hazy, black market connections, which came to epitomize social evils. In Bucharest the mahala represented this in-between zone. It was a space that had not acquired urban features, but had lost the positive aspects of the countryside. In Poland, where there were considerable opportunities in the private sector, the suburbs were associated with badylarze (dry stalk men) – wealthy farmers, who got rich as a result of delivering vegetables and flowers to the city market. They were not positive characters in either official or public opinion. In both cities, the stigmatization of ‘country’ features was (and still is) significant. It arose in the context of difficult living conditions, tough competition for goods, the consolidation of the new urban community, the search for stability, and the recreation of ‘urban’ models of daily life since the 1960s. After 1989 it was renewed by a touch of nostalgia for the old city that was destroyed in both social and material terms (in the case of Bucharest, the large-scale demolitions of the 1980s were an additional trauma). This stigmatization seems to be common in this part of Europe, but wider comparative studies would be required to prove this hypothesis.

77 Błażej Brzostek: „Ketman” und „urbanitate”. Äußere Zeichen gesellschaftlicher Unterschiede in Bukarest und Warschau in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren, in: Włodzimierz Borodziej/Jerzy Kochanowski/Joachim von Puttkamer (eds.), „Schleichwege”. Inoffizielle Begegnungen sozialistischer Staatsbürger zwischen 1956 und 1989. Köln/Weimar/Wien 2010, 25–54.

Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast

Nowa Huta, Eisenhüttenstadt and Ostrava-Poruba in Early State Socialism: The Proletarianization and Ruralization of New Cities I Introduction Based on the legislative history of the first ‘socialist cities’ in Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, this article compares proletarianization and ruralization processes in Nowa Huta, Eisenhüttenstadt and Ostrava-Poruba in the first three decades after World War II. These cities emerged behind the Iron Curtain during the socialist industrialization period, which was regulated by the dictates of heavy industry. The residential areas Huta im. Lenina (HiL), Eisenhüttenkombinat Ost (EKO) and Nová huť Klementa Gottwalda (NGKH) were constructed for the workforce of the new industrial plants in these cities. Although this article deals only with these three representative examples, the phenomenon of the planned socialist city was also found in other East Central and Southeastern European states.¹ The homogenization of these cities and their disconnection from Western European urban development trends under Stalin was limited to the 1950s. For ideological reasons, capitalist models were abandoned throughout Eastern Europe in that decade, and the Soviet urban development of the 1930s became the preferred model.² However, the planning and realization of major urban development and industrialization projects in the Soviet Union during the 1930s was not entirely divorced from Western developments. As recent studies show, an

1 Anders Åman: Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era. An Aspect of Cold War History. Cambridge/London 1992; Stephen Kotkin: Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 1995; on the socialist model cities Žd’ár nad Sázavou, Stálinváros and Nowa Huta, see the articles by Peter Lozoviuk (481–503), Sándor Horváth (505–526) and Katherine Lebow (527–540) in: Christiane Brenner/Peter Heumos (eds.), Sozialgeschichtliche Kommunismusforschung. Tschechoslowakei, Polen, Ungarn und DDR 1948–1968. München 2005. 2 Andreas Ludwig: Eisenhüttenstadt. Wandel einer industriellen Gründungsstadt in fünfzig Jahren. Potsdam 2000, 42.

122 | Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast increasing number of foreign experts, such as Ernst May, Le Corbusier and Albert Kahn, became involved in Soviet urban development from the late 1920s onwards.³ Ideas about urban planning continued to circulate even after World War II, and this was clearly visible in East Central Europe. Although of all Nikolai Milyutin’s brilliant pre-war Sozgorod designs only a few buildings were actually built, East Central European urban architects adapted Tony Garnier and Ebenezer Howard’s concepts of an ideal and garden city as an answer to urban structural issues at that time. Attentive visitors can still detect many similarities between the Polish Nowa Huta, the East German Eisenhüttenstadt and the Czech OstravaPoruba. Indeed, the structures of the city centres are so similar that one could easily confuse them. The international exchange that was palpable in debates on city development in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s was still an important frame of reference in the construction of these new cities in the 1950s. As the following testimony shows, despite limited resources and a prescribed new socialist lifestyle, the best Polish architects tried to overcome the urban vs. rural opposition and looked to the United States for inspiration. In his Miastoprojekt team, Tadeusz Ptaszycki, the main architect of Nowa Huta and a graduate of the Warsaw University of Technology, gathered together a group of young architects who represented different traditions from the Warsaw, Cracow and Lviv schools:⁴ Nowa Huta was planned by the best Polish architects. The architects did not follow any plans from Moscow – as was customary at that time – but from [. . . ] New York. These included the architectural concept of the ‘neighbourhood unit’ from the 1920s, which was used in the planning of New York’s development. Polish architects maintained active contacts with American architects during the interwar period and they used their observations in the construction of the new city. The blocks (osiedla) in Nowa Huta were just like the ‘neighbourhood units’, self-sufficient, with their own infrastructure of an independent mini-city.⁵

In this article, I will investigate differences and similarities between the three new cities, focussing on the decision to locate new cities in those places, the mobilization of workers, and the relations between the steel and iron works HiL, EKO and NHKG and Nowa Huta, Eisenhüttenstadt and Ostrava-Poruba. Since the three selected examples differed in terms of pre-existing infrastructure, the question to what extent the construction of new cities during the socialist industrialization

3 Harald Bodenschatz/Christiane Post (eds.): Städtebau im Schatten Stalins. Die internationale Suche nach der sozialistischen Stadt in der Sowjetunion 1929–1935. Berlin 2003, 30, 57. 4 Stanisław Juchnowicz: Nowa Huta – z doświadczeń warsztatu projektowego, in: Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa (ed.), Nowa Huta – architektura i twórcy miasta idealnego. Niezrealizowane projekty. Kraków 2006, 26–33, 33. 5 Ziaja, Nowa Huta.

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period contributed to the proletarianization of the population cannot be answered conclusively. Indeed, it seems that socialist industrialization actually encouraged ruralization tendencies in several cases. Until now, most studies have tended to approach these cities from a sociohistorical or an architectural perspective.⁶ The history of the industrial plants that are inextricably linked to these cities has rarely been discussed.⁷ Yet the relationship between the city and the plant was hugely significant in the case of socialist cities, especially at the beginning of the 1950s. The plants shaped all aspects of the social and economic life of their neighbouring cities in the period of socialist industrialization. Below, I show how this dependence on the plant also greatly influenced processes of proletarianization and ruralization in the cities examined here.

II Deciding where to locate socialist cities As recommended in Stalin’s programmatic booklet “Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.”, socialist city planners concentrated on heavy industry, chiefly on the iron and steel industry.⁸ New iron and steel works were built and

6 Rosmarie Beier (ed.): Aufbau West – Aufbau Ost. Die Planstädte Wolfsburg und Eisenhüttenstadt in der Nachkriegszeit. Katalog zur Ausstellung des Deutschen Historischen Museums vom 16. Mai bis 12. August 1997. Berlin 1997; Jenny Richter/Heike Förster/Ulrich Lakemann: Stalinstadt – Eisenhüttenstadt. Von der Utopie zur Gegenwart. Wandel industrieller, regionaler und sozialer Strukturen in Eisenhüttenstadt. Marburg 1997; Dariusz Aleksandrowicz: The Socialist City and its Transformation. Frankfurt an der Oder 1999 (Discussion Papers 10/99); Elisabeth KnauerRomani: Eisenhüttenstadt und die Idealstadt des 20. Jahrhunderts. Weimar 2000; Valerie Lozac’h (ed.): Eisenhüttenstadt. Leipzig 1999; Ruth May: Planstadt Stalinstadt. Ein Grundriß der frühen DDR – aufgesucht in Eisenhüttenstadt. Dortmund 1999; Narodziny Nowej Huty. Materiały sesji naukowej odbytej 25 kwietnia 1998 roku. Kraków 1999; Ingrid Apolinarski: Die gesamtstädtischen Planungen für Eisenhüttenstadt in den Jahren 1950 bis 1989, in: Christoph Bernhardt/Thomas Wolfes (eds.), Schönheit und Typenprojektierung. Der DDR-Städtebau im internationalen Kontext. Erkner 2005, 321–339. 7 Jochen Czerny: Der Aufbau des Eisenhüttenkombinates Ost 1950/1951. Dissertation Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena 1971; Manfred Pawlitta: Die „Sozialistische Industrialisierung“ in Polen unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Entwicklung in der eisenschaffenden Industrie. Dissertation Universität Oldenburg 1979; Axel Gayko: Investitions- und Standortpolitik der DDR an der Oder-Neiße-Grenze 1950–1970. Frankfurt am Main/Berlin 1999; Herbert Nicolaus/Lutz Schmidt (eds.): Einblicke: 50 Jahre EKO Stahl. Eisenhüttenstadt 2000. 8 Dietrich Mühlberg: Alltag und Utopie. Gedanken bei einem Rückblick auf die ostdeutsche Geschichte, in: Franziska Becker/Ina Merkel/Simone Tippach-Schneider (eds.), Das Kollektiv bin ich. Utopie und Alltag in der DDR. Köln 2000, 15–26, 18.

124 | Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast production was increased dramatically in existing steel works throughout East Central Europe. This phase of industrialization was characterized by a new focus on the social position and the role of workers and ‘new people’, and economic planning became a key instrument in the process. The fact that this industrialization was in some cases a departure from the previous development pattern of a country posed the greatest challenge to implementing the Soviet model. Czechoslovakia and East Germany were already highly industrialized. In contrast to Poland, they were resource-poor countries, with the exception of extensive lignite deposits in the GDR and coal in Czechoslovakia. Hence the Czechoslovak and East German economies were based more on skilled workers than on natural resources.⁹ In both countries, socialist industrialization did not mean a structural change from agriculture to industry, but rather a shift in emphasis within the existing industry. In East Germany and Czechoslovakia, structural change after 1945 was mostly confined to specific regions – the north in the GDR and the east in the ČSR. The effects of structural change were much more palpable in Poland, which had a high rate of employment in the agricultural sector. The decisions to locate new cities in certain regions illustrate the important role played by boundary changes, forced migration and territorial transformation in economic policy in Eastern Germany and Poland during the socialist transformation. In all three case studies, real economic requirements were an important factor, but they were not the only motivation behind these decisions. As a resident of Nowa Huta reported: There are various theories as to why the outskirts of Cracow were chosen for the realization of gigantic construction plans. The best known one, the ‘ideological theory’, suggests that the old bourgeois and conservative Cracow was meant to be shattered by the construction of a ‘worker city’ and iron and steel works. There is some truth to that, but in reality, economic aspects outweighed those considerations. Iron and steel works needed raw materials: iron ore (which could be transported from Krivoy Rog in the Ukraine thanks to the rail connection between Cracow and Lviv), hard coal (which was plentiful in [. . . ] Upper Silesia), and finally a lot of water (the Vistula river was right around the corner). In addition, welleducated specialists were required, especially engineers, and there was enough of them in Cracow (thanks to the AGH – the Academy of Mining and Metallurgy in Cracow). So the decision to build [the plant and residential district] close to Cracow was well thought through in every respect.¹⁰

9 Iván T. Berend: Central and Eastern Europe 1944–1993. Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery. Cambridge 1996. 10 Ziaja, Nowa Huta.

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There is a widespread belief that politics were decisive in the location of prestigious projects in the iron and steel industry, but this is not borne out by the evidence. Social considerations such as job creation were also important. The EKO and Nowa Huta created jobs in regions where they were sorely needed: in Eisenhüttenstadt with its high proportion of displaced people and in the heavily populated region of Małopolska. The need to overcome regional imbalances between urban and rural areas was an additional factor. Nowa Huta helped to alleviate rural overpopulation and poverty in Cracow’s hinterland in the same way the Central Industrial Region (COP) had boosted the regional economy in the 1930s. The choice of these three locations for new cities was consistent with the plans and investments of the interwar period in many ways. This continuity is particularly clear in the Czechoslovak ‘black Ostrava’, where the development of the Vítkovice Ironworks had already been planned before the war. But even in the case of the EKO at Fürstenberg/Oder, investment in industry had already started during World War II. Apart from the shipping industry, brown coal had been vital for the area before the war. Strategically important factories had been relocated here from the western part of Germany to avoid Allied aerial attacks, and hundreds of concentration camp inmates had worked there during the war. However, these production sites were dismantled after the war. In Poland, the decision to build two new metallurgy combines in two different places had been made even before the war.

III The labour force in the new cities Publications about proletarianization and mass population movements show that there were also continuities from the interwar period with regard to the workforce of all three industrial plants. Despite the rupture articulated in historical works from the 1950s, a personnel policy based exclusively on ‘new people’ was not feasible. The history of the construction of the first church and the later establishment of the Solidarność movement in Nowa Huta highlights the contradiction between socialist plans and the will of new residents.¹¹ A former resident of the city describes this vividly: Just a few years after the foundation of the city, the ‘communist’ residents of Nowa Huta requested the construction of [. . . ] a church. Such a request was outrageous for the communists. A church in a modern socialist city? Incredible, a mortal sin! This led to riots in 1960.

11 Józef Gorzelany: Gdy nadszedłczas budowy Arki. Dzieje budowy kościoła w Nowej Hucie. Paris 1988.

126 | Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast The city, the police and ZOMO units [motorized police units (‘milicja obywatelska’), D.J-Q.] marched against rioting residents. After this incident, the temporary erection of a cross was allowed. Meanwhile, the majority of ‘socialist children’ participated regularly [. . . ] in religion classes in the Cistercian monastery in the village of Mogiła, close to Nowa Huta. Established by Odrowąż, the Bishop of Cracow, this was a famous monastery where the Cistercians had lived for almost 800 years. Fifteen years later, another bishop of Cracow, Karol Wojtyła [the later Pope John Paul II, D. J-Q.], compelled communists to build a new church. The famous Arka Pana (the Arch of the Lord) was built and officially opened in 1977 as ‘The Church of the Mother of God, Queen of Poland’. The church was located in Bieńczyce, in the western part of the town, while the Cistercian church and monastery were in the eastern part. Thus, the residents of Nowa Huta could choose between two churches, and they had shorter distance to walk to them. Further churches were built in the following years. [. . . ]. The communist vision ceased to exist only 30 years after the foundation of the city! The Solidarność union took over the reins of power in the city in 1980. In the following year, the largest bastion of free unions in Poland was created there.¹²

Due to the strength of the Catholic Church in Poland, a conservative agricultural tradition was far more rooted in Nowa Huta than it was in Ostrava-Poruba or Eisenhüttenstadt. In contrast to Czechoslovakia or the GDR, Polish society was hardly secularized. More than 95 per cent of Polish citizens were professed Catholics. Thus despite the widespread approval of the new system, the new residents of Nowa Huta were not ready to give up their faith and religious practices, and they only accepted the new socialist model to a certain extent. They were ready to fight for their own vision of the new system, in which the Catholic Church played an important role. Tensions were fuelled by that contradiction between the residents’ own conservative point of view and the reality of the new city, and they led to the establishment of anti-communist movements and even organized resistance. While the Catholic Church and religion were distant memories for many of the residents of Eisenhüttenstadt and Ostrava-Poruba, in Nowa Huta they were an intrinsic part of everyday life. Ultimately, the socialist system failed everywhere in East Central Europe because citizens refused to embrace it fully. In Poland, however, this happened much faster and to a far greater extent than in other countries because the new type of ‘working class’ was much more foreign to its citizens. The Soviet model was much closer to the tradition of the German welfare state than it was to the previous system in Poland.¹³ There was also a much stronger working-

12 Ziaja, Nowa Huta. 13 Helga Schultz: Das sozialistische Projekt und die Arbeiter. Die DDR und die Volksrepublik Polen im Vergleich, in: Helga Schultz/Hans-Jürgen Wagener (eds.), Die DDR im Rückblick. Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, Kultur. Berlin 2007, 224–243, 225, 227–228.

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class tradition in Czechoslovakia and East Germany than there was in Poland.¹⁴ The industrial workers in Nowa Huta represented the first proletarian generation there, while most of the workers in Eisenhüttenstadt and Kunčice were already familiar with proletarian ideas and lifestyles. In East Germany and Czechoslovakia, most of those engaged in the construction of the new cities were blue-collar workers. As Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato and Dorothee Wierling have shown, a large proportion of migrants from distant industrial areas (more than half of all workers) participated in the construction of the EKO.¹⁵ Many of them were from Upper Silesia and had already worked in heavy industry before the war. With the exception of a significant number of young men from Slovakia (initially up to 40 per cent of the total workforce), most of the men involved in the construction of the new metallurgical plant in Kunčice came from the Ostrava industrial area. There were no such continuities in Nowa Huta. There, workers had to be trained from scratch. The new city of Nowa Huta was also confronted with another ‘problem’ – the Roma population. Ostrava also had to grapple with this issue when Roma were moved there from the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia. In 1953, the Polish government passed legislation aimed at helping those members of the Roma community who were ready to adopt “a regulated and settled lifestyle.”¹⁶ The first thirty Roma families (approximately 160 people) were resettled from the High Tatra mountain region to Nowa Huta in 1950. By 1956, their number had risen to 270 people. State policy towards Roma was based on the somewhat simplistic assumption that the alleged civilizational gap between Roma and ethnic Poles would be closed when the Roma adopted the culture and lifestyle of their non-Roma neighbours.¹⁷ It quickly became clear that policy makers had little or no idea about Roma culture and traditions.

14 Christoph Kleßmann: Arbeiter im „Arbeiterstaat“ DDR. Deutsche Tradition, sowjetisches Modell, westdeutsches Magnetfeld (1945 bis 1971). Bonn 2007; Peter Heumos: Aspekte des sozialen Milieus der Industriearbeiterschaft in der Tschechoslowakei vom Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges bis zur Reformbewegung der sechziger Jahre, in: Bohemia 2 (2001), 323–362. 15 Lutz Niethammer/Alexander von Plato/Dorothee Wierling: Die volkseigene Erfahrung. Eine Archäologie des Lebens in der Industrieprovinz der DDR. Berlin 1991. 16 Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast: „Proletarische Internationalität” ohne Gleichheit. Ausländische Arbeitskräfte in ausgewählten sozialistischen Großbetrieben, in: Christian Th. Müller/Patrice G. Poutrus (eds.), Ankunft – Alltag – Ausreise. Migration und interkulturelle Begegnung in der DDRGesellschaft. Köln 2005, 267–294, 282. 17 Katherine Lebow: Unfinished Utopia. Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–1956. Ithaca 2013, 106–110.

128 | Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast They decided that Roma should live in multi-storey buildings, although this conflicted with Roma tradition, according to which a man could not live ‘under a woman’. This was of course unavoidable in a multi-storey building, and many families were reluctant to leave their barracks and tents and move into new apartments. When they did move, another issue arose. Zdzisław Olszewski, the director of the Nowa Huta health administration, reported that he had to persuade Roma not to “keep rabbits and chickens in beautiful bathtubs or light campfires on the floor.”¹⁸ In 1964, another compulsory resettlement of Roma was carried out under the banner of “productivizing the Roma”.¹⁹ But even those Roma who aspired to take advantage of the full spectrum of employment and social welfare opportunities in Nowa Huta had serious obstacles to overcome. Most Roma could only find unskilled and low-paid jobs. A long-term study conducted in 1970 confirmed that most Roma in Nowa Huta were engaged in undesirable forms of employment, such as rubbish collection.²⁰ Thus the proletarianization of this part of Nowa Huta’s population turned out to be much more difficult than that of the rest of the population. Moving to the ‘first socialist city’ meant social advancement for most of Nowa Huta’s new residents. We can speak of the emergence of a new industrial working class in Nowa Huta as a consequence of the migration of the rural population to the industrial centre. This was only the case to a certain extent at the Kunčice metallurgical plant, where peasants from Slovakia became industrial workers. Proletarianization was minimal in the EKO. In 1951, only 24 per cent of the entire workforce there had no industrial training. Until 1956, construction work in Cracow was concentrated on Nowa Huta. Out of more than 18 000 apartments built in and around the city in the years 1955 and 1956, over 12 000 were located in that “socialist city”.²¹ In spite of that, there were still not enough apartments, especially in the early years, and important infrastructure was lacking. But as soon as new residents of Nowa Huta got hold of an apartment, most of them found hitherto undreamt-of luxuries there and took great care of them: Houses were built with solid bricks, apartments had high ceilings (3.5 metres) and they were luxuriously equipped for the 1950s, with parquet flooring among other things. They looked very nice, and my mother asked us to rub the floor every few weeks with a special ‘parquet polish’ (pasta do podłóg) and then polish it (glancować). And sanding the parquet

18 Quoted in: ibid., 111. 19 Jerzy Ficowski: Cyganie Polscy. Warszawa 1953, 185. 20 Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 111. 21 Andrzej Chwalba: Dzieje Krakowa. Kraków w latach 1945–1989. Kraków 2004, 69.

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(cyklinowanie) was by far the worst. Every few years, my grandfather and I sanded it (more than 75 square metres of wood) by hand with special tools – ghastly work! Parquet floors were covered with carpets with fringes, which we (my sister and I) had to comb, so that they would lie straight. From time to time, carpets were brought outside and hung on a special carpet pole, where they were beaten with a carpet beater (trzepaczka). At other times, girls used the same carpet pole as a gymnastics apparatus. And in the winter, carpets were laid on the fresh snow and beaten again. The kitchen was big, with a large window [. . . ]. There was even a narrow wooden press under the window to air the room, with shelves (for pots, for instance) and a practical sliding door – instead of a fridge. There was also a closet, approximately two metres wide, where my grandfather built wooden shelves and where my mother stored approximately 200 jars of compote, pickled cucumbers and tomato sauce (everything homemade of course). From today’s point of view, wallpaper was the only missing ‘luxury item’, but it was impossible to buy it back then (we were able to get it later from the GDR). So we had to paint the walls every few years. Painting the ceilings was especially challenging (at a height of 3.5 metres). All the windows in the apartment were very big (about 2 metres high) and they were double windows. Thus, it required a lot of work to clean them too. The window frames had to be unscrewed with a screw-driver and cleaned on the inside and the outside, which meant that for every window there were four sides. A bathroom (with a bathtub and a huge gas heater) and a separate toilet were another ‘luxury’ back then.²²

While industrial workers in Poland and Czechoslovakia experienced a new social mobility at first hand, in the GDR, industrial workers were recruited mainly from the same social class. There, part of the workforce was recruited from other industrial sectors. Female employment also increased. Pictures of women felling trees or building roads and railways were a feature of socialist industrialization everywhere in East Central Europe. But they were especially common in Eisenhüttenstadt and in East Germany as a whole because of the demographic constellation after World War II. “The woman of the building generation is robust, resolute, energetic and helpful; she stands next to the man as an equal co-worker”, wrote the GDR magazine Frau von heute in 1952.²³ In spite of the different sources of labour, the plants – especially those in Eisenhüttenstadt and Kunčice – found it very difficult to find enough workers. This was not only due to a shortage of qualified workers, as was the case in Nowa Huta, but also due to a general lack of workers. Nationwide advertising campaigns were launched for all three sites to attract workers. The EKO also faced another problem – the flight of the population to the West, which was not solved until the Berlin Wall was built.

22 Ziaja, Nowa Huta. 23 Markus Ulrich: “Eine Frau steht ihren Mann!” Zur Konstruktion von Weiblichkeit „auf dem Bau“, in: Ute Mohrmann/Leonore Scholze-Irrlitz/Sigrid Jacobeit (eds.), FrauenAlltag im östlichen deutschen Osten: Eisenhüttenstadt. Münster 2008, 25–42, 26.

130 | Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast Despite significant differences, the three locations were confronted with similar problems stemming from the same model of socialist industrialization and an ‘economics of shortage’. A large workforce fluctuation is typical of any transformation process. Harsh working conditions and inadequate housing led to a high worker turnover in all three plants in the 1950s. Workers at the EKO were poached for other industrial sites constructed along the Oder-Neisse line in the early 1960s. In addition to the high turnover, all three plants had to deal with high rates of attrition and absenteeism, which were also typical features of the socialist transformation. In Poland and Czechoslovakia, farmers constituted the biggest group of absentees during the harvest period. The seasonal use of young worker brigades (in Nowa Huta and Kunčice) or prisoners (in the EKO) only exacerbated the problem. The impact of everyday problems on the new cities is clearly illustrated in an excerpt from the “Poem for Adults” by Adam Ważyk, which was published in 1955 in Nowa Kultura. It is no coincidence that this poem is about Nowa Huta, just like Andrzej Wajda’s “Man of Marble” (1976), because of the inhabitants of all three cities, the mainly rural population of Nowa Huta found it particularly difficult to adapt to urban life.

Adam Ważyk: A Poem for Adults²⁴ Ze wsi, z miasteczek wagonami jadą

From villages and little towns, they come in carts

zbudować hutę, wyczarować miasto,

to build a foundry and dream out a city,

wykopać z ziemi nowe Eldorado,

dig out of the earth a new Eldorado.

armią pionierską, zbieraną hałastrą

With an army of pioneers, a gathered crowd,

tłoczą się w szopach, barakach, hotelach,

they jam in barns, barracks, and hostels,

człapią i gwiżdżą w błotnistych ulicach:

walk heavily and whistle loudly in the muddy streets:

wielka migracja, skudlona ambicja,

the great migration, the twisted ambition,

na szyi sznurek – krzyżyk z Częstochowy,

with a string on their necks – the Czestochowa cross,

trzy piętra wyzwisk, jasieczek puchowy,

three floors of swear-words, a feather pillow,

maciora wódki i ambit na dziewki,

a gallon of vodka, and the lust for girls.

dusza nieufna, spod miedzy wyrwana,

Distrustful soul, torn out of the village soil,

wpółrozbudzona i wpółobłąkana,

half-awakened and already half-mad,

milcząca w słowach, śpiewająca śpiewki,

in words silent, but singing, singing songs,

wypchnięta nagle z mroków średniowiecza

the huge mob, pushed suddenly

masa wędrowna, Polska nieczłowiecza

out of medieval darkness: un-human Poland,

wyjąca z nudy w grudniowe wieczory. . .

howling with boredom on December nights. . . .

W koszach od śmieci na zwieszonym sznurze

In garbage baskets and on hanging ropes,

chłopcy latają kotami po murze,

boys fly like cats on night walls,

żeńskie hotele, te świeckie klasztory,

girls’ hostels, the secular nunneries,

trzeszczą od tarła, a potem grafinie

burst with rutting – And then the “Duchesses”

miotu pozbędą się – Wisła tu płynie.

ditch the foetus – the Vistula flows here. . . .

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Wielka migracja przemysłbudująca,

The great migration building industry,

nie znana Polsce, ale znana dziejom,

unknown to Poland, but known to history,

karmiona pustką wielkich słów, żyjąca

fed with big empty words, and living

dziko, z dnia na dzień i wbrew kaznodziejom –

wildly from day to day despite the preachers,

w węglowym czadzie, w powolnej męczarni,

in coal gas and in slow, continuous suffering,

z niej się wytapia robotnicza klasa.

the working class is shaped out of it.

Dużo opadków. A na razie kasza.

There is a lot of refuse. So far, there are Frits.

A high level of labour migration was common to all three sites. Particularly in Poland, it was an important indicator of the transformation process. Especially during the construction phase, the new socialist cities were characterized by a high proportion of male residents. The EKO was an exception to this rule: here, many women took part in construction work due to a shortage of male workers in post-war Germany. While up to 40 per cent of new workers came to Kunčice from Slovakia and the EKO workforce comprised emigrants from all over the GDR, most migrants to Nowa Huta came from the surrounding region. For the new residents of Nowa Huta, the average distance to their hometowns was about 80 kilometres. This relative proximity, together with difficult living conditions, encouraged the emergence of so-called peasant workers (chłopo-robotnicy).²⁵ Many of Nowa Huta’s new residents commuted from the surrounding villages to the factory and had to strike a balance between rural and urban life. Contemporary witnesses remember how life in that new city was marked by the harvesting cycle: The basement in the house was something special. You needed to walk down very long stairs, maybe 10 metres long, and then the labyrinth of narrow corridors would begin, where each apartment had its own room (we had seven partitions in each corridor, which added up to approximately 40 basement rooms). They were used mainly to store potatoes in winter. A truck used to deliver them in late autumn (right after the harvest), packed in 50-kilo sacks. We used to order maybe eight of those. My grandfather made a huge wooden box and we shook out the potatoes in there.²⁶

The lack of qualifications in the workforce was a major challenge in all three plants. While some workers in Nowa Huta lacked basic literacy skills and had to be taught how to read and write, the EKO had to train steel workers in a country

24 English translation in: Edmund Stillman (ed.): Bitter Harvest: The Intellectual Revolt behind the Iron Curtain, at: http://www.ucis.pitt.edu/eehistory/H200Readings/Topic3-R3.html [last accessed on 6.03.2013]. 25 Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast: Stahlgiganten in der sozialistischen Transformation. Nowa Huta in Krakau, EKO in Eisenhüttenstadt und Kunčice in Ostrava. Wiesbaden, 2010, 111. 26 Ziaja, Nowa Huta.

132 | Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast with no significant metallurgical industry. Differences in the levels of qualification of the workforce in all three plants could not be bridged during the socialist transformation. The metallurgical plant in Cracow did not attain the ratio of college graduates that the EKO already had in the 1960s until the second economic transformation of the 1990s. The activation of women in the workplace was a goal pursued in all East Central European countries, and a lot of attention was paid to the advancement of women in all three plants. This was motivated less by a desire for equal rights than it was by the need for additional labour. At the beginning of the socialist transformation, the integration of women into the workforce was necessary in all three cases due to the imbalance in the population structure after the war. In Nowa Huta especially, increasing the number of women employed in industry was an opportunity to gain additional workers without having to build additional housing. In East Germany and Czechoslovakia, the housing shortage, but also a general shortage of labour favoured the recruitment of more women to the workforce. Military considerations also played a large role here. Especially in East Germany, the employment of women in industry allowed the party to have more male workers serving in the army. In Nowa Huta, the ratio of women in the workforce never exceeded 22 per cent. The proportion of women in the EKO was larger than that at the outset, and it rose to almost 30 per cent after only a few years.²⁷ What is, however, certain is that equality was not achieved at management level. There were no women on the boards of directors of any of the three plants.

IV The transformation of the steel works and the city/plant relationship The development of new cities in East Central Europe was dictated to a great extent by their neighbouring factories, especially in the 1950s. All three cities discussed here were built on ‘green meadows’, on areas that had been mostly rural until then. The industrial investment plans also prescribed how the cities were to be built. In the face of a rapidly growing demand for employee housing, there was no time to thoroughly prepare or revise these construction plans.²⁸ The Nowa Huta project was only approved by the central administration in 1952, three years after construction had gotten under way there.

27 Jajeśniak-Quast, Stahlgiganten in der sozialistischen Transformation, 129. 28 Juchnowicz, Nowa Huta, 27.

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The first construction workers and employees at the new plant in Kunčice required accommodation. Despite the proximity of Ostrava, there was not enough housing to satisfy the enormous demand created by socialist industrialization. Initially, workers lived in wooden barracks or even in tents right next to the construction site – this was also the case in Eisenhüttenstadt and Nowa Huta. In August 1951, the National Commission for the Development of the Ostrava Region (Vládní komise pro výstavbu Ostravska) revised the original construction plan for Nová Ostrava, bringing it more in line with the plan for Nowa Huta. The revised plan foresaw that the city would be divided into three village municipalities: Poruba, Svinov and Polanka nad Odrou. It was, however, never realised, and a reduced development plan for Nová Ostrava (Poruba) was introduced in 1952.²⁹ In total, more than 1 300 new apartments were built in Poruba every year from 1951 to 1953. However, until the 1980s a lack of housing remained an issue in all three new cities. Many workers in the Kunčice plant found accommodation in another new city ten kilometres from the Kunčice plant – Havířov. Poruba and Havířov were perceived as gigantic construction sites and workers’ hotels, rather than proper cities, especially in 1950s and 1960s. Rubber boots became a ubiquitous item of clothing, and numerous young residents were forced to live in workers’ hotels for many years. These circumstances worked against the integration of the young workforce into the city. As new cities, Nowa Huta and Poruba (Nová Ostrava) were independent administrative units for only a short period of time. Poruba was independent in the planning period only, while Nowa Huta was legally independent for just two years. In March 1951, the government appointed a national council to the city district of Nowa Huta, and from then on, Nowa Huta was an administrative district of Cracow. Nevertheless, the dividing line remained clearly noticeable. The administration of the new cities and the plants attached to them was separate from the outset, and a separate construction management for the cities and the plants was introduced in 1950. Yet the factories continued to dictate the rhythm of life in the new cities. Since most residents were employees of the iron and steel works, settlements were often organised in accordance with the production cycle or even individual shifts. Trams were packed full shortly before and after each shift. The opening hours of shops and even schools and kindergartens were also orientated to the three shifts: 6 a.m.–2 p.m., 2 p.m.–10 p.m., and 10 p.m.–6 a.m. Architectonically, the close city/plant relationship can still be sensed today. City planners, especially in Nowa Huta and Eisenhüttenstadt, made sure that the main city thoroughfare led directly to the iron and steel works. In Nowa Huta

29 Jaroslav Bakala et al.: Dějiny Ostravy. Ostrava 1993, 471.

134 | Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast and Eisenhüttenstadt, the main road was designed to connect the respective city centres with the plant. As a former resident of Nowa Huta recalls: The steel works extended over approximately 1 000 hectares [ca. 2 500 acres, D. J-Q.] – it was huge, almost a small city. It didn’t just have blast furnaces (seven in total) and rolling mills, but also its own coke and cement plants. [. . . ]. A road with two wide lanes in both directions and a tramline in the middle (blue trams, line no. 4) ran straight from the city centre to the steel works. The entrance was grandiose: two huge buildings in the (neo-)renaissance style with ornaments (fascia) on the roof were called ‘the Doge’s Palace’ or ‘the Vatican’. They were the headquarters of the management and the administration. The interior was even more magnificent, with marble, mirrors, wooden panelling, and even custom-made furniture. It was nothing like the modest socialist style; it was the pure luxury of the Renaissance. It should be pointed out here that Polish architecture in the 1950s and 1960s had nothing in common with Russian ‘socialist realism’ (the Palace of Culture and Science [in Warsaw, D. J-Q.] was the only exception, but that was a gift from the USSR). While the Soviet architecture of the time emulated classicism (the typical architecture of Leningrad/St. Petersburg), the Poles preferred the renaissance and baroque styles (models: Wawel, Zamość and Kazimierz nad Wisłą).³⁰

The new cities’ great dependence on the plants was thought to be a hindrance to their development as urban centres in their own right. The social city concept was based on the ‘neighbourhood unit concept’ that had already been applied in New York in the 1920s. Thus, huge ‘neighbourhood units’ were built in Nowa Huta, accommodating about 20 000 residents each. These units were split into three or four settlements, each housing 5 000 to 6 000 residents. Each of these settlements had its own public amenities, such as shops, schools, kindergartens, nurseries, health centres, restaurants, cultural centres and post offices. However, many social and cultural facilities were built much later than planned. For instance, while there were plans to build a cultural centre and a shopping centre in Nowa Huta in the 1950s, neither of these projects was completed before the 1980s. As a result, the factories assumed many cultural and supply functions. In Eisenhüttenstadt, the realization of construction plans followed a similar pattern. There were distinct construction phases in all three cities. In Nowa Huta, residential complexes 1 to 4 were built in the 1950s, but complexes 7 to 8 were not built until the 1970s. Therefore, each of the complexes – from four- or five-storey houses to high-rise prefabricated blocks – reflects the economic and political context in which they were built. All utilities were owned by the state or cooperatives. Factories and all sorts of ancillary businesses were created to supply workers not only with food and consumer goods, but also with electricity, water, homes, and

30 Ziaja, Nowa Huta.

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social institutions. The factory supply unit could be called the biggest restaurant in Cracow, as it served more than 25 000 meals every day in 16 canteens. In addition to 16 bars and a casino, there were 36 grocery stores and two take-away restaurants.³¹ The plant even included a pig farm, where animals ate leftovers from the canteens. The factory’s health service employed around 150 doctors, more than 30 dentists, and 400 nurses in 11 health centres in the mid-1980s. It had its own emergency unit and two hospital units: an occupational disease clinic and a surgery.³² The new cities’ independence increased over time, and many municipal decisions were placed in the hands of the local administration. This shows that the city/plant relationship shifted from total dependence in the initial development phase to relative autonomy in the last years of state socialism. The three cities differed in terms of their degree of dependence on their respective plants. In Cracow and Ostrava, where Nowa Huta and Poruba evolved into city districts, that dependence was not as great as it was in Eisenhüttenstadt. The sign at the entrance to the latter city – with huge furnaces in the foreground, next to an apartment block and a river – illustrates Eisenhüttenstadt’s heavy reliance on the plant. Neither Nowa Huta nor Ostrava-Poruba had such a coat of arms.³³ The combines also determined the size of the cities. The table below shows the relationship between population growth and employment growth in the respective plants in Cracow, Ostrava and Eisenhüttenstadt. For Stalinstadt (later Eisenhüttenstadt) in particular, the population’s reliance on the plant is clear. The agricultural hinterland of Eisenhüttenstadt had a population density of 40 residents per square kilometre, and was thus one of the least populated areas in the GDR. The EKO plant engaged most of the population of a working age in the region.³⁴ The same high ratio was not observed in the areas surrounding Nowa Huta and Kunčice. Admittedly, Cracow was one of the Polish cities with the fastest population growth, and Nowa Huta was one of the reasons for that, but other plants in the region also fuelled that growth.³⁵ In Ostrava, the role played by the Kunčice Plant in urban growth was not as significant as that of the EKO in Eisenhüttenstadt. Moreover, many workers in Kunčice (about 40 per cent) did not actually live

31 Ośrodek Infromacji i Edukacji Społecznej (ed.): Kombinat Metalurgiczny Huta im. Lenina Kraków. Kraków 1987, 33. 32 Ibid., 37. 33 In contrast to Eisenhüttenstadt and Nowa Huta, Kunčice does not have its own administration. For administrative purposes, it is part of Slezská Ostrava, an administrative district of Ostrava. 34 Andreas Ludwig: Industrieller Kern und neue Stadt, in: Arbeitsgruppe Stadtgeschichte (ed.), Eisenhüttenstadt. „Erste sozialistische Stadt Deutschlands”. Berlin 1999, 55–65, 59. 35 Chwalba, Dzieje Krakowa, 16.

136 | Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast in Ostrava, but in Havířov. However, most NHKG workers lived in districts of Ostrava such as Poruba (about 35 per cent), Kunčičky, Kunčice and Hrabová (about 20 per cent).³⁶ Table 1: The dependence of the cities on the plant³⁷

Eisenhüttenstadt Plant Eisenhüttenstadt Eisenhüttenstadt Plant as a percentage of Eisenhüttenstadt Kunčice Plant Ostrava Kunčice Plant as a percentage of Ostrava Nowa Huta Plant Cracow Nowa Huta Plant as a percentage of Cracow

1950

1960

1970

1980

1989

2004

1 160

5 749

7 721

9 362

11 934

3 230

10 000

25 000

45 000

48 000

52 000

38 000

11.6

22.9

17.1

19.5

22.9

8.5

5 223 189 191

20 296 233 488

24 404 280 000

25 419 322 000

23 055 320 000

9 000 315 000

2.7

8.6

8.7

7.8

7.2

2.8

733 343 600

18 985 481 000

31 524 584 900

38 365 715 700

29 288 750 500

8 000 746 000

0.2

3.9

5.3

5.3

3.9

1.0

V Conclusions Eisenhüttenstadt, Nowa Huta and Ostrava-Poruba are typical industrial towns. They were built during the period of socialist industrialization and their development was dictated to a large extent by heavy industry, especially the iron and steel industry. During the 1950s in particular, the plants exerted a huge influence on life in their neighbouring cities. The growth of those cities was in fact determined by the plants, because most residents were either factory workers or former factory workers. The area of the cities also increased as the plants expanded.

36 Bakala et al., Dějiny Ostravy, 472. 37 On Eisenhüttenstadt, see Ludwig, Eisenhüttenstadt. Wandel einer industriellen Gründungsstadt, 84; Nicolaus/Schmidt, Einblicke, 96, 176, 200; http://www.eisenhuettenstadt.de; on Kunčice, see: Miroslav Buchvaldek: Československé dějiny v datech, Nakladatelství Svoboda. Praha 1986, 646; Český Statistický Úrad (ed.): Statistická ročenka České Republiky 2001. Praha 2001, 58; Edmund Grygar: Kronika Nové Huti Klementa Gottwalda Ostrava-Kunčice (unpublished source held at: Podnikový archiv Nová Huť Ostrava – Kuničice); on Nowa Huta, see: Marian Michalik (ed.): Kronika Krakowa. Warszawa 1996, 507.

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Initially, the planned socialist cities tended to have a very young population structure and they were shaped by migration from rural areas. More and more people were needed to work in industrial production, and most of them were recruited from agricultural regions. This labour migration was especially important for the development of Nowa Huta. In Ostrava-Poruba too, migrants from the rural part of Slovakia played an important role. Eisenhüttenstadt, where industrial workers from the lost German territories in the East were employed in the EKO, was an exception to this rule. A comparison of everyday life in the three cities in the first decade of state socialism shows that Nowa Huta was most affected by a process of ruralization, the effects of which are still felt today. Numerous sociologists began to undertake research on this aspect of Nowa Huta’s development after the Polish October in 1956, when sociology was reinstated as an academic subject in Polish universities. The huge number of surveys, photos and statistics in the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow testifies to this.³⁸ Ostrava-Poruba was affected by ruralization to a lesser extent. Here, the influx of young people from rural Slovakia and the Roma population was especially important. In comparison to the other two cities, Eisenhüttenstadt was influenced the least by ruralization. It is interesting that there are parallels in the fate of these three cities to this day. The steel works in Nowa Huta, Eisenhüttenstadt and Ostrava-Poruba were not only built in the same era, they were also privatized at the same time, and they were all purchased by the steel company and global player Arcelor-Mittal.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Jerzy Ziaja for his Memoirs from Nowa Huta, which I was allowed to cite in this article.³⁹ Thanks also to Małgorzata Szajbel-Keck for translating them into English.

38 See: Antoni Stojak (ed.): Huta im. Lenina i jej załoga, Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego 447, Prace sojologiczne, Zeszyt 3. Kraków 1976; idem: Studia nad załogą Huty imienia Lenina, in: Polska Akademia Nauk. Prace Komisji Socjologicznej 9, Zakład Narodowy imienia Ossolińskich. Wrocław/Warszawa/Kraków 1967; Ryszard Kapuściński: To też jest prawda o Nowej Hucie, in: Anna Pawłowska/Jerzy Feliksiak (eds.), Młodzi stąd. Reportaże 1950–1965. Warszawa 1966; Stefan Kozicki/Zbigniew Stolarek: Krajobraz ogni. Antologia reportaży o Nowej Hucie. Warszawa 1971. 39 See Jerzy Ziaja: Nowa Huta – komunistyczny fenomen – osobiste wspomnienie z lat 60-tych i 70-tych, at: http://www.polonia-viva.eu/index.php/pl/historia-2/420-nowa-huta-komunistyczny -fenomen-osobiste-wspomnienie-z-lat-60-tych-i-70-tych [last accessed on 5.04.2013].

Ivana Dobrivojević

Changing the Cityscapes: The Ruralization of Yugoslav Towns in Early Socialism I Introduction During the interwar period the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was one of the most economically underdeveloped countries in Europe. According to data from 1931, farming represented the main occupation and the only source of income for three quarters of the population. Subsistence agriculture prevailed, since only 2.9 per cent of farmers owned more than 20 hectares of land.¹ Tiny properties, widespread poverty and a weak industrial sector were the main impediments to modernization. Subsistence farming and low consumption could not stimulate industrial development, and due to the slow pace of industrialization there was no large-scale migration from villages to cities. Thus, the problem of agrarian overpopulation did not diminish. Indeed, a huge average birth rate of 200 000 per annum coupled with an extremely low level of urbanization compounded agrarian overpopulation, with an average rural population density of 140 people per 100 hectares of arable land (1931).² Although the interwar period in Yugoslavia was marked by some progress towards modernization, industrialization proceeded slowly and the volume of production remained low. In a century characterized by technical and technological transformation and advancement, Yugoslav industry was predicated on outdated machinery and an unskilled workforce.³ Thus, the average national income, the best indicator of (under)development, was very low – at only $80 per capita, Yugoslavia was at the very bottom of the European ladder.⁴ Under these economic circumstances, the possibilities of finding work in towns were limited. According to the data from the 1931 census, Belgrade, Zagreb and Subotica were the only cities with more than 100 000 inhabitants, while Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Skoplje, Novi Sad and Rijeka had over 50 000 inhabitants each. Moreover,

1 Ljubodrag Dimić: Kulturna politika Kraljevine Jugoslavije 1918–1941. Volume 1, Beograd 1996, 26–35. 2 Jozo Tomasevich: Peasants, Politics, and Economic Change in Yugoslavia. New York/London 1955, 309–317. 3 Mari Žanin Čalić: Socijalna istorija Srbije 1815–1941. Beograd 2004, 397–398. 4 Michael Kaser: The Economic History of Eastern Europe 1919–1975. Volume 1, Oxford 1986, 281.

140 | Ivana Dobrivojević demographers point out that many Yugoslav towns, especially those in Vojvodina, southern Serbia, Kosovo and Macedonia, were not urban centres in the true sense of the word, because the majority of the population there was engaged in farming. Due to its partial agrarian structure, Subotica represented a prime example of a so-called “false urbanization”.⁵ Given widespread poverty, an underdeveloped industrial sector, a backward and dilapidated railway and road network, and primitive farming methods, the mobility of the Yugoslav population was low. Thus, the life of the vast majority of inhabitants began and ended within the borders of the same district.⁶ Of the 3.5 million people born in the countryside after unification (1918), only 19 per cent were absorbed by Yugoslav cities, i.e. on average, around 30 000 people moved from the countryside to urban centres each year.⁷ The effect of the Great Depression also curtailed migration. The government instructed local authorities to appeal to peasants not to move to cities, especially to Belgrade, as “they would find neither a job nor receive any help from officials”.⁸ Yet, despite the slowness of the urbanization process in Yugoslavia, some progress was noticeable. While trade and handicrafts had been the main drivers of pre-war Yugoslav urbanization, industrialization became one of the most important factors of interwar urbanization.⁹ Belgrade, the capital of the unified Yugoslavia, experienced a rapid increase in its population. Clerks, officers, soldiers, merchants, artisans and the rural poor from all over the country flocked to the capital to take up positions in the state administration or seek employment. The influx of new inhabitants was particularly intense in the years before 1929.¹⁰ In the interwar period, population growth in Belgrade was two and a half times higher than the national average. Thus, in only two decades the number of naturalized Belgrade residents increased by about 210 000.¹¹ Although street lighting, a water supply and sewerage system, and the first trams had been introduced in Belgrade at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, large-scale urbanization was only witnessed in the interwar period. In a city of migrants and huge social differences, modern and more traditional lifestyles coexisted. Alongside modern multi-storey

5 Dolfe Voglenik: Urbanizacija kao odraz privrednog razvoja FNRJ. Beograd 1961, 32; Cvetko Kostić: Grad i vreme. Osnovi sociologije grada. Beograd 1982, 52. 6 Dimić, Kulturna politika, 57. 7 Voglenik, Urbanizacija kao odraz, 73. 8 Todor Stojkov: Opozicija u vreme šestojanuarske diktature (1929–1935). Beograd 1969, 27. 9 Voglenik, Urbanizacija kao odraz, 119. 10 Bogdan Radovanović: Demografski odnosi u Beogradu 1918–1941, in: Vasa Čubrilović (ed.), Istorija Beograda. Volume 3, Beograd 1974, 161. 11 Voglenik, Urbanizacija kao odraz, 11.

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buildings, newly cobbled streets, shops with colonial goods and luxurious fabrics, cinemas, and glamorous parties, another urban environment could be found – the world of unpaved streets and dusty lanes, slum suburbs, and oriental fragrances and colours.¹² The influx of migrants, unplanned construction and widespread poverty led to ruralization, which was the most obvious side effect of rapid urbanization. The housing crisis in the major cities Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana was acute.¹³ According to estimates, around 70 000 families across the whole Kingdom of Yugoslavia lived in dreadful conditions.¹⁴ Despite increasing demand, relatively few new apartments were built – in the interwar period around 20 000 apartments were built in the capital.¹⁵ Moreover, the newly erected apartments did not cater to everybody’s needs. Private entrepreneurs – the main investors in the interwar period – usually erected modern and luxurious apartments. Rents were high and most of the urban population could not afford them. As a result, many inhabitants, mostly migrants, were compelled to live in unhygienic conditions in humid and dilapidated buildings or slums.¹⁶ Although state and local authorities tried to promote the construction of cheaper flats by providing affordable loans, these isolated efforts did not do much to solve the overall housing problem.¹⁷ Yugoslavia’s belated industrialization, incomplete modernization, and slow process of urbanization were interrupted by the Second World War. Destroyed cities and villages, deserted fields, a sick and starving population, and hundreds of thousands of refugees, invalids and orphans were the tragic consequences of warfare. Immediately after the war, the authorities estimated the human losses at 1 706 460 people (10.8 per cent of the population). However, historians believe that that figure is actually closer to one million.¹⁸ Despite the lack of reliable data on victims, it is certain that the number of war casualties and the scale of destruction were far greater than in the First World War.¹⁹ However, human losses and devastation on a massive scale were only the most obvious consequences of the war. 12 Sreten Vujović: Gradsko stanovanje i privatnost u Srbiji tokom 20. veka, in: Milan Ristović (ed.), Privatni život kod Srba u 20. veku. Beograd 2007, 276. 13 Ljubomir Petrović: Problemi stanovanja u Kraljevini Jugoslaviji 1918–1941, in: Istorija 20. veka 1 (2000), 49–64, 50. 14 Slobodan Vidaković: Naši socijali problemi. Beograd 1932, 130. 15 Miloš Bobić/Sreten Vujović: Krov nad glavom. Ogledi o stambenoj bedi i siromaštvu. Beograd 1985, 97. 16 Vidaković, Socijali problemi, 109–111. 17 Petrović, Problemi stanovanja, 50–52. 18 Stevan K. Pavlović: Hitlerov novi antiporedak. Drugi svetski rat u Jugoslaviji. Beograd 2009, 9. 19 Yugoslav national income was halved in the period from 1938 to 1946. See Barry Eichengreen: The European Economy since 1945. Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond. Princeton/Oxford 2007, 131.

142 | Ivana Dobrivojević The old political system was shattered, national conflicts and divisions reached boiling point, and the population welcomed a revolutionary polarization of society into partisans and their supporters on the one hand, and monarchists on the other. Using incendiary partisan rhetoric and assurances that the “old shall never return”, party leaders tried to consolidate power, neutralize political opponents, modernize society and achieve sustainable reconciliation in a country where national conflicts and divisions had resulted in terrible war atrocities.²⁰ They did so under the guise of socialist transformation with reference to the slogan of “brotherhood and unity”. Industrialization, de-agrarianization and mass migration to the cities led to a relative urbanization of villages and the partial ruralization of cities in the first post-war decade. Overambitious goals set by party officials, as well as modest financial capabilities, insufficient qualified personnel and the politicization of all activities are some of the reasons for the limited scale of socialist modernization in the period under review. On the other hand, the transformation and modernization of a largely autarkic agrarian society would have represented an almost insurmountable challenge even under much more favourable political and economic circumstances. Economic reforms initiated in the mid-1950s, steps towards the democratization and liberalization of society in the 1960s, and attempts to develop socialism with a ‘human face’ resulted in radical improvements in the quality of life in Yugoslavia. Thus, in the longer term, there is no doubt that socialist industrialization and modernization encouraged remarkable economic growth and improvements in living standards. However, in comparison to other European countries, the level of urbanization remained low during the entire socialist period.²¹ Thus, it appears that the significant progress towards modernization achieved under socialism was not a sufficient stimulus for an essential transformation of Yugoslavia into a fully industrialized, urban and developed society.

II Rural-urban migration in early socialism Rapid post-war industrial development led to major socio-economic changes in Yugoslav society. The rural population so closely bound to the land and agriculture permanently or temporarily abandoned its traditional occupation to find em-

20 Josip Broz Tito: Socijalistička demokratija mora imati snažnu ekonomsku podlogu, in: Govori i članci. Volume 6, Zagreb 1959, 176. 21 According to census data from 1981, only 46.6 per cent of the population lived in urban areas; see Sreten Vujović/Mina Petrović: Urbana sociologija. Beograd 2005, 403.

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ployment in factories and on large socialist construction sites. Some turned their backs on agriculture voluntarily, while others were forced to do so by party officials. Considerable investment in the economy and rapid industrial development paved the way for migration, which gained momentum in 1953. Contemporary demographers were reminded of the “migration of peoples” in late antiquity.²² However, until 1955 the volume of migration was actually slightly lower than the natural increase in the urban population. As in Western countries, the transformation into an urban society occurred in the lifetime of just one generation.²³ According to the census conducted in 1961, a total seven million people, or 38 per cent of Yugoslavia’s population, moved from the countryside to towns or cities or from one village to another in the period from 1945 to 1961.²⁴ Moreover, it was estimated that one million people had moved to Yugoslav cities in the period from 1945 to 1953.²⁵ However, urbanization processes in Yugoslavia were overshadowed by the explosive growth of Belgrade. Due to its political significance, rapid industrialization, and greater employment and educational opportunities, Belgrade was a magnet for migrants. All those in pursuit of a better life perceived the capital as a symbol of hope and unlimited opportunities. Thus, Belgrade was rapidly turning into a city of newcomers. According to the official statistics for 1953, 74 per cent of the city’s inhabitants had moved to Belgrade from somewhere else.²⁶ The prominent political magazine NIN chronicled: Most of them left their own surroundings, house, land and, in some cases, a decent and normal life and went to Belgrade in search of work, drawn by the spirit of a major city that exerted the magnetic draw of a promised land. They came with numerous family members – wives, children, mothers and in-laws – and settled in vulnerable zones, occupying the last remnants of the only possible space in the acute housing crisis.²⁷

In the first post-war decade the fate of Yugoslav cities mirrored that of the former bourgeoisie to a certain degree. The mass emigration and wartime suffering of members of the pre-war economic, political and cultural elite had a lasting effect

22 Ivanka Ginić: Dinamika i struktura gradskog stanovništva Jugoslavije. Demografski aspekti urbanizacije. Beograd 1967, 97. 23 Louis Wirth: Urbanism as a Way of Life, in: George Gmelch/Walter Zenner (eds.), Urban Life. Readings in Urban Anthropology. Prospect Heights 1996, 15. 24 Dušan Breznik/Milovan Radovanović: Demografski i ekonomski aspekti prostorne pokretljivosti stanovništva Jugoslavije posle Drugog svetskog rata. Beograd 1968, 16. 25 Stanovi, Archive of Josip Broz Tito (hereinafter A JBT), KPR III-A-1-b. 26 “Nestaju etnografske, kulturne i ekonomske pregrade. Preko četiri miliona stanovnika se seli”, in: Borba, 10.05.1955. 27 “Samozvani stanovnici u velikom gradu”, in: NIN, 19.06.1955.

144 | Ivana Dobrivojević on the socio-economic structure of the cities. Apart from the tribulations of the war, this former elite had to contend with the communist authorities’ policy of eradicating elements of the ‘old’ society and ‘old’ ways of life by clamping down on all those who they perceived as their political, ideological, and ‘class’ opponents. Persecution, arrests and trials, accusations of ‘collaboration’, ‘speculation’ and ‘profiteering’, as well as economic ruination as a result of confiscation and nationalization represented just some of the measures taken by the new regime against the pre-war elite. Radical changes in economic policy and differences of opinion regarding strategic development potentials and priorities stalled the urbanization process and decisively influenced the course, the level and the quality of urban changes in the rapidly growing cities. However, apart from political and economic factors, historical circumstances greatly contributed to urban chaos. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, urban development was rarely permanent and the epicentre of urbanization shifted from one town to another over a period of several decades.²⁸ The reason why urbanization processes first materialized in demographic and spatial changes and only much later in a cultural shift lay above all in the absence of developed urban centres and traditions of urban life.²⁹ The decline and dehumanization of the cities coupled with a decrease in the quality of urban life and changing behavioural patterns – prompted by party policies and the influx of migrants who were unaccustomed to urban culture – were clearly visible across Yugoslavia. The devastation wreaked by the war, widespread poverty, the party’s economic policy and rushed mass migrations also worsened the living conditions of the population. Communal flats and provisional factory barracks, a constant shortage of goods, a poor public transportation network, an inadequate urban infrastructure, low wages, and inhuman working conditions in factories and on large socialist construction sites speak volumes about deteriorating living conditions in early socialist Yugoslavia. Poverty and pervasive neglect combined with the rapid increase in population turned even relatively prosperous urban centres into backward provincial towns.³⁰ The drastic decrease in the number of shops as a consequence of the party’s policy of destroying ‘speculators’, a poor level of service, a chronic shortage of goods, and ramshackle cinemas and restaurants all evidenced a temporary decline in ur-

28 Vogelnik, Urbanizacija kao odraz, 157. 29 Vojislav Ðurić: Pojam, uloga, činioci i modeli urbanizacije. Specifično sociološko gledište, in: Sociologija 3–4 (1970), 416. 30 Zapisnik sa sastanka sa književnicima u Socijalističkom savezu – saveznom odboru na dan 6.04.1956, Archive of Yugoslavia (hereinafter AJ), 142-46-163.

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ban life. Ruralization was most apparent in the lack of hygiene, in the behaviour of provincial migrants who brought their way of life to the cities, in the chaotic, unplanned and half-finished development of the suburbs, in provisional architecture and, ultimately, in a dramatic decline in cultural life.³¹ The careless attitude of the urban population and local authorities to cultural heritage in certain cities only compounded ruralization. For example, the People’s District Committee in Novi Pazar “allowed the remaining material, out of which the old city of Ras had been built, to be used for lime burning.”³² In Kruševac, the protected medieval tower was used as a public toilet, and local officials did nothing to prevent this. The situation was similar in other cities – bricks were stolen from the site of the former Byzantine city Justiniana Prima, and the People’s City Committee of Čačak used a palace from early nineteenth century as a storeroom.³³ The dehumanization of cities, which was closely linked to the dehumanization of life in general, gradually led to the creation of a vicious circle of communal and urban chaos, from which it was impossible to break free.

III Communal negligence Economic policy, minimal investment in housing and infrastructure, and strict party control over cultural life meant that socialist urbanization, instead of being the main component of modernization and the engine of economic and cultural development, actually became a synonym for the territorial expansion of the city, a rapid increase in urban populations, a decline in the quality of life, but also the disappearance of urban facilities. The post-war expansion of cities and chaotic and unplanned construction represented a continuation of the pre-war development that had proceeded with no zoning plans. Aware of the accumulated urban problems, the new regime decided to establish town-planning institutes at state and regional level in 1946. However, as in all other spheres of life, here too socialist reality diverged sharply from official rules and regulations. The opinion of townplanning institutes was barely required for the construction of industrial plants in urban centres. At the last minute, investors would come to the institute to ask for formal permission, which had to be granted, since the withholding of consent was 31 Ivana Dobrivojević: Urbanization in Socialism. Everyday life in Yugoslav Towns 1945–1955, in: Katrina Gulliver/Helena Toth (eds.), Cityscapes in History. Creating the Urban Experience. London 2014, 83. 32 Referat o zadacima gradskih povereništava za prosvetu u vezi sa radom gradskih muzeja, Archive of Serbia (hereinafter AS), G 187-22. 33 Ibid.

146 | Ivana Dobrivojević regarded as ‘blocking construction work’.³⁴ Thus, despite the existence of such institutes, decisions on the location of factories were made with little regard for basic urban planning principles, i.e. factors like proximity to residential areas, the prevailing wind and other climatic conditions. Similarly, in the construction of apartments, urban planners were only superficially consulted, because the investment plans came with pre-defined instructions and directives. Thus, the new settlements that emerged on the outskirts of towns often lacked electricity, a water supply, paved streets and the most basic of infrastructures. All over Yugoslavia, dark buildings with tiny entrances were built. They had no basic sanitary facilities and residents had to make do with temporary outdoor toilets. Architects described the new suburbs as “plain and ugly” and were particularly critical of the fact that no efforts were being made to fit the newly erected structures into the architecture of their surroundings.³⁵ Even during the building process, construction plans were constantly readjusted, and one-storey houses were sometimes ‘adapted’ into multi-storey buildings.³⁶ Paradoxically, instead of preventing poorly planned and ill-conceived construction work, the authorities significantly contributed to the chaotic development of the cities. Despite the establishment of town planning institutes, the introduction of urban development regulations, and the professed commitment of the authorities to improving the overall quality of urban life, the decline of towns and cities was clearly visible across Yugoslavia. Vast numbers of run-down buildings were not restored – mostly due to a lack of funds, doubts that the investment would yield a significant return, or a lack of interest on the part of the owner. As one report noted, “it is not uncommon to see facades caving in, balconies in a dilapidated condition, dirty entrances and shabby windows, even in the very centre of the city.” The same bleak scenes of urban and cultural decline were visible in Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana, and even in Bled, once a developed tourism centre.³⁷ Dusty and unpaved streets, unfinished squares and crumbling footpaths, muddy lawns, a few alleyways, small shops and restaurants, insufficient schools and even fewer hospitals and hospital beds were just some of the characteristics of the rapidly growing socialist cities.³⁸ Due to the lack of light bulbs and chronic short-

34 Dobrivojević, Urbanization in Socialism, 82. 35 Ibid., 87–88. 36 Odnos planske privrede i urbanizma. Referat arhitekte Dimitrija Marinovića, AS, G 125-53. 37 Zapažanja o kulturnom izgledu naših gradova, AJ, 317-78-110. 38 Pov br 29 887 (4.11.1948), AS, G 125-57; Br. 15 259/48 (13.01.1949); AS, G 125-57; Zapažanja o kulturnom izgledu naših gradova, AJ, 317-78-110; Izveštaj, AS, G 125-61; Obrazloženje, AJ, 130-749-1210; Problemi zdravstvene službe Beograda, Historical Archive of Belgrade (hereinafter I AB) 136-153.

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ages of electricity, most Yugoslav cities, with the exception of downtown Belgrade, were plunged into darkness, as entire streets were without a single bulb.³⁹ The members of the new political elite, who presented themselves as the vanguard of modernization and progress, actually contributed in no small part to the ruralization of towns. Thus, public sanitation was almost non-existent, because the local authorities put all their efforts into meeting the quotas and deadlines set by the plan and “reckoning” with the supporters of the Cominform and the remaining members of the pre-war elite.⁴⁰ The indifferent attitude of party officials to municipal negligence was also adopted by city dwellers. Given that they were rarely punished, violations of communal regulations were common across Yugoslavia.⁴¹ Due to the “significant weakening” of “consciousness and hygiene awareness”, the custom of cleaning in front of one’s home was abandoned.⁴² According to official party reports, the signs of pervasive municipal negligence – run-down buildings, filthy streets, dusty shop windows, piles of rubbish, rubble and other construction materials in the city centre, unsanitary toilets, and temporary pigsties – were some of the most dreaded images of Belgrade.⁴³ Periodical sanitation actions organized by party activists did not significantly contribute to the improvement of sanitary conditions.⁴⁴ The gravity of the problem and the degree of municipal chaos were clearly illustrated in an article published in the prominent daily Politika, which openly stated: “The city of Belgrade can hardly

39 Zapažanja o kulturnom izgledu naših gradova, AJ, 317-78-110. 40 Dobrivojević, Urbanization in Socialism, 90–91. 41 Since the level of literacy and education varied (the most developed regions were Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, while the least developed were Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo and Montenegro), regional differences in hygiene habits were visible to some extent. However, reports show that the conditions in which urban dwellers lived were broadly similar. Due to communal negligence, periodical outbreaks of infectious diseases like diphtheria, dysentery and typhoid fever occurred, especially in the first years after liberation. Poor sanitary conditions were visible in Belgrade and other Serbian towns, Zenica, Brčko, Sarajevo (Bosnia), Slavonski Brod, Rijeka (Croatia), Ljubljana, Bled (Slovenia). See V. Zapažanja o kulturnom izgledu naših gradova, AJ, 317-78-110; AJ, 31-24-43; AJ, 31-28-36. 42 Sanitarne prilike u Beogradu, AJ, 671 (Ministarstvo narodnog zdravlja DFJ)-1-1; Obrazloženje, AS, G 129-9. 43 “Za kulturniji izgled našeg glavnog grada. Neuredni i zapušteni izlozi lokala i prodavnica ruže Beograd”, in: Politika, 21.07.1951; Sanitarne prilike u Beogradu, AJ, 671-1-1; “Oko završenih objekata ostaju otpaci i nagomilani materijal”, in: 20. oktobar, 1.08.1947; Br. 1733 (18.07.1950), I AB, 136-350. 44 Zapisnik sa sastanka sa rukovodiocima agitpropa reona, MSV, GK NO, AFŽ i Saveza boraca održanog 29. maja 1950, I AB 137-144.

148 | Ivana Dobrivojević be more unclean than it is today.”⁴⁵ The ruralization of the cities and their gradual decline could no longer be concealed. Thus, even the party leaders who had previously managed to gloss over the facts had to admit that “the situation regarding sanitary conditions in towns and suburbs is worse than before the war.”⁴⁶ The chaotic urban conditions all over the country were not just the consequence of the havoc wreaked by the war. They persisted for years after the war and just seemed to evidence people’s habits and mentality in the first place. However, in addition to negligence and carelessness, there were also objective reasons for poor sanitation. Widespread poverty and the party’s stubborn insistence on industrialization at the cost of neglecting all other segments of society had a detrimental effect on communal hygiene, “severely endangering the health of the inhabitants”.⁴⁷ The destruction caused by the war coupled with a lack of investment in urban infrastructure produced serious problems – for example, regular street-washing in the Serbian town of Valjevo was hampered by water shortages.⁴⁸ Official reports indicated that the rapidly growing industrial town of Smederevo was granted only 20 000 dinars for the monthly maintenance of public sanitation. However, this sum was only enough to cover the cost of maintaining one eight-storey building or purchasing one month’s fuel for a single vehicle.⁴⁹ Despite mass migration to the cities, the authorities were not concerned about improving and expanding urban infrastructure networks, which, even in the prewar period, had been primitive and inadequate. Although the situation worsened due to the war and the influx of migrants, investment in infrastructure was barely envisaged in the Five-Year Plan, which prioritized the development of heavy industry.⁵⁰ Thus, attempts to improve urban infrastructure and the quality of life were limited to isolated efforts by local officials with little support or encouragement from the central authorities.⁵¹ Moreover, in the context of the open conflict with the USSR (from 1949 onwards), investment was reduced even further.⁵² For that reason, the development of cities, in particular Belgrade, lagged far behind their demographic growth, and the living conditions of the urban population gradually deteriorated. Communal problems were such a hindrance to city

45 “Može li Beograd da bude čistiji?”, in: Politika, 28.08.1950. 46 AS, G-129-9. 47 Dobrivojević, Urbanization in Socialism, 91–92. 48 Municipal Historical Archive of Valjevo (hereinafter MIAV), A 1. 5. 23-168. 49 Godišnji izveštaj sreskog komiteta KPS sreza Smederevskog, AS, Ð4-1. 50 Zakon o petogodišnjem planu razvitka narodne privrede Narodne republike Srbije u godinama 1947–1951, in: Službeni glasnik Narodne republike Srbije, 5.07.1947. 51 Opšti prikaz mreže komunalnih objekata, AS, G 129-20. 52 Stenografske beleške sa VI gradske konferencije SK Beograda 7–8. oktobra 1955, I AB, 136-151.

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life that even party officials almost unanimously acknowledged that the situation had escalated into a serious political problem.⁵³ Although reports on the quality of life in various cities were largely similar, the worst conditions were found in Smederevo, where inhabitants had about two litres of clean water per person per day.⁵⁴ Despite their professed willingness to improve hygiene and public health, party leaders did not want to diverge from agreed economic policy. Heavy industry and the fulfilment of the (overly) ambitious Five-Year Plan were the state’s main priorities. Since every sphere of life was subordinated to industrial development, in the water supply system factories were given priority over the urban population. Thus, the inhabitants of Valjevo had tap water for only three hours per day, while the rest was “reserved” for the smooth operation of industrial facilities and other institutions.⁵⁵ Small sewerage networks added to the chaos: due to the inadequate removal of waste, there was an unbearable stench in cities during the rainy season.⁵⁶ The low level of investment in communal infrastructure came with a price. Although Yugoslavia had plenty of water resources, the water supply system was primitive and inadequate. Thus, the country lagged behind almost all European states – only Albania had a less developed water supply network.⁵⁷

IV Housing One of the most pressing problems faced by the rapidly growing socialist cities was the dramatic shortage of apartments. The lack of living space had a detrimental effect on the quality of life and significantly contributed to the further ruralization of cities. It also threatened the privacy of huge numbers of people. Housing, which had already been inadequate in pre-war times, was damaged and destroyed during the war. Reconstruction was slow, as the development of heavy industry sapped scarce financial resources. Thus, from the end of the war to 1950, Serbian authorities built only 12 900 new buildings, barely enough to replace half the houses that had been destroyed.⁵⁸ Even when urgent repairs were carried out, they were usually far from sufficient, because the buildings in question were often in a very poor condition to start with, mainly due to their age, the negligence

53 54 55 56 57 58

Izveštaj ekipe CK KPS o radu gradskog komiteta Smedereva, AS, Ð4-30. Ibid. Izveštaj, AS, G 125-61. Ibid.; Zapažanje o sadašnjem stanju i kulturnom nivou Beograda, AJ, 317-78-110. Snabdevanje vodom i kanalisanje, AS, G 129-34. Stanje stambenog fonda u 97 gradova NR Srbije, AS, G 125-68.

150 | Ivana Dobrivojević of tenants, and rents that did not even cover basic expenses. The subject of atrocious housing conditions was even broached in official reports, which stated that a large number of buildings were only inhabited “out of absolute necessity” and under “ordinary circumstances”, no one would live in those houses.⁵⁹ Entire residential areas in Prizren “were on the verge of collapsing”, and similarly dreadful living conditions prevailed in the central municipalities of Belgrade.⁶⁰ At the height of the housing crisis, people were living in “bars, sheds and basements”, in the corridors and halls of factories, offices, storerooms, and even in the underground public toilet near the National Theatre in Belgrade.⁶¹ Moreover, a survey conducted in the capital in 1955 revealed that 63 per cent of flats in the central district of Stari Ðeram were unfit to be lived in.⁶² While newspapers reported almost daily on the construction of new flats by the state, in the early 1950s the rate of construction was only at 70 per cent of pre-war levels, even according to official statistics. The combination of rapid population growth, slow building, and poor housing maintenance led to a steady decrease in the amount of urban space available to each person. Thus, in the period between 1949/1950 and 1954, the average amount of space available to an individual dwindled by as much as 22 per cent (from 11.6 to 8.7 square metres) to a level that was far below the minimum defined in French sociological theory.⁶³ In practically all Yugoslav cities people formed long queues outside the administrative offices in charge of housing, waiting for a solution to their accommodation problems.⁶⁴ Despite the ruthless propaganda campaign against “uneconomically” used housing space and the policy of ‘cramming’ apartments, which disregarded all legal regulations, the authorities did not have a solution to the acute housing crisis.⁶⁵ The miserable conditions in which people lived were best described by the district secretary of the Obrenovac Party Committee, who noted

59 I AB, 137-401. See also Zapisnik sa sastanaka CK KP Srbije održanog 20. novembra 1947, AS, Ð2-Politbiro - 1. 60 Izveštaj sa obilaska Raške, Novog Pazara, Prizrena, Peći, Uroševca i Gnjilana, AS, G 125-68. 61 Br 20 059 (27.08.1950), AS, G 125-30; Godišnji izveštaj GK KPS Rankovićevo za 1949, AS, Ð535; Izveštaj sa obilaska Raške, Novog Pazara, Prizrena, Peći, Uroševca i Gnjilana, AS, G 125-68; Godišnji izveštaj sreskog komiteta KPS za Ljig, AS, Ð4-1; “Obalskim radnicima se moraju osigurati bolji životni uslovi”, in: Borba, 25.03.1948; I AB, 1.4.42-90 (povereništvo za stanove). 62 Stanovi, A JBT, KPR III-A-1-b. 63 Dobrivojević, Urbanization in Socialism, 84–85. In sociological theory, 14 square meters per person is considered to be the minimum required living space; see Sreten Vujović: Ljudi i gradovi, Budva 1990, 58. 64 Pregled životnog standarda, A JBT, III-a-1-b. 65 Party officials used the newspapers to appeal to the urban population to report on their neighbours who had ‘surplus’ housing space. See “Zbor birača u Trećem reonu traži da se popravljaju

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that “half of the inhabitants slept until midnight, and the other half slept after midnight.” This was only a slight exaggeration – although Obrenovac witnessed a demographic explosion in the first post-war decade (from 1 800 to 8 000 inhabitants), just two new houses were erected in the same period.⁶⁶ The inhabitants of Belgrade lived under the most difficult circumstances. Since the party could not stop or control rural-urban migration, the housing crisis intensified with “a cumulative effect”.⁶⁷ All attempts by the government to curtail the influx of people to the capital failed. Thus, in the first post-war decade the population of Belgrade increased by a phenomenal 250 000 people. Yet, only 16 540 new apartments were constructed in the same period.⁶⁸ Under these circumstances, even state officials feared the possible political consequences of the acute housing crisis. In closed sessions, high-ranking party officials concluded that the prevailing living conditions impinged not only on the comfort of tenants and their right to privacy, but also had a direct impact on people’s health and “their morale and ability to work”.⁶⁹ Official estimates from 1955 spoke eloquently of the gravity of the crisis. According to these estimates, 200 000 new apartments would have to be built in towns throughout Yugoslavia in order to achieve a “tolerable, but not satisfactory standard”. In terms of the amount of available housing space, Yugoslavia was at the very bottom of the European ladder, with only Greece lagging behind it.⁷⁰ Under such circumstances, even the journalists who skilfully glossed over reality could not pretend to be optimistic. Thus, the prominent political magazine NIN claimed that the housing crisis could be resolved by 1980, after the construction of three million new apartments!⁷¹

zgrade i pravilnije iskorišćuju stanovi”, in: Politika, 7.01.1951; Izveštaj GK KPS za Kragujevac za 1949, AS, Ð5-13; Stambena situacija u Šapcu i Valjevu, AS, G 125-68. 66 Savetovanja sa sekretarima sreskih komiteta, 5–6. oktobra 1955, AS, Ð2-4-2. 67 Rapid industrialization was accompanied by a chronic shortage of labour. Patriarchal attachment to the village and agriculture, difficult working conditions, low wages, and constant shortages were the main reasons why the peasantry refused to seek employment in the factories and on socialist construction sites. In order to overcome hindrances to the construction of socialism in the country, party leaders tried to convince Yugoslav citizens to find employment in industry. Therefore, all party structures at all levels were engaged in the agitation and (forced) mobilization of workers; Beograd, AJ, 130-749-1210. 68 Božidar Furundžić: Građavinska delatnost Beograda u periodu 1944–1964, in: Godišnjak grada Beograda 1–2 (1964), 103. 69 Beograd, AJ, 130-749-1210. 70 Problemi životnog standarda (1955), A JBT, KPR III-A-1-b. 71 “Jedna zanimljiva prognoza o našoj stambenoj budućnosti. Tri miliona stanova bi rešilo stambenu krizu”, in: NIN, 13.03.1955.

152 | Ivana Dobrivojević However, despite the huge housing crisis, the authorities failed to see that regular maintenance was key to resolving the acute crisis. Until 1949 no funds were provided or envisaged for these purposes.⁷² Officials usually blamed pre-war renters for the dilapidation of residential buildings. A 1946 law on the compulsory maintenance of buildings was rarely obeyed. Due to a shortage of construction materials and a general lack of interest, the local authorities who were supposed to enforce this law usually turned a blind eye to ‘unconscious owners’. Paradoxically, buildings that had been nationalized were often the first to fall apart. Left to their own devices, the tenants who lived in overpopulated flats had neither the desire nor the will to regularly maintain them. Although the buildings that were nationalized were usually in better condition than others, state care for these assets was confined to irregular rent payments, signing contracts with tenants, and administrative paperwork. The fact that in some cases local authorities did not even know the exact number of buildings in their possession spoke volumes about systematic negligence.⁷³ This attitude to housing was not simply the result of bad housing policy, government neglect, and financial hardship; it was also indicative of a certain mentality and way of life. The ruralization of the cities, which began in the prewar period, peaked under the new economic and political circumstances. The capital of the country, Belgrade, was especially affected. Migrants from the countryside retained their rural habits in their new urban surroundings. In many tenement houses, bathrooms and maid’s rooms served as storerooms for firewood or were used to dry meat.⁷⁴ The cellars of newly erected buildings, which were mostly inhabited by recently arrived workers from the countryside, were turned into pigsties and chicken coops, while livestock was kept both in the peripheral areas of Belgrade and in the central city district of Stari Grad.⁷⁵ Improper use of sanitary facilities, defecating in public, inappropriate waste disposal, pig slaughtering in bathrooms, and chopping logs and coal in residential areas testified to the changing structure of the population and the erosion of urban culture and the urban way of life.⁷⁶ The introduction of control measures, perennial appeals in the newspapers about the need to preserve housing, and public

72 Održavanje zgrada, AS, G 129-20. 73 Godišnji izveštaj Pokrajinskog komiteta KPS za Vojvodinu, AV-334-1041; Upravljanje stambenim fondom u režiji, AS, G 129-34. 74 Dobrivojević, Urbanization in Socialism, 92. 75 “Nove zgrade u stambenim kolonijama nemilosrdno se upropašćuju”, in: Politika, 27.06.1951; “Sprovođenje odluke o držanju domaćih životinja i pernate živine”, in: Politika, 22.12.1952. 76 Br. 9348 (31.08.1948), I AB, 1. 4. 42- 91 (povereništvo za stanove); “Mnogi građani se nemarno odnose prema zgradama u kojima stanuju”, in: Politika, 17.12.1948; “Za bolje čuvanje stambenih

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criticism and punishment of negligent tenants, did not have the desired effect. After each eviction, “extensive repairs of the flat” were necessary.⁷⁷ Flat-wrecking was so widespread that the authorities stated helplessly: “It is common practice that, when moving out, people take door handles and entire locks, bulbs, keys, switches, sockets and other electrical material. [...] Windowpanes are broken, and sometimes even the wooden frames of windows and doors as well. The new tenants are so happy to get the flat that they don’t even notice these trifles. [...] Reports [to the authorities] on such wrecking are very scarce.”⁷⁸ However, even when they moved into newly erected and furnished buildings, tenants did not tend to maintain and clean their flats on a regular basis. Thus, just one year after their construction, new houses in central Belgrade were ruined. The entrances to the buildings were demolished; stairs and bannisters were stained and broken; stairways were clogged with rubbish; light bulbs in the corridors were stolen; and doorbells were removed.⁷⁹ Similar scenes of neglect could be found in the new residential areas in Bor, Aleksinac, Leskovac and Niš. A lack of education, rural habits, a low standard of living, and occasional food shortages as a result of the planned economy encouraged migrants to build pigsties, chicken coops, sheds and makeshift toilets out of old boards and “various waste”.⁸⁰ Attitudes to housing and living space in general were clearly different in Vojvodina, where the natives put far greater effort into regularly painting and maintaining their homes than the colonists.⁸¹ Thus, socialist urbanization and modernization were limited. Although state officials repeatedly underlined their commitment to improving living conditions and the quality of life, the ideal of the “garden city” bore little resemblance to the socialist reality embodied in ill-conceived buildings, systematic negligence, and the absence of any sense of order and aesthetics.⁸² Decrees, orders and appeals

zgrada u Beogradu”, in: Politika, 10.03.1953; “Kažnjeni krivci za nesavesno održavanje državnih stambenih zgrada u Beogradu”, in: Borba, 1.03.1947. 77 Održavanje zgrada, AS, G 129-20. 78 Dobrivojević, Urbanization in Socialism, 93. 79 “Stanari kvare stanbene zgrade na Cvijićevom bulevaru”, in: 20. oktobar, 7.10.1950. 80 Uređenje novih stambenih naselja, AS, G 129-4. 81 Analiza komunalne problematike na teritoriji APV, AS, G 129-13. After the liberation, the vast majority of indigenous Germans were expelled from Vojvodina. Their land was confiscated and given to the war veterans and their families. Around 68 000 families (207 000 people) moved to Vojvodina from all parts of Yugoslavia. However, most of them were colonists from Bosnia and Herzegovina; Stanje kolonista u Vojvodini po federalnim narodnim republikama na dan 1. maja 1946, AJ, 97-9-60. 82 “Čitav novi grad niče u Železniku”, in: Borba, 5.11.1947.

154 | Ivana Dobrivojević communicated in the press about the need to protect new buildings contrasted starkly with the provisional architecture and the chaotic and unplanned development of the suburbs. Ruralization was also reinforced by the social segregation that, paradoxically, accompanied socialist urbanization.⁸³ Living on the very bottom rung of the social ladder, in half-finished and isolated suburbs, far from the city lights and any form of amusement, newcomers faced even more difficult conditions than in the villages they had come from. The newly constructed socialist colonies offered them “barely a roof over one’s head and nothing else.”⁸⁴

V Cultural life In addition to widespread poverty and the party’s cultural policy, large-scale migration to the cities and the ideological confrontation with members of the prewar elite led to a deterioration in the cultural life of Yugoslav urban centres. In the first post-war decade, the rapid transformation of society led, paradoxically, to the decline of cultural and entertainment amenities, which had been inadequate even before the war. Due to the influx of rural migrants with very little disposable income and different aesthetic sensibilities to the pre-war urban population, two cultural worlds developed and coexisted – the world of theatres, concert halls and art galleries, and the world of “inns, café songs and folklore”.⁸⁵ Firmly rooted in ideology, the cultural opportunities that the city offered were neither rich nor diverse. The new socialist culture shunned rural cultural traditions and light entertainment designed to appeal to the masses. The party insisted on ‘high’ but ideologically appropriate and politically educational culture. Thus, dilettante cultural groups were sharply criticized for turning to the “national repertoire” and promoting folklore, which was perceived “as a form that masked all kinds of superstitions.”⁸⁶ A preference for light entertainment and the strict separation of culture and politics was considered to be “petty-bourgeois”; that kind of culture allegedly encouraged frequent parties, which escalated into “drinking sprees, fights and immorality of various kinds.”⁸⁷ At a time when the urban population spent about three and a half times less money on cultural activities than it did on tobacco and alcohol, bringing high cul-

83 84 85 86 87

See also Vujović, Ljudi i gradovi, 49–50. AJ, 16-22-27. Dobrivojević, Urbanization in Socialism, 94. Problemi ideološkog i kulturno - prosvetnog rada među radnicima, AJ, 142-46-161. AJ, A CKSKJ, VIII, II/8-a-10 (k 29).

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ture to barely literate masses was no easy task.⁸⁸ While most city dwellers wanted to escape the bleak socialist reality by indulging in “merry nights”, music and comedy acts, party officials offered lectures, politically engaged plays and films as the only alternative. Organized collective visits to theatres and cinemas did not have the desired effect. The authorities complained that “the honour seats” reserved for strike workers “were always unoccupied”.⁸⁹ Although a survey conducted in Belgrade showed that poverty and poor housing conditions in distant and isolated suburbs fuelled workers’ indifference to anything but salaries and tariff rules,⁹⁰ party leaders failed to realize that one of the main preconditions for cultural education was the improvement of living and working conditions. Noble, yet politically motivated attempts to bring ‘high culture’ to the undereducated masses failed because the intended “audience [was] not used to the stage reality, and was thus unable to create a distance between themselves and the stage, but took part in the performances by fidgeting [and emitting] muffled shouts and sometimes inappropriate laughter.”⁹¹ Despite dogmatic lectures and attempts to popularize classical music, marches and revolutionary songs, party officials were powerless to mould the tastes and cultural needs of the masses.⁹² The party’s cultural policy failed abysmally. Instead of trying to raise the standard of popular drama and entertainment, the authorities only offered high cultural forms, which the majority of city dwellers could neither understand nor accept. Therefore, a paradoxical situation arose – the music scene was so polarized that the oratorio and the primitive tavern song were the only available forms of musical expression.⁹³ In the vacuum that was thus created, a tawdry mass culture derived from rural folk music emerged.⁹⁴ The sudden growth in the urban population was not followed by an increase in cultural and entertainment amenities. A cinema ticket “was a real rarity”, while a night at the theatre was only possible “thanks to good luck or a resourceful friend”. Even the press, which usually glossed over such problems, reported on

88 Stenografske beleške sa VI gradske konferencije SK Beograda održane 7–8. oktobra 1955, I AB, 136-151. 89 See also Br. 103 od 15. februara 1946, AS, Ð2-13-1; Kulturno – prosvjetni rad, AJ, A CKSKJ, VIII, II/8-a-12 (k 29). 90 O prosvetnom i kulturnom radu među radnicima, I AB, 136-146; Analiza života i rada radničke omladine (1953), AJ, 114-92. 91 Dobrivojević, Urbanization in Socialism, 94. 92 “Gradovi bez muzičkog života”, in: Politika, 17.02.1954; Problemi muzičkog odeljenja Radio – Beograda, AJ, A CK SKJ, VIII, II/4-d-2 (k 27). 93 Problemi kulturno – zabavnog života, AJ, 142-46-163. 94 Slobodan Pavićević: Nove potrebe – novi vidovi kulture. Kič i šund nisu došli sami, in: Kultura. Časopis za teoriju i sociologiju kulture i kulturnu politiku 8 (1970), 134.

156 | Ivana Dobrivojević the lack of opportunities to go out in Belgrade: “There are enough coffeehouses, but few of them are nice and cosy. There are very few restaurants, and even fewer comfortable ones where you can stay longer and have an enjoyable evening. The number of theatres is quite adequate, but the repertoire and the specific qualities of the programme leave a lot to be desired. There is a dreadful lack of cinemas, including open-air theatres.”⁹⁵ The situation in provincial towns was far worse. Cultural opportunities were limited – the promenade, dances and the cinema represented nearly the only forms of entertainment.⁹⁶ Reports from different cities echoed each other. The inhabitants of Kragujevac noted with resignation that a trip to Belgrade was the only form of entertainment for them. Chaotically developing cities had nothing to offer to their inhabitants. “The inns have no live music. Chairs are put on the tables at nine in the evening and that’s when people go to sleep”, the newspaper Omladina (Youth) chronicled.⁹⁷ Moreover, war destruction, the policy of the new government regarding private ownership, food rationing and the problem of supply, as well as the practice of converting restaurants into administrative offices, resulted in a reduction in the number of restaurants and bars. Thus, the number of restaurants dropped by 63 per cent.⁹⁸ Under these circumstances, even the newspapers wrote that “very nice pre-war pubs and restaurants” had been turned into socialist canteens, warehouses, colonial shops, and workshops, while “once respectable bars increasingly resembled former road inns.”⁹⁹ The party’s economic policy, which neglected and ultimately ruined the tertiary sector, and its attempts to control all cultural activities were other factors that led to the gradual decay and ruralization of cities in the first decade after the Second World War.

VI Conclusion The revolutionary change that led to the shattering of the ‘old’ society and the ‘old’ way of life, the scorn for intellectuals and white-collar workers, the devastation wreaked by the war, hurried migrations, and the formation of a new governing

95 Dobrivojević, Urbanization in Socialism, 93. 96 Godišnji izveštaj o radu partijske organizacije grada Niša za 1949. godinu, AS, Ð6-3. 97 “Živo pozorište u tihom gradu”, in: Omladina, 5.01.1955. 98 Zapisnik o razgovoru potpredsednika SIV - a druga Edvarda Kardelja sa predstavnicima ugostiteljskih komora Jugoslavije dne 8. aprila 1955, A JBT, KPR III-A-4-e. 99 “Kad je premalo kafana i restorana...”, in: Politika, 18.08.1950; “Četrdeset novih restorana i bifea u Beogradu”, in: Politika, 9.12.1950, 98.

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elite based solely on ideological criteria and wartime merits were the main reasons for the ruralization of Yugoslav cities and towns in early socialism. The low standard of education and the dogmatic political views of party officials, who mostly originated in the peasantry, were bound to make their mark on the overall situation in urban centres and on society as a whole. Paradoxically, it fell to these party officials, the majority of whom were intimidated by the city and unable to fully adopt urban ways of life, to lead urbanization and modernization processes in socialist Yugoslavia in the first post-war decade. Carried away by their ideological beliefs, party officials did not realize that an increase in the urban population alone could not lead to the economic advancement and modernization of society at large.¹⁰⁰ However, the question remains whether the urbanization process in such a poor, backward and predominantly agrarian country could have been substantially different in the given political and ideological framework. The split with the USSR and the U-turn in foreign and domestic policy brought about significant changes. While the economic reforms of the early 1950s reflected a certain degree of liberalization and democratization, in 1955 Josip Broz Tito and high-ranking party officials realized that the goal of high-speed industrialization was expensive and unproductive. A faltering economy, low productivity, poor production quality, huge debts, and a low standard of living were a heavy burden for the country to carry. Faced with the possible failure of their economic policy, party leaders decided to reduce investment in heavy industry and focus on improving the overall standard of living.¹⁰¹ In the years and decades that followed, the quality of life in Yugoslavia significantly improved. Large-scale investment in urban infrastructure, the construction of new apartment blocks, and the development of the tertiary sector and the cultural sphere, especially in larger cities, were the most obvious signs of change. Instead of ugly and isolated suburbs, modern and functional neighbourhoods were developed (New Belgrade, New Zagreb, Velenje, etc.). Although migration peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, due to the modernization of life in the villages and the improvement of urban infrastructure, migrants adapted more easily to urban life. However, the transition from rural to urban society, which was never completed under socialism, came with a price, and its consequences are still visible in today’s cities – in spatial planning, architecture and a tawdry mass culture (especially popular music).

100 Dobrivojević, Urbanization in Socialism, 98. 101 AJ, A CK SKJ, III/63; Josip Broz Tito: Govor prilikom puštanja u pogon hidrocentrale kod Zvornika, in: Govori i članci. Volume 10, Zagreb 1959, 274–275.

Sándor Horváth

Ruralization, Urban Villagers and Perceptions of Migration in Hungary during ‘De-Stalinization’ (Budapest, Sztálinváros) “Socialist settlements will differ markedly from that which we see today in our city or countryside: they will be neither the one nor the other.”¹ Nikolai Miliutin, 1930 “Our city could be famous for pig farming as well as metallurgy.”² Sztálinváros Press, 1957

“We must regard as the third source of the Stakhanov movement the fact that we have a modern technique. The Stakhanov movement is organically bound up with the modern technique. Without the modern technique, without the modern mills and factories, without the modern machinery, the Stakhanov movement could not have arisen. Without modern techniques, technical standards might have been doubled or tripled, but not more,” argued Stalin with reference to the roots of the Stakhanov movement at the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites in 1935. In his modernist interpretation, modernity was not only a challenge, but a tool; it was the engine of the Stakhanov movement that would render people’s lives “more joyous”. In this relatively short speech, Stalin mentioned the word modern 16 times.³ So one of the first ‘historians’ to represent Stalinism and socialism as a modernist campaign in the mid-1930s was actually Stalin himself. Since modernity and its challenges were represented by city life and not by villages, the question of how migrants to cities from rural areas adapted to urban life was a central concern of urban anthropology. It was also addressed in texts written by communist party officials at almost the same time. The first documents that were used in support of the thesis of the ruralization (okrestianivanie) of Soviet cities were produced by communist party officials in the context of the industrial-

1 Nikolai Miliutin: Sotzgorod. The Problem of Building Socialist Cities (1930). Cambridge 1974, 61. 2 A kohászat mellett városunk a sertéstenyésztéséről is nevezetes lenne, in: Sztálinvárosi Hírlap, 22.02.1957, 4. 3 Josef V. Stalin: Speech at the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites. 17.11.1935, in: Josef V. Stalin: Problems of Leninism. Peking 1976, 775–794, at: http://marx2mao.com/Stalin/ SCS35.html#s3 [last accessed on 24.01.2013].

160 | Sándor Horváth ization drive launched by Stalin in the 1930s. These documents tried to represent the conflict between the Bolshevik modernizers and the millions of ‘backward’ peasants (about 17 million peasants settled in the cities in the years 1928–1935) as the conflict of two civilizations.⁴ This narrative about the ruralization of the cities was fuelled by the narrative of Soviet modernization and widely used by proponents of the totalitarian paradigm (or totalitarianism model).⁵ The critique of the ruralization of the cities is often based on the different experiences of the different members of contemporary society. As Stephen Kotkin put it in his critique of Moshe Lewin’s thesis of the ruralization of the cities, “Lewin sees a clash ‘of almost two nations or two civilizations’ whose outcome turned out to be tragic for both. In Magnitogorsk, however, such ‘ruralization’ – if that is the appropriate term – appears to have been largely beneficial, both materially and in terms of social cohesion.”⁶ Lewin suggested in 1985 that the “ruralization of the cities facilitated the irruption of elements of Russia’s religious-autocratic tradition into the emergent official culture. This ‘return of the repressed’ merged with new elements, associated with the recreation of hierarchies, apparatuses and elites, such as an animus against egalitarianism, the inculcation of discipline, patriotism, conformism, authoritarianism and careerism.”⁷ Lewin argues that ruralization and the documents about it influenced and forged new forms of social structure. He also points out that adopting urban ways of cultural life did not happen instantaneously: “the cultural level of workers in large cities [. . . ] showed that in European Russia the time workers dedicated weekly to ‘culture’ was falling.”⁸ Lewin writes that the urbanization of the rural population also entailed changes to its way of life. The overall level of education was thought to be a good indicator of the level of urbanization and the development of a cultured socialist population. This discourse of ruralization had its roots in the debates about kul’turnost’, which informed the debates about the rural population’s capacity to adapt to urban life. “East European intellectuals placed a high premium on kul’turnost’ and since the nineteenth century had considered it part of what they believed was their mission to educate and uplift the downtrodden peasant masses. To do so was con-

4 Moshe Lewin: The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia. London 1985, 37. 5 See Robert C. Tucker: The Stalin Period as an Historical Problem, in: Russian Review 4 (1987), 424–427; Henry Reichman: Reconsidering ’Stalinism‘, in: Theory and Society 1 (1988), 57–89; Robert C. Tucker: Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation. New York 1977. 6 Stephen Kotkin: Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley 1995, 107–108. 7 S. A. Smith: Review of Moshe Lewin: The Making of the Soviet System, in: Social History 1 (1987), 123–125. 8 Lewin, The Making, 39.

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sidered an essential step toward national revitalisation.”⁹ The debates about the rural population and their uncivilized life were also rooted in the Soviet definition of culture as an evolutionary phenomenon and the revolutionary goals of modernization (i.e. industrialization and urbanization).¹⁰ In the experience of urban anthropologists in the West and communist cadres in the East, in almost every large city one district was regarded in the popular consciousness as a village within the city.¹¹ In the East, it was the inhabitants of housing estates in particular that were seen as villagers in the eyes of the local authorities, and the myth of the ruralization of cities was created in the first reports of the strange new habits of migrants. The discourse of ruralization also served a political purpose. After Stalin’s death, the cadres often suggested that all the problems of the cities derived from the industrialization process, claiming that the migrants who had arrived in those years had blighted the life of the cities.¹² The Stalinist industrialization campaign – which in some East Central European countries lasted less than a decade – was blamed for the problems deriving from this period for almost forty years. De-Stalinization saw a new wave of calls for a communist social reform. At the end of the 1950s it was common for local administrations to point to the ruralization of the cities and the social problems arising from it in order to receive more investment for infrastructure and housing. This cemented the perception that ruralization was a local social policy problem.¹³

9 Katherine Lebow: Kontra Kultura: Leisure and Youthful Rebellion in Stalinist Poland, in: David Crowley/Susan E. Reid (eds.), Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc. Evanston 2010, 71–92, 74; Vadim Volkov: The Concept of Kul’turnost’: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process, in: Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: A Reader. London 2000, 210–230. 10 Sheila Fitzpatrick: The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia. Ithaca 1992, 5. 11 From the early nineteenth century until the 1930s, the Budapest district of Tabán, close to the castle on the Buda side of the Danube, was regarded as such. See Gábor Gyáni: Bérkaszárnya és nyomortelep. Budapest 1992, 139–146. 12 At this time in Budapest, social problems were redefined in the documents of the local administration and the term social policy was reinvented by party bureaucrats to legitimize their power. See Sándor Horváth: Két emelet boldogság. Mindennapi szociálpolitika Budapesten a Kádár-korban. Budapest 2012, Chapter 1, 21–73. 13 This was the case in Sztálinváros, the first socialist city in Hungary, which had a lower budget for investment after Stalin’s death. See the Minutes of the City Council Meeting on 4 February 1956, Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Fejér Megyei Levéltára (Hungarian National Archives, Fejér County Archive; hereinafter FML) XXIII/502. 11. d. ; and in Budapest, where the ‘reinvention’ of social policy after 1956 had its roots in the de-Stalinist narrative that tried to represent the difference between the social policy of the Stalinist (Rákosi) period and the de-Stalinist (Kádár) era. See the Report on the Work of the Permanent Committee on Social Policy (Jelentés a Szociálpolitikai

162 | Sándor Horváth The term ruralization was easily absorbed into the totalitarian narrative because it was a counter-narrative to the representation of socialism as modernist. My point is simple: the narrative of the ruralization and proletarianization of socialist cities in East Central Europe stemmed from narratives of de-Stalinization that tried to represent the new regime as modernist and it shaped the language of local party officials who had to write reports on ruralization. Thus, the discourse of ruralization was a tool with which to represent the discontinuity between the regimes after Stalin’s death and to claim a new legitimacy based on the language of modernization. However, the argument that socialism was a motor of modernization was not at all new; that point had already been made in the ‘golden age’ of Stalinism. Moreover, the views of the migrants themselves are absent from discussions of the ruralization of the cities versus the urbanization of the migrant communities. In official reports we can only find some clues as to the migrants’ experiences. In this article, I base my argument on the history of two totally different Hungarian cities in the 1950s and 1960s. The first is Sztálinváros (Stalintown), the first socialist city in Hungary, which was built in the mid-1950s, at the turning point from the ‘golden age’ of Stalinization to de-Stalinization. The second is Budapest in the 1960s, at the beginning of the so-called de-Stalinization campaign. The city had become increasingly village-like after the large industrial zones around the old capital were annexed into a new administrative zone called Greater Budapest in 1950. Most of Budapest’s new inhabitants lived in one-storey buildings in the industrial zone, but their rural habits were only noticed by the local press and administration in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when party bureaucrats decided to make Budapest a target of mass tourism. So the villagers of Budapest only became visible with the growing consumption and modernization of the city centre. The historical debate on the ruralization of socialist cities – and I’m not talking about the various definitions of the socialist city – is part of the ongoing debate about the concepts of modernity and neo-traditionalism among historians of Russia and the Soviet Union in the United States.¹⁴ As Michael David-Fox puts it, “a debate over the concept of modernity lurks behind much recent English-language scholarship on Russian and Soviet history, even as the discussion has reached

Állandó Bizottság munkájáról) of 27 September 1957, Budapest Főváros Levéltára (Budapest City Archives; hereinafter BFL), Fővárosi Tanács (City Council, hereinafter FT), XXIII-101a, 146–147. 14 See Richard Anthony French/Ian F.E. Hamilton (eds.): The Socialist City. Spatial Structure and Urban Policy. Chichester 1979.

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something of an impasse.”¹⁵ In her edited volume on new directions in the historiography of Stalinism, Sheila Fitzpatrick describes the long-standing debate on the nature of Stalinism: two distinct approaches can be discerned, one stressing the ‘neo-traditional’ aspects of Stalinism, the other its modernity. The ‘modernity’ group, which includes Jochen Hellbeck and other young scholars who were graduate students at Columbia in the first half of the 1990s, suggests that the stereotype of modernity based exclusively on Western experience (parliamentary democracy, market economy) is inadequate, and points to the Soviet example as an important alternative form. [. . . ] The neo-traditionalists [. . . ] drawing on the work of Ken Jowitt, Andrew Walder, and Janos Kornai, do not dispute that the Soviet Union represented an ‘alternative type of modernity’. Their interest, however is drawn more particularly to the ‘archaicizing’ phenomena that were also a part of Stalinism: petitioning, patron-client networks, [. . . ] ascribed status categories [. . . ] the mystification of power [. . . ].¹⁶

So modernity has become an elusive, mysterious concept, and it has become a free hunting ground with no time limit for historians of the socialist period. A very similar phenomenon can be seen in the official depiction of the fight against ruralization by the local authorities in 1950s Sztálinváros and 1960s Budapest.

I Perceptions of ruralization in Sztálinváros, Hungary’s first socialist city The perception of ruralization in Sztálinváros was largely shaped by the discourse of de-Stalinization after 1953. The golden age of Stalinism in Hungary lasted only five years (1948–1953), so long-term social processes such as urbanization cannot be understood in the interpretative framework of totalitarianism.¹⁷ Urban policy

15 Michael David-Fox: Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism. On Recent Debates in Russian and Soviet History, in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 54 (2006), 535–555, 535. 16 Sheila Fitzpatrick: Introduction, in: Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalinism: New Directions. London/New York 2000, 1–13, 11. 17 The revisionist schools in Anglo-American and German scholarship have already challenged the previous Cold War paradigm based on various concepts of totalitarian rule and reconceptualised our understanding of these regimes, which was previously firmly linked to the idea of an omnipresent and omniscient state. This research encouraged a move away from the political to the socio-cultural, and shifted the focus to everyday experiences. See Sheila Fitzpatrick/Alf Lüdtke: Energising the everyday: on the breaking and making of social bonds in Nazism and Stalinism, in: Michael Geyer/Sheila Fitzpatrick (eds.), Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. New York 2009, 266–301.

164 | Sándor Horváth did not change significantly from 1952 to 1954, which is especially remarkable in the case of Sztálinváros, the youngest town in Hungary. However, the perception and representation of the different lifestyles of migrants did change at this time. Although some villages in cities were demolished or rebuilt, almost every new city produced a new village in the city, because one of their functions was to demonstrate the struggle between modern and old values. But why were these districts defined as villages within the cities? It was not because the buildings in these districts resembled those of villages. It had more to do with the marked difference in the everyday culture of the residents of these districts when compared with the norms of the cities in which they were located. Housing estates in particular became the primary targets of narratives about the ruralization of Eastern European cities. When he first visited Boston’s West End, Herbert J. Gans believed he had been transported to an exotic place because of the intense social life he found on the narrow streets, the multiplicity of tiny shops, and the rubbish piled in the streets. In the book based on the research he conducted in the area in 1957 and 1958, he concluded that its residents were “urban villagers” because of their distinctive culture. The new migrants adapted to urban culture by deploying networks of kin, the local community, and local institutions, and by creating a distinctive local sub-culture.¹⁸ Gans lived in the West End from October 1957 to May 1958, just before the onset of the so-called redevelopment. He had two main research interests: “to study a slum and to study the way of life of a low-income population.”¹⁹ At the same time, but far away from Boston, the writer and journalist András Sándor pursued very similar goals in his hometown of Sztálinváros, Hungary’s first socialist city. In the creation of a new urban identity, an emphasis was placed on the city’s rootlessness and on the rigid separation of the old, i.e. traditional, and new everyday cultures, where the latter conformed to officially prescribed norms. In 1959 András Sándor wrote that “rootlessness itself is dangerous. In Sztálinváros there were relatively few who were able to root themselves in a few years and these were the germinating plasma of the new city, or its very first drops.”²⁰ What was described as rootlessness in the local press, personal accounts, and in official discourse was, however, actually a process of transformation in everyday culture that was very difficult for contemporaries to grasp. This

18 Herbert J. Gans: The Urban Villagers. Group and Life of Italian-Americans. New York 1962, 11–12, and especially chapters 3, 5 and 11. 19 Ibid., xiii. 20 Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára (Secret Police Archive, hereinafter ÁSZTL). O–13582, (my italics, S.H.).

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process was described through a discourse that divorced the past from the future, the village from the city, socialism from the capitalism, and, last but not least, Stalinism from de-Stalinization. The process of exchanging the village for the city entailed far more than a change in the cultural habits of those who had left their village to settle in a socialist city; it also determined notions of urban space and urban living. A number of districts in Sztálinváros came to be defined as village-like after Stalin’s death because of the everyday culture of those who settled in them (e.g. Technikum, Déliváros, Radar). If we look at the estates of deceased persons from Sztálinváros, it seems that where material culture was concerned, the differences between rural and urban cultures were not as marked as one might infer from official discourse, i.e. statements by the local council, the police, the courts and the press. Furthermore, village and urban cultures fused, and the transformation in migrant values resulted from the fact that in many cases the representatives of village and urban value systems lived together in the same family. This fusion was reflected in the contents of the estates of the deceased, which show that it was not uncommon for those living in city centre flats to continue to own ploughs in the aftermath of agricultural collectivization, while migrants from villages owned the kinds of items that were considered unambiguously urban in that period. One of the deceased, a work group leader, was born in the agricultural community of Mezőkövesd and had a flat in the city centre. When he died in 1962, he owned both agricultural land and items associated with an urban existence like a wrist-watch and a suite of furniture.²¹ Suites of furniture were just as common among residents of the village swallowed by Sztálinváros as they were among the engineers who lived in the city centre.²² The contents of estates were determined to a far greater extent by the present income and employment of the head of the household than they were by their place of birth and social background. There are no major differences in the contents of estates that would corroborate an urban/village divide in Sztálinváros. Despite all this, from the early days of the city, official discourse underlined an opposition between the culture of the urban villagers and the true urban residents. Patterns of behaviour associated with village and city people were emphasized in descriptions of several city streets. The village-like streets around the construction workers’ barracks were represented as the antithesis of the modern

21 Sztálinváros Notary Papers (Sztálinvárosi közjegyző iratai; hereinafter SZki), FML, Box 3, 1962. 22 Discussion of the will of János K., 30 August 1961 (K. János, 1961.08.30., hagyatéki tárgyalás) and discussion of the will of Mrs. László B., 21 June 1961 (B. Lászlóné, 1961.06.21., hagyatéki tárgyalás), FML. SZki. 2. d. 1961.

166 | Sándor Horváth and sociable boulevards like Stalin Avenue. The barracks were built in various forms, two of which dominated in Sztálinváros: large dormitory barracks, with common areas, and barracks with individual rooms for families. The first street in Sztálinváros to be defined as an urban street, 1 May Street, was settled by people who had migrated from other towns.²³ Its residents, allegedly the city’s most urban inhabitants, including white-collar workers who had emigrated from Budapest, lived on this street. It was also in this street that the traffic was first regulated in an ‘urban’ manner by separating the pavement from the road. The provision of parks and a basic infrastructure also symbolized its urban nature. Yet only a few meters from the middle of the street, construction workers and unfinished buildings dominated the landscape. In the eyes of the authorities, a ‘consolidated’ life was a key prerequisite of an urban existence. Lockable front doors and caretakers created a border between 1 May Street houses and a non-urban outside world. One of the main reasons for employing caretakers was to expel manifestations of non-urban behaviour to streets that were further away. This kind of control was codified in a set of regulations for residents that was consistent with socialist morality; it was updated by the local council annually. There was a guesthouse at either end of 1 May Street. As far as urban public opinion was concerned, the reform and urbanization of these guesthouses were key issues. The arguments advanced as solutions to this problem were based on the commonly-held view that the street itself played a central role in the socialization of particular social groups, especially children.²⁴ The measures taken in 1954 to civilize the city centre, including measures to create public parks and prosecute residents for disturbing the peace and keeping animals, defined the norms that were considered essential for an urban resident to internalize. Where local public opinion was concerned, the clash between rural and urban norms of behaviour became a central problem. The wave of regulations left two possibilities open to the urban villagers: either to remain outside city life, or to adapt to those norms that the authorities defined as urban. In 1955 it was decided that those accommodations that did conform to urban norms needed to be concentrated in one area of the city.²⁵ The elements seen to infringe most upon urban norms and contaminate the city were the market, the second-hand shop,

23 Tibor Weiner: Sztálinváros, in: Aladár Sós/Kálmán Faragó/Géza Hermány/György Korompay (eds.), Sztálinváros, Miskolc, Tatabánya. Városépítésünk fejlődése. Budapest 1959, 17–88. 24 Ulfert Herlyn: Die Stadtstraße als Lernort für verschiedene soziale Gruppen, in: Hans-Jürgen Hohm (ed.), Strasse und Straßenkultur: interdisziplinäre Beobachtungen eines öffentlichen Sozialraumes in der fortgeschrittenen Moderne. Konstanz 1997, 233–248. 25 FML. XXIII/502. 10. d. 6.01.1955.

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the guesthouses, and the emergency flats. All of these spaces were placed under even greater supervision.²⁶ The urban nature of the city centre was represented by buildings like the Gold Star Hotel (opened in 1954) or the Dózsa Cinema. In the Béla Bartók House of Culture, urban entertainment and exhibitions aimed at members of the intelligentsia (who had come to Sztálinváros from Budapest and other large cities) replaced the balls that had previously been held in the workers’ barracks and were now seen as rural.²⁷ At the most popular evening dance events, urban dances dominated – the waltz, the tango, and later the twist, which in turn met with a different kind of official disapproval. In the popular consciousness, it was widely believed that Sztálinváros’ residents came from all over the country, but that picture needs to be refined. The brick-layers who arrived on the first construction sites came from the ranks of the rural kubikosok (diggers), those who had travelled far from their villages in search of construction work. Yet from 1953 onwards, after the establishment of the first factory, most of the workers arriving in the town came from provincial industrial towns, but also from Budapest. The migrants’ social status and the depiction of their lifestyle began to change not only because of changing approaches to urban policy after Stalin’s death, but also because of the new workforce, which became much more dominant in the town after the opening of the first. newly built factory. From my own sample of 448 workers in the Sztálin Steel Works Machine Factory who gained the right to settle permanently in Sztálinváros (people working in construction were hardly ever granted permanent residence rights in the city), only 43 per cent were born in villages, while 20 per cent were born in Budapest. Over half (58 per cent) of the skilled workers were born in the capital, something that was true of only 8 per cent of the unskilled workers – the latter were far less likely to get a flat.²⁸ The most skilled and educated workers arrived directly from cities or towns and were depicted as people who were already equipped with the expectations, norms and culture of urban residents. However, most of those who arrived in the city during the construction years were construction workers from rural areas who, according to the popular consciousness, had absorbed rural

26 FML. XXIII/502. 8. d. 11.11.1954. 27 Sztálinvárosi Hírlap, 19.12.1956, 4. 28 The total number of workers employed in the first factory ranged between 1 200 and 1 500; therefore, my sample represents more than 30 per cent of the total workforce. In my sample, unskilled workers accounted for 36 per cent of the total, administrative workers 21 per cent, skilled workers 22 per cent, and engineers and managers 21 per cent. These proportions reflect the skill structure of the whole workforce. See Dunai (Sztálin) Vasmű (Stalin Steel Works), Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár, Országos Levéltár, (Hungarian National Archives, Country Archive, hereinafter OL), XXIX–F–2–a. 10; 20; 73; 74; 76; 84. d.

168 | Sándor Horváth norms, especially with regard to how they spent their free time. In 1953 there was substantial outward migration from the city, as centrally mandated cuts in investment led to the suspension of construction work and the departure of the geographically mobile construction workers. In the same year, workers with an urban background came to dominate city life, making the task of ‘cleansing’ the city – especially the city centre – even more urgent in the narrative of the local administration. Over the course of 1953 the police were frequently called to the Knife Thrower, Sztálinváros’ most notorious pub, which was located on Béke tér (Peace Square) at the informal heart of the city. The police raids did not come as a surprise. In contrast to the previous tolerant leader of the local council, the new leader Jenő Tapolczai decided to restore order in the city’s pubs.²⁹ From 1953 onwards, urban policy was shaped not only by the administration of the steel works, but increasingly also by the local council. As Tapolczai later wrote: Our city appeared in police reports [. . . ] year in year out as the country’s most blighted city [. . . ] therefore we launched the struggle to close down all those establishments that were clearly disreputable. Examples of such disreputable establishments were the ‘Leper’ guesthouse, the ‘Buffet’, the ‘Knife-Thrower’, and later ‘The Blue Mouse’. The rumour about the ‘Leper’ was that before you went in, you needed to fire one shot into the establishment, and it was only advisable to go inside if they didn’t fire back. The elimination of the ‘Leper’, that is the gathering place of the local underworld, was a real test of strength for the council – as we placed it under constant police supervision. Our first line of attack was to shut down the temporary bus station behind the ‘Leper’ and the workers’ barracks that stood next to it. Then we took measures to shut down the guesthouse, which was not as easy as it sounds.³⁰

What Tapolczai described in both his memoirs and in council meetings as the Leper was usually described as the Knife-Thrower in official documents.³¹ His struggle with it and what it represented played a central role in his memoirs because it illustrated the council’s struggle against alcoholism in the city under his leadership. In 1953 the construction of the city centre was complete and Peace Square, on its fringe, did not conform to the ideal urban lifestyle that the council sought to promote. The pub on Peace Square was the pub of those from the barrack village and villagers who commuted to Sztálinváros. Thus, the struggle

29 Bulcsú Bertha: A legendás város, in: István Matkó (ed.), Ipari közelképek. Budapest 1986, 7–23, 15. 30 Jenő Tapolczai: Egy elnök naplója. Budapest 1977, 43. 31 The Leper was also the nickname of a pub in the Radar district of the city. Miklós Miskolczi: Az első évtised. Dunapentelétől – Dunaújvárosig. Dunaújváros 1975, 72.

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against the Knife-Thrower became a symbol of the struggle between rural and urban elements within the developing city. In the winter of 1953 the building in which the Knife-Thrower was located was renovated and larger windows were installed in the pub in the hope that they would deter unwanted customers.³² But this attempt was unsuccessful, in part because it was easier to throw drunken customers through bigger windows. One sign that things had not improved, as far as the local police was concerned, was a gang fight in February 1954, in which one arrested man made political statements that went beyond what was permissible from the authorities’ point of view. Many witnesses maintained that the fight had been sparked by the arrival of the police, who had been in the vicinity of the pub on the lookout for disturbances of the peace on Peace Square.³³ All those arrested and interviewed by the police lived in the barracks or in neighbouring villages and all of them were unskilled workers, something that suggests that the regulars all came from the same social group. The renovation and the police raids failed to solve the problem of the KnifeThrower. In June 1954 a fight outside the pub ended in the death of one of the combatants.³⁴ As a consequence, the local authorities raised the issue with the Mining Food Supply Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Commerce, which ran the Knife-Thrower. The Directorate had resisted the closure of the pub on several occasions, fearing that the closure of the establishment would result in a serious loss of income.³⁵ However, the local council finally emerged victorious and on 8 October the local newspaper announced the closure of the Knife-Thrower. This was represented as a victory over criminals, alcoholism, and the untidy villagers living the town.³⁶ The campaign against the Knife-Thrower was seen as part of the struggle between urban and rural ways of life. The ultimate closure of the KnifeThrower did not mean that the rural way of life was automatically replaced by an urban lifestyle, but it did mean that the culture identified as rural was confined to a particular part of the city. The local authorities hoped that the closure of the Knife-Thrower would lead to an improvement in the reputation of Peace Square and, by extension, Sztálinváros itself. However, the notoriety of Peace Square and the Knife-Thrower lingered and proved to be stronger than the will of the local council.

32 Sztálinvárosi Hírlap, 31.12.1953, 5. 33 Sztálinváros Court, Criminal Trials (Sztálinvárosi Bíróság. Büntetőperek) 1954–1956, L. Emánuel and the official incitement of violence against the media (L. Emánuel izgatás és hatósági közeg elleni erőszak). FML 146/1954. 34 Sztálinvárosi Hírlap, 25.06.1954, 4. 35 Tapolczai, Egy elnök naplója, 44. 36 Sztálinvárosi Hírlap, 8.10.1954, 3.

170 | Sándor Horváth The police took draconian action against drunks and those who served them. The local council frequently threatened to withdraw licences and the local newspaper drew attention to abuses by attempting to shame those responsible. All of this further stigmatized those who were pub regulars.³⁷ The number of those identified as alcoholics grew, not because there were actually more drunks on the city’s streets, but because the authorities increasingly came to see people who drank a white wine spritzer with friends after work as alcoholics. For certain social groups, the pub was not merely a place to unwind, but a centre of sociability.³⁸ The authorities refused to accept that pubs were centres of social integration. In official discourse there was no acknowledgement of this dimension of the pub; it was portrayed instead as a place where individuals engaged in deviant behaviour. This is clear in two conflicting statements made at a trial. The defendant testified that “during the break at work three colleagues invited me to a bar, where we returned at the end of work with the same lads. We began drinking there, and as it was new wine and the lads mixed brandy (pálinka) into my wine, I got so drunk that I didn’t know what was happening anymore.” In its report to the prosecutor, the police claimed that the defendant committed the crime alone, not as part of a group, and in part as a result of intoxication: “F. Ferenc [. . . ] went to bar no. 301 in Sztálinváros after work and drank alcoholic beverages. When the named individual was in an intoxicated state, he left for his temporary lodgings and made certain unacceptable statements about the party and communists there in front of his room-mates.”³⁹ The actions of the local council and the police were compatible with a vision of the city that saw the city centre as its most important part. For that reason, the establishments located there had to be purged of ‘harmful’ elements. The vision of the city planners, which required that citizens’ actions were transparent and supervised by the authorities, could only be realized by ‘cleansing’ city centre pubs. As the occupational structure of the town changed, a new myth of its founders had to be constructed and arrests in pubs rose quite dramatically. These arrests depended, of course, not only on policing policy, but also on available police manpower and official expectations. In country reports the crime rate in Sztálinváros was the highest in Hungary in the 1950s (comparable with other ‘new cities’ such as Nowa Huta in Cracow, Praga Północ in Warsaw, Novi Beograd in Belgrade, and Stalinstadt in the GDR), not because more criminals moved there, but due

37 FML. XXIII/502. 13. d. 31.05.1957. 38 Sztálinváros Court, Virágos János és társa, FML, 310/1958. 39 Sztálinvárosi Bíróság, FML, 11/1954. ügy. 1958.

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to the stricter police control in socialist towns and the specific attitudes of the police.⁴⁰ The new socialist cities had to exemplify a stricter control of urban spaces, so the number of police raids and investigations (which impacted greatly on crime statistics) rose dramatically in these cities. The crime rate in Sztálinváros was actually no higher than in the thousand-year-old, conservative county town Székesfehérváros. According to police reports, the two towns had similar crime rates.⁴¹ Often these reports acknowledged the link between higher crime rates and the rising number of police raids in the town. As one report put it in 1953, “the rising number [of criminal cases] is due to the fact that we had to carry out more inspections under the plan.”⁴² If the police did not increase the number of raids they carried out in compliance with the plan, they were criticized for not writing enough reports.⁴³ The local newspaper, the Sztálinvárosi Hírlap (Sztálinváros Press), represented the urban person as somebody who lived a sober life. Instead of visits to the pub, they went to the cinema and the theatre or listened to the radio. They liked walking and also enjoyed going to the open-air pool in their free time. They furnished their flats with urban furniture brands or whole suites instead of furniture made by carpenters that was defined as rural, and they slept on the practical sofabed. Yet contrary to the assumed urban/rural divide, the commercial department of the local council reported in 1954 that the residents of the villages adjoining Sztálinváros bought their furniture in the city.⁴⁴ The same newspaper also suggested that the urban citizen took regular baths in their bathroom and used their pantry for storing foodstuffs bought at the mar-

40 Ian F. E. Hamilton/Alan D. Burnett: Social Processes and Residential Structure, in: R. Anthony French/Ian F. E. Hamilton (eds.), The Socialist City. Toronto 1979, 263–304, 278–283; Sztálinváros Police report on work in January 1953 (Sztálinvárosi kapitányság vezetőjének kiértékelő jelentése az 1953. január havi munkáról), Fejér County Police documents (Megyei Rendőrfőkapitányság iratai Fejér Megyei Levéltár), FML, XXIV. Rendőrség. 1953. 5. d. 1953. 41 For example, at the beginning of construction work in Sztálinváros in 1952, when the number of single men was higher in Sztálinváros than in Székesfehérvár, the number of registered prostitutes was far higher in Székesfehérvár. See Fejér County Police documents, Police work ethic (Erkölcsrendészeti munka), FML.XXIV. 11. [s] 2. d. 1952. 42 “Az emelkedés főként annak tudható be, hogy fokozott ellenőrzést tartottunk a tervek szerint”. Evaluation report of January 1953, work on offences. Sztálinváros Chief of Police (Kiértékelő jelentés 1953. január havi kihágási munkáról. Sztálinvárosi kapitányság vezetője). FML. XXIV. 11. Rendőrség (Police). 5. d. 1953. 43 For example: Report on police work in 1957/1958 (Jelentés az 1957-58-as évi rendőrségi munkáról), FML. Rendőrség. 9. d. 1957–1958. 44 FML. XXIII/502. 7. d. 17.03.1954.

172 | Sándor Horváth ket, not for keeping animals. They only cooked and ate in the kitchen, spending the rest of the time in the sitting room with their family. They used their balcony for sunbathing, sewing, and for giving their children a breath of fresh air, but would never dry their clothes on it, preferring to use the common washroom – something, which in reality rarely existed, or was used by someone else. From 1959 the city council Enforcement Department fined those who used their balconies to dry clothes, ostensibly because this marred the appearance of the city. In the definition promoted by the authorities, the function of a balcony was to “beautify the city” and for this reason, they tried to ensure that instead of clothes, “healthy flower boxes” were found on balconies.⁴⁵ According to the local paper, urban girls and the city’s working women went to the hairdressers and the beauticians, even though they knew how to take care of their appearance themselves. They attended the carnival ball in evening dress and went to work in suits.⁴⁶ The paper, however, did not consider the women who worked in the clothing factory or those who worked on the building sites, because it did not consider their dress to be urban. People whose behaviour did not conform to official notions of urban norms were stereotyped as villagers who made noise, chopped wood in their flats, threw their rubbish out of their windows or accumulated it in the cellar, kept animals in their bathrooms, went regularly to the local pub, and bought on the black market instead of using the city’s shops.⁴⁷ The districts with the highest villager populations (the Technikum district, Radar, and Déliváros), were reputed to be places where fighting and squatting were common and the shops in these districts were often compared to village groceries.⁴⁸ The stigmatization of the residents of these districts was also the stigmatization of those who had come to the city from rural areas. In their quest to create an urban image for Sztálinváros, the authorities in the city fought for a number of years against street peddlers and the street stalls that were scattered randomly across the city. They wanted to concentrate the street stalls and the peddlers in one place – the city market – citing aesthetic considerations and the defence of public order as reasons. At the beginning of 1954 employees of the local council and the police conducted a raid that was directed against the “occupation” of Stalin Avenue by black marketeers and “sent the peddlers there to the market, through agitation designed to educate them.” The agitation that was designed to educate them did not seem to have had the desired

45 46 47 48

FML. XXIII/502. 16. d. 17.7.1959; SZH. 7.02.1958, 2; 14.11.1958, 5. Sztálinvárosi Hírlap, 21.01.1958, 3. Sztálinvárosi Hírlap, 19.06.1957, 2; Sztálinvárosi Hírlap, 26.02.1957, 3. Sztálinvárosi Hírlap, 15.12.1956, 3; Sztálinvárosi Hírlap, 3.08.1957, 5.

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effect, because the peddlers continued to sell on Stalin Avenue, which was wide and had originally been envisaged for political demonstrations.⁴⁹ As the peddlers sold their wares right in front of the shop displays, the authorities then tried to use the people who worked in the shops to “send them [the peddlers] away”.⁵⁰ This attempt to clear the street also failed. The number of illegal traders eventually dwindled on Stalin Avenue, but only because custom began to dry up and grass verges were laid in the centre of the street. Furthermore, the council managed to prevent many of the sellers from working without a permit. The permits granted to legal sellers give us some information about who sold at the market and on Stalin Avenue and what they sold. Sztálinváros’ market seems to have been similar to a village fête.⁵¹ The fact that many officially recorded births were to parents who gave their occupation as either ‘performer’ or ‘circus member’ suggests that theatrical performances and circus tricks were commonplace at the market. Of course, circus tricks were not generally permitted at the official market, but the black market of these forms of leisure was much more tolerated.⁵² So we can understand why the city authorities sought to drive these village fête-like activities to the margins of the city next to its amusement park, which in 1957 was officially designated the city’s “market and circus district”.⁵³ The development of the city’s parks defined its urban image in local culture. The parks and play areas performed the social function of creating space for urban forms of leisure and restricting children’s play to certain designated areas. Nothing illustrates the representative function of Sztálinváros’ parks better than the fact that some of the saplings and flowers were brought from Budapest, and if children played outside of their play area in the park, it was interpreted as an infraction of park rules. The local authority employee responsible for enforcing the rules complained that he was unable to fine those who broke them because they were all under fourteen years of age. The leader of the city council Jenő Tapolczai angrily noted that “children play football or run across the grass in front of those responsible for bringing them up and their teachers, who do absolutely nothing to stop them.”⁵⁴ In the older parts of the city, goats and geese destroyed parks designed to lend an urban appearance to former village districts. In the meetings

49 FML. XXIII/502. 7. d. 13.01.1954; 17.03.1954. 50 FML. XXIII/502. 7. d. 5.05.1954. 51 FML. XXIII/509. 1. d. Árusítási engedélyek. 52 FML. Sztálinváros. Születési anyakönyvek. 1954–1955. 53 FML. XXIII/502. 13. d. 19.03.1957. 54 FML. XXIII/502. 7. d. 5.05.1954.

174 | Sándor Horváth of the city council’s implementation committee, committee member Jenő Takács urged “the peasants in the old city” to “be more particular about the image of the city. Those who live in the old city should feel that they also live in Sztálinváros.”⁵⁵ The ambitious leader of the city council planned to remove the construction workers’ barracks from one of the islands in the Danube (Szalki island) and create a park in their place, which would become Sztálinváros’ Margaret Island.⁵⁶ In the end they built a pioneer camp and a fish restaurant, which is still popular today.⁵⁷ Because of the cramped conditions of much of the city’s accommodation, the parks became the places where young couples courted in the evenings. One article published in 1957 drew attention to the fact that at dusk the parks drew “a particular kind of visitor [. . . ]. Here and there, there is a scarcely audible whispering, and now and then the sand crunches under the feet of the lovers seeking a park bench. Of course, they search in vain, for every bench is already taken.”⁵⁸ From 1954 onwards the city authorities paid greater attention to ensuring the urban management of traffic. They introduced speed limits of 50 kilometres per hour within the city limits and 25 kilometres per hour on Stalin Avenue, in view of the heavy traffic that used it. Street signs were erected and pedestrian crossings were introduced.⁵⁹ In order to create the impression of monumental grandeur for visitors, the authorities proposed banning both heavy goods vehicles and horsedrawn traffic from Stalin Avenue, 1 May Street, Endre Ady Street, and Attila József Street – from the so-called inner city. In the end, however, a more pragmatic solution was adopted. Heavy goods vehicles were only banned from the largely residential Endre Ady and Attila József Streets, because these routes were not required for traffic to and from the steel works. In order to make a better first impression on visitors, the routes by which long-distance buses arrived in the city were changed, so that they no longer dropped their passengers off in front of the shabby houses that doubled as barracks on Márton Szórád Street, but set them down in front of the newly built, representative Gold Star Hotel.⁶⁰ In popular discourse, residents of the city who kept animals were regarded as villagers. In the barracks and camps of the Radar district, the local council made several attempts to ban the keeping of pigs, none of which was successful.⁶¹ The

55 FML. XXIII/502. 11. d. 12.06.1956; 17.05.1956; 10. d. 9.09.1955; 7. d. 21.06.1954. 56 Margaret Island was the public park preferred by the middle classes of Budapest. 57 FML. XXIII/502. 10. d. 10 March 1955; 11. d. 12.04.1956. 58 Sztálinvárosi Hírlap., 10.12.1957, 3. 59 FML. XXIII/502. 7. d. 26.05.1954.; 23.06.1954. 60 FML. XXIII/502. 10. d. 10.03.1955.; 9.06.1955.; 4.08.1955. 61 FML. XXIII/502. 16. d. 9.11.1959.

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residents of high-rise blocks of flats regularly prepared freshly slaughtered pigs for storage or consumption in the common laundry room/kitchen. The plans for houses with gardens in a planned garden suburb foresaw only a wooden shed or a chicken hut, but not a pen for a pig.⁶² At the same time, it is worth noting that among the first people to avail of state-subsidised credit from the State Savings Bank to build private homes, there were many who did not just spend their loan on fridges, radios, or mass-produced furniture, but also on a pig. Many people who lived in flats furnished with mass-produced furniture kept their pigs in houses in the old areas of the city. After slaughtering the pig where it was kept, they would prepare it for storage or consumption in the common laundry room/kitchen of their block of flats.⁶³ In order to reinforce the city’s urban nature, the workers’ barracks built in the early days of the city on Market Square were demolished in 1960. Furthermore, a public toilet was planned for Stalin Avenue, the streets were decorated with urban clocks, and instead of pubs, ‘bistros’ were opened. Electrically lit billboards were also planned to advertise the services of the State Savings Bank and the National Lottery. At the same time, however, the barrack villages remained and the flats in the Technikum district were still unheated in winter. One third of all the city’s shops were located in the barracks.⁶⁴ In official discourse the village-like parts and symbols of the town were depicted as remnants of the old way of life and the early days of the city at the beginning of the 1950s. The ‘new and modern’ Sztálinváros came into existence after Stalin’s death in 1953, especially after 1956 in the context of de-Stalinization. The city name was changed from Sztálinváros (Stalintown) to Dunaújváros (New Town by the Danube) in 1961, marking a shift in emphasis from the power of Stalin to the power of modernity.

II Budapest: the shop window and perceptions of migration Hungarian films of the early 1960s depicted Budapest as a colourful shop window. At that time Budapest represented a new kind of socialist consumption, not only because of the influx of Western tourists, but also because the state took pains to demonstrate a pro-consumption attitude. The new symbols of this decade – the

62 FML. XXIII/502. 13. d. 27.12.1957. 63 FML. XXIII/502. 16. d. 14.12.1959.; Sztálinvárosi Hírlap, 16.01.1958, 3. 64 FML. XXIII/502. 18. d. 19.01.1960.; 16.01.1960.; 1.03.1960.; 24.05.1960; 3.07.1960.

176 | Sándor Horváth places of consumption (e.g. presszó (coffee-bars) and the large department stores) and the new housing estates – became the preferred locations for film shoots. Unlike the 1950s, when the city’s image in film was rather homogeneous, in the 1960s feature films represented Budapest as a spectacular, colourful and varied shop window.⁶⁵ All of the modern buildings, housing estates, and public institutions built at this time featured in these films. New magazines and feature films sometimes portrayed the city as a European metropolis, similar to Paris and Rome.⁶⁶ Diverse representations of the city – and sometimes acknowledgements of segregation – could also be found more regularly in the media. Illustrated magazines – among them the popular Nők Lapja (Women’s Magazine) – often published reports about different city districts in Budapest, the problems of the people who lived there, and their “different modes of behaviour”.⁶⁷ These representations contributed to the definition of urban life and the re-interpretation of urban spaces. One reason for the changing image of Budapest lies in the fact that the migrants arriving from the countryside to Budapest at the end of the 1960s were mainly workers from small villages or agricultural towns. However, few of them could get an apartment in Budapest due to the residency restrictions in Budapest since 1962.⁶⁸ The official representation of the city had an effect on the local administration and on city policies, which were subordinated to the goals of tourism and mass consumption. Apart from new housing estates, new hotels and modern department stores were the most important city projects and investments in 1960s Budapest. However, the construction of new hotels on the banks of the Danube was prioritised over building residential apartment blocks, because these hotels symbolized not only the new age of consumption, but also a greater openness to the West.⁶⁹ A photo reportage published in the new popular newspaper Esti Hírlap (Evening News) represented Budapest as “the city of nice department

65 Balázs Varga: Várostérkép. Az ötvenes-hatvanas évek magyar filmjeinek Budapest-képe, in: Zsombor Bódy/Mónika Mátay/Árpád Tóth (eds.), A mesterség iskolája. Tanulmányok Bácskai Vera 70. születésnapjára. Budapest 2000, 502–516. 66 Ibid., 515. 67 See, for example, Angyalföld az emberek földje, in: Nők Lapja 6.01.1962; A kör bezárul, in: Nők Lapja, 6.01.1962; A mi Budapestünk, in: Nők Lapja, 20.01.1962; A Rákóczi útra kiküldött tudósítóink jelentik, in: Nők Lapja, 17.02.1962. 68 Gyula Benda: Budapest társadalma. 1945–1970, in: Nikosz Fokasz/Antal Örkény (eds.), Magyarország társadalomtörténete. III. válogatott tanulmányok. II. kötet. (1945–1989). Budapest 1999, 8–31. 69 In early 1960 it was decided to go ahead with a project to build new hotels on the banks of the Danube and new department stores, despite the fact that only one new housing estate was in the planning and testing phase in Budapest at that time. See The Building and Reconstruction of

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stores and shops” in 1959.⁷⁰ Consumption, tourism and openness to the West were key concepts in the process of legitimizing the Kádár regime and promoting de-Stalinization in Hungary after 1956.⁷¹ In the context of making Budapest’s public spaces more consumptionoriented and representing them as such, new migrants to the city from the countryside and the population of the outer city districts were portrayed as wild in official discourse. The most important argument against building a mega department store like the GUM in Moscow⁷² in the centre of Budapest (on today’s Erzsébet Square) was the expected reaction of the population from the outskirts of the city: “they invade the inner city, we cannot move, and not only during rush hour.”⁷³ In 1964 Hungarian mass tourism was boosted thanks to tourismfriendly investments. In just one year, the number of foreign tourists doubled (from 584 000 foreign tourists in 1963 to 1 100 000 in 1964) and documents produced by the Metropolitan Council compared the income from tourism with that of Austria and some other western countries.⁷⁴ In the first half of the 1960s tourism became the most significant economic sector in Budapest’s inner city. As a result, beggars and people from the outer city became ‘disturbing factors’ in the downtown area. The ‘cleansing’ of the inner city and the campaign against the ruralization of Budapest were closely interrelated. Migrants with a rural background became a commonly known stereotype as a result of the discourse that considered them a social problem. In 1967 the problem of beggars with rural backgrounds in the inner city was engendered by a new policy introduced against them. The director of the city’s tourist office and the inner city parish priest addressed letters to the head of the Budapest Metropolitan Police complaining about the increase in the number of beggars around Váci Street (the most important shopping street at the time

Hotels and Department Stores in Budapest (Budapesti szállodák és áruházak építése, valamint rekonstrukciója) 22.03.1960, BFL, VB. XXIII-102a. 6 April 1960. 70 Budapest, a szép üzletek városa, in: Esti Hírlap 28.11.1959, 1. 71 János Kádár (1912–1989) was the General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party from 1956 until his retirement in 1988. 72 GUM is the abbreviation of the Russian Главный универсальный магазин (Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin, Main Universal Store). After it was reopened in 1953, GUM was one of the few stores in the Soviet Union that represented the welfare of Soviet society, because it did not have shortages of consumer goods. 73 The Work of the Metropolitan Office for Tourism and the Development of Tourism. Debate (A Fővárosi Idegenforgalmi Hivatal munkája és Budapest idegenforgalmának fejlesztése. Vita), BFL. VB. XXIII-102a. 6.04.1960, 155. 74 BFL, FT, XXIII-101a. 18–19.12.1964, 237.

178 | Sándor Horváth and a symbol of socialist consumption) and the inner city hotels. At a subsequent meeting of the city council, the head of police stated that “all of these letters demand us to take radical action against the beggars, [. . . ] it is a huge problem in the inner city [. . . ] and it is not so nice to see dirty people in rags all over the inner city.” He confirmed that under the new policy “if they are young or are able to work, we will take them away,” but asked “what can we do with the old and sick?”⁷⁵ At the same time, slum sensationalism became a popular subject in the local press (for example, in the newspaper Esti Hírlap) as public policymaking transformed and appeared to raise living standards, contrary to the beginnings of rapid industrialization in Hungary. In the 1960s a new type of popular reform journalism was drawn to the subject of the Budapest slums. The people who lived in the slums on the outskirts of the city came to represent Budapest’s new urban villagers. As the problem of ruralization was closely connected to the question of legitimate and illegitimate forms of consumption, it became highly relevant in the context of the Kádár regime’s efforts to build its ‘frigidaire socialism’, which promised consumption within a socialist system.⁷⁶ Rudolf Szamos published a study about the demolition of the Valéria Mária slum on the outskirts of Budapest to make room for a new housing estate (the Attila József housing estate). Szamos tried to represent the inhabitants of this slum as the new occupants of the newly built apartments. However, only a few of them were given apartments in the new housing estates and most of them were forced to move away from Budapest.⁷⁷ The stereotypes of urban villagers and people living in slums survived in depictions of the inhabitants of new housing estates built far away from the inner city.⁷⁸ Such depictions were compatible with the official propaganda that claimed that the new, socialist environment not only raised living standards, but also educated people. Housing estates were represented in official discourse as places where people (mainly workers) got an education and the social classes came together. In other words, it was alleged that the rural population was introduced to the proper, urban way of life here. 75 BFL. VB. XXIII-102a. 20.12.1967, 104–105. 76 The epithet ‘frigidaire socialism’ refers to the large number of refrigerators sold in the 1960s and 1970s. 77 Rudolf Szamos: Barakkváros. Budapest 1960, 17, 180. For more information on the Valéria Mária slum, see: Sándor Horváth: A lakótelepek népe és a bűn metaforái: a Mária Valériától a csövesekig, in: Tímea N. Kovács (ed.), A modernitás laboratóriumai: gyárak és lakótelepek. Budapest 2008, 83–100; Áron Nagy-Csere: Nyomortelepből mintalakótelep. Szocialista városrehabilitáció vagy a szegények fegyelemzése?, in: Korall 40 (2010), 45–67. 78 Nők Lapja, 15.07.1959; similar stereotypes can be found in the representation of another slum called Dzsumbuj, see: Nők Lapja, 19.04.1969. On this phenomenon, see: Péter Ambrus: A Dzsumbuj. Egy telep élete. Szeged 2000.

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In order to demonstrate the success of socialist industrialization, urban and village lifestyles were also contrasted in official texts of the 1960s. In these texts urban people were civilized and rural people were wild, awaiting civilization. This alleged urban and socialist civilization process was part of the propaganda surrounding the new urban consumption. Iván Szelényi and György Konrád’s model of urban social inequalities under socialism, which became widely known and accepted, was based mainly on research carried out in new housing estates at the end of the 1960s.⁷⁹ The book convincingly argued that urban segregation could also take place under the nonmarket or pseudo-market conditions created by the command economy and the socialist state. The authors attributed the phenomenon to the fact “that different institutions [. . . ] need a different workforce structure, and therefore the housing districts allocated near these kinds of ‘symbiotic complexes’ will potentially have different social structures.”⁸⁰ These differences could also be depicted as a civilizing process, as a narrative of the constant struggle between the urban and villager lifestyles, which focused attention on the regime’s efforts to promote modern life.

III Epilogue In Budapest, the inhabitants of the so-called periphery were identified as villagers and deviants in order to legitimize the centralized apartment allocation system. However, the city of Sztálinváros was the largest single investment project in Hungary’s first five-year plan and for that reason, it had to select its residents carefully. An analysis of applications for residency permits clearly shows that the people who settled permanently in the city had come from urban environments. In 1949, just before construction got under way in Sztálinváros, there were 54 settlements classified as towns or cities in Hungary, where slightly more than a third of the total population lived. At this time, 65 per cent of Hungary’s population had been born in villages or on farmsteads. The eastern regions of the country, from which most of the construction workers had come to the Sztálinváros site, were less urban in character than the country as a whole. Unlike Sztálinváros, in 1950s Budapest only every third inhabitant was a migrant. However, the new in-

79 Iván Szelényi/György Konrád: Az új lakótelepek szociológiai problémái. Budapest 1969. 80 Iván Szelényi: Városi társadalmi egyenlőtlenségek. Budapest 1990, 99–102.

180 | Sándor Horváth habitants of Budapest flocked to the city in much greater numbers.⁸¹ On the other hand, both cities experienced ruralization not at the peak of migration, but at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of the so-called modernist social reform of de-Stalinization.

81 See Sándor Horváth: A kapu és a határ: mindennapi Sztálinváros, 29, 52–77; Benda, Budapest társadalma, 13.

| Part III: Space and the Crises of Modernity

Ivan Jakubec

Integration or Decentralization? The Construction of Railways and Waterways in Cisleithania The Austro-Hungarian Empire occupied a central position in Central and South Eastern Europe and represented a transit zone from the north/north west to the south/southeast of the continent. In this article, I analyze the development of the most important railway lines, highlighting the motives for establishing them and the chronology in which this took place. While not forgetting the Hungarian context, I focus here on the Austrian part of the empire.¹ A great deal of attention has already been devoted to the subject of railway development in the AustroHungarian Empire in both scholarly and popular science publications.² Yet many of these texts are written from the perspective of today’s nation states. Among the published historical sources on this issue, we can mention the extensive work published by the Austrian Railway Ministry at the end of the nineteenth century and Viktor von Röll’s Enzyklopädie des Eisenbahnwesens.³

1 I wrote this article as a participant in the PRVOUK programme (P 12) at Charles University in Prague on “History from an interdisciplinary perspective. Europe and (versus) the world: continental and intercontinental transfers and their consequences”. 2 See, for example, the Czechoslovak and Czech publications by Miroslav Štěpán: Přehledné dějiny československých železnic. Praha 1958; Josef Hons: Dějiny dopravy na území ČSSR. Bratislava 1975; Stanislav Petr: Zásahy státu do železničního podnikání a jeho důsledky, in: Z dějin československé dopravy, Rozpravy NTM 37. Praha 1969, 30–41; Jaroslav Pacovský: Lidé, vlaky, koleje. Praha 1982; Milan Hlavačka: Dějiny dopravy v českých zemích v období průmyslové revoluce. Praha 1990; Josef Hons et al.: Čtení o severní dráze císaře Ferdinand. Praha 1991; Mojmír Krejčiřík: Po stopách našich železnic. Praha 1991; Miroslav Hubert/Milan Hlavačka: Rakouský dopravní gigant: Rakouská severozápadní dráha a Rakouská severozápadní paroplavební společnosti 1868–1922, in: Dějiny věd a techniky 3 (1992), 65–84; Milan Hlavačka/Ivan Jakubec et al.: Železnice, Čech, Moravy a Slezska. Praha 1995; Milan Hlavačka: Cestování v éře dostavníku. Všední den na středoevropských cestách. Praha 1996; Ivan Jakubec: Ekonomické aspekty výstavby železnic v dlouhodobé perspektivě na příkladu pražsko-drážďanské dráhy, in: Rozpravy NTM 175 (2002), 17–21; Stanislav Pavlíček: Naše lokálky. Praha 2002; Vladimír Štípek: Vývoj železniční infrastruktury v druhé polovině 19. stol. s důrazem na budování místních drah. Diploma thesis VŠE Praha 2012; Pavel Schreier: Příběhy z dějin našich drah. Kapitoly z historie českých železnic do roku 1989. Praha 2002; idem: Zrození železnic v Čechách, na Moravě a ve Slezsku. Praha 2002. 3 Geschichte der Eisenbahnen der Österreichisch-Ungarischen Monarchie I–VI. Teschen 1898; Viktor von Röll: Enzyklopädie des Eisenbahnwesens. Berlin/Wien 1912–1923, at: http://www.zeno.org/nid/20011402539 [last accessed on 5.06.2013].

184 | Ivan Jakubec Railways played an important role in the industrialization of the Habsburg Monarchy, even more so than in England, where they were only deployed in the latter phase of the (first) industrial revolution. In the Habsburg Monarchy, they were already a factor in the first industrialization phase. As Herbert Matis writes: “The railways became the key sector of industrial development as a whole and thus the engine of the industrial revolution.”⁴

I The expansion of the railway network in the Habsburg Monarchy: phases and tendencies An initial phase of private railway development for trading and transportation purposes (1824–1841) gave way to a phase of railway development by the state (1841–1854), which was known as the ‘national railway system’ or the ‘transition to the national railway system’.⁵ The decree issued by the Court Chancery on 23 December 1841 ruled that the construction of the railways would be financed by the state and determined the routes of the planned national railway system: Vienna-Prague-Dresden; Vienna-Trieste; and Venice-Milan-Lake Como-Bavaria. These routes took account of global trade (from the North Sea to the Adriatic), the necessity of connecting the various parts of the empire, in particular with Vienna, and strategic interests (including interests in Northern Italy).⁶ At the same time, there were fears that neighbouring states would construct competing lines, thereby jeopardizing transit through the empire.⁷ This phase ended with the privatization of some national railways. The state, however, retained its right to determine which routes could be travelled. A sharp fall in the value of railway shares in 1845 meant that the state had to come to the rescue of the railways, thus ushering in the first era of railway nationalization (1850–1854).⁸ Apart from strategic and administrative reasons, in the Czech lands this nationalization was also motivated by ethnic factors and reflected the growing tensions between Czechs and Germans at end of the nineteenth century. 4 “Die Eisenbahn wurde zum Schlüsselsektor des gesamten industriellen Aufstieges und damit zum Träger der industriellen Revolution” in: Herbert Matis: Österreichische Wirtschaft 1848–1913. Berlin 1972, 186–187. 5 Decrees on 29 December 1837 and 18 June 1838 approved general rules and regulations for the concession system used by the railways. 6 Geschichte der Eisenbahnen. Volume 1, Part 1, 316. 7 Ibid., 198–199. 8 Roman Sandgruber: Ökonomie und Politik. Österreichische Wirtschaftsgeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Wien 2005, 205.

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The second phase (1854–1877/1879) saw the sale of national railways and the expansion of railways, with the state granting loan guarantees and routing rights. The Concessions Act of 14 September 1854 complemented the plan for the railways published in November 1854. With this plan, the state administration attempted to raise the interest of the private sector and influence routing with strategic, administrative and economic reasons in mind. The plan foresaw that ten thousand kilometres of track would be built in twenty years, a target that was later fulfilled to all intents and purposes.⁹ The proposed primary railway network comprised three main-line routes from west to east, and a further three from north to south. According to the plan, 465 kilometres of track were to be built in just two to three years.¹⁰ The crash on the Viennese Stock Exchange during the World Exhibition in 1873 had a huge impact on railway development, interrupting the development boom and leading to regulatory interventions by the state in the railway business. These interventions ranged from the 1877 Sequestration Act, which was first applied in 1879 with regard to the financial results of the railway companies, to instances of nationalization. In the wake of the crisis, large state advances were provided to finance emergency construction projects (Notstandsbauten) aimed at ensuring the upgrading and completion of certain important routes. The table below shows that the boom in railway construction in the western part of the empire began in 1869 and ended with the crisis of 1873, thus coinciding with the first economic boom (1867–1873) in the Austrian part of the empire. Table 1: Annual construction of new railway tracks in Austria 1867–1878 (in kilometres)¹¹ Year Kilometres

1867 180

1868 388

1869 740

1870 839

1871 1 238

1872 1 158

(Year) (Kilometres)

1873 836

1874 324

1875 663

1876 444

1877 475

1878 42

In Hungary, the expansion of the railways proceeded similarly until 1867. Growth in private railways in the 1840s was followed by expansion in accordance with state dictates in the first half of the 1850s and the development of Hungarian main-line and secondary private railways alongside the privatization of national railways in the second half of the 1850s. We can only talk of two distinct transport-

9 Geschichte der Eisenbahnen. Volume 1, Part 1, 316. 10 Ibid., 484. 11 Source: Alois Brusatti (ed.): Die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung. Wien 1973, 289.

186 | Ivan Jakubec ation policies in Cisleithania (Austria) and Transleithania (Hungary) from 1867 onwards. The two systems were also in competition with each other. After the establishment of the Dual Monarchy, private railways were nationalized in Hungary. However, the expansion of the national railway network later ceased and local and private railways were once again developed.¹² The third phase (1877/1879/1880–1905) can also be characterized as a transition to a national railway system with the purchase of private railways by the state. The 1877 Sequestration Act paved the way for the nationalization of unprofitable railways in Austria, which were at risk of closure. Local railways with less stringent technical criteria expanded the network.¹³ These railways were built not only by large railway companies, but also by newly founded local railway companies, for example, the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Lokalbahnen and the Böhmische Commercialbahnen. Local railways were generally constructed with financial assistance from the state (interest-free loans, subventions, amortization guarantees, interest payment guarantees, and the purchase of shares) or the region or both. The development of local railways was motivated by transportation, political, and administrative considerations, as well as ethnic reasons in the case of Bohemia. The table below illustrates the rapid growth of local railways in the Austrian part of the empire from 1880 to 1910. Table 2: The development of Austrian local railways 1880–1910 (in kilometres)¹⁴ Year Kilometres

1880 15.6

1885 1 063.1

1890 2 343.2

1895 3 359.6

1900 5 739.4

1905 7 170.9

1910 8 592.1

The purchase by the state of private railways, which began in the 1870s, culminated in the large-scale nationalization of main-line routes at the turn of the century. The last phase (1906–1918) was characterized by the nationalization of unprofitable private railway companies. The considerable expansion of the national railway network at this time was due not only to nationalization, but also to overall state development. The ambitious so-called ‘second connection’ from Vienna to the port of Trieste, which was too expensive for private investors, is particularly

12 Röll, Enzyklopädie. Volume 7, Berlin/Wien 1915, 426–443. 13 Permission was granted to build railways that were steeper, with lower pressure on the axle and sharper bends. These railways could follow the contours of the terrain they crossed more closely and they were cheaper to build than ordinary railways. However, only light engines and lower speeds were permitted on them. 14 Source: Brusatti: Die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung, 299.

Integration or Decentralization?

| 187

noteworthy. The establishment of a separate Railway Ministry in 1897 testifies to the importance the state placed on railways at this time. Various factors led the state to nationalize railways. Nationalization allowed the state to determine transportation policy, railway construction, and tariffs. It made it easier to order locomotives, train carriages, and other equipment. The state was also eager to strengthen its position in negotiations on international agreements with foreign railway administrations in order to have an efficient transport system in the event of war.

II The principal domestic and local routes In the Austrian half of the empire the main railway network radiated outwards from Vienna in various directions to form a fan that encompassed the north and north west (Prague), the north east, the west, the south, and the south west.¹⁵ Here, as in Hungary, the regional capitals, chambers of industry and commerce, inland ports and seaports, areas rich in natural resources, in particular coal, and spas were gradually connected to the railway network. The linking of Vienna to the regional capitals reflected political and administrative will. By the 1860s most regional capitals had been connected to the railway network, with the exception of Zadar (Dalmatia) and Sarajevo (Bosnia). The railway to Sarajevo was completed in 1906, while the line to Zadar was only completed in 1967. The development of so-called ‘coal railways’ (Kohlebahnen) in the 1850s and 1860s (e.g. the AussigTeplitz Railway and the Buštěhrad Railway) and the connection from Vienna to Trieste completed in 1857 were motivated by economic interests. Military strategic considerations also played a role in the expansion of the railway network, particularly to garrison towns. In Bohemia, apart from the necessity of connecting cities and towns of administrative importance, ethnic divisions were also reflected in railway development. Important regional centres with a majority German population (e.g Liberec, Karlovy Vary and Cheb¹⁶) were often better connected with neighbouring German regions and Vienna by rail than they were with Prague.

15 Vienna-Trieste; Vienna-Italy; Vienna-Salzburg; Vienna-České Budějovice-Cheb; ViennaPrague-Saxony; Vienna-Ostrava-Galicia; and Vienna-Budapest. 16 Throughout this article I use the current names for places now located in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, etc., even though they were better known by their German names in the period examined here, e.g. Liberec (Reichenberg), Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad), Cheb (Eger), Ústí nad Labem (Aussig), Děčín (Tetschen), Teplice (Teplitz), Podmokly (Bodenbach), Litomyšl (Leitomischl),

188 | Ivan Jakubec Czech Germans often complained that local railways tended to be built in areas with an ethnic Czech majority. In an article in the liberal Viennese weekly Die Zeit entitled “The national struggle in Bohemia and the German economy” published in 1900, Dr Fritz Carns claimed that the regional administration in Bohemia raised no objections to the construction of local railways through areas mainly inhabited by Czechs, but made it exceedingly difficult to get permission to construct these railways in areas with a German majority.¹⁷ Carns also came up with a surprising proposal – closer ties with Germany – “to give our industry access to a powerful and affluent market”,¹⁸ and painted a bleak picture of the Dual Monarchy: The almost saturated alpine countries, Galicia with its weak purchasing power, a market fenced off by nationalists in the Sudetenland, the loss of Hungary in the recent past, the lost Balkans, and, to top it all, our weak position in international trade – these are the prospects for our industry.¹⁹

A common interest in developing the Bohemian economy was not strong enough to keep national conflicts in check. The article ends with the statement: “There is no other way around the problem: both ethnic groups must be separated in all matters that concern their nationality. Then it just might be possible for them to find common ground in economic matters, and perhaps also in the political sphere.”²⁰ The frequent Czech claim that Prague was not sufficiently connected to Vienna does not stand up to scrutiny. According to the Austrian railway timetable for the summer of 1912, the following daily services operated between Prague and Vienna: three direct services, including one train to Berlin (on the left side of the Elbe valley); three services from Berlin to Vienna (on the right side of the Elbe valley) that by-passed Prague but stopped at nearby Kolín; three indirect connections via Gmünd; and two direct services to Vienna via Gmünd. Thus Prague was linked to Vienna by five direct train lines and six indirect train lines. We have seen how economic, political, military and cultural factors spurred railway construction in the Austrian half of the empire. This was also the case

Sokolov (Falkenau), České Budějovice (Budweis), Brno (Brünn), Karviná (Karwin), Bochnia (Salzberg) and Orlova (Orlau). 17 Fritz Carns: Der nationale Kampf in Böhmen und die deutsche Volkswirtschaft, in: Die Zeit, 10.02.1900, 84–85. 18 Ibid., 85. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid.

Integration or Decentralization?

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189

in Hungary. Yet aside from state interests and the interests of individual countries, the fierce competition between the various railway companies should also be taken into account. This led to the construction of parallel routes, for example, the train lines on either side of the Elbe river – the connection between AustrianGerman border and Vienna (Austrian Northwest Railway). In general, one can say that the development of the railway network in the empire (until 1867) and subsequently in Cisleithania contributed to greater administrative, economic and military integration. Yet it did not reinforce the links between the two halves of the empire, nor did it overcome ethnic divisions. The construction of local railways usually proved to be unprofitable and contributed little to economic development. The construction of a second set of tracks on main-line (freight) routes from Vienna to Galicia, Trieste, Italy, Germany and Hungary marked a significant step in railway development. In Hungary, a second set of tracks was constructed on main-line (freight) routes from Budapest to Galicia and northern Slovakia.²¹ These train routes formed the backbone of the empire’s railway network and were vital to trade and transportation. Some of them served economic purposes only, such as the connection from Cheb to Litoměřice via Ústí nad Labem and Časlau with an extension to Děčín (brown coal), or the connection from Vienna to Cracow (mainly coal and salt). In some cases, the construction of the second track had still not been completed by the time the empire collapsed (e.g. the stretch from Gmünd to brown coal deposits and spas in western Bohemia). Two tracks were foreseen for a number of routes from the outset, but the second track was usually built according to demand and available funds. During the First World War, the Kaiser Ferdinand Northern Railway began to build two further tracks along the route from Vienna to Bochnia (in Silesia). After the war a partly built hundredkilometre stretch of track in Bohemia was removed because it was deemed to be an ‘unwanted’ route.

21 The following double-track routes (4 984 km in total) had been built by the end of the Habsburg Monarchy: Vienna-Trieste; Vienna-Linz-Salzburg; Innsbruck-Italy; Vienna-Gmünd; Vienna-Cracow-Przemyśl-L’viv; Brno-Kolín-Prague-Kralupy nad Vltavou with a connecting line to Lovosice-Ústí nad Labem-Podmokly; Čáslav-Kolin-Litomeřice with a connecting line to StřekovDěčín; Prague-Zdice; Cheb-Ústí nad Labem; Vienna-Budapest; Budapest-Győr; Budapest-SzegedTimișoara; Budapest-Žilina, Budapest-Fiľakovo; and Budapest-Miskolc-Przemyśl. See ÖsterreichUngarn’s Eisenbahnen 1903. Prochaskas neue Ausgabe Österreich-Ungarn’s Eisenbahnen. Zweiundsiebzigste Ausgabe, Teschen/Wien/Leipzig; Železniční síť Čech, Moravy, Slezska a zemí sousedních. Dle úředních pramenů sestavil Josef Matějček, 1914; On the history of the railways in the Alps, the Danube region and the Adriatic region, see: Elmar Oberegger: Infobüro für Österreichische Eisenbahngeschichte, at: http://www.oberegger2.org [last accessed on 5.06.2013].

190 | Ivan Jakubec By 1913 there were 22 981 kilometres of track in Austria and 22 369 kilometres in Hungary. In Austria, 82 per cent of the railway network was run by the state (either owned by the state or privately owned but under state control), compared to 84.4 per cent in the Hungarian half of the empire. Double-track routes represented 15.9 per cent of the entire network in the western part of the empire and just 5.9 per cent in the eastern part of the empire.²² The following table shows the development of the railways in the Austrian and Hungarian parts of the empire and in the empire as a whole from 1837/1846 to 1913, taking both state and private railways into account. Table 3: The railway system in Austria-Hungary (1837–1913) in kilometres²³ 1837

1850

1860

1870

1880

1890

1900

1913

14

1 357

2 927

6 112

11 429

15 273

19 229

22 981

State-run railways

0

833

13

13

1 970

6 660

11 059

18 850

%

0

0.6

0

0

17.2

43.6

57.5

82

Railways in Hungary

0

222

1 614

3 474

7 047

11 251

17 538

22 369

State-run railways

0

0

0

354

2 603

7 539

14 526

19 022

%

0

0

0

10.2

36.9

67

82.8

85

14

1 579

4 541

9 586

18 476

26 524

36 767

45 350

Railways in Austria

Total railways in AustriaHungary

Economically weaker regions could not afford to invest much money in railways, especially in the construction of local railways. Economically developed regions such as the Bohemian lands and Lower Austria were better placed to do so. In 1913 42 per cent of Austria’s entire railway network lay in the Bohemian lands. The table below shows the distribution of the railway network among the different regions of Cisleithania.

22 Röll, Enzyklopädie. Volume 7, 426–443.; idem: Enzyklopädie. Volume 10, Berlin/Wien 1923, 49–71. 23 Source: Röll, Enzyklopädie. Volume 7; idem: Enzyklopädie. Volume 10.

Integration or Decentralization?

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191

Table 4: The distribution of the railway network (main-line and local railways) in Cisleithania in 1913²⁴ Track length

1 kilometre of track per

In kilometres

As a percentage of the total length

km2

inhabitants

Austria below the Enns river

2 477

10.78

8.00

1 426

Austria above the Enns river

1 109

4.83

10.80

769

Regions

Salzburg Styria

418

1.81

17.11

514

1 489

6.48

15.06

970

Carinthia

625

2.72

16.51

634

Carniola

508

2,21

19,61

1 035

Coastal region (Austrian Illyria)

586

2.55

13.61

1 525

1 217

5.30

24.05

896

Bohemia

6 771

29.46

7.67

1 000

Moravia

2 119

9.22

10.49

1 237

Tyrol and Vorarlberg

Silesia

688

2.99

7.48

1 100

Galicia

4 131

17.98

19.00

1 943

613

2.67

17.02

1 305

Bukovina Dalmatia Total

260

1.00

55.71

2 807

22 981

100.0

13.05

1 243

An Austrian monograph on economic development published in the 1970s takes a very critical view of railway development in the empire: Despite clear indications of progress, the situation at this point in time [the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, I.J.] was by international standards similar to that in the middle of the nineteenth century: the railways in Austria, and in Hungary, were far less developed than those in other industrialized nations. ²⁵

Here unfavourable geographical conditions, which made railway construction very expensive, and late industrialization were contributory factors. We can talk of a new transportation policy in the empire from the 1880s onwards. It entailed increased state investment in the development of transportation networks, which

24 Source: Österreichisches Statistisches Handbuch. 32. Jg., 1913. Wien 1914, 192. 25 Alois Brusatti (ed.): Die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung. Wien 1973, 303.

192 | Ivan Jakubec had risen to 34 per cent of state expenditure by 1910, with investment in railways representing 26.8 per cent of this share.²⁶ In spite of the aforementioned jeremiads, after 1880 the railway network in the empire, particularly in Austria, drew closer to the standard set by Germany and France in terms of density.²⁷ Complaints that the government in Vienna was giving preferential treatment to the Austrian part of the empire were frequently heard. It should be noted that one third of the direct taxes and two thirds of the indirect taxes that flowed to Vienna came from the Czech lands. This includes the taxes paid by large companies that operated businesses in the Czech lands but had their headquarters in Vienna.²⁸ Despite these disparities in tax yields, at 10.48 krones per capita, public investment in infrastructure in the Bohemian lands in 1910 covered just two thirds of infrastructure costs. By comparison, per capita investment in Lower Austria (including Vienna) was 15.73 krones and 12.21 krones in Styria. Annual investment increases were, however, the same in Bohemia and other regions (5.94 per cent).²⁹

III The role of the railways in processes of integration and de-centralization The transfer of technological innovation from different parts of Europe and the USA to Central Europe can be clearly seen in railway construction. Often, the imported technologies were improved upon in Central Europe and exported further to other parts of Europe and the world. This was the case in the construction of locomotives and carriages and the participation of Austrian engineers in railway construction in Eastern and South Eastern Europe. The first locomotives and carriages used in Austria came not only from Great Britain, but also from the USA (William Norris in Philadelphia, Charles Tayleur & Co., Warrington), Belgium (John Cockerill Seraign near Liège), and later from

26 Othmar Pickl: Das Wirtschaftswachstum der Habsburger Monarchie und ihre Verflechtung in dem internationalen Handel im 19. Jahrhundert, in: Hermann Kellenbenz (ed.), Wirtschaftliches Wachstum, Energie und Verkehr vom Mittelalter bis ins 19. Jahrhundert: Bericht über die 6. Arbeitstagung der Gesellschaft für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Stuttgart/New York 1978, 197. 27 Pickl, Das Wirtschaftswachstum, 196. 28 Roman Sandgruber: Wirtschaftswachstum, Energie und Verkehr in Österreich 1840–1913, in: Kellenbenz, Wirtschaftliches Wachstum, 67–93, 82. 29 Karl M. Brousek: Die Großindustrie Böhmens 1848–1918. München 1987, 31.

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Germany or the German states (e.g. Meyer in Mülhausen).³⁰ British, Belgian and German engineers were also instrumental in the establishment of the first railway company in the Habsburg Monarchy. Copies of imported locomotives began to appear as early as 1837. The first railway companies built their own engineering works in Vienna (the Wien-Gloggnitz Eisenbahngesellschaft machine shop) or Wiener Neustadt (Günther und Prevenhuber). Even William Norris began to produce locomotives in Vienna. Freight carriages for the Olomouc–Prague Railway (1845) were initially imported from Pflug in Berlin, Ratgeber in Munich and the Esslingen engineering works and were only later produced in the empire.³¹ By the end of the 1850s, locomotives were being manufactured in five places³² and carriages in seven places.³³ While the production of locomotives was concentrated in Lower Austria (Vienna and Wiener Neustadt) in the nineteenth century, in the last years of the empire the focus of production shifted to the Bohemian lands. Austrian iron and steel works were involved in the manufacture of train tracks from the very start of railway construction in the empire.³⁴ Later even private railway companies purchased tracks from various manufacturers. For example, the Kaiser Ferdinand Northern Railway bought its train tracks from Austrian manufacturers, while companies financed with foreign capital tended to buy from manufacturers in Great Britain or Germany (Phoenix). As I mentioned, the production of steam locomotives in the empire was initially concentrated in Lower Austria. In 1900 the first standard gauge steam locomotives were manufactured in the Bohemian lands by the Erste böhmischmährische Maschinenfabrik in Prague thanks to the director’s brother Bohuslav

30 Hlavačka, Dějiny dopravy, 90–92; František Jílek (ed.): Studie o technice v českých zemích 1800–1918. Volume 3, Praha 1985, 290–292; idem: Volume 4, Praha 1986, 293–309; Karl Gölsdorf : Lokomotiven in Alt-Österreich 1837–1918. Wien 1978. When referring to companies, I use their original names even though some of them went on to change their names several times. 31 At the railway manufacturing works in Semmering, Hernals, Graz, Podmokly, Pardubice, Česká Třebová, Brünn/Brno and Tábor. 32 The engineering works of the state railway company in Vienna, W. Günther in Wiener Neustadt, G. Sigl in Vienna (later in Wiener Neustadt), the engineering works of the KaiserinElisabeth-(West) Bahn company in Vienna and the engineering works of the Südbahn in Verona. 33 The Prague-Viennese Public Limited Company for the Manufacture of Carriages in PragueBubny (until 1873); the Dr. Stroussberg Carriage Factory in Holoubkov (1873–1876), Schustala & Co. in Kopřivnice (1882), the Královopolská engineering works in Brno (1890), the Kasimir Lipiňski engineering works in Sanok (1895), Fram in Kolín (1899) and the carriage factory in Studénka (1900). 34 In Neuenberg (Styria), Prevalje (Carinthia) and the Witkowitz Mining and Steel Works (northern Moravia).

194 | Ivan Jakubec Mařík-Václav, who came from Knittelfeld in Styria. The engineering works in Slané in central Bohemia also began to manufacture locomotives in 1912. Economics can be seen as a means of integration that transcends national and ethnic affiliations. In the case of the Dual Monarchy we need to ask whether there was a single market or two complementary markets that cooperated and overlapped with each other. We should also note that the relationship between the two economies was characterized by growing rivalries. Hungary wanted to reduce the amount of industrial goods it ‘imported’ from Austria. The talks on common questions concerning the economy, trade and finance, which were held every ten years, did not improve economic relations. The two parts of the empire also competed with each other in transportation policy. Austria and Hungary built competing railways and ports. Initially, railways were financed by the state and private investors. In the context of the sale of state railways to private enterprises and the granting of state guarantees for the construction of new routes in the mid-1850s, there was an injection of French capital from the Franco-Austrian Consortium led by the Société Genérale du Crédit Mobilier (Emile and Isaac Péreir in Paris and Johann Georg von Sina in Vienna). The Staatseisenbahn-Gesellschaft (SteG) was founded with the help of the Consortium following the purchase of the Northern and South Eastern State Railways in 1855. French interest then turned to the iron and steel industry with the aim of developing a basis for expansion to the Balkans. These plans were abandoned in the wake of the 1873 crisis and the bankruptcy of Union Générale in 1882.³⁵ The main shareholders of the profitable coal railways (the Aussig-Teplitz Railway and the Buštěhrad Railway) were from the German Reich (Reichsdeutsche). In the border regions of the Bohemian lands (Cheb, Podmokly, etc.) capital from Saxony, Bavaria and Prussia prevailed. The development of the railways, particularly local railways, was a reflection of economic growth. While many railway projects were abandoned as a result of the crash on the Viennese Stock Exchange in 1873, in the long term it led to greater efficiency in the railway sector. The expansion of the railway network slowed down somewhat and new projects were less ambitious. In some cases, however, it was competitors that contributed to the poor results of railway companies. For

35 See Ivan Jakubec: Zur Einführung des Thomas-Verfahrens in den böhmischen Ländern, in: Manfred Rasch/Jacques Mass (eds.), Das Thomas-Verfahren in Europa. Entstehung – Entwicklung – Ende. Essen 2009, 213–240; idem: Role podnikatelských elit v zavádění thomasace v Čechách, in: Duch zakladatelů. Průmyslová společnost a společenská emancipace. Der Geist der Gründer. Industriegesellschaft und gesellschaftliche Emanzipation. Ústí nad Labem 2006, 54–62.

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example, the Prague-Dux Railway was overshadowed by its rival, the Buštěhrad Railway.³⁶ It goes without saying that the railways fuelled modernization in the Habsburg Monarchy. From the very beginning they fulfilled a number of functions as a major purchaser of modern industrial products (from the metallurgy, engineering, mining, and construction industries) and a means of reliably transporting large quantities of goods and people quickly, regularly, and at an affordable price. The telegraph, a technology based on the railways, led to a radical acceleration in the speed of news transmission (from the 1870s onwards newspapers contained news from every part of the empire from the previous day). The expansion in railway transportation is illustrated by the fact that the number of passengers on private and state railways increased tenfold in the period from 1880 to 1913. In 1913 the Cisleithanian railway transported 302 million passengers (the population of Cisleithania was 28 million). By comparison, in 2012, in the midst of a period of railway stagnation in the Czech Republic, Czech Railways transported 169 million passengers (the Czech Republic has a population of 10 million).³⁷ It is thus clear that the train had become a common means of transportation by the last years of monarchy. In the context of the empire, the railway functioned as an engine of economic growth. The impact of the railways on the settlement patterns and growth of urban centres illustrates this. In 1843 81.7 per cent of the population of the Bohemian lands lived in small communities with less than 2 000 inhabitants. By 1910 this proportion had fallen to 57.9 per cent. And while only 3.7 per cent of the population lived in larger communities with over 10 000 inhabitants in the middle of the nineteenth century (1843), by 1910 that percentage had risen to 18.7 per cent.³⁸ Yet the construction of the railways did not automatically lead to economic growth and greater social mobility. Indeed, improved public transportation often led to the depopulation of poorer regions as people moved to find work elsewhere. However, a clear connection between railway development and economic growth can be seen in the case of Ústí nad Labem. The town had been connected to the railway network since 1851, but only developed into a modern industrial city after the

36 The most profitable railways were the Aussig-Teplitz Railway and the Buštěhrad Railway. Between 1858 and 1875 the rate of dividends was 4–25.2 per cent. See Hlavačka, Dějiny dopravy v českých zemích, 80. 37 Röll, Enzyklopädie. Volume 7, 426–443.; České dráhy: Tiskové zprávy. České dráhy přepravily o 3 miliony cestujících více, celkem jejich služeb využilo 169 milionů zákazníků, at: http://www.ceskedrahy.cz/tiskove-centrum/tiskove-zpravy/-15819 [last accessed on 5.06.2013]. 38 Ivan Jakubec/Zdeněk Jindra et al.: Dějiny hospodářství českých zemí. Od počátku industrializace do konce habsburské monarchie. Praha 2006, 87.

196 | Ivan Jakubec construction of the Aussig-Teplitz Railway, the enlargement of the Elbe port for the transhipment of brown coal, and the establishment of new businesses.³⁹ Yet the railways did not have a significant effect on the growth of towns and communities where railway development only got going in the last third of the nineteenth century (e.g. Litomyšl). The location of the train station, more precisely its significant distance from the town centre, also hindered economic development. Apart from the question of location, fear of the new means of transportation and the costs involved played a role here, as did the interests of the owners, publicans and drivers of horse-drawn carts, who feared a fall in their income and demanded that railway stations be built further from the centre to secure their income. This behaviour, which was understandable from an economic point of view, was an obstacle to the development of railway transportation, which was very difficult and costly to remove. With certain reservations, one can state that railway transportation was generally an instrument of integration. Local railways (industrial and coal) were integrative at local level, but sometimes had the opposite effect at national level due to their focus on local interests. Whenever railways were built with state support, the interests of the state and/or regional capitals with regard to routing had to be respected. When railway development proceeded without state help, routing decisions reflected the economic interests of the railway owners. The development of the railway network did not lead to a convergence of levels of economic development across the empire. It would be more correct to say that wealthy regions became wealthier and poorer regions poorer. The construction of railways in economically underdeveloped mountain regions with little regard for their viability or economic potential usually brought no significant improvement to the local economy. If local railways were not constructed near industry (factories or natural resources), railway development tended to stagnate. The railways also furthered economic migration, one example being the migration of people from Galicia to Silesia for work. For the most part, competing train lines did not contribute to integration. Locomotives and carriages could only run on both main-line and local routes if the technical parameters allowed, taking the lower load capacity of the secondary routes into account. Each railway company had its own fleet of locomotives and carriages and its own tariffs. Foreign railways even used their own technical and signalling equipment. It was only after 1918 that technical parameters (e.g. axial load) and tariffs were standardized. Railway construction furthered the development of regional centres in the Czech lands and other parts of the empire. Most regional capitals became trans-

39 Jakubec, Ekonomické aspekty, 17–21.

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portation centres, but there were some exceptions, mainly due to their location far away from coal reserves and other important raw materials on the one hand, and from the main routes connecting the important cities in the Habsburg Monarchy on the other.⁴⁰ Prague became the most important junction in Bohemia. At the same time, other regional centres located mainly in German-speaking regions such as Cheb or Liberec were only indirectly connected with Prague (via secondary routes). The progressive nationalization of the railways and the establishment of a Railway Ministry clearly evidence integration. The newly created Czechoslovak Republic continued with nationalization and established its own railway ministry. The most heavily used main-line routes, most of which were nationalized before the First World War, formed the backbone of integration. The construction of local railways reflected economic strength, or perceptions of that strength. The fact that the largest concentration of railways was found in the Bohemian lands testifies to the particular strength of the Bohemian economy within the empire. The main-line routes followed the main trade routes, often state highways. A railway connection between Vienna and the regional centres did not necessarily bring economic benefits. Regional economic development depended more on whether the regional centre emerged as a transportation hub within the network of main-line and secondary railways. The density of railways was a good indicator of economic strength in any region. As a rule, the later the railways came to a region, the smaller the economic benefits they brought. The existence of iron ore or coal deposits in certain regions led to their industrialization (e.g. Kladno in central Bohemia or the Ostrava region). At the same time, the transportation of raw materials to remoter regions also furthered their industrialization. Thus the railway allowed a national (Cisleithanian) market to be created. The economy furthered the division of labour between the regions. Here railway transportation played a crucial role in the circulation of goods throughout the empire (e.g. iron ore from Styria to northern Moravia, salt from Salzburg and Bochnia, petroleum and wheat from Galicia, industrial goods from the Bohemian lands to the entire empire and further afield, brown coal from the Sokolov region, coal from the Ostrava and Těšín regions, etc.). Although the empire functioned as an economic entity with different regions specializing in different fields, it was clear that the ethnic and political (national) ambitions of various ethnic groups (including Hungarians) were stronger than any common economic interests.

40 Examples of unsuccessful development are Jihlava, Opava and Kutná Hora. By contrast, the railways boosted the economic development of cities and towns such as Prague, Plzeň, České Budějovice, Hradec Králové, Cheb, Liberec, Břeclav, Brno, Olomouc, and Ostrava.

198 | Ivan Jakubec

IV The main stages and routes in the development of waterways in Cisleithania (Austria) The Danube was the main inland waterway in the empire, connecting both capitals with each other and the empire with Bavaria and the Balkans. The Vltava and Elbe rivers were the main waterways in Bohemia, while the Vistula played an important role in Galicia. Steamship companies operated along the Danube and on stretches of the Elbe and Vltava rivers. In 1912 traffic volumes reached 2.7 million tons along the entire length of the Danube, compared to 3.7 million tons on the Elbe.⁴¹ In Bohemia, the canalization of the main waterways was initiated by the Commission for the Canalization of the Vltava and Elbe rivers in Bohemia (Kommission für die Kanalisierung des Moldau- und Elbeflusses in Böhmen), which was founded in 1896. The Commission managed the construction of hydraulic structures from Prague (Vltava) to the Austrian-German border (Elbe). Before the outbreak of the First World War, nine hydraulic structures had been completed and two were under construction. The following table presents an overview of the navigable river network in the Austrian part of the empire.⁴² The planned development of the inland waterway network provided for in Act No. 66/1901 in accordance with the government programme of Prime Minister Ernest von Koerber, a major advocate of investment in transportation projects, represented the largest undertaking of its kind in Austria in the second half of the nineteenth century.⁴³ Under this plan, Austria was to become a major inland waterway junction, a crossroads to the north (Elbe-Hamburg) and the north west (Oder-Sczeczin), the eastern border of Galicia (Vistula), and the south and the

41 Brusatti, Die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung, 311. 42 In Štvanice, Troja, Klecany, Dolany, Miřejovice, Vraňany-Hořín, Dolní Beřkovice, Štětí, and Roudnice. 43 See, for example, Alexander Gerschenkron: An Economic Spurt that Failed: Four Lectures in Austrian History. Princeton 1977; Ivan Jakubec: Říšský vodocestný zákon č. 66/1901 jako fenomén hospodářských dějin a DVT?, in: Rozpravy Národního technického muzea 189. Praha 2004, 53–58; Michal Bartoš (ed.): Vodní cesta D-O-L: Historie, ekologie, krajina. Horka nad Moravou 2004; Ivan Jakubec: Vodocestný zákon a jeho realizace, in: Konference na lodi. Vodní dílo v krajině. Praha 2006, 54–65; Jaroslav Kubec/Jozef Podzimek: Křižovatka tří moří. Vodní koridor Dunaj-Odra-Labe. Praha 2006; Kateřina Smutná: Průplavní odbočka na Brno. K historii Dunajsko-oderského průplavu 3 (2009), 16–21; Ivan Jakubec: Idea Dunajsko-oderského průplavu v 19. a 20. století a její, in: Marcella Rossová (ed.), Integration und Desintegration in Mitteleuropa. Pläne und Realität. München 2009, 235–256; Petr Velek: Studie trasování vodního koridoru Dunaj-Odra-Labe. Bachelor thesis. University of Economics. Praha 2011.

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Table 5: The network of navigable waterways in Austria in 1913 by region⁴⁴ Region

Length of shipping routes (floatable rivers) in km

Length of shipping routes (navigable rivers and canals) in km

Total

Percentage of total

Austria below the Enns river

–

319

319

4.9

1.6

202

Austria above the Enns river

141

462

603

9.2

5

157

Salzburg

Length of Steamship routes shipping in km routes 2 per 100 km

54

43

97

1.5

1.3

–

Styria

463

190

654

10

2.9

–

Carinthia

311

4

315

4.8

3

–

Carniola

18

137

156

2.3

1.5

22

Coastal region

–

118

118

1.8

1.4

69

251

77

329

5

1.1

–

Bohemia

805

364

1 170

17.9

2.2

197

Moravia

200

33

233

3.5

1

–

Silesia

–

27

27

0.4

0.5

–

Galicia

1 287

815

2 102

32.2

2.6

637

Tyrol and Vorarlberg

Bukovina

345

–

345

5.3

3.3

–

Dalmatia

–

55

55

0.8

0.4

48

3 879

2 650

6 530

100.0

2.1

1 330

Total

south west (Danube-Black Sea). The implementation of the plan depended on technical development. While it was meant to support economic development, it was also acknowledged that it would be a significant drain on state finances in the regions involved in waterway development. The government in Vienna tried to gain the approval of Czech MPs – especially the Young Czechs – for the development of both waterways and a second railway connection with Trieste.⁴⁵ This was

44 Source: Österreichisches Statistisches Handbuch, 162. 45 The Tauernbahn (Schwarzach-Gastein; Gastein-Möllbrücken/Spittal an der Drau), the Karawanken- und Wocheinerbahn (Klagenfurt/Villach-Görz-Trieste), and the Pyhrnbahn (KlausSpittal am Pyhrn-Selzthal).

200 | Ivan Jakubec seen as an attempt to support common German-Czech interests and thus foster better relations between the two nations. The Czech deputies finally voted for the plan and contributed to its ratification in the Reichstag in 1901. Act No. 66/1901 foresaw the development of a vast network of waterways in Austria in the period from 1904 to 1924. The scale of the planned network was estimated at about 1 600 kilometres at a cost of between 770 and 842 million krones. Governments in regions through which the canalized rivers and canals would run were involved in implementing the plan. In some cases there were plans to regulate and canalize existing rivers (e.g. by building locks) and build canals that followed the natural course of rivers. The implementation of Act No. 66/1901 placed a major burden on the Austrian state budget, regional budgets, and even the budgets of regions that were unaffected by the expansion of the waterway network. The plan to finish construction on the network in just two decades was highly ambitious. The development of the network also demanded that the government introduce effective tariff and customs policies and thus led to greater administrative intervention in the transportation and economic spheres. The Danube-Oder Canal, together with the connection to the Elbe, the Danube-Vltava Canal and the Oder-Vistula-Dniester Canal formed the basis of the planned inland waterway network. The table below gives details of the planned network. Table 6: The waterway development plan for Cisleithania in accordance with Act No. 66/1901⁴⁶ Waterways Danube-Oder Canal

Length in kilometres

Expected costs (in millions of krones)

288/274*

140/150*

Danube-Vltava-Elbe Canal (Korneuburg to Č. Budějovice and the canalization of the Vltava from Č. Budějovice to Prague)

382.4/390*

259/240*

Canal from the Danube-Oder Canal to the middle reaches of the Elbe and the canalization of the Elbe from Melnik to Jaroměř

382.8/316*

231.2 /170*

Linz-Budweis Canal

95*

70*

Lateral canals to Brno and from Karviná to Orlová

80*

20*

537.2/479*

212.2/120*

1 590.4/1 634

842.4/770

Oder-Vistula-Dniester Canal Total

46 Source: Antonín Smrček: Nástin historie vodní cesty Dunaj-Odra-Labe v souvislosti s úpravou řeky Moravy, in: Plavební cesty Dunaj-Odra-Labe 1 (1940), 30; and idem: Snahy a boje o vodní cesty Dunaj-Odra-Labe v souvislosti s úpravou řeky Moravy, 38, in the Sdružení Dunaj-Odra-Labe Praha Archive.

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As Alexander Gerschenkron has shown, resistance to the planned development from Austrian bureaucracy – primarily the Ministry of Finance – proved too strong and ultimately led to the postponement of construction work. In the document cited by Gerschenkron, a number of reservations about the project were voiced. First and foremost there was a fear that the cost of building canals would be much higher than in other countries due to Cisleithania’s mountainous landscape. It was assumed that high operating costs would place a further burden on state finances. There was also concern that the canals would support cheap imports of agricultural produce to the Austrian market and therefore threaten indigenous producers. It was thought that Budapest, seen by Austrians as a rival city at that time, would benefit more than Vienna from the transportation of coal from the northern provinces on waterways due to the lower freight tariffs down the Danube. It was claimed that canals might also disadvantage the railways, the object of heavy state investment in the previous decades.⁴⁷ When it became clear that the plan would not gain unanimous support, a competition arose between the Bohemian supporters of the proposed Danube-Vltava-Elbe canal and the Moravian supporters of the Oder-Danube canal. In the end, however, finances were cut to the extent that neither of the projects could be realized.⁴⁸ By the time the empire collapsed, just three locks had been built on the middle reaches of the Elbe with a further six under construction.⁴⁹ A reservoir had been built in eastern Moravia (Bystrička) and a few bridges in Galicia. The completed work represented only a fraction of the planned development. After the First World War the Czechoslovak authorities attempted to implement the plan, at least in the Czech part of the former empire. Work on locks continued and work began on new hydraulic structures. Construction even continued into the Second World War in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Silesia, and Vienna, but soon came to a halt. A waterway development plan also existed under state socialism and after 1989, but it has yet to be implemented.

47 Gerschenkron, An Economic Spurt, 90. 48 Ibid., 98. 49 The finished locks were in Hadík, Obříství, and Hradec Králové. The locks under construction were in Lobkovice, Kolín, Poděbrady, Nymburk, and in Prague (Smíchov and Mánes).

202 | Ivan Jakubec

V Conclusion The development of both railway and waterway networks reflects centralizing tendencies, particularly if we consider the railway connections between the two capital cities and the regional capitals and other urban centres in Austria. At the same time, there were decentralizing tendencies or attempts at integration at regional level, which led to the development of a relatively dense network of secondary and local railways around regional centres. While centralizing tendencies prevailed in Austria until the late 1870s, decentralizing tendencies became increasingly apparent from the 1860s to the end of the empire. Developments in Hungary followed a similar pattern, but with a slight delay. Railway nationalization in Austria from the end of the nineteenth century meant increased state intervention in the everyday running of the railways, in tariffs, timetables, rules and regulations, etc. In contemporary specialist literature Austria-Hungary was described as a country at the centre of Europe. The empire was a transit region from the north and the north west to the south and the south east of the continent. Most regional capitals were connected with the railway. However, the connection was usually with Vienna and not with each other. It is certainly true that the capital of the Dual Monarchy aimed to integrate the empire’s transportation network. At the same time, local networks developed around regional capitals. The Bohemian lands had the densest railway and (planned) waterway network in Austria. Yet the state (the Railway Ministry) granted little in the way of financial support to develop transportation networks from the regional capitals to other countries. We should also remember that what, from the point of view of the regions, was a deficient transportation network, was seen by people in the capital cities and central imperial institutions to be perfectly adequate. Surprisingly, the ambitious plan for the development of Austria’s waterway network at the turn of the century followed the course of the most important railway lines. Had it been fully realized, Austria’s transportation network would have doubled in size. In negotiations on the plan, regional capitals and other important political, industrial and cultural centres tried to ensure that they would be connected to the planned waterway network by lateral canals. After the First World War, victor states (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia) and loser states (Austria and Hungary) had to find a compromise with regard to routing and freight transportation. They also had to come to terms with new borders and new economic, social, political, cultural and military strategic interests. Attempts were made in the interwar period to improve transportation

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links, particularly between Czechoslovakia, Austria and Hungary. Heinrich von Wittek, the former Austrian Railway Minister, proposed a Railway Association to integrate the Austrian, Czechoslovak and west Yugoslavian railway networks.⁵⁰ Elemér Hantos, an important financial expert, proposed the establishment of a Central European Railway Association.⁵¹ The main-line railways built before the 1870s are still main-line routes today in the successor states of the Habsburg Monarchy. The Kaiser Ferdinand Northern Railway operated on the left track in Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland until December 2012, when it was finally decided that trains would run on the right track. After the fall of the Iron Curtain and German reunification, the north-south transit connection from Berlin to Vienna was revived not just for international freight transportation, but also for passenger travel.⁵² This development was also supported by the shift in the Czech government’s transportation policies after the division of Czechoslovakia in 1992. The construction of the railway and waterway network meant (political, economic, military, cultural) integration on the one hand, and disintegration on the other. Thus, while the economic development of the Habsburg Monarchy supported integration tendencies, it was not strong enough to stem the separatist tendencies in politics. Nevertheless, developments in transportation at that time led to the establishment of structures that are still in use today.

50 Heinrich von Wittek: Die österreichischen Eisenbahnen vor und nach dem Kriege, in: DeutschÖsterreich. München/Leipzig 1921, 101–126; Deutschösterreichische Verkehrsprobleme. Denkschrift anlässlich des 25-jährigen Bestandes 1893–1918. Wien 1919. 51 Elemér Hantos: Mitteleuropäische Eisenbahnpolitik. Zusammenschluß der Eisenbahnsysteme von Deutschland, Österreich, Ungarn, Tschechoslowakei, Polen, Rumänien und Jugoslawien. Wien/Leipzig 1929; idem: Paneuropäische Verkehrsprobleme, in: Zeitschrift für Geopolitik 4 (1927), 592–599. 52 On problems surrounding the Prague-Vienna connection in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Beppo Beyerl: Die Eisenbahn. Historische Weichenstellungen entlang des österreichischen Schienennetzes. Wien 2004.

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The Sea(side) Borderland of Modernity: ˙ and Tallinn from the Rostock, Klaipeda 1870s to the 1920s Although the Baltic world – to use the term proposed by the Finnish historian Matti Klinge – constitutes a shared cultural sphere, perhaps even comparable with Braudel’s Mediterranean, the divide between a ‘more peaceful’ Scandinavian North and West and a much more hectic and diverse South and East is undeniable.¹ While there were two monarchies (Denmark and Sweden) and two empires (the Romanovs and the Hohenzollerns) in the Baltic region before World War I, ten years later Copenhagen and Stockholm remained royal capitals, but the empires had been replaced by seven republics and one free city.² History repeated itself after World War II, when in 1949 the two monarchies were joined by four republics (including three socialist republics) and another empire – the USSR. In 1991 the status quo of the early 1920s was restored (with only the free city missing). Therefore, my decision to limit the discussion to the three port cities of the ‘dynamic’ southern and eastern Baltic that seem to promise the most interesting results from a comparison, and to the critical – not just for Europe – half century between 1870 and the early 1920s should not come as a surprise. The year ˙ and Tallinn, when they 1870 marked a common zero hour for Rostock, Klaipeda had to face the challenges of a rapidly changing world. The second landmark is ˙ and Tallinn, the year 1918 only more problematic. In the case of Rostock, Klaipeda opened a Pandora’s box, and the fight with what crawled out of it lasted for an-

1 Matti Klinge: The Baltic World. Helsinki 1995. Other studies demonstrating the significance of the Baltic as a historical and cultural community include: David Kirby: The Baltic World 1772– 1993. Europe’s Northern Periphery in an Age of Change. London/New York 1995; Marko Lehti (ed.): The Baltic as a Multicultural World: Sea, Region and Peoples. Berlin 2005; Witold Maciejewski (ed.): The Baltic Sea Region. Cultures, Politics, Societies. Uppsala 2002; Alan Palmer: Northern Shores. A History of the Baltic Sea and its Peoples. London 2005; Jann M. Witt: Die Ostsee. Schauplatz der Geschichte. Darmstadt 2009; Ulla Ehrensvärd/Pellervo Kokkonen/Juha Nurminen: Die Ostsee. 2000 Jahre Seefahrt, Handel und Kultur. Hamburg 2010; Wolfgang Froese: Geschichte der Ostsee. Völker und Staaten am Baltischen Meer. Gemsbach 2002; Michael North: Geschichte der Ostsee. Handel und Kulturen. München 2011. 2 Palmer, Northern Shores, 293; Vasilijus Safronovas: The Competition of Identity Ideologies in a ˙ in the 20th Century. Klaipeda ˙ City of South-Eastern Baltic Sea Region. The Case Study of Klaipeda 2010, 7; Norbert Götz/Jörg Hackmann: Civil Society in the Baltic Sea Region: Towards a Hybrid Theory, in: Norbert Götz/Jörg Hackmann (eds.), Civil Society in the Baltic Sea Region. Aldershot/Burlington 2003, 3–16, 5–6.

206 | Jerzy Kochanowski other five years, ending differently for each of the three cities. The year 1923 had ˙ revolt constituted a fait accompli, placing a symbolic significance. The Klaipeda the city under Lithuanian sovereignty. Also at the beginning of 1923, Tallinn finished its short-lived and turbulent career as Soviet Russia’s window on the world, entering a period of normal, unspectacular existence. Rostock, for which hyperinflation was the final straw, began to sink and only bounced back a decade later. It is also not insignificant that in August 1923, the first ship moored at the still primitive pier in the port of Gdynia, which was under construction at the time. The emergence of this new port city no doubt created a totally new situation in the Baltic, bringing the previous epoch to a decisive close. Maritime port cities are always points of contact between states, societies, cultures and economies. For there to be a flow (of people, goods and ideas) between them, they have to have specific advantages, but appropriate economic and political conditions must be present as well. They determine whether port cities flourish or flounder.³ That is why I focus mainly on the factors determining the (un)modern character of the urban centres in the title: (non-)adjustment to global technical and economic standards and reactions to outside models. Did ˙ and Tallinn differ in this respect from other coastal cities, and Rostock, Klaipeda if so how and why?

I The nineteenth century: a maritime revolution? There is, without a doubt, a connection between the sea and modernity in the broad sense of the word. Port cities played, and to a large degree continue to play, a key role in the economic, cultural and political life of the world. The term itself is a clear and commonly understandable code, which tells not only of a city’s location on the coast and the economic functions connected with that, but also of the social, demographic and cultural characteristics that differentiate it from inland cities.⁴ Even in antiquity the inhabitants of port cities had much more contact with various outside influences – economic, cultural and political – than their

3 Andrew F. Burghardt: A Hypothesis about Gateway Cities, in: Annals of the Association for American Geographers 2 (1971), 269–285, 269–271. 4 Helmuth Berking/Jochen Schwenk: Hafenstädte: Bremerhaven und Rostock im Wandel. Frankfurt am Main/New York 2011, 33–36; Brian Hoyle/David Pinder: Cities and the Sea: Change and Development in Contemporary Europe, in: Hoyle/Pinder (eds.), European Port Cities in Transition. London 1992, 1–19, 1; Dirk Schubert (ed.): Hafen- und Uferzonen im Wandel. Analysen und Planungen zur Revitalisierung der Waterfront in Hafenstädten. Berlin 2002, 13.

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counterparts in other regions. Traditionally, port cities constituted centres of innovation and enterprise; they were the gateways for streams of goods, money, people and information, and, at the same time, the places where specific capacities were developed, making it possible to control and exploit those streams.⁵ It was therefore easier for port cities to achieve economic and political autonomy; they often emerged as clear rivals to the capital cities (in political, economic, social, cultural, and other terms), especially if the latter were “cities of the centre”.⁶ The type of port city that arose in antiquity, in which town and port functions were closely integrated and the port practically constituted a part of the city and was located at its centre, survived until the late nineteenth/early twenti˙ and Tallinn, all of eth century.⁷ This was highly significant for Rostock, Klaipeda which dated back to the Middle Ages and had to confront new geopolitical realities and technological and economic challenges in the half century examined in this article.⁸ When the wheels of modernizing changes suddenly gained pace in the early 1870s, old port cities were forced to adapt to economic and technical circumstances that were changing at lightning speed. Regular shipping routes, larger

5 Günter Warsewa: Lokale Kultur und die Neuerfindung der Hafenstadt, in: Raumforschung und Raumordnung 5 (2010), 373–387, 381–382; Carolyn Cartier: Cosmopolitics and the Maritime World City, in: Geographical Review 2 (1999), 278–289; Ludwik Janiszewski: Marynizacja. Przyczynek teoretyczny, in: Roczniki Socjologii Morskiej 4 (1988), 5–14, 7. 6 Warsewa, Lokale Kultur, 383–385. 7 Berking/Schwenk, Hafenstädte, 33–36. For a discussion of each model and phase in the development of ports see: Peter J. M. Nas/Timoer Rejinders/Elline Steenhuisen: Three Harbor Cities. An Exploration of the Ports of IJmuiden (The Netherlands), Banjul (The Gambia) and Jakarta (Indonesia), in: Arndt Graf/Chua Beng Huat (eds.), Port Cities in Asia and Europe. London/New York 2009, 33–56, 33–34; Waltraud Kokot: Port Cities as Areas of Transition – Comparative Ethnographic Research, in: Waltraud Kokot/Mijal Gandelsman-Trier/Kathrin Wildner/Astrid Wonneberger (eds.), Port Cities as Areas of Transition. Ethnographic Perspectives. Bielefeld 2008, 7–25. 8 Rostock: Gerhard Stübe: Rostock. Eine deutsche Seestadt. Dresden 1957; Walther Müller: Rostocks Seeschiffahrt und Seehandel im Wandel der Zeiten. Rostock 1930; Karsten Schröder (ed.): In deinen Mauern herrschte Eintracht und allgemeines Wohlergehen. Eine Geschichte der Stadt Rostock von ihren Ursprüngen bis zum Jahre 1990. Rostock 2003; Tallinn: Karsten Brüggemann/Ralph Tuchtenhagen: Tallinn. Kleine Geschichte der Stadt. Köln/Weimar/Wien 2011; Raimo Pullat: Die Geschichte der Stadt Tallinn. Reval von seinen Anfängen bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg. Tallinn 2005; Arved von Taube: Reval/Tallinn. Hansestadt Landeshauptstadt Olympiastadt. ˙ Düsseldorf/Kempten 1979; Klaipeda: Bernhart Jähnig (ed.): Memel als Brücke zu den baltischen Ländern. Kulturgeschichte Klaipedas vom Mittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert. Osnabrück 2011; Kurt Forstreuter: Die Memel als Handelstraße Preußens nach Osten. Königsberg 1931; Johannes Sembritzki: Geschichte des königlich preußischen See- und Handelsstadt Memel. Memel 1926; Gerhard Willoweit: Die Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Memelgebiets. Volumes 1–2, Marburg 1969.

208 | Jerzy Kochanowski ships, and increasing trade required modern and efficient handling, management by shipping companies, shipbrokers as mediators between exporters and freighters, insurance companies, and banks. Traditional merchant family approaches to management and trade turned out to be obsolete and inefficient. (Thomas Mann showed the crisis of those approaches in the story of the Buddenbrook family from Lübeck in the years 1835 to 1877). Under these circumstances the cities that emerged victorious were those that adopted the modern, capitalist management system and had extensive communication links to the hinterland, especially via rail. It was the railroad in particular that changed the extent to which port cities depended on the hinterland, and a centre not connected in this way had little chance of survival on the market.⁹ Integration into the inland transport system furthered the development of ports but weakened port cities at the same time. The speed and efficiency of rail transport meant that there was no longer a need for big storehouses in ports. Increasingly, quays were becoming places for quick reloading rather than storage and trade, turning more and more into staging posts. Port cities were no longer monopolists in overseas trade that could impose conditions on the inland, but now had to adapt to overall economic and trade policy. The once typical concentration of centres of trade, finance and transportation in one place (sometimes with one person in control) was gradually but irreversibly becoming a thing of the past. Increasingly, those tasks were being assumed by large trade organizations and industrial concerns from the inland. The ports themselves were becoming more and more industrial in character. For logistical and technological reasons, shipyards had to remain close to the sea. They now required much more space. The port and its surrounding area were also the perfect location for processing industries based on imported articles that it was difficult or not very profitable to transport further in an unprocessed state, such as cacao, rice, tropical fruits, fish, cotton, etc. The considerable surplus of women available to work in port cities was also significant. The transformation of the port city from a market place to a distribution and industrial centre was connected with the increasing separation of port and city.¹⁰ This process did not take place everywhere at the same time; its intensity and effects varied from city to city. In Europe, the further to the east and south of Liver-

9 Bohdan Nagórski: Organizacja portów morskich, in: Józef Borowik/Bohdan Nagórski (eds.), Organizacja portów morskich. Ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem Gdyni i Gdańska. Toruń 1934, 17–40, 33–34; Peter Biebig/Hein Wenzel: Seehäfen der Welt. Berlin 1989, 14. 10 Nagórski, Porty morskie, 5, 7–8; Władysław Gaworecki: Czynniki kształtujące zespółportowomiejski Gdańsk-Gdynia. Gdańsk 1973, 56–57; Nas/Rejinders/Steenhuisen, Three harbor cities, 34.

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pool, Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg a city lay, the longer the process took, the less radical it was, and the more shades and transitional stages it had. One could say, however, that the Baltic ports discussed here were not among the beneficiaries of the changes and were left behind in the technological and trade race. They usually did not have the necessary capital to modernize either the port facilities or the fleet. As a result, pre-industrial structures lingered for a long time in port management, and at the quays the masts of sailing ships outnumbered the funnels of steamships even at the beginning of the twentieth century. Summing up, one could claim that Tallinn crossed the border of modernization rather smoothly, Rostock went down during the crossing, and Klaip˙eda looked for a safe passage.

II 1870–1914: The growing importance of the hinterland ˙ To a certain degree, the experiences of Rostock and Klaipeda, which were both part of the Hohenzollern Empire since 1871, were similar. In the unified state, the ˙ was the last large port on the Baltic that did not freeze over and fact that Klaipeda Rostock was an exporter of grain no longer had the same significance it used to have. In the new Germany, the economic centre of gravity shifted west and the dependence on grain supplies from the Baltic region decreased as transoceanic transport became cheaper. There was also less demand for wood. Furthermore, neither city had good communication links to the inland. The natural hinterland ˙ was Russia, which, however, naturally preferred its own ports in the for Klaipeda region such as Liep¯aja and Riga. Although the Berlin-Königsberg railway line was ready in 1857 and extended to the border with Russia in 1861, it bypassed the city. It was 1875 before the railway finally reached the city, and the connection was only with Prussia, not with the empire of the tsars. As a result, Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad) remained the most important intermediary between the ˙ was left with the (not insignificant) role of a wood mertwo empires, and Klaipeda chant. And while the city was a port of call on the routes of shipping lines in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, they were limited to the Baltic, reaching no further than Hamburg. It cannot be said, however, that the city was in crisis. In 1875 small shipbuilding enterprises formed a company that became the basis for a local, modern shipyard industry. At first, the company produced and repaired mostly wooden fishing boats, eventually moving on to small steamships. Yet there were not enough funds to build larger ships. Despite its limited connections with the in˙ land, Klaipeda became the most important reloading point for wood not just

210 | Jerzy Kochanowski in East Prussia, but in all of eastern Germany, surpassing even Königsberg or Gdańsk. It is not surprising that particular branches of industry developed there, for example the production of veneer, cellulose, etc. The appearance of the city also changed; it began to look more modern. In 1900 the first car appeared on the streets, the city’s waterworks began to operate in 1902, the telephone network and the port were expanded, and in 1913 789 deep-sea ships entered the port. While the future may not have looked too rosy, there was no real need to worry.¹¹ ˙ If the overall outlook was positive for Klaipeda, the same could not be said about Rostock. The city was worried that the unification of Germany would bring an end to old privileges accumulated over centuries, which had largely been behind the success of local merchants and sailors. It comes as no surprise that Rostock was one of the last German towns (along with its twin Wismar) to give up its own currency in 1864, adopting the new taxation system only in 1870. In sheer numerical terms, it was still a sea power with the third biggest fleet in the Baltic in 1870 (after Hamburg and Bremen, and before Lübeck, Szczecin and Gdańsk).¹² Yet the sea blockade imposed by France during the war in 1870/71 kept the town’s sailing ships in port. They were replaced on their former routes by faster and more efficient British steamships. While Rostock was almost a monopolist in Mecklenburg, in the unified state of the Hohenzollerns it was just one of many ports, certainly not the most important one, and located in a dead point in terms of transportation. The city was added to the railway network as early as 1850 and in 1864 it was connected with the Stralsund-Neubrandenburg-Berlin line. However, the route was long and indirect. What’s more, the Hamburg-Lübeck-Güstrow-Szczecin line opened in 1870, so Rostock was practically cut off from the inland. The crisis of 1873 put paid to plans to build a canal connecting Rostock and Berlin or a direct railway line (110 km shorter than the existing one). Grain producers were no longer dependent on the services of Rostock merchants and freighters, because they could now ship their grain from Szczecin or Hamburg. And they chose the second option more and more often. Szczecin was generously subsidized by the Berlin government and perfectly connected with the hinterland by the navigable Oder river and the first railway line connecting Berlin with the Baltic. Hamburg, with a hinterland encompassing much of central and eastern Germany (all the way to Bohemia), greatly surpassed Rostock not only in

11 Willoweit, Die Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 260–262, 290–291, 309, 321, 375–377, 381, 384; Julius Žukas: Soziale und wirtschaftliche Entwicklung Klaip˙edas/Memels von 1900 bis 1945, in: Im Wandel der Zeiten: Die Stadt Memel im 20. Jahrhundert, Nordost-Archiv. Zeitschrift für Regionalgeschichte, Neue Folge 10 (2001), 75–116, 75–77; Sergiusz Mikulicz: Kłajpeda w polityce europejskiej 1918–1939. Warszawa 1976, 16–20. 12 The city was then known by its German name, Stettin.

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terms of the size of its fleet, but above all in terms of modern technical and organizational solutions. United Germany was not only an immense state, but also a huge economy growing at lightning speed and an increasingly important global exporter and importer. International trade required deep ports that were equipped with modern facilities and well managed with excellent connections to the inland. These requirements were met by ports on the North Sea – Hamburg and Bremen (Bremerhaven) – but not by the technologically backward Rostock with its shallow port, outdated facilities and inefficient management approaches. In the old Baltic ports the traditional system of organizing sailing and trade lingered for a long time. The Partenreederei, a kind of cooperative of freighters who invested in one ship and cargo, was common, and retired captains who could no longer sail often engaged in trade. In the large North Sea ports the process of separating sailing from sea trade accelerated after 1870. Distinct groups of freighter-owners and merchant-brokers emerged, which no longer dabbled in small trade, but conducted business on a large scale. Fast and large-scale trading became possible thanks to the shift away from wooden sailing ships (which would prevail in Rostock for a long time yet) in favour of steamships or iron sailing vessels that always sailed on fixed routes and the revolution in telecommunications (telegraph, telephone). Transoceanic trade effectively undermined the way Rostock merchants made a living. Importing grain from the USA, Australia and Canada lowered the prices in Europe so much that exporting expensive German agricultural products became unprofitable. Since grain prices were higher on the German domestic market than on the world market, large-scale producers (including those from Mecklenburg) sent it by rail to Berlin and growing industrial centres, while granaries in Rostock stood empty. Imports were also no great source of profit because of the poor connections with the rest of the country. Foreign ships were also put off by the outdated facilities there – primitive quays, magazines and reloading machines, as well as shallow docks, which made it impossible for larger ships to enter. But there were not enough funds (and, it seems, creativity) for necessary modernization projects. Furthermore, the opportunity to develop ferry transportation between the city and southern Scandinavia was overlooked, as that undertaking was not seen to be profitable. Sassnitz, where these ferry connections became a very successful business, later showed that the opposite was true. The great fleet of wooden sailing ships that had once been Rostock’s pride suddenly became a burden on its economy. Although the first German modern screw steamship had been produced in the local shipyard in the early 1850s, the conservative freighters preferred the cheaper wooden sailing ships and continued to invest in them. Of the total 378 ships that made up Rostock’s fleet in 1870 only six were steamships; by 1890 their number had grown to 24 (out of a total 205 ships).

212 | Jerzy Kochanowski It is therefore not surprising that the city’s sea economy was characterized by bankruptcies and sales in the late 1870s/early 1880s. The worst year was 1885, when soup kitchens became necessary and were visited by great numbers of people. However, there was light at the end of the tunnel a year later when the Lloydbahn was completed, connecting Warnemünde with Neustrelitz via Rostock. From Neustrelitz, the Northern Railway led straight to Berlin. This meant that Rostock’s hinterland grew immeasurably. Yet, by the time this ‘gateway to the country’ was opened, Rostock had practically lost its place among the ports engaged in independent global trade and its operations were limited to supplying the direct hinterland of Mecklenburg with goods imported from Denmark and England. Although the route from Warnemünde to the city port in Rostock was deepened right before the outbreak of World War I, only ships with a GRT (gross register tonnage) of up to 3 500 could moor there (and by then, ships with a GRT of 10 000 were not uncommon). Increasingly, it was industry, above all the shipbuilding industry, and not shipping that was shaping the face of the city. In 1900 the Hansawerft merged with AG Schiffe- und Maschinenbau to form Neptun-Werft, a joint-stock company. The new company was a significant infusion of modernization for the freighters of Rostock, who were moving on to steamships and more modern management approaches. The city itself also became more modern and grew (from 13 000 inhabitants in 1819 to 31 000 in 1871 and 67 000 in 1919). Nearby Warnemünde became a fashionable, very popular spa. It seemed, however, that Rostock’s days as a significant sea power were definitely over.¹³ ˙ Unlike the populations of Rostock and Klaipeda, for whom the early 1870s were not the best period, the inhabitants of Tallinn hoped for a turn in their fortunes. The city had experienced a long period of recession after the decision in 1783 to expand the naval port, with preferential treatment being given to St. Petersburg and Riga (in tariffs among other things). In comparison with those cities, Tallinn had become a second-class port, with considerably less privileges. The city had grown poorer, becoming, like Rostock in the last decades of the nineteenth century, a reloading site for the immediate hinterland. However, Tallinn was a fashionable city in the first half of the nineteenth century because of the Ro-

13 Müller, Rostocks Seeschiffahrt, 7, 79–83, 85, 88–92, 98, 101; Stübe, Rostock, 71–73; Karsten Schröder: Industrialisierung und Reichsgründung. 1851 bis 1914, in: Schröder, In deinen Mauern, 134–160; Martin Polzin/Horst Witt: Rostock von der bürgerlich-demokratischen Revolution 1848/49 bis 1945. Rostock 1974, 23–30, 61; Ingbert Schreiber: Seehafen Rostock, in: Rostocker Hefte 11 (1984), 5; Derek Hall: East European Ports in a Restructured Europe, in: Hoyle/Pinder, European Port Cities, 98–115, 100.

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mantic fascination with everything medieval, ‘Nordic’ and ‘northern’. It was also a popular seaside resort. Located close to the capital, the city became an important topos in Russian literature (much later, in the second half of the twentieth century it was the preferred historical setting for the Soviet film industry). Thanks to the relative autonomy of the Baltic provinces since the times of Catherine the Great, in the coastal city one could breathe more freely in both a literal and a figurative sense (for example, Griboedov’s plays, which were forbidden in Petersburg, were shown in Tallinn, albeit in German). In 1857 Tallinn stopped being a fortress, making it much easier to conduct business. Yet the real turning point came with a good connection to a large hin˙ and Rostock both lacked. In October 1870 the terland – something that Klaipeda Baltic Railway connected Tallinn with the Russian capital. This was a boost to the development of the port and local industry. The railway line and the city’s convenient location near St. Petersburg, for which it was – especially in the winter months – a substitute port, meant that Tallinn quickly became one of Russia’s most important transit ports. The average revenue from transit was 1 117 000 roubles per year in the mid-1860s, rising to 12 780 000 roubles by 1871, 28 750 000 roubles by 1873, and 131 310 000 roubles by 1880. It was mostly grain (which since the beginning of the twentieth century came mostly from Siberia) that was shipped to the West, while cotton, coal, ore, and semi-finished products were imported from England and Germany. Most imported goods were intended for the Russian market, but about one third was consumed or processed locally. The port and the railway contributed to the rapid development of industry, including the food industry (mills, distilleries), the wood industry (paper, cellulose), the engineering industry, and – thanks to the cotton brought to the port – the textile industry. The boom had a significant impact on demographics and the ethnic makeup of the city. In the watershed year of 1870 Tallinn’s population was similar to that of Rostock (about 30 000), but by the beginning of World War I it was almost four times as large (116 132 in 1913). The ethnic composition of the population also changed radically. In terms of numbers, wealth and prestige, the city was for a long time dominated by Germans, who constituted 42.9 per cent of the population in 1820. In that same year, Estonians accounted for slightly more than one third of the population (34.8 per cent), with Russians representing a little less than one fifth (17.9 per cent). Yet the change in the legal status of the peasant population (chiefly Estonian), the dissolution of traditional class structures and the development of industry, which increased the demand for cheap labour, accelerated the migration of Estonian peasants to the cities, mainly Tartu and Tallinn. In Tallinn, the two largest ethnic groups – Estonians and Germans – switched places at the top in just half a century. Thus while Estonians accounted for 51.2 per cent of the

214 | Jerzy Kochanowski population in 1871 and Germans 34.4 per cent, by 1913 the vast majority of the city’s inhabitants were Estonian (71.6 per cent) and the German population was almost on a par with the Russian population (Germans: 10.7 per cent and Russians: 11.4 per cent). All three ethnic groups became more and more self-contained, living not so much together as parallel to each other. Although the city was still developing quite well in the first decade of the twentieth century, clouds began to gather over the port. This was because Tallinn was not as well connected to the Russian interior (and especially the TransSiberian Railway) as its main rivals, Riga and Ventspils in neighbouring Latvia. In 1900 54.6 per cent of Russian butter exports went through Tallinn, but in 1903 this was the case for only 1.9 per cent of those exports. In Russian foreign trade, especially in grain, there was a growing tendency to favour ports located on the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea over the Baltic ports. Increasing tensions in international relations also led to a drop in activity at Tallinn port. Paradoxically, proximity to St. Petersburg, which had once been so beneficial, was now a disadvantage for the port. This was because the Russian authorities made Tallinn the Baltic fleet’s base, hindering its trading activities by imposing high railway fares for transport to the inland. Before the war, it was decided that one of the fortresses in the fortification system around the capital would be located here, in addition to a shipyard to make warships. The Tsar Peter the Great Naval Fortress was finished in 1912 and a year later the Russian-Baltic Shipyard was opened, largely thanks to French capital (in 1916 the shipyard employed over 15 000 workers). Notwithstanding these developments, the rapidly growing city still gave the impression of being rather provincial, as it lacked – unlike Riga or Helsinki – a wealthy middle class that could be the patron of representative districts. When the population exceeded a hundred thousand at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, a competition for a comprehensive urban and architectural plan was launched on the assumption that the population would soon be 300 000. These grand plans were abandoned with the outbreak of the First World War.¹⁴

14 Brüggemann/Tuchtenhagen, Tallinn, 161–168, 175–176, 178–179, 183–184, 191-192, 199–200, 216– 217; von Taube, Reval/Tallinn, 112–114; Pullat, Die Geschichte der Stadt Tallinn, 124, 130, 139, 143– 144; Albert Pullerits (ed.): Estland. Volk, Kultur, Wirtschaft. Tallinn 1931, 180–182; Seraina Gilly: Der Nationalstaat im Wandel. Estland im 20. Jahrhundert. Bern 2002, 37–67, 94; H. A. Ronimois: The Baltic Trade of the Soviet Union. Expectations and Probabilities, in: American Slavic and East European Review 3–4, (1945), 174–178, 176.

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III After World War I: the nation state context Although the First World War did not devastate Baltic ports as much as the next war would, it led to a lot of confusion in what had appeared to be a stable part of the world between Sund and St. Petersburg. The defeat of the two major empires, Hohenzollern Germany and Romanov Russia, created a new political and economic reality in the Baltic region, especially in the south east. For the new nation states, having their own windows on the world as well as merchant marines and navies was a priority, a precondition for survival, and a key legitimising factor. Finland, Estonia and Latvia were at a distinct advantage, with their capitals being important, seagoing ports. Lithuania had to negotiate and fight for its port, while ˙ and Gdynia Poland had to build one. Beyond doubt, however, Tallinn, Klaipeda became gateways to the world. By comparison, the door to Rostock seemed just slightly ajar. Rostock after the First World War can best be described using the words torpor, pauperization and downfall. Even the November 1918 revolution proceeded relatively calmly there. Although rebel sailors from Kiel reached Warnemünde as early as 5 November and Soldiers’ and Workers’ Soviets appeared in Rostock over the next few days, radically leftist slogans did not meet with much support in a city dominated by rather moderate political forces. Its location in a dead point between Hamburg and Szczecin, both of which had better transportation links to the inland, did not change either. As before, Rostock was left with Mecklenburg, but even here it encountered stiff competition from Lübeck, Wismar, Stralsund, Greifswald and Szczecin. The chances to put into deeper waters (figuratively and literally) were slim, as Rostock ship-owners suffered huge losses because of the war and reparations. In 1914 they had owned 65 steamships (73 180 GRT), but by 1921 this number had fallen to just 18 (15 169 GRT). Moreover, the railway put a halt to the special, low fares for the port, resulting in an instant decrease in trade. The attempt to switch to deep-sea fishing did not succeed either. In 1919 the Rostocker Hochseefischerei AG was established. It sent the first ships to sea in the following year; the fishing port and the sales hall were ready. Yet by 1921 the enterprise was already bankrupt, having been unable to withstand the competition with the more efficient, wealthier North Sea ports. The city’s faltering economy was initially rescued by the shipyard. In the first years after the war, the Neptun-Werft did not lack orders – for reparations deliveries, among other things. In 1920 it employed 1 830 workers, more than ever before. Yet it too succumbed to (hyper)inflation. The scale of layoffs in the mid1920s was such that by 1926 the shipyard had only 400 employees. Attempts to improve things were unsuccessful and in 1928 the shipyard employed 27 clerks

216 | Jerzy Kochanowski and a mere 7 workers! It survived in part thanks to Soviet orders at the end of the 1920s (for fishing boats, tug-boats and dredgers) and the whole city was revived after 1933 thanks to investment in the aircraft industry (Heinkel). The port, however, fell into decline, left behind by Szczecin, Gdańsk and, in particular, North Sea trading centres. As a result, Rostock’s share in German reloading amounted to just 0.5 per cent in 1936. It seemed that Rostock’s days as a port, not to mention a sea power, were well and truly over.¹⁵ Tallinn, which had already lost the Russian market in 1917, experienced similar problems. At first it could still fill German orders, but these ceased in November 1918 after the defeat of the Reich. The war of the now independent state with Bolshevik Russia also began in November, making large-scale trading practically impossible. The state shipyard constructed between 1911 and 1913 had the facilities and the know-how to build ships with a capacity of up to three thousand tons. Yet from 1919 until the end of the 1920s only three small schooners were built there. During the war, Russian authorities requisitioned half of Tallinn’s fleet for its military effort. Most ships were never recovered. Along with financial difficulties identical to those experienced by Rostock, this meant that the former tonnage (80 000 tons) could not be restored by the end of the 1920s.¹⁶ Tallinn’s former competitors – Riga, Liep¯aja and Ventspils – remained, fighting even more fiercely than before for a piece of a pie that had become much smaller. Russia, until recently the provider for Latvian and Estonian ports, became first an openly hostile enemy and later a contractor, negotiating firmly and without sentiment. On the threshold of the 1920s Tallinn gained a short-lived advantage over other ports when, thanks to the Tartu Peace Treaty with Soviet Russia signed on 2 February 1920, Estonia became the only Western neighbour with whom Soviet Russia had stable diplomatic relations. For both sides this brought life-giving, resuscitative shots – of goods for Russia and money for Estonia. While Tallinn hoped its status as the most important middleman in trade with Russia would be restored, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Chicherin did not hide the fact that the mediation of small Baltic republics would no longer be necessary after Russia had established relations with Western powers. Before his predictions came true, Tallinn, through which almost three quarters of the world’s trade with

15 Schröder, In deinen Mauern, 183–187; Ortwin Pelc: Rostock wird Großstadt. Stadtplanung und Wohnungsbau in den 1920er und 1930er Jahren, in: Otwin Pelc (ed.), 777 Jahre Rostock. Neue Beiträge zur Stadtgeschichte. Rostock 1995, 211–221; Peter Danker-Carstensen: Tönjes Cordes – ein Rostocker Werftdirektor erhält einen Orden und fällt in Ungnade, in: Schriften des Schifffahrtmuseum der Hansestadt Rostock. Volume 3, Rostock 1997, 139–152, 140–141; Polzin/Witt, Rostock von der bürgerlich-demokratischen Revolution, 129–130; Schreiber, Seehafen Rostock, 5. 16 Pullerits, Estland, 183.

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Bolshevik Russia was being conducted by the second half of the 1920s, became for almost three years the busiest and most cosmopolitan port in the eastern Baltic region. A French journalist’s description of the Estonian capital at the beginning of the 1920s as an “international cesspool” was not unfounded. It was a city where businessmen, troublemakers and crooks crossed paths, and the business conducted there was as big as it was shady. The Soviet gold used to pay for imported goods had to be appropriately laundered, usually in Tallinn. This was carried out by a Soviet delegation led by the former People’s Commissar for Finance Izydor Gutkowski, which arrived in the Estonian capital on 18 February 1920. Officially, it was only an agency of Tsentrosoyuz, an institution that handled imports and exports for the Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives. However, in reality its job was to buy goods (from scythes, herrings and shoes to guns, mortars and locomotives) that had been ordered by various Soviet institutions (people’s commissariats, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the Comintern) from foreign middlemen, pay for them, and then oversee the shipping of the delivered goods. Business was going well, private banks were earning money, the state was profiting, and the port was continually busy. This led the Estonian authorities to assume that the country would regain its position as an important middleman between East and West and Russia’s most important partner in this part of the world. Yet Chicherin’s prophecy was slowly fulfilling itself. Since the spring of 1921, following the economic agreement with Great Britain, Soviet gold could be sold on the London Stock Exchange. And with the normalization of Soviet Russia’s international situation, Estonia no longer played the role of Russia’s gateway to the world. After the Treaty of Riga in August 1920, Tallinn’s traditional competitor – Latvia – returned to the fray. In late 1921/early 1922 the Russian agency in Tallinn was reorganized. It was now directly subordinate to the People’s Commissariat for International Trade and could no longer manage things as it pleased. This was the first step the Soviet Union took towards giving up Tallinn as its gateway to the world. Trade was decreasing so fast that by the end of 1922 foreign businessmen and speculators began to sell their offices on the representative Viru Street and leave the city. Before this happened, however, 683.5 million gold roubles (and goods of similar value) were transferred through Tallinn’s banks and port, resulting in a profit of about 50 million roubles for Estonian businessmen and the government. This allowed the young Estonian state to take a breather and temporarily stabilize the currency, creating the illusion of a return to its former role as an agent between East and West. It was taught a painful lesson – the year 1923 brought hyperinflation, economic and political crisis, and an attempt at a communist putsch. It

218 | Jerzy Kochanowski became clear that the country’s historical heritage was of little consequence under the new conditions, and new solutions had to be sought.¹⁷ ˙ The First World War was a difficult experience for Klaipeda as well. While 789 seagoing ships had entered the port in 1913, by 1918 their number had fallen to just 234, and trade in English coal or Russian goods was out of the question. ˙ could look to the future with a bit more optimism than Rostock or Yet Klaipeda Tallinn. During the war the city found itself in the hinterland of the front, and the railway lines leading to it were extended. As a result, Klaip˙eda began to aspire to a hinterland reaching as far as Ukraine, in spite of the seasonal Neman river, which was unnavigable in winter. Yet while no one had any doubts as to what states Rostock and Tallinn belonged to after the First World War, both Lithuani˙ itself, ans and Poles laid claim to the Prussian Klaip˙eda. Paradoxically, Klaipeda which had been undervalued until then by Berlin, was not overly worried about a divorce, and looked with hope at the emergence of independent Poland and Lithuania, while not really wishing to find itself in one those countries. For the first time in its history, it was at the centre of truly grand politics. The dispute over ˙ region has been covered so extensively that it will be sufficient to the Klaipeda limit my discussion here to the factors that decided the future of the city in terms of its economy and modernization. The victors debating in Versailles agreed to separate Lithuania Minor from East Prussia, but they did not expect the peripheral Klaip˙eda to be the subject of such a fierce dispute. As a result, a provisional decision was made: the right ˙ was placed under international bank of the Neman river together with Klaipeda control, while the left bank remained part of German East Prussia. After the Treaty of Versailles came into force (10 January 1920), French troops marched into the ˙ region.¹⁸ Klaipeda

17 Ronimois, The Baltic trade, 174; Jaak Valge: Es ist nicht alles Gold, was glänzt. Das Gold der Bolschewiki in Estland 1920–1922 und die Folgen, in: Olaf Mertelsmann (ed.), Estland und Russland. Aspekte der Beziehungen beider Länder. Hamburg 2005, 163–173; Christine A. White: The Gateway to Russia. The Baltic States as a Conduit for British and American Trade with Soviet Russia 1918–1924, in: Anders Johansson/Kärlis Kangeris/Aleksander Loit/Sven Nordlund (eds.), Emancipation and Interdependence. The Baltic States as New Entities in the International Economy, 1918–1940. Stockholm 1994, 41–62; Anthony J. Heywood: The Baltic Economic “Bridge”: Some Early Soviet Perspectives, in: Anders Johansson/Kärlis Kangeris/Aleksander Loit/Sven Nordlund (eds.), Emancipation and Interdependence. The Baltic States as New Entities in the International Economy, 1918–1940. Stockholm 1994, 63–85. 18 Tadeusz Maria Gelewski: Rola Prus Litewskich w stosunkach polsko-litewskich w XX wieku (do 1939 roku), in: Andrzej Skrzypek/Stanisław Szostakowski (eds.), Polacy, Litwini, Niemcy w kręgu wzajemnego oddziaływania. Z zagadnień Litwy Pruskiej i stosunków niemiecko-litewskich i polsko-litewskich w drugiej połowie XIX i XX wieku (do 1939 roku). Olsztyn 1992, 47–64, 51;

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˙ It seems that Klaipeda’s economic elite was happiest of all about this solution, as it hoped that an autonomous region would have the opportunity to develop, thanks to cooperation with its neighbours – Poland, Lithuania and Germany. In fact, much seemed to point in that direction. The Frenchmen were not hampering trade relations with England, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia (countries that ˙ from the very beginning). Even the fact had had diplomatic outposts in Klaipeda that customs control had been instituted between Lithuania and East Prussia ˙ turned out to be a positive economic impulse. The inhabitants of Klaipeda rekindled their nineteenth-century smuggling traditions, making good money from contraband (and working closely with Gdańsk in this field). In the years 1920– ˙ 1922 Klaipeda experienced the kind of prosperity it had not known for a long time. Its population grew from 32 000 inhabitants in 1920 to 35 000 in 1922. New companies were being founded, banking services were developing, and cellulose production was increasing, as was the production of carriages in a factory that opened in 1918. In October 1922 the first seagoing steamship was floated off the shipway. On the other hand, exports of the region’s main resource – wood – decreased by 200 per cent compared to the pre-war period. It was not so much the weakening of the global economic situation that was behind this, as the provisional nature ˙ of the solution to Klaipeda’s problem, which rather than mitigating the conflict, aggravated it. The most interested players were polarized and pursued opposing goals. Before the empires had had time to make the final decision (in Decem˙ region into a ‘free state’ under the ber 1922 the plan was to transform the Klaipeda supervision of the League of Nations for fifteen years initially), the Lithuanian government resorted to violent solutions, modelled on the operations of both Gabriele D’Annunzio in Rijeka and Lucjan Żeligowski in the Vilnius region. The international situation was advantageous for Lithuania – it was recognized de jure on 22 December 1922, and the occupation of the Ruhr planned for 11 January 1923 drew the world’s attention away from the events in the city on the Neman river.¹⁹ The Klaip˙eda Revolt against the French occupation began on 10 January 1923 and did not last long. By the end of February Lithuanians had gained real authority over the region. They had to wait over a year for the international sanctioning of

Lutz Oberdörfer: Die Großmächte und die Zukunft des Memellandes 1919–1924/25, in: Jähnig, Memel als Brücke, 163–204, 171–176, 182–183; Mikulicz, Kłajpeda, 23, 53; Christian-Alexander Schröder: Das “Territoire de Memel”. Entwicklung und Entstehung eines völkerrechtlichen Provisoriums. Berlin 2004, 38–41, 46, 54. 19 Vytautas Žalys: Ringen um Identität. Warum Litauen zwischen 1923 und 1939 im Memelgebiet keinen Erfolg hatte. Lüneburg 1993, 11, 19, 23, 25, 27; Mikulicz, Kłajpeda, 43, 46–47, 66–68.

220 | Jerzy Kochanowski ˙ Convention signed in Paris on 8 May 1924 the fait accompli. Under the Klaipeda ˙ region became a part of the (it came into effect on 25 August 1925), the Klaipeda Lithuanian state.²⁰

IV Conclusion Although Rostock recovered in the 1930s thanks to modern industry, it can hardly be said that the city found itself at the forefront of modernization. Its historical ballast also weighed heavily when Rostock became the GDR’s gateway to the world in the late 1950s/early 1960s. It is therefore worth considering the extent to which ˙ as modern ‘national the past influenced the functioning of Tallinn and Klaipeda ports’. Although it sounds somewhat paradoxical, the end of the 1920–1922 transit boom ultimately bore fruit for Tallinn. The city abandoned its dream of being a strategic middleman between East and West and focused on relations with the latter. It had to give up heavy industry (shipyards, for instance) and concentrate on developing lighter industrial sectors, especially the processing industry and the textile industry. While texts from the second half of the 1930s still described Tallinn as a big city rather than a metropolis, it made huge progress towards modernization. Its status as the capital of a new nation state influenced the appearance of public spaces, the development of transportation (the city was one of the most important railway junctions and airports in the region), and the radical modernization of the port, through which the bulk of goods and passengers passed on their way into and from Estonia in the 1930s.²¹ Tallinn’s reputation as a tourist destination with a high standard of service, a well-developed transportation system, and fairly low prices drew foreign guests, mainly from Scandinavia (the Finnish prohibition of 1919–1931 played a significant role here). Good relations with Finland, established in the early days of independence, began to pay off, and Tallinn was increasingly compared to its sister city Helsinki in terms of the cityscape and the inhabitants’ way of life.²² Beyond doubt, the relations established with Finland 20 Mikulicz, Kłajpeda, 68–79, 93–98, Piotr Łossowski: Kłajpeda kontra Memel. Problem Kłajpedy w latach 1918–1939–1945. Warszawa 2007, 57–74. 21 Anu Mai Köll: The Development Gap. Estonian Adaptation to Trade with Western Europe, in: Johansson/Kangeris et al., Emancipation and Interdependence, 193–210, 201–203; Gilly, Der Nationalstaat, 243–244; Pullerits, Estland, 85–86; Pullat: Die Geschichte der Stadt Tallinn, 159. 22 Von Taube, Reval/Tallinn, 118; Karsten Bruegemann: The Eastern Sea is the Western Sea: Some Reflections on Estonia as a Baltic Sea Country, in: Lehti, The Baltic as a Multicultural World, 59–79, 66.

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after the First World War were a long-term investment, which had a significant impact on Estonia’s (and especially Tallinn’s) modern character under the Soviets as well. ˙ Klaipeda, by contrast, remained hostage to the past. On the one hand, the government in Kaunas invested enormous resources in the port, expanding and modernizing it, also making sure that the national merchant fleet increased in size. By the 1930s over 70 per cent of Lithuania’s foreign trade was already passing through ˙ Klaipeda. The city had also begun to compete successfully for Soviet transit, especially with Königsberg and Liep¯aja. However, it was hardly a fully-fledged national port, since a large section of the population had a more or less hostile attitude towards the state and its government. While the central Lithuanian government in Kaunas referred to historical arguments for the region’s ancient Lithuanian iden˙ tity and waged a diplomatic campaign for Klaipeda, Lithuanians were a minority ˙ region (in 1920 they accounted for three per cent of all in the city and the Klaipeda ˙ the region’s inhabitants). And a considerable number of the so-called Klaipediškis quickly became disappointed with the new order because Kaunas was pursuing a stern and at times even brutal policy of Lithuanization, regardless of the region’s distinct historical and cultural character. In accordance with the slogan “Neman is our river, but not our border”, most local Germans assumed that the city would only belong to Lithuania for a limited time. It’s not surprising that the martial law instituted after the 1926 coup d’état ˙ until 1938, and in elections to the led by Antanas Smetona was in force in Klaipeda ˙ Parliament, it was the lists of German candidates that won. autonomous Klaipeda ˙ In the end Klaipeda, annexed by Germany in March 1939, was the first national port to be lost.²³ ˙ pales in comparison with another case The success of Lithuanian Klaipeda of a country with just one harbour in the Baltic – Poland. Gdynia was the result of a successful project to create a national gateway to the world – a completely new port and city built by the reborn country. The port, which the world first heard about in the mid-1920s, was already one of the most modern and important Baltic ports just a decade later. It was surrounded by a modern city, which had also been built from scratch and was populated by an immigrant community (already 120 000 people in 1939) that identified with the city and saw its future there. Gdynia – the port and the city – became one of the most important topoi of

23 Kesttutis Jokšas/Arunas Galkus/Rimuté Stakéniené: The only Lithuanian seaport and its environment. Kaunas 2003, 39–42; Ernst-Albrecht Plieg: Das Memelland 1920–1939. Deutsche Autonomiebestrebungen im litauischen Gesamtstaat. Würzburg 1962, 50, 182–189; Žalys, Ringen um Identität 37–89; Žukas, Soziale und wirtschaftliche Entwicklung, 88–99.

222 | Jerzy Kochanowski state propaganda, a tool for forging a national community free from the past and looking towards a modern future.²⁴ The difference between Poland and Lithuania in terms of economic strength is clear in this case. The injection of modernity turned out to be effective in Gdynia’s case. While Rostock, Tallinn and Klaip˙eda legitimize themselves in equal measure through their medieval past and modern present, for Gdynia the past is modern. It’s not without reason that nationwide surveys recently showed that Gdynia is the best place to live (2010), inhabited by the happiest Polish citizens (2011).²⁵

24 Michał Graban: Kształtowanie się ładu przestrzennego Gdyni (na tle wzajemnych relacji miasta i portu zachodzących od okresu powstania miasta do czasów współczesnych), in: Zeszyty Gdyńskie 1 (2006), 33–50, 33–35; idem: “Nowoczesność” i “ponowoczesność” – dwa oblicza Gdyni, in: Zeszyty Gdyńskie 2 (2007), 115–148, 115–116; Mieczysław Widernik: Główne problemy gospodarczo-społeczne miasta Gdyni w latach 1926–1939. Gdańsk 1970, 28–29, 53–60; Maria Sołtysik: Na styku dwóch epok. Architektura gdyńskich kamienic okresu międzywojennego. Gdynia 2003, 9; Izabela Jopkiewicz: Gdynia dwudziestolecia międzywojennego dziennikarskim okiem widziana, in: Dagmara Płaza-Opacka/Tadeusz Stegner (eds.), Wędrówki po dziejach Gdyni. Gdynia 2004, 147–165, 147–152; Beate Störtkuhl: Gdynia – Meeresmetropole der Zweiten Polnischen Republik, in: Arnold Bartetzky/Maria Dmitrieva/Stefan Troebst (eds.), Neue Staaten – neue Bilder? Visuelle Kultur im Dienst staatlicher Selbstdarstellung in Zentral- und Osteuropa seit 1918. Köln/Weimar/Wien 2005, 33–46. 25 http://trojmiasto.gazeta.pl/trojmiasto/1,89917,7451173,Gdynia_to_najlepsze_miejsce_do_ zycia_Sondaz_samorzadow [last accessed on 28.10.2012]. The survey from 2011 was conducted in 32 large and medium-sized Polish cities, based on a very large statistical sample (16 000 people). Nortus & Potworna spółka: Gdzie najlepiej w Polsce się żyje ludziom?, at: http://nortus. pinger.pl/m/2423445/gdzie-najlepiej-w-polsce-sie-zyje-ludziom [last accessed on 29.10.2012].

Stanislav Holubec

“We bring order, discipline, Western European democracy, and culture to this land of former oriental chaos and disorder.” Czech Perceptions of Sub-Carpathian Rus and its Modernization in the 1920s After the collapse of the communist regime, the Czechs started to rediscover, discuss and rewrite their modern history. The First Czechoslovak Republic was a focal point of post-communist historical narratives. Scorned for its capitalist character under communism, after 1989 it became a symbol of democracy and an inspiration for the new Czech state. The story of Sub-Carpathian Rus is part of the narrative about Czechoslovakia’s ‘golden twenty interwar years’.¹ According to this narrative, the former Hungarian territory inhabited mainly by the Rusyn ethnic group became prosperous under Czech rule and was ‘stolen’ by Stalin after 1945. Public interest in Sub-Carpathian Rus rose dramatically in the 1990s in the Czech Republic; numerous publications on the territory appeared; excursions were organized; and in certain circles reunification was even discussed. Czech interest in the territory persists today, although it is less intense than immediately after 1989. In the past decade historians have challenged the overwhelmingly positive picture of interwar Czechoslovakia, especially in studies on the issue of nationalities.² However, a critical analysis of Czech rule in Sub-Carpathian Rus has yet to be written. For a long time, Hungarian, Russian, Ukrainian and Rusyn histor-

1 The territory situated in the Carpathian Mountains between the cities of Uzhhorod and Yasinya has no historical name. Up to the dissolution of the Kingdom of Hungary, the districts of Bereg, Ung and Máramaros were located here. In the nineteenth century some Rusyns and other Slavs used the term ‘Hungarian Rus’ or the Hungarian term ‘Kárpátalja’ in reference to this territory. The term Sub-Carpathian Rus emerged in 1918 in the United States in the context of negotiations between Czechoslovak and Rusyn émigré associations. The region was renamed ‘Carpathian Ukraine’ after September 1938 to reflect the victory of the Ukrainian nationalists. In March 1939, when the territory was integrated into Hungary, it became officially known as ‘Karárpátalja’. When the region was integrated into the Soviet Union after 1945, it was renamed Zakarpate (Trans-Carpathia). 2 For example, Jaroslav Kučera: Minderheit im Nationalstaat. Die Sprachenfrage in den tschechisch-deutschen Beziehungen 1918–1938. München 1999; Tara Zahra: Kidnapped souls. National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands. 1900–1948. Ithaca/London 2008; Mirek Němec: Erziehung zum Staatsbürger? Deutsche Sekundarschulen in der

224 | Stanislav Holubec ians also seemed to reproduce established national narratives and are only now expressing more balanced views on the modern history of this territory.³ Even today, the narrative of the successful cultural and economic development of Sub-Carpathian Rus under Czechoslovak rule persists in Czech historical memory and historiography.⁴ Foreign publications are, however, less enthusiastic about the role of the Czech administration in the region.⁵ In order to assess the Czechoslovak contribution to the economic and social development of the region in the twentieth century, we would need to compare it with the previous Hungarian and later Soviet efforts to modernize Sub-Carpathian Rus. In the absence of reliable studies, this is difficult. Yet the Czech narrative of the economic devastation of the region under Hungarian and Soviet rule should not be accepted at face value. Unfortunately, studies by non-Czech historians are of little help here. In his history of Sub-Carpathian Rus from the Russian perspective, Andrey Pushkash is critical of the periods of Hungarian and Czechoslovak rule, but praises Soviet efforts to modernize the region.⁶ And a collective monograph by Hungarian and Rusyn authors views the Czechoslovak and Soviet periods critically, highlighting the discrimination against the Hungarian minority in both periods, and acknowledges the progress made under Hungarian rule.⁷

Tschechoslowakei 1918–1938. Essen 2009; Nancy M. Wingfield: Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech. Cambridge 2007. 3 See, for example, Paul Robert Magocsi: A History of Ukraine. The Land and its Peoples. Toronto 2010; Peter Švorc: Zakletá zem. Podkarpatská Rus 1918–1946. Praha 2007; Česko-slovenská historická ročenka 1997. Brno 1997. On the Jews in the region see: Yeshayahu A. Jelinek: The Carpathian Diaspora. The Jews of Sub-Carpathian Rus’ and Mukachevo 1848–1948. New York 2007. On identity issues see: Elaine Rusinko: Straddling Borders. Literature and Identity in SubCarpathian Rus. Toronto 2003. For the Russian perspective on the history of the country see: Андрей Пушкаш: Цивилизация или варварство: Закарпатье (1918–1945) [Andrey Pushkash: Tsivilizatsiya ili varvarstvo. Zakarpate 1918–1945]. Moskva 2006. For the Hungarian-Ukrainian perspective see: Csilla Fedinec/Mikola Vehes (eds.): Zakarpattia 1919–2009 rokiv: Istoria, politika, kultura. Uzhhorod 2010 (in Hungarian: K´arp´atalja 1919–2009. T¨ ort´enelem, politika, kult´ura. Budapest 2009). On the history of the Hungarian minority in Sub-Carpathian Rus throughout the twentieth century in English see: N´ ador B´ ardi/Csilla Fedinec/L´ aszl´ o Szarka (eds.): Minority Hungarian Communities in the Twentieth Century. New York 2011. On the socio-economic development of the Rusyn ethnic group in Hungary before 1918 see: Maria Mayer: The Rusyns of Hungary. Political and Social Developments 1860–1910. New York 1997. 4 See, for example, Ivan Pop: Podkarpatská Rus. Praha 2005 and the publications of the Society of Friends of Sub-Carpathian Rus (Společnost přátel podkarpatské Rusi) including: Jaromír Hořec: Nedělitelná svoboda. Podkarpatská Rus. Praha 1992; idem: Podkarpatská Rus – země neznámá. Jinočany 1994. 5 Magocsi, A history of Ukraine, 642–654. 6 Pushkash, Tsivilizatsia ili varvarstvo. 7 Fedinec et al., Zakarpattia 1919–2009 rokiv, 63–67.

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The following article aims to critically examine the first years of the Czech administration in Sub-Carpathian Rus, thus contributing to more nuanced historical writing on the region. In an analysis of the integration of Sub-Carpathian Rus into the Czechoslovak state after 1918, I show how integration was not only a political and administrative task, but also occurred on a symbolic level. The description of the inhabitants of this territory in a way that legitimized Czech rule over it was one important aspect of its symbolic integration. I argue that in their description of the territory and its inhabitants, the Czechs used the typical language of European orientalism, as analyzed by scholars such as Edward Said, Larry Wolff, and Maria Todorova.⁸ I also argue that the concept of orientalist or colonial thinking is useful in understanding Czech discourse on this territory during the interwar years. As I show, this discourse was constructed from the perspective of those in power and the inhabitants of Sub-Carpathian Rus became a classical ‘imagined other’ in Czech eyes.

I The political integration of Sub-Carpathian Rus into Czechoslovakia The idea of uniting the future Czech state with the Hungarian territory inhabited by the Rusyns was first mooted in late 1917 in the United States, where the Czech political émigré community led by Tomáš G. Masaryk was trying to persuade the American public and political elites to support the idea of an independent Czechoslovakia. At the same time, Rusyn émigrés in the USA led by Gregory Zhatkovich were agitating for either the autonomy of Sub-Carpathian Rus within Hungary or its absorption by Russia after the war. Before 1917, the Czechs had had no intention of integrating the Hungarian Rusyns into their future state and were convinced that the integration of Sub-Carpathian Rus into Russia was the most likely scenario. However, after the Bolsheviks came to power, more and more Rusyns began to doubt that they would ever be integrated into Russia. As Peter Švorc argues, the idea of becoming part of the future Czechoslovakia may also have germinated in Rusyn émigré circles in America due to their positive experience of cooperating with Slovak émigré associations before the war.⁹ The first submissions to

8 Edward Said: Orientalism. New York, 1978; Larry Wolff : Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford 1994; Maria Todorova: Imagining the Balkans. New York 1997. 9 Peter Švorc: Začlenenie Podkarpatskej Rusi do ČR (1918–1920), in: Česko-slovenská historická ročenka 1997. Brno 1997, 39–60, 47.

226 | Stanislav Holubec Masaryk by individual Rusyns proposing the inclusion of the Hungarian territory inhabited by the Rusyns in a future Czechoslovakia were recorded in May 1918. Yet a memorandum from the American National council of Uhro-Rusysns submitted to President Wilson in October 1918 did not mention integration into Czechoslovakia as an option. Here the preferred scenarios were an independent Rusyn state (either with Rusyns only or together with Ukrainians from Galicia) or autonomy within Hungary. In response to the memorandum, President Wilson indicated that he favoured the idea of autonomy not within Hungary, but as part of Poland or Czechoslovakia.¹⁰ The final decision was approved in a plebiscite among the American Rusyns (1 113 votes), in which 66 per cent voted in favour of autonomy within Czechoslovakia. In early 1919 Rusyn organizations in SubCarpathian Rus also accepted the accession of their territory to Czechoslovakia. Before 1918 Czech public discourse had paid far less attention to Rusyns than it had to Slovaks and other Slavs in the Monarchy. Indeed, the territory and its inhabitants were hardly known in the Czech lands.¹¹ The leaders of the Czechoslovak resistance in the USA welcomed the incorporation of the Rusyn territory into their future state, when they became aware that there was now little chance that it would be absorbed by Russia, a solution they would have preferred. They were also reluctant to leave it in Hungarian hands or let it be used as a basis for a future Ukrainian state, which the Czechs feared would become too pro-German. The integration of the territory into Czechoslovakia was justified by portraying it as a bridge to Russia, a kind of geopolitical safeguard against German influence. Later, probably in the context of the escalation of the Czech-Polish conflict over Těšín, the territory began to be called a “bridge to the Slavs”.¹² This term, which ignored the Slavic character of Poland, was commonly used in subsequent years. After the PolishCzechoslovak War, it seems that the Czechs no longer recognized Poland as a truly Slavic state, in contrast to the South Slavic nations or Russia. It is also interesting that the perception of the territory as a bridge to Russia survived into the 1920s, despite the fact that it was clear after the defeat of the Soviet army near Warsaw in 1921 that Sub-Carpathian Rus would be bordered only by Poland and Romania, with the Soviet-Polish border located more than one hundred and fifty kilometres further to the east. It seems that the Czechs did not be-

10 Ibid., 49. 11 On the Czech perception of Rusyns before 1918 see: Roman Holec: Postoj Čechov a Slovákov k Rusínom v predvečer prvej svetovej vojny, in: Česko-slovenská historická ročenka 1997. Brno 1997, 29–37. 12 Zprávy čs. červeného kříže. Volume 2, 15.02.1923, 39.

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lieve that the border drawn between Poland and the Soviet Union would last. Many Czechs would have preferred the prospect of a democratized Russia annexing the Ukrainian-speaking territories in Poland, thereby establishing a common Russian-Czechoslovak border. As we will see, a future handover of Sub-Carpathian Rus to Russia was not completely against the wishes of many Czechs, including both communists and pro-Russian nationalists. After 1922 the idea of a bridge to the Slavs gradually lost its appeal and Sub-Carpathian Rus was again seen as a strategic bridge, this time, however, to Romania, dividing hostile Poland and Hungary. One liberal author even expressed his delight in 1929 that Czechoslovakia did not share a border with the Soviet Union.¹³ The incorporation of Sub-Carpathian Rus into Czechoslovakia and the new borders that resulted from this were formalized in the Saint-Germain Treaty in September 1919. For economic reasons, the new borders of the territory also encompassed the lowlands inhabited by ethnic Hungarians (most of the traffic routes, including the railroad connecting the east and the west of the country, were situated there). The Saint-Germain Treaty also redefined the territory’s borders with Slovakia. This prompted fierce criticism from representatives of the Rusyns, as it meant that approximately 85 000 Rusyns (or one fifth of that ethnic group in Czechoslovakia) now lived on Slovak territory. In this case, the Czechs again pointed to economic reasons, claiming that the Rusyn territory on the Slovak-Polish border was accessible only with great difficulty from SubCarpathian Rus, because the mountain valleys opened to the south and not to the east. However, the establishment of this border was not only a matter of accessibility, but also reflected Slovak interests in the larger territory. The ability of the Slovaks to assert these interests in Prague was crucial.¹⁴ The first Czechoslovak military units arrived in Uzhhorod, the town which had been declared the capital of Sub-Carpathian Rus,¹⁵ in January 1919 and reached the centre of the region by April 1919.¹⁶ They found it difficult to assert their authority and win the respect of the local population. The political situation in the territory in the first half of 1919 was characterized as ‘chaotic’. Some communes had their own administration, some were under Bolshevik rule, and others were

13 Otakar Slezák: Naše Malé Rusko, in: Přítomnost, 9.05.1929, 278. 14 Paul Robert Magocsi: The Rusyn-Ukrainians of Czechoslovakia. An Historical Survey. Vienna, 1983. 35–38. 15 In this article, I use the English transcription of the Ukrainian and Russian name for the city. In other languages, it is known as Ungvár (Hungarian), Užhorod (Czech and Slovak), Ужгород (Uzhgorod, Russian and Ukrainian), and Ungwar (German). 16 Magocsi, The Rusyn-Ukrainians, 34.

228 | Stanislav Holubec still controlled by Hungarian authorities. The eastern part of the territory had been occupied by the Romanian army during its conflict with the Hungarian Soviet Republic in April 1918 and was only handed over to the Czech administration in July 1919.¹⁷ This lack of order led to the introduction of military rule in SubCarpathian Rus, which lasted until January 1922. The Czech authorities soon realized that the territory was problematic not just from a political point of view, but also in religious, ethnic and economic terms. Extending over approximately 13 000 square kilometres, the territory had a population of 604 000, comprising Rusyns (63 per cent), Hungarians (17 per cent) and Jews (13 per cent), with insignificant German and Roma minorities.¹⁸ The Rusyns were an ethnic group in the midst of a nation-building process. They lived in impoverished conditions in the Carpathian Mountains with an economy based on pasturage and farming. According to statistical data, the Rusyn-speaking population had the lowest social status and the lowest standard of living of any other group in the former Kingdom of Hungary.¹⁹ They had no distinct ethnic identity and tended to identify either with their localities or at best with their own ethnic group (tribe) – the Boykos, the Lemkos, or the Hutsuls, each of which spoke different dialects. Their only shared source of identity was their religious affiliation to the Eastern Catholic (Uniate) Church. According to statistics on religion, the population of the territory was mainly Eastern Catholic (Uniate) (54 per cent), with some Jews (15 per cent), Russian Orthodox Christians (10 per cent), Protestants (10 per cent), and Catholics (9 per cent).²⁰ The few Rusyn intellectuals were divided on the question as to what a prospective Rusyn ethnic identity should be based upon: the Ukrainian affiliation, the Russian affiliation, or an exclusively Rusyn affiliation. The Ukrainian affiliation was attractive due to the proximity of the languages and Ukraine’s successful nation-building process; the appeal of the Russian affiliation lay in the existence of the tsarist empire; and the Rusyn affiliation was advocated by the Eastern Catholic Church and to some extent also by the Hungarian authorities. Economically, the region had been the least developed part of the Kingdom of Hungary, with high rates of illiteracy and infant mortality, which were at that time, however, comparable with those in Transylvania or Galicia. The impoverished mountain areas of the region contrasted starkly with the lowlands inhabited by Hungarians, which were comparable with the rest of the Hungarian agricul-

17 Švorc, Začlenienie Podkarpatske, 55. 18 Vladimír Srb: Obyvatelstvo Podkarpatské Rusi, in: Demografie 3 (1999), 207–219, 214. 19 László Katus: Hungary in the Dual Monarchy. Boulder 2008, 317. 20 Ibid., 216.

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tural lowlands in socio-economic terms. Before 1919 the region had one of the highest emigration rates in the whole of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the war, it had been devastated to a far greater extent than other parts of Hungary (the frontline was located there from December 1914 to May 1915). Economic difficulties were compounded after 1918 when the territory was cut off from the Hungarian lowlands by the newly drawn borders. This proved to be an economic disaster, because it meant that the inhabitants of the Carpathians could no longer find seasonal work in Hungarian agriculture. Interestingly, Czech observers rarely mentioned the economic obstacles caused by the establishment of the new border or the destruction of the territory during the war.²¹ In Czech writing there was a clear preference for narratives of the ‘thousand years of Hungarian oppression and exploitation’. The 1920 Czechoslovak constitution promised the autonomy stipulated by American Rusyns when they agreed to integration into Czechoslovakia in 1918. Sub-Carpathian Rus was to have its own assembly, legislation in its own language, its own schools, its own religion, and a local government led by a governor of Rusyn origin. According to the constitution, the governor would be appointed by the president of the republic, but he would be accountable to the Sub-Carpathian assembly. Although this constitutional clause was fulfilled (with the appointment of former Rusyn émigré Gregory Zhatkovich as governor), the real power in the region became concentrated in the hands of his deputy (the vice governor), who was always a Czech official. The elections to the regional assembly and the Czechoslovak parliament were postponed. This was justified by the claim that it would be better to wait until the situation in the region had calmed down.²² The first parliamentary elections were not held until 1924 and the assembly was not created until 1938. Apart from representatives of local elites, Czech politicians residing in Prague (such as the Social Democratic politician and expert on the region’s affairs Jaromír Nečas (1888–1945)) also stood for election. Furthermore, the number of seats in the national parliament was somewhat lower than it should have been, given the size of the population.²³ There were other signs of the region’s insufficient representation in central organs: no Rusyn politician was made a minister in the national government or a general in the Czechoslovak army, although Rusyns accounted for about three per cent of the Czechoslovak population. The

21 B. Albert: Čs. červený kříž v Podkarpatské Rusi, in: Zprávy československého červeného kříže. Volume 1 (2), 1.12.1920, 18; “Volby na Podkarpatské Rusi”, in: Národní politika 63, 4.03.1924, 1. 22 Švorc, Začlenienie Podkarpatskej, 47. 23 The number of seats was calculated based on the adult population, so regions with a high child population were at a disadvantage.

230 | Stanislav Holubec division of Czechoslovakia into political units called země (lands) in 1927 (the Czech, Moravian-Silesian, Slovak, and Sub-Carpathian lands) petrified or even worsened the territory’s legal status.²⁴ Although these lands had their own local authorities – a president, a government (both appointed by the Czechoslovak minister of the interior) and a partly elected diet – the power of these authorities remained very limited. Sub-Carpathian Rus was in fact placed on the same level as the other three lands. After the 1927 reform, the only vestige of the promised autonomy was the Rusyn governor, who held his office alongside the president of Sub-Carpathian Rus, a Czech official.

II Symbolic integration into Czechoslovakia In late 1919 the Czech government decided to send about twenty thousand officials to Sub-Carpathian Rus, entrusted with the task of establishing the rudiments of a functioning state apparatus. Hungarian officials were dismissed across the board. This was justified by the Czech claim that they were not willing to take the oath of loyalty to the republic.²⁵ The journey to Sub-Carpathian Rus was itself a challenge to the first Czech officials sent there. The train connection from Prague to Slovakia was disrupted by the Czech-Polish War and floods that made it impossible to travel via Těšín. For that reason, the officials were forced to take longer route through Bratislava. On their journey through Slovak territory several Hungarian conductors placed obstacles in their path. Those officials who had to serve in eastern Sub-Carpathian Rus had to travel through Romania because there was no railway connecting the centre and the east of the region.²⁶ The journey from Prague to Uzhhorod took about 24 hours, approximately the same length as the journey from Prague to Paris. A further eight hours was required to get to the east of Sub-Carpathian Rus. Even after the situation had settled down, the journey Prague–Uzhhorod took fifteen hours, which was still longer than the six-hour train journey Budapest–Uzhhorod before the war.²⁷

24 See Marcel Pencák: Cesta k uzákonění zemského zřízení v roce 1927, in: Český časopis historický 4 (2006), 821–870. 25 Václav Drahný/František Drahný: Podkarpatská Rus, její přírodní a zemědělské poměry. Praha 1924, 97. 26 Josef Linek: Podkarpatská Rus. Úvahy a poznámky. Třebechovice pod Orebem 1922, 40–41. 27 Karel Hostaša: Na okraj dopravy a zájezdů na Podkarpatskou Rus, in: Jaroslav Zatloukal (ed.), Podkarpatská Rus. Sborník hospodářského, kulturního a politického poznání Podkarpatské Rusi. Bratislava 1936, 159, 174–176.

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I should mention that the Czechs were not completely inexperienced when it came to governing other nations. Some Czech officials had worked with the Austrian authorities governing Bosnia after 1878 and others had gained experience as officers in Galicia or Bukovina.²⁸ In 1919 patriotic rhetoric was used to lure Czech officials into service outside the country. In addition, officials were promised higher salaries and a faster career track.²⁹ However, many complained later that in Sub-Carpathian Rus not only the salaries were higher, but also the prices. The benefits paid by the state were also lowered after a couple of years, fuelling rumours that officials were sent to Sub-Carpathian Rus as a punishment for various offences (in Austrian-Czech bureaucratic slang the territory was called a Strafstation – štráfštace).³⁰ There are, however, no records of any such policy being implemented. After their arrival in Sub-Carpathian Rus, Czech officials started to carry out their daily administrative tasks, but they also took in their new environment and wrote about it in order to familiarize Czech readers at home with the region. They developed different arguments to suggest that the integration of the region into Czechoslovakia was legitimate and rational. They claimed that their activities were contributing to the economic and cultural development of the region. In 1926 one Czech observer noted the main results of Czech “diligence”: “repaired roads, well-built schools, well-kept fields, drained moors, clean restaurants, friendly administrative offices, efficient hospitals, post offices and shops.”³¹ It is an indisputable fact that the Czech administration initiated numerous ambitious projects including electrification, the erection of telephone lines, and the construction of hospitals, schools, roads, hydroelectric plants, bridges,³² and an airport in Uzhhorod. Nevertheless, Sub-Carpathian Rus remained the least developed part of Czechoslovakia and we cannot really say that the gap between it and the other Czech lands closed at that time. Quite tellingly, in 1932 the region boasted just four tractors and four ambulances, vehicles that were already common in the Czech lands at that time.³³

28 See the memoirs of a Czech policeman in Bosnia: František Valoušek: Vzpomínky na Bosnu. Brno 1999; Vzpomínky průkopníků technické služby v zemi podkarpatoruské. Užhorod 1933, 29. 29 Emil Kasík: Obrázky z Podkarpatské Rusi, in: Nová doba 68, 9.03.1924, 3. 30 Slezák, Naše Malé Rusko, 277. 31 F. Skácelík: Podkarpatská Rus nedávno a dnes, in: Lumír 10, 28.01.1926, 529. 32 In the period from 1918 to 1932, 54 new bridges were constructed, 30 wooden bridges and 24 concrete bridges. See František Beneš: Mosty, in: Jaromír Musil (ed.), Technická práce v zemi podkarpatoruské. Užhorod 1933, 28–32, 30. 33 Jaromír Musil: Úvod. Vývoj a činnost SIA odboru Spolku československých inženýrů v Užhorodě, in: idem, Technická práce v zemi, 3–7, 4.

232 | Stanislav Holubec If we examine some projects in detail, we can see that they often didn’t progress as smoothly as the Czechs would have liked. A good example is the only airport in Sub-Carpathian Rus. Plans to build the airport were made immediately after 1918. However, due to the controversy over which city to designate regional capital (Mukachevo or Uzhhorod) and problems finding a suitable location, construction only got under way in 1927 and the airport was not finished until 1929. A lack of materials, the insufficient experience of local workers, and their strike were cited as reasons for this delay. Plans to establish a flight connection from Uzhhorod to Bucharest via Cluj also took some years to be realized.³⁴ From 1929 to 1930 two daily flights operated from Uzhhorod to Košice, but it soon became clear that one was sufficient. The number of people taking flights to and from Prague was much lower than the number of people who continued to take the train from Prague to Uzhhorod even though it took about five hours longer.³⁵ Fear of flying was not the only reason for this preference; the plane ticket cost twice as much as the train ticket and flights were often cancelled due to bad weather. Although there is no available data on the cost of running the airport and the revenue it produced, the project seems to have been prestigious without yielding any profits. There were also other projects that never got beyond the planning stages during the twenty years of Czechoslovak administration, such as the early plan to build a railway connecting the east and west of Sub-Carpathian Rus (eliminating the necessity of travelling 40 kilometres through Romania) or the motorway project connecting western and eastern Czechoslovakia proposed by the entrepreneur Jan A. Baťa in 1937.³⁶ It is doubtful that a better train or road connection with the Czech lands would have made Sub-Carpathian goods more competitive, because transportation costs would still have been too high, not to mention the discriminatory rail tariffs imposed on goods from the region. Bending to the resistance put up by the Czech and Moravian towns on the line, the authorities even failed to establish a direct train service from Prague to Uzhhorod with only one stop at Košice.³⁷ Uzhhorod can be called the biggest success story of Czechoslovak modernization. One Czech observer characterized it soon after the arrival of the Czechs

34 Václav Mareš: Užhorodské státní letiště, in: Hlasy východu, 14.04.1929, 2. 35 Idem: Vývoj letecké dopravy, in: Jaromír Musil, Technická práce v zemi, 44–48, 47. 36 Jan Rychlík: Zapojení železnic podkarpatské Rusi do sítě drah Československa, in: Československá historická ročenka 1997, 115–121, 118; Jan Antonín Baťa: Budujeme stát. Zlín 1937. 37 Karel Hostaša: Na okraj dopravy, 175.

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as “a small, ugly and non-regulated town in an impoverished state”.³⁸ The Czech administration in the city soon took steps to modernize it and make it a representative regional centre. Among the numerous projects it embarked on, it is worth mentioning the regulation of the river Uz and the construction of a water supply system, four hundred apartments for state employees and numerous public buildings.³⁹ The population of Uzhhorod grew from 20 000 in 1918 to 30 000 in 1930 (by comparison, the population grew from 11 000 in 1890 to 20 000 in 1918 and from 17 000 in 1944 to 117 000 in 1989).⁴⁰ In 1935 the same observer expressed his delight that the city had lost its Hungarian-Jewish character and become more Slavic thanks to its large Czech population (according to the 1930 census, Czechs accounted for 31 per cent of the population). Hungarian lost its status as the city’s official language after the 1930 census showed that Hungarians represented less than 18 per cent of the population.⁴¹ Various measures were taken in the public sphere to demonstrate the symbolic integration of Sub-Carpathian Rus into Czechoslovakia. First of all, CzechRusyn bilingualism was introduced, replacing the Hungarian monolingualism that had previously characterized the territory. However, on old photographs we sometimes see only Czech signs, especially on amenities that were supposed to be used mainly by the Czechs, such as leisure time facilities (the local spa, mountain cottages). Major streets in Sub-Carpathian towns were named after Czech personalities such as Masaryk, Miroslav Tyrš, the founder of the Czech sports organization Sokol, and Alois Rašín, the Czechoslovak finance minister who was assassinated in 1923.⁴² The territory was re-mapped, with many places gaining Czechized names. An exhibition about the new territory, which opened in Prague in 1924, stressed its folklore and Rusyn traditions to the exclusion of other ethnic groups.⁴³ Memorials of Masaryk and Tyrš were erected in Uzhhorod and other

38 Alois Raušer: Užhorod, hlavní město země Podkarpatoruské, in: Zatloukal, Podkarpatská Rus, 158–163, 159. 39 The town cinema, the slaughterhouse, the poorhouse, the town jail, a commercial school, a Roma school, the police headquarters, the military headquarters, the regional and local courts of justice, the postal and telegraph office, the public health authority building, the revenue authority building, the Ministry of Public Works building, and the aforementioned Governor’s Palace. 40 Khto mi I skilki nas v Uzzhorodi? Naselenja miasta, at: http://uzhgorod.ws/nature-stat.htm [last accessed on 1.05.2013]. 41 Alois Raušer, Užhorod, 162. 42 Prokop Kroupa: Kroupův průvodce Podkarpatskou Rusí. Praha 1934, 12. 43 Sergej Makovskij (ed.): Katalog výstavy ‘Umění a život Podkarpatské Rusi’ pořádané pod záštitou guvernéra Podkarpatské Rusi Dra Antonína Beskida školským odborem civilní správy Podkarpatské Rusi v Užhorodě. Praha 1924.

234 | Stanislav Holubec Sub-Carpathian towns. A memorial plaque commemorating a visit by Masaryk and a second one with soil from Zborov (a battlefield where Czech legions fought the Austrian army in 1917) were erected at the entrance to the Governor’s Palace in the capital city.⁴⁴ In the late 1920s Czechs were the largest ethnic group in Uzhhorod, accounting for about one third of its inhabitants.⁴⁵ Yet in the territory as a whole, Czechs represented just two per cent of the population. The Czechoslovak Tourist Club established marked hiking trails with Czech signs in the mountains. (The locals joked that the Czechs were preparing their future escape route.⁴⁶) The construction of a separate Czech residential area and a government district in Uzhhorod called Užhorodské Dejvice (named after a district of Prague with many government buildings) is reminiscent of colonial praxis. Czech residential districts were also built in other towns, for example Masaryk’s Colony in Khust and the Czech Colony in Mukachevo.⁴⁷ One Czech commentator claimed that the Czech residential districts would have an “educative effect” (působit výchovně) on the local Rusyn and Hungarian populations.⁴⁸ (The tendency to invest mainly in Uzhhorod was criticized at that time even by some Czech observers.)⁴⁹ The symbolic subordination of Sub-Carpathian Rus is clearly illustrated by the transportation of six Sub-Carpathian wooden churches to Czech towns, given either as a ‘present from the Rusyn people to the Czechs’ or purchased by the Czechoslovak state from the locals for a very low price (it was claimed that transportation would save them from destruction).⁵⁰ This is reminiscent of the transportation of several Egyptian monuments to Europe by British or French authorities in the nineteenth century. It must be stressed, however, that the Czechs completely denied that the territory was their ‘colony’.⁵¹ They presented themselves rather as its “saviours and educators”, who had “lots of duties and responsibilities without any rights and advantages”, and insisted that their investment in the territory exceeded their gains.⁵²

44 Jaroslav Dostál: Podkarpatská Rus. Praha 1933, 11–12. 45 Ibid. 46 Karel Matoušek: Podkarpatská Rus (všeobecný zeměpis se zvláštním zřetelem k životu lidu). Praha 1924, 119. 47 In this article, I use the English transcription of the Ukrainian name for the city. In other languages it is known as: Munkács (Hungarian), Mukačevo (Czech and Slovak), Мукачеве (Ukrainian), Мукачево (Russian and Rusyn), and Munkatsch (German). 48 Karel Matoušek, Podkarpatská Rus, 220. 49 Jan Anděl: Republika Československá. IV. Slovensko-Podkarpatská Rus. Praha 1934, 397. 50 Kostelík z Podkarpatské Rusi, in: Jas – rodinný ilustrovaný měsíčník, 29.08.1929, 2. 51 Zprávy čs. červeného kříže 2. 15.02.1923, 39. 52 J. Bouda: Dělnická turistika, in: Rozhledy, 14.01.1927, 3.

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The Czech mass sports organization Sokol played an important role in the ideological integration of the territory into Czechoslovakia. The Czech officials, who were almost obliged to be members of Sokol, soon established local groups in Sub-Carpathian Rus and tried to recruit new local members, particularly among schoolchildren. As early as 1921 the Uzhhorod Sokol group sent 30 Rusyn boys to the Sokol festival in Prague “to pay homage to the Czechoslovak capital”.⁵³ Thousands of Sokol sportsmen from the Czech lands also visited Sub-Carpathian Rus and demonstrated their mass gymnastics to the locals to show “how they love their brothers who have until recently been separated and oppressed.”⁵⁴ The author admitted, however, that “not everybody understood the reason for our visit.”⁵⁵ The Czech Catholic press took a different view of Sokol’s activities in SubCarpathian Rus. It claimed that the Sokol organization had little chance of flourishing in the region, because it was ignored by both ordinary Rusyns and the local intelligentsia. The Catholic press suggested that the bulk of the Rusyn nation would be more interested in joining the Czech Catholic mass sport organization Orel (Eagle).⁵⁶ In actual fact, the Rusyns were interested in neither organization: the desire to engage in sport was alien to them. In the First Republic membership of both Sokol and Orel was insignificant in Sub-Carpathian Rus compared to other parts of Czechoslovakia. In the 1930s some Czechs on the left of the political spectrum began to criticize the colonial features of the Sub-Carpathian integration project. The best-known example is Ivan Olbracht, the Czech novelist and author of the most famous novel about the territory, Nikola Šuhaj loupežník (Nikolai Schuhaj, Highwayman; published in 1932). In his reports from the early 1930s, Olbracht criticized the concentration of power in Czech hands throughout Sub-Carpathian Rus. He argued that while exclusively Czech rule had perhaps been necessary shortly after 1918, there was no justification for it now. In this way, Czechs were only blocking educated Rusyns from entering important positions in the state apparatus. Olbracht also criticized the myths fabricated by Czechs about Hungarian cruelty and oppression, which had no basis in reality, and he made various critical remarks about the Czechization policy.⁵⁷ According to Olbracht, Czech officers were just as unhappy as the Rusyns because they felt as though they were stationed in a foreign country.

53 Drahný/Drahný, Podkarpatská Rus, 110. 54 Václav Bartoníček: O významu zájezdu sokolského na Slovensko a Podkarpatskou Rus, in: Sokol 11–12 (1921), 237. 55 Ibid. 56 Na podkarpatskou Rus!, in: Našinec, 21.02.1923, 2. 57 Ivan Olbracht: Hory a staletí. Praha 1982, 39–43.

236 | Stanislav Holubec To further the symbolic integration of Sub-Carpathian Rus into Czechoslovakia, the local inhabitants were portrayed as being in need of Czech rule and preordained to live in a common state with the Czechs. Czech authors described the Rusyns as the ethnic group that was entitled, by virtue of its history and ethnicity, to rule over the region. Rusyn’s were alleged to be both similar to the Czechs (their ‘Slavic brothers’) and different from them (backward, and therefore in need of Czech help).⁵⁸ It was also important to identify the alleged enemies of the Rusyn people, from whose yoke the Czechs would liberate and protect them. In descriptions of the Rusyn population as backward, I found repeated attempts to orientalize Sub-Carpathian Rus. Czechs typically portrayed the region as the non-European East in contrast to the European West. Their articles, brochures and books often talked about the “uncultured east of our republic”⁵⁹ where there was “complete disorder and oriental colourfulness” and “many things resemble[d] the near orient”.⁶⁰ The most common term used to describe the region in the 1920s was “Czechoslovak Bosnia”.⁶¹ Since the late nineteenth century, this part of the former Ottoman Empire had been a synonym for backwardness and political instability in Czech discourse.⁶² We also find the name “our Belgium”, suggesting that the region had been seriously damaged during the war and was in need of reconstruction.⁶³ Some authors looked further afield to find parallels. Vojtěch Lev claimed that “the Hungarians turned Sub-Carpathian Rus into a part of darkest Africa.”⁶⁴ The term “Czechoslovak Tahiti”, which emerged in the late 1920s when the first Czech writers and painters went to Sub-Carpathian Rus, highlighted the lure of the territory for artists, especially painters.⁶⁵ We also find the term “Czechoslovak Canada”, which probably reflected the fact that much of the region was under forest.⁶⁶

58 Ladislav Šíp: Pro positivní práci na Podkarpatské Rusi, in: Národní politika, 23.07.1923, 1. 59 Ibid., 121. 60 Matoušek, Podkarpatská Rus, 105; Iva Němejcová-Měkká: Podkarpatská Rus. Průvodce a stručný nástin zeměpisný. Praha 1932, 6. 61 Slezák, Naše Malé Rusko, 278. 62 Smutné poměry v Podkarpatské Rusi, in: Československá republika (189), 11.07.1920, 1. The nickname ‘Czechoslovak Bosnia’ was still being used in 1927. See Jaromír Nečas: Podkarpatská Rus a poslání sociální demokracie na východě republiky, in: Nová doba, 1.05.1927, 6. It gradually disappeared in the 1930s. 63 Zprávy čs. červeného kříže, (3), 15.03.1923, 33. 64 Vojtěch Lev: Brána na východ – Karpatská Rus. Praha 1921, 16. 65 Pop, Podkarpatská Rus, 131. 66 Jaroslav Nauman: Naši na Podkarpatské Rusi, in: Přítomnost, 17.10.1921, 654.

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An oriental character was also ascribed to many of the inhabitants of SubCarpathian Rus. As one observer wrote, “the semi-oriental nature of the country attracted numerous Asiatics: Hungarians, Jews and Gypsies.”⁶⁷ Yet the Rusyns themselves were described not as oriental, but as Slavic. In Czech discourse at that time descriptions of the Hungarians and the Jews as oriental were common. Even President Masaryk, who was critical of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, wrote about Hungarians in this way.⁶⁸ This negative stereotyping had deeper roots in the nineteenth-century Czech discourse on the Slovak Magyarization policy. In late nineteenth-century Czech novels, Hungarians were shown in an even more negative light than Germans.⁶⁹ Hungarian politics during World War I and the military conflict between the Hungarian Soviet Republic and Czechoslovakia also reinforced anti-Hungarian sentiment.⁷⁰ As we know from Said, from the European perspective the Orient is characterized by a different flow of time. Oriental time is slower (but sometimes also much faster), random and disorganized; it is either not measured at all or measured in a very haphazard way. Czech officials and visitors to Sub-Carpathian Rus often referred to the local inhabitants’ inability to express themselves in numbers and measure time and space. For the Czech authorities, the Rusyn delegations that approached them were too large (at times they comprised about a hundred people) and their submissions were too “long-winded and garrulous”.⁷¹ The local inhabitants often didn’t know the exact age of the older people in their communities. This presented the Czech statisticians compiling data on the territory with a new challenge. For example, locals would often claim that a seventy-year-old man was a hundred years old.⁷² One Czech journalist also complained about the slowness of the locals. In his view, the Rusyn had “lots of time for everything, and he like[d] to contemplate the different mysteries of his dream-world and religious issues”.⁷³

67 Matoušek, Podkarpatská Rus, 82. 68 Masaryk called Hungary “Mongolian” in 1920 (Tomáš Garigue Masaryk: Nová Evropa (Stanovisko slovanské). Praha 1994, 118.) and claimed that it was “a country without a deeper culture” (ibid., 126) and an “overly aristocratic nation” (ibid., 127). 69 Vladimíra Borová: Obraz Němců v české historické beletrii 1890–1900, in: Luďa Klusáková (ed.), Obraz druhého v historické perspektivě. Praha 1997, 11–39, 14. 70 Orientalizing tendencies can also be found in the aforementioned exhibition on the new country. For example, the authors of the exhibition catalogue saw the roots of local folk embroidery in the Altai region, Tibet, India, and Mongolia. Local carpets were said to be “Persian style”. Sub-Carpathian art was seen to blend relatively modern Central European motifs with more ancient motifs originating in a mythical Asia, see Makovskij, Katalog výstavy, 12. 71 Cyril Kochannyj: O Podkarpatské Rusi. Praha 1929, 87. 72 Matoušek, Podkarpatská Rus, 69. 73 Josef Pešek: Kulturní poměry a osvětová práce v Podkarpatské Rusi. Užhorod, 1921, 11.

238 | Stanislav Holubec Different calendars existed for the different religions and only 130 days in the year were not holidays of some kind. As the Czechs saw it, this distracted the local population from their work. Czech entrepreneurs claimed that the huge number of holidays – “twice as high as in our lands” – discouraged them from investing in the region.⁷⁴ The classic texts of European orientalism refer to three main orientalizing stereotypes. The first of these is the ‘noble savage’, a term often used to describe the ‘simple’ cultures discovered by Europeans. The second is that of the servile but treacherous Eastern merchant. The fanatical and cruel warrior who oppresses other peoples represents the third orientalizing stereotype. We encounter all three stereotypes in descriptions of the three main ethnic groups of Sub-Carpathian Rus by Czech observers.

III Rusyns, Jews and Hungarians We can detect the stereotype of the ‘noble savage’ in descriptions of the Rusyn majority. Here the category of the ‘people’ or ‘folk’ (lid) was almost sacralized. The Rusyn people were said to be “actually good, kindhearted”, but also passive, desperate, naive, childish and backward.⁷⁵ Some commentators also appreciated their “natural helpfulness and modesty”.⁷⁶ One tourist guidebook recommended hiring a Rusyn guide for hiking in the mountains: “He knows the land, carries the luggage, knows the shelters, cottages and wells, prepares the fire; he is a faithful bearer and servant.”⁷⁷ A more negative stereotype of the Rusyns was common among Czech officials who had served for a long time in the region and had been cured of their original idealism. In this variant, the Rusyns were lazy, incompetent and corrupted by their former lords and Jews. It was alleged that they had exploited Czech idealism and learned how to bargain from the Jews. Czech visitors complained that local sellers were demanding much higher prices for their goods than in the past.⁷⁸ One Czech journalist blamed the Hungarians for spoiling the Rusyns with their schooling policy. In his opinion, the Rusyns had been corrupted by the “money and other material advantages” given to them as an incentive to accept the Magyar-

74 75 76 77 78

Emil Kasík, Obrázky z Podkarpatské, 3. Němejcová-Měkká, Podkarpatská Rus, 6. Ibid. Jiří Král: Podkarpatská Rus. Praha 1924, 3. Anděl, Republika Československá, 395.

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ization of their children in schools. He claimed that under Czech rule, the Rusyns expected to get everything for free and did not want to pay for anything.⁷⁹ Another observer complained that the Rusyns were so used to Hungarian lords and their ways that they had no understanding of Czech democratic customs. They wondered whether the Czechs were really their masters after all, when they saw them hiking in the mountains – something the Hungarians had never deigned to do.⁸⁰ Some commentators advised Czechs to abandon some of their democratic ideals, warning that otherwise they might lose the respect of the locals.⁸¹ The perception of the Rusyns as basically good people, who had just been impoverished and corrupted by Jews and Hungarians sometimes gave way to complete disillusionment. For example, the right wing Národní listy claimed in 1921 that the poor cultural development of the natives was due not only to the Hungarian administration, but also to the “character of the Rusyn people”. The article went on to say: “At this point it is time to tell the truth: the Rusyns as a whole are indolent, lazy and incredibly devoted to alcohol. [. . . ] The farming is so primitive that you sometimes cannot distinguish a field from a fallow. [. . . ] It is too much work for the Rusyn to pull weeds.”⁸² Although there were German villages with perfect farms in the region, their Rusyn neighbours see it [the German farming], but continue to happily farm in their own way, calling the ‘Swabs’ names or envying them. [. . . ] Their passion for alcohol is also well known. There is possibly no other nation that is affected by it as much as the Rusyns are. [. . . ]. For alcohol, the Rusyn will sell you the shirt off his back, his wife, children, and even himself. [. . . ] Rusyn villages make an unfavourable impression. The cottages are mainly wooden and shabby; the fences are broken. [. . . ] To force the locals to repair the road, you must refuse to sell them rum.⁸³

For Said, the orientalizing stereotype of the noble savage is typically accompanied by attempts to infantilize local populations and portray them as irrational. This can also be seen in the case of Sub-Carpathian Rus. The region was characterized as our “dear foster child whom we are bringing up”.⁸⁴ A warning that “a ballot in the hand of an illiterate voter becomes a razor in the hand of a child” circulated in the run-up to a planned election.⁸⁵ One observer complained that the locals did 79 Pešek, Kulturní poměry, 12. 80 Václav Čížek: Tělesná výchova na Podkarpatské Rusi, in: Zatloukal, Podkarpatská Rus, 176–178, 177. 81 Linek, Podkarpatská Rus, 35. 82 Z podkarpatské Rusi, in: Národní listy, 22.06.1921, 1. 83 Ibid. 84 Václav Drahný: Zemědělské poměry v Podkarpatské Rusi. Užhorod/Praha 1921, 25. 85 Matoušek, Podkarpatská Rus, 122.

240 | Stanislav Holubec not understand the format of political speeches and always wanted to interrupt the speaker before he had finished.⁸⁶ Another recommended showing slides instead, which could perhaps help the audience remember a few words and ideas.⁸⁷ It was said that the locals could be so fascinated by something that they forgot everything else at once, living, for example, too much for politics and forgetting to work under the Czechoslovak administration.⁸⁸ Even their sex life was criticized as disorderly and deviant. Rusyns were alleged to engage in sexual activities with close relatives and shamelessly perform sexual acts in front of their children.⁸⁹ The Czechs perceived themselves as the ‘parents’ of the ‘childlike’ Rusyns. Sometimes it was argued that the Czechs were actually only ‘step-parents’ who would one day return the child to its real parents – the Russians – as soon as they had been liberated from the Bolsheviks.⁹⁰ This was, however, not the prevailing view among the authors I have examined, most of whom tended to stress the permanency of Sub-Carpathian Rus’s place in Czechoslovakia. Interestingly, Czech descriptions of the Rusyns usually overlooked Rusyn elites, who were not as few in number as the Czechs would have liked. It seems that the Czechs perceived them as rivals and attempted to marginalize them, suggesting that the Rusyn intelligentsia was very small or associating it with the ‘pro-Hungarian’ Eastern Catholic Church or Ukrainian nationalists. Initially, the Czechs had placed certain hopes in the Rusyn émigrés returning from the United States.⁹¹ After all, the émigrés had decided to integrate the region into Czechoslovakia and were thought to be in a position to teach local Rusyns rational and democratic habits. However, the Czech reluctance to grant real autonomy soon alienated the émigrés and some of them, including the first Governor Zhatkovich, went back to the USA or joined camps hostile to the Czechoslovak state. The inability of the Czechs to win the trust of local elites was a key factor in the persisting

86 Ibid., 118. 87 Linek, Podkarpatská Rus, 35. 88 D. Richard [pseud.]: Podkarpatská Rus jindy a nyní. Politické a národohospodářské náčrtky z Podkarp. Rusi. Mukačevo 1927, 17. 89 Matoušek, Podkarpatská Rus, 148. 90 This view was particularly prevalent among the Czech Russophile right. In 1921 the Drahnýs expected that the situation in Russia would improve and she would once again become a great power. They wrote that then “the conditions for Sub-Carpathian Rusyns will be better in Russia than in our state” (Drahný/Drahný, Podkarpatská Rus, 106). They claimed that one day “when our brothers in the East [the Russians, SH] ask how the child is doing, it will be in our interest not to get bad reports from the Rusyns [. . . ] but to be praised by them. This can win us the sympathies of the great Russian nation” (ibid., 106). These almost obsequious statements suggest that for many Czechs, the Rusyns’ only importance lay in their function as a bridge to the ‘beloved’ Russians. 91 Drahný/Drahný, Podkarpatská Rus, 109.

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bad relations between Rusyns and Czechs in the region. As one observer admitted ten years after unification, “it is a sad reality experienced by every Czech, but the Rusyns do not like us.”⁹² In Czech descriptions, the backwardness of the region was often linked to an under-developed Rusyn national consciousness. The Czechs were perplexed when the Rusyns confused ethnicity with religion (when asked about their ethnicity, some of them said that they belonged to the “Russian religion”).⁹³ Czech observers often pointed out that the Rusyns had no common national identity and were divided into various tribes (Hutsuls, Boykos and Lemkos). The existence of tribes reinforced the image of an underdeveloped ‘pre-modern’ people, but it also fascinated Czech observers. The Hutsuls in the east of the region were seen as the Rusyn elite; they were the “spiritually gifted part of the Rusyn nation [. . . ] noted for their artistic creativity, energy and independence”.⁹⁴ Czech visitors who wanted to experience real folk culture were advised to go the Hutsul region. By contrast, the Boykos in central Sub-Carpathian Rus were seen as the most backward and destitute of the Rusyn tribes. As one observer wrote, “the name Boyk is considered an insult.”⁹⁵ In terms of their cultural development, the Lemkos in the west were seen to lie somewhere between the other two tribes. Perhaps that’s why they are referred to less often in Czech texts. Tribal affiliation was not the only facet of Rusyn identity. A distinction was also made between the population in the mountains (Verchovinci) and the population in the lowlands (Dolňane). The first group was said to be “physically and mentally backward”, while the second was described as “better situated and more physically and mentally developed”.⁹⁶ Czech discussions of the local tribes, Jews and Gypsies are infused with biological-anthropological discourse.⁹⁷ At that time, this discourse was no longer being used to describe the adult population of the Czech lands, with the exception of schoolchildren in poorer districts, the Roma population, and the mentally or physically disabled. Hutsuls, Jews and Gypsies were categorized according to hair colour, eyes, nose shape, body shape, and stature. There was a consensus that the mental capacity of the ‘impoverished’ Rusyns and Gypsies was low, with the possible exception of the Hutsuls. Jewish intelligence was interpreted

92 Slezák, Naše Malé Rusko, 277. 93 Matoušek, Podkarpatská Rus, 107. 94 Král, Podkarpatská Rus, 62. 95 Němejcová-Měkká, Podkarpatská Rus, 18. 96 Ibid., 19. 97 See, for example, V. Suk: Příspěvky k anthropologii Podkarpatských Huculů, in: Národopisný věstník Československý 15 (1922), 32–43.

242 | Stanislav Holubec as cunning.⁹⁸ Opinions were divided on the question of the physical health of the locals; optimistic views alternated with descriptions of a “sick, starving and destitute population”. The Hutsuls were usually characterized as healthy. Indeed, the members of this tribe seemed to exert an almost sexual fascination on Czech visitors. One observer described their “robust and tall bodies (average 167 cm), bright eyes and dark hair”.⁹⁹ Another portrayed them as “strong healthy men, tall with hooked noses, big dark eyes, dark hair; their look is an expression of manly strength, Slavic character, and resolve.”¹⁰⁰ By contrast, the Boykos were said to have “a weaker physical constitution than the Hutsuls and their mental development [was] slower due to malnutrition, diseases and an excessive fondness for alcohol.”¹⁰¹ The image of Sub-Carpathian Jews cultivated by the Czechs corresponds to the second orientalizing stereotype of the servile but treacherous Eastern merchant referred to above. The Jews were alleged to exploit the Rusyn population with their shady dealings and lure them to alcoholism. Yet their cleverness and diligence were also acknowledged: The Jew is industrious, hard-working; he is engaged in business, handicrafts, or farm work. He knows how to read and write, he rules over the highlands and the destitute people who live there. He buys cattle cheaply, stealing the Rusyn’s last penny, cheating him with his cleverness and ambition, and driving him into incredible poverty.¹⁰²

Another observer wrote that “the Jew uses bribes and loans; with his cunning, usury and treacherous alcohol he brings the Rusyn down with a prepared trap from which the Rusyn has no chance of escaping; he becomes a true slave in the hands of the ruthless Jew.”¹⁰³ The view of this minority as racially different and inferior was also expressed in publications that seemed to dodge the Czechoslovak censor, which was usually very strict with regard to fascist, racist and communist propaganda: The Jew is different even physically; although he belongs to the white race, he is a member of the Semitic family, so you can recognize him at first sight with his weak physical constitution, dark or red hair and beard, the oriental look in his eyes, a strongly hooked nose, and massive protruding lips.¹⁰⁴

98 Matoušek, Podkarpatská Rus, 92. 99 Král, Podkarpatská Rus, 24. 100 Linek, Podkarpatská Rus, 22. 101 Richard, Podkarpatská Rus, 62. 102 Němejcová-Měkká, Podkarpatská Rus, 20. 103 Matoušek, Podkarpatská Rus, 92–93. 104 Ibid., 91.

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A third commentator described the Jews as a “destructive” and “subversive element”.¹⁰⁵ Their language was considered to be a “distorted German used as a way of communication in their shady business”.¹⁰⁶ Even the Jewish ability to learn languages quickly was viewed with suspicion.¹⁰⁷ The Czechs alleged that the Jews were collaborating with the Hungarians and used the image of a two-headed monster and the term ‘Hungarian-Jewish’ (maďarskožidovský).¹⁰⁸ As Yeshayahu Jelinek has noted, this allegation was particularly ironic, given that it was made at a time “when the government in Hungary was in the hands of Admiral Miklós Horthy, whose extreme right-wing followers took a decidedly anti-Jewish stand.”¹⁰⁹ The level of anti-Semitism I have found in Sub-Carpathian Rus at this time contradicts existing scholarly literature on interwar Czechoslovakia, which tends to reproduce the image of the Czech population as liberal and friendly towards Jews. The Catholic and nationalist press was particularly anti-Semitic. The Catholic daily Našinec wrote that Uzhhorod was “full of dirt, water, mud and Jews.” It claimed that the region was “rich and beautiful, but fouled up terribly by Jews.”¹¹⁰ To avoid accusations of anti-Semitism, some observers argued that they were not against the Jews per se, but only against those who lived in Sub-Carpathian Rus, who were in fact Khazars, an Asian tribe that had converted to Judaism in early medieval times.¹¹¹ Their descendants had allegedly migrated from Galicia to Hungary in the late nineteenth century. Another observer refused to be called an antiSemite, because his stance was held by all those writing on Sub-Carpathian Rus, including even “professors and men of science.”¹¹² In Sub-Carpathian Rus, the former Hungarian lords corresponded to the third orientalizing stereotype of the oriental and cruel warrior. They were described as “chivalric”, “haughty”, “boastful”, and “splendid”.¹¹³ While these attributes were not entirely negative, they were used to illustrate their alleged inability to govern in a rational way. Their rule over the territory was characterized as “cruel,

105 Drahný/Drahný, Podkarpatská Rus, 32. 106 Ibid., 38. 107 Matoušek, Podkarpatská Rus, 92. 108 Ibid., 85. 109 Jelinek, The Carpathian Diaspora, 189. 110 Na Podkarpatskou Rus!, in: Našinec, 21.02.1923, 2. 111 Chazaři a židé, in: Rozvoj 13. 25.06.1932, 4. This claim was first made by Hungarian AntiSemites. The key work in this field, ‘In the Khazar land’ by Miklos Bártha, was translated into Czech and published in Mukachevo as ‘V zemi Chazarů’ in 1927. 112 Drahný/Drahný, Podkarpatská Rus, 103. 113 Linek, Podkarpatská Rus, 22.

244 | Stanislav Holubec truly Asiatic and absolutist”.¹¹⁴ Sometimes, we find an element of Schadenfreude in Czech comments on the defeated former rulers: “There is no more beautiful sight than the liberated and freely breathing population of Slovakia and SubCarpathian Rus and the humiliated Hungarians and Magyarons [non-Hungarian inhabitants of Hungary who identified with Hungarians, S.H.]”, reported one Czech member of the mass sports organization Sokol about his visit.¹¹⁵ The history of Sub-Carpathian Rus under Hungarian rule was typically described as one thousand years of oppression and exploitation.¹¹⁶ Yet contemporary historians such as Jelinek speak about the “relatively favorable economic situation during the period of past Hungarian rule”.¹¹⁷ Interestingly, in the first years of the Czech administration of the region, Czech observers tended to overlook the current Hungarian minority, focussing instead on the former Hungarian lords. In the late 1920s commentaries on Hungarians became less harsh and the focus turned to the current Hungarian minority, which was characterized as “nationally and politically conscious, materially well situated, literate, mainly farmers” in contrast to the “lazy” Rusyns.¹¹⁸ In 1929 the Czech liberal weekly Přítomnost even described the Hungarian farmer as “placid, hard-working, peace-loving and fond of order, with no sympathies for the rebellious agitation of the disloyal part of the Hungarian intelligentsia.”¹¹⁹ Just as in the Czech perceptions of the Rusyns, here too a contrast was drawn between the ‘good people’ and a hostile intelligentsia.

IV Communists, the Catholic Orthodox Church, Ukrainian émigrés and the Czech self-image Apart from Hungarians and Jews, from the Czech perspective there were three other groups hostile to the Rusyn people and opposed to efforts to introduce democracy and civilization in Sub-Carpathian Rus: the communists, the Catholic Orthodox Church, and Ukrainian émigrés.

114 115 116 117 118 119

Volby na Podkarpatské Rusi, in: Národní politika 63. 4.03.1924, 1. Bartoníček, O významu zájezdu, 232. Tisíciletá válka, in: Zprávy čs. červeného kříže 2. 15.02.1923, 35. Jelinek, The Carpathian Diaspora, 125. Poměry na Podkarpatské Rusi, in: Národní politika 50. 20.02.1925, 2. Slezák, Naše Malé Rusko, 278.

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The communists were depicted as wild demagogues and agitators who promised the impossible to the people.¹²⁰ The Bolshevik revolution was greeted with enthusiasm by many Rusyns, as were the Hungarian Soviet Republic and the advancement of the Red Army into Central Europe in 1920. In the first elections in 1924, which were held some time after the peak in the revolutionary war, communists gained a spectacular 39 per cent of the votes. It seems that they had a strong support base, particularly among Hungarians and Jews.¹²¹ The Czech right-wing press demanded that the election results be declared invalid, arguing that while this step might be seen as anti-democratic, “the interests of the nation and the state must be come before everything else, even before democracy if it poses a danger to them.”¹²² In this context, Hungary (together with Romania) was seen for the first time as a positive example, as a country where “the government keeps watch so that the forces of destruction cannot expand dangerously and misuse civil and party freedoms to the detriment of the state in the name of democracy.”¹²³ In some Czech reports on the communist victory, disappointment at the Rusyns’ ingratitude is palpable: “Whoever voted for the communists was voting against the paved road to his village or the functioning hospital in his town.”¹²⁴ Czech observers were loath to admit that serious social problems had been the main factor in the communist victory. Instead, they blamed communist demagogy and election tricks. It was claimed that by registering quickly, the Communist Party had been listed as number one on the ballot papers and many people had voted automatically for it.¹²⁵ In the late 1920s support for the Communist Party declined in the region, plummeting from 30 per cent in the 1925 election to 15 per cent in 1929. During the Great Depression the communists recovered some of their former strength, gaining 25 per cent of the votes in the last democratic election in 1935.¹²⁶ Throughout the interwar period, however, the Communist Party had its best electoral results in this part of Czechoslovakia. It is therefore doubtful that the Rusyns were as opposed to integration into the Soviet Union in 1946 as is sometimes claimed nowadays. 120 Němejcová-Měkká, Podkarpatská Rus, 23. 121 According to Sláma, who analyzed the 1935 election, the communists gained 18 per cent of Rusyn votes in the region, 37 per cent of Hungarian votes, and 51 per cent of Jewish votes. We can assume that the proportions were similar in the 1924 election. See Jiří Sláma: Die Parlamentswahlen im Jahre 1935 in Karpathorussland, in: Bohemia 29 (1988), 34–49, 43. 122 Vina vlády na prohraných volbách, in: Národní myšlenka 3 (1923/1924), 207. 123 Ibid., 206. 124 Skácelík, Podkarpatská Rus, 529. 125 Josef Barabáš: Podkarpatské volby, in: Rozmach (6), 1.04.1924, 89. 126 Michal Barnovský: Niekoĺko poznámok k stranícko-politickej štruktúre na Podkarpatskej Rusi, in: Česko-slovenská historická ročenka 1997. Brno 1997, 91.

246 | Stanislav Holubec The Czechs accused the entire Eastern Catholic Church and the local Eastern Catholic priesthood of previous collaboration with the Hungarians and economic exploitation of the Rusyn people. Bishop Alexander Papp contributed to tensions when he refused to meet President Masaryk on his first visit to the region in 1920.¹²⁷ One journalist described the Eastern Catholic priesthood as “not very educated and greedy”.¹²⁸ Many Czech observers saw parallels between the historical development of the Eastern Catholic Church in Sub-Carpathian Rus and the reCatholicization of the Czech lands in the seventeenth century, an era remembered by the Czechs as a time of national and cultural decline. In their narrative of the more recent developments in Sub-Carpathian Rus, the Catholic Church was substituted by the Eastern Catholic Church and the Germans by the Hungarians.¹²⁹ Only the Czech Catholic press had a different view, claiming that the Eastern Catholic Church was actually more loyal to the Czechoslovak state than was generally supposed. It pointed out that although the head of church was pro-Hungarian, most priests were pro-Czechoslovak and pro-Rusyn, and they were held in high esteem by “the people”.¹³⁰ However, the conversion of one fifth of its members to Russian Orthodoxy after 1918 and the communist leanings of many Rusyns indicates growing Rusyn distrust of the Eastern Catholic Church. The growing popularity of the Russian Orthodox Church was welcomed by many Czechs as the Rusyns’ return to their Russian roots.¹³¹ The third group who came to be perceived as hostile by the Czechs were nationalist émigrés from Ukraine. About five thousand in number, the mainly intellectual émigrés were employed as teachers in Sub-Carpathian schools in the early days of Czech rule.¹³² At that time, the authorities were attempting to de-Magyarize the school system and overlooked the fact that the Ukrainians had little interest in the Czechoslovak state. Due to their similar language and customs, they soon won influence over the locals and some of them began to agitate in favour of a future Ukrainian state. They also succeeded in taking over certain Rusyn organizations, which subsequently started to stress the region’s Ukrainian identity. In the Czech press, the “Ukrainian agitators” were accused of “exploiting the hospitality of our state and spreading distrust of it” and turning the Rusyn people into “a puppet in

127 Hierarchie na podkarpatské Rusi, in: Rozmach, Čtrnáctideník pro politiku a národní kulturu 5 (1924), 30. 128 Linek, Podkarpatská Rus, 8. 129 “The well-known methods of the Jesuits were applied: setting Eastern Catholics against Orthodox Russians, burning Orthodox Russian books”. See: Drahný/Drahný, Podkarpatská Rus, 35. 130 Na podkarpatskou Rus!, in: Našinec, 21.02.1923, 2. 131 Sláma, Die Parlamentswahlen, 38. 132 Jaromír Hořec: První kroky svobody. Podkarpatská Rus 1918–1920. Praha 1999, 23.

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their hands”.¹³³ The Galician émigrés who were familiar with the region and the local dialect were perceived as particularly dangerous.¹³⁴ Journals propagating the idea of a Greater Ukraine were alleged to have been circulated to pupils by teachers of Ukrainian origin. One journalist was critical of the Ukrainian textbooks held in school libraries, which described Ukrainians as the most beautiful race on earth and Czechs as descendants of the Mongols.¹³⁵ Another journalist went even further, accusing the Ukrainian nationalists of being the allies of the Turks and the Germans “for a long time” and calling them “the enemies of the Slavs”.¹³⁶ Some Czechs considered their language to be mere “jargon” and warned against introducing it in schools.¹³⁷ In the words of one commentator, the “implementation of Ukrainian as an official language in the territory would mean the de-Slavicization of the territory.”¹³⁸ In the late 1920s some of the most extreme Ukrainian nationalists were expelled from Czechoslovakia.¹³⁹ To curb the influence of the Ukrainians, the Czechoslovak authorities also began to encourage the exclusively Rusyn orientation they had previously rejected as pro-Hungarian. The Czechs believed that the Rusyns, unlike the Slovaks, could not be absorbed into the Czechoslovak nation. I found only one reference to the Rusyns as a Slovak tribe.¹⁴⁰ For the Czech authorities, the question of which national affiliation was preferable remained, however, unresolved. With some exceptions, the Czechoslovak right wing supported a Russian orientation for Sub-Carpathian Rus, the left wing favoured a Ukrainian orientation, and the centre parties leaned towards an exclusively Rusyn orientation. There is little mention of two other ethnic groups in Czech discourse – the Roma and the Germans. Together, they accounted for one to two per cent of region’s inhabitants. The Germans in Sub-Carpathian Rus were described as orderly and industrious; they were “the only good farmers, who generally accumulated a considerable fortune”.¹⁴¹ Their alleged cultural proximity to the Czechs was emphasized, something that was unheard of in the rest of Czechoslovakia.¹⁴² Yet

133 Poměry na Karpatské Rusi, in: Český deník, 30.11.1923, 9. 134 Politika na Podkarpatské Rusi, in: Národní politika, 11.06.1925, 2. 135 X. A. W.: Dvě memoranda z Podkarpatské Rusi, in: Národní myšlenka. Volume 5 (8), 1925, 246. 136 Ibid. 137 F. Skácelík: Memento z Podkarpatské Rusi, in: Lumír 6/7, 12.07.1923, 371. 138 Ibid., 368. 139 Paul Robert Magocsi/Ivan Pop: Czechs, in: Paul Robert Magocsi/Ivan Pop (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Rusyn History and Culture. Toronto 2002, 81. 140 Antonín Hartl: Kulturní život v osvobozené podkarpatské Rusi. Praha 1924, 22. 141 Z podkarpatské Rusi, in: Národní listy, 22.06.1921, 1. 142 Drahný/Drahný, Podkarpatská Rus, 34.

248 | Stanislav Holubec given the strained relations between Czechs and Germans back home, Czech observers could only identify with the Germans to a certain extent. On the rare occasions they were mentioned, the Roma were portrayed as a radicalized version of the impoverished Rusyns. They were said to be backward, with a tendency to tempt people to sin (for example, by playing “seductive music” in pubs).¹⁴³ Czech observers also rehearsed the typical racist claim that their beauty was short-lived: “The Roma body quickly develops a lively freshness of youth, but it descends too early into the shapelessness of old age, especially in the case of women.”¹⁴⁴ In contrast to Rusyns, Jews, Hungarians or Romani, the Czechs painted a picture of themselves as rational, civilized and just Europeans. As in Slovakia, here the Czechs have also shown great organizational talent and real Slavic patriotism (pravé slovanství). Unlike the former foreign and arrogant Hungarian, the Czech who came here after the coup is a man with a Western European education, an honest and efficient official, who easily understands the Rusyn people; he is less haughty and ostentatious, but educated and thrifty, without prejudices, and a real democrat. In his relationship with the local people, he is not a master or a commander, but an honest and friendly fellow citizen and adviser. We bring order, discipline, Western European democracy, and culture to this land of former oriental chaos and disorder.¹⁴⁵

Curiously, no contradiction was seen between Slavic patriotism and Europeanism. The following description of the state regulation of Jewish usury illustrates how the Czechs viewed themselves: the Czech judge and policeman forced one to respect the law and other people’s property; the Jewish merchant felt secure and calculated the advantages of our revolution. But he has trouble coming to terms with the honesty and intransigence of the Czech clerk when it comes to taxes, and it is an unpleasant novelty for the Jew that the Rusyns also get concessions [. . . ] due to their oriental origins and traditions, the Jews are inclined toward the Hungarians, and yet they are above all coolly calculating; they accept the permanency of the Czechoslovak Republic and the new conditions. Although they do not love our state, they have learnt to obey its laws, administrative capacity, universal tolerance, and good and stable currency. Let’s not forget, that, like all Orientals, the Jew is impressed by a government that is vigorous, strong and pompous.¹⁴⁶

143 144 145 146

Linek, Podkarpatská Rus, 40–41. Matoušek, Podkarpatská Rus, 89. Ibid., 206–207. Ibid., 96.

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On rare occasions, negative Czech attributes were mentioned, such as their excessive idealism and kindness, which were sometimes exploited by the locals.¹⁴⁷ Czech commentators also referred to the eternal political squabbling among Czechs. As one observer put it, “what the region needs least from us, is politics.”¹⁴⁸ What it most required was “positive work”. I also came across a warning to young Czech officials not to succumb to the temptations of alcohol and prostitution while serving their country so far away from home. They were advised to avoid pubs with “seductive Roma music” and attend theatre plays or concerts with their fellow Czechs instead.¹⁴⁹

V Conclusion Czech historiography continues to see the First Czechoslovak Republic, its political elites and bureaucratic apparatus as fundamentally democratic. The narrative of the golden twenty years of Sub-Carpathian Rus reinforced the positive image of interwar Czechoslovakia and it still prevails in Czech public discourse. In my article, I tried to highlight less familiar aspects of the period of Czech rule over Sub-Carpathian Rus. Czech perceptions of the region and its inhabitants reflected not only the ‘culture shock’ experienced by the new rulers, but also their attempts to legitimize their domination. The construction of enemies of the Rusyn people in Czech discourse also allowed Czechs to present their rule as the only possibility of saving ‘the people’. I also showed how the category of the ‘people’ was almost sacralized in support of a paternalistic relationship between the majority of the local population and the Czech administrators. Czech perspectives on the region and its people in the interwar years were overburdened with Czech ethnocentrism and nationalism. For that reason, the Czech administrators of Sub-Carpathian Rus were unable to develop a more balanced view of the territory they were ruling and only alienated the local population further.

147 “Our regime elicits no respect, because our kindness is interpreted as a weakness. [. . . ] We have not yet learned how to colonize. We are paying, but the local people are not and they even claim that we are stealing their bread.” See: Poměry na Karpatské Rusi, in: Český deník, 20.7.1924, 3; Kochannyj, O podkarpatské Rusi, 87. 148 Šíp, Pro positivní práci, 1. The term ‘politics’ seems to have had very negative connotations at that time. ‘Democracy’, on the other hand, was connoted positively. Politics was understood as quarrelling and demagogy, while democracy was seen as the responsible management of public affairs. 149 Linek, Podkarpatská Rus, 40–41.

250 | Stanislav Holubec It seems that when the Czechs came to rule over other minority ethnic groups, they quickly adopted the discourse of the rulers they were so critical of – the Germans and the Hungarians. Yet they disguised it with terms like ‘democratization’, ‘Slavic brotherhood’, and ‘cultural development’. Almost all the binaries of Western orientalist discourse as they are defined in standard textbooks on postcolonialism can be found in the Czech imagining of Sub-Carpathian Rus and its inhabitants.¹⁵⁰ Thus Czechoslovak rule over Sub-Carpathian Rus was not only about development and growth; its discourse and practices can be characterized to a large extent as semi-colonial. The Czech discourse on Sub-Carpathian Rus did not allow the region to become a subject of history, and for that reason, Rusyn, Hungarian and Jewish intellectuals could not identify with it. This discourse might have increased the legitimacy of Czechoslovakia in the eyes of the Czech public, but it alienated other minorities. The failure of the Czechs to renounce it proved disastrous in the late 1930s. The Czechoslovak state invested massively in Sub-Carpathian Rus after 1918 and it cannot be denied that Czech rule led to improvements in Rusyn cultural life. Yet if we consider the economic development of the region, the semi-colonial practices and mentalities of its Czech administrators, and the denial of the autonomy promised in 1920, evaluations of Czech rule become less positive. We should also not forget that improvements in local people’s lives were not only due to the region’s integration into Czechoslovakia. Here, other developments in the twentieth-century history of Sub-Carpathian Rus also played a role, for example the integration of the region into Hungary in 1939 and into the Soviet Union in 1945 or the creation of an independent Ukraine in 1991. As part of Hungary after 1938, the region enjoyed autonomy and its cultural life flourished. And under Soviet rule, the region witnessed significant cultural and social development (e.g. the founding of the University of Uzhhorod, which had been promised but not delivered by the Czechs, as well as unprecedented industrialization and urbanization). While the disintegration of the Soviet Union was economically disastrous for the region, it did create new opportunities for the Rusyns and the Hungarian minority to advance their cultural life. We can only hope that future historical studies will offer a more nuanced assessment of the history of Sub-Carpathian Rus, a region whose inhabitants carried the passports of five different states in the last century.

150 See, for example, Joanna P. Sharp: Geographies of Post-colonialism. Spaces of Power and Representation. London 2008.

List of Contributors Włodzimierz Borodziej is Professor of Modern History at the History Department of Warsaw University and co-director of the Imre Kertést Kolleg in Jena. He is editor-in-chief of Polskie Dokumenty Dyplomatyczne, a series of edited Polish foreign policy documents published by the Polish Institute for International Affairs since 2005. He is also chairman of the Academic Committee of the House of European History in Brussels. Recent major publications include: The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 (Madison 2006); „Schleichwege“: Inoffizielle Begegnungen sozialistischer Staatsbürger zwischen 1956 und 1989 (Köln/Weimar/Wien 2010, co-edited with Jerzy Kochanowski and Joachim von Puttkamer); and Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert (München 2010). Błażej Brzostek is an historian based at Warsaw University. He specializes in the social history of twentieth-century Europe and urban history. Recent publications include: À la recherche de la splendeur. Les aspirations métropolitaines de Bucarest et de Varsovie au XXe siècle, in: Revue Roumaine d’Histoire, 3–4 (2009); and „Ketman” und „urbanitate”. Äußere Zeichen gesellschaftlicher Unterschiede in Bucharest und Warschau in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren, in: Włodzimierz Borodziej/Jerzy Kochanowski/Joachim von Puttkamer (eds.), „Schleichwege”. Inoffizielle Begegnungen sozialistischer Staatsbürger zwischen 1956 und 1989. Köln/Weimar/Wien 2010. Ivana Dobrivojevic is a research fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History in Belgrade. She specializes in the political and social history of interwar Yugoslavia, urbanization and modernization processes in socialist Yugoslavia, and everyday life under communism. Her publications include: Drzavna represija u doba diktature kralja Aleksandra 1929–1935. Beograd 2006; and

Selo i grad. Transformacija agrarnog drustva Srbije 1945–1955.Beograd 2013. Gábor Gyáni is Research Professor at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and professor at Eötvös Loránd University and Central European University. He is a social historian with a particular interest in the urban world and historical theory. His English-language publications include: Parlor and Kitchen. Housing and Domestic Culture in Budapest, 1870–1940. Budapest/New York 2002; Identity and the Urban Experience: Fin-de-Siécle Budapest. New York 2004; and Social History of Hungary from the Reform Era to the End of the Twentieth Centur. New York 2004 (with György Kövér and Tibor Valuch). Stanislav Holubec is a research associate at the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena with responsibility for the Challenges of Modernity research area. Recent publications include: Sociologie světových systémů. Hegemonie, centra, periferie. Praha 2009; Lidé periferie. Sociální postavení a každodennost pražského dělnictva v meziválečné době. Plzeň 2009; and Golden Twenty Years or Bad Stepmother? The Czech Communist and Post-Communist Narratives on Interwar Czechoslovakia, in: Acta Poloniae Historica 110 (2014). Sándor Horváth is a senior research fellow at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where he also heads the Department of Contemporary History. He is an editor of the Hungarian Historical Review. Recent publications include: A kapu és a határ: mindennapi Sztálinváros. Budapest 2004; Kádár gyermekei: ifjúsági lázadás a hatvanas években. Budapest 2009; and Két emelet boldogság: mindennapi szociálpolitika Budapesten a Kádár-korban. Budapest 2012.

252 | List of contributors Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast is Professor of Interdisciplinary Polish Studies and Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Polish Studies at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder. Major publications include: Stahlgiganten in der sozialistischen Transformation. Nowa Huta in Krakau, EKO in Eisenhüttenstadt und Kunčice in Ostrava. Wiesbaden 2010; Willkommene Investoren oder nationaler Ausverkauf? Ausländische Direktinvestitionen in Ostmitteleuropa im 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin 2006 (co-edited with Jutta Günther); and Geteilte Städte an Oder und Neiße. Frankfurt (Oder) - Słubice, Guben - Gubin und Görlitz - Zgorzelec 1945–1995. Berlin 2000 (with Katarzyna Stokłosa). Ivan Jakubec is Professor of Economic and Social History at Charles University in Prague. He is also a member of the editorial board of the Prager wirtschafts- und sozialhistorische Mitteilungen, a journal focused on economic and social history. Major publications include: Eisenbahn und Elbeschiffahrt in Mitteleuropa 1918–1938. Die Neuordnung der verkehrspolitischen Beziehungen zwischen der Tschechoslowakei, dem Deutschen Reich und Österreich in der Zwischenkriegszeit. Stuttgart 2002; Schlupflöcher im „Eisernen Vorhang“. Tschechoslowakisch-deutsche Verkehrspolitik im Kalten Krieg. Die Eisenbahn und Elbeschiffahrt 1945–1989. Stuttgart 2006; and Verkehrsinfrastruktur und Planung in der Tschechoslowakei nach 1945, in: Christiane Brenner/Martin Schulze Wessel (eds.), Zukunftsvorstellungen und staatliche Planung im Sozialismus. Die Tschechoslowakei im ostmitteleuropäischen Kontext 1945–1989. München 2010. Martin Jemelka is Assistant Professor of Social and Economic History at the Technical University in Ostrava and a research fellow at the Centre for Economic and Social History at the University of Ostrava. He has published several books on everyday life in mining colonies including: Na kolonii:

život v hornické kolonii dolu Šalomoun v Moravské Ostravě do začátku socialistické urbanizace. Ostrava 2007; Na Šalomouně: společnost a každodenní život v největší moravskoostravské hornické kolonii (1870– 1950). Ostrava 2008; and Lidé z kolonií vyprávějí své dějiny. Ostrava 2009. He recently co-edited the volume Company Towns of the Bat’a Concern. History – Cases – Architecture. Stuttgart 2013 (with Ondrej Sevecek). Jacek Kochanowicz is Professor of Economic History at Warsaw University and visiting professor of history at the History Department of Central European University in Budapest. He is a member of the editorial board of Roczniki Dziejów Społecznych i Gospodarczych. His publications include: The Market Meets Its Match: Restructuring the Economies of Eastern Europe. Cambridge 1994 (with Alice Amsded and Lance Taylor); Backwardness and Modernization: Poland and Eastern Europe in the 16th–20th Centuries. Aldershot 2006; Kultura i gospodarka. Warszawa 2010; and Private Suffering, Public Benefit: Market Rhetoric in Poland, 1989–1993, in: Eastern European Politics and Societies 1 (2014). Jerzy Kochanowski is a professor at the Historical Institute of Warsaw University. He is editor-in-chief of the quarterly journal Przeglad Historyczny. Recent publications include: People on the Move. Forced Population Movements in Europe in the Second World War and its Aftermath. Oxford/New York 2008 (with Pertti Ahonen, Tamás Stark et al.); „Schleichwege“. Inoffizielle Begegnungen sozialistischer Staatsbürger zwischen 1956 und 1989. Köln/Weimar/Wien 2010 (co-edited with Włodzimierz Borodziej and Joachim von Puttkamer); Deutschland, Polen und der Zweite Weltkrieg. Geschichte und Erinnerung. Potsdam/Warszawa 2013 (coedited with Beate Kosmala); and Jenseits der Planwirtschaft. Der Schwarzmarkt in Polen 1944–1989. Göttingen 2013.

List of contributors

Joachim von Puttkamer is Professor of Eastern European History at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena and co-director (together with Włodzimierz Borodziej) of the Imre Kertész Kolleg. Recent major publications include: Ostmitteleuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. München 2010; „Schleichwege“. Inoffizielle Begegnungen

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sozialistischer Staatsbürger zwischen 1956 und 1989. Köln/Weimar/Wien 2010 (coedited with Włodzimierz Borodziej and Jerzy Kochanowski); and Schulalltag und nationale Integration in Ungarn. Slowaken, Rumänen und Siebenbürger Sachsen in Auseinandersetzung mit der ungarischen Staatsidee, 1867–1914. München 2003.

Index Baberowski, Jörg, 22 Baťa, Jan A., 232 Bauman, Zygmunt, 22, 23, 43 Bentoiu, Annie, 111 Berberyusz, Ewa, 99, 100 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 107 Berend, Ivan, 9, 26, 38 Boia, Lucian, 105 Bourdieu, Pierre, 9

Gaj, Milík, 84, 85 Gans, Herbert J., 164 Garnier, Tony, 122 Gerschenkron, Alexander, 6, 24, 27, 201 Giddens, Anthony, 6, 18 Gluck, Mary, 66 Goffman, Erving, 8 Griboedov, Aleksandr, 213 Gutkowski, Izydor, 217

Carns, Fritz, 188 Castells, Manuel, 9, 48 Catherine II (The Great) of Russia, 213 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 100 Charles II of Romania, 108 Chicherin, Georgiy, 216, 217 Clooney, George, 17, 29 Comte, Auguste, 7 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 17, 18 Crainic, Nichifor, 107

Hanák, Péter, 54, 55 Hantos, Elemér, 203 Harvey, David, 9 Haslinger, Peter, 19 Hayek, Friedrich August von, 42 Hellbeck, Jochen, 163 Herbert, Ulrich, 26 Hirschhausen, Ulrike von, 21 Hořínek, Antonín, 96 Horthy, Miklós, 60, 243 Howard, Ebenezer, 122 Huntington, Samuel, 7

Dąbrowska, Maria, 106 Dahrendorf, Ralph, 45 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 219 David-Fox, Michael, 162 Doering-Manteuffel, Anselm, 26 Durkheim, Émile, 5, 7 Eisenstadt, Shmuel, 7 Eminescu, Mihai, 105 Erdei, Ferenc, 56 Ferenc, F., 170 Filgas, Josef, 94 Fisher, Mark, 8 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 163 Florescu, Gheorghe, 117 Ford, Henry, 43 Foucault, Michel, 9 Freedman, Milton, 42 Fukuyama, Francis, 7 Fülep, Lajos, 58

Illyés, Gyula, 58 Janos, Andrew, 9, 26, 27 Jelinek, Yeshayahu, 243, 244 Jowitt, Ken, 163 Judson, Peter, 19 Judt, Tony, 49 Jureit, Ulrike, 21 Kádár, János, 177, 178 Kaelble, Hartmut, 26 Kahn, Albert, 122 Kant, Immanuel, 17 Karácsony, Sándor, 68, 69 Keynes, John Maynard, 42, 49 Keyserling, Hermann Graf, 107 Kirn, Walter, 17 Kłoczowski, Jerzy, 32 Kodolányi, János, 58 Kövér, György, 56

256 | Index Koerber, Ernest von, 198 Konrád, György, 179 Kornai, Janos, 163 Kossuth, Lajos, 54 Kotkin, Stephen, 160 Kovács, Imre, 59 Kubicki, Paweł, 101 Le Corbusier, 122 Lefebvre, Henri, 9 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 37 Leonhard, Jörn, 20 Lev, Vojtěch, 236 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 8 Lewin, Moshe, 160 List, Friedrich, 34, 38 Liulevicius, Vejas, 21 Lukacs, John, 40 Lyotard, Jean-François, 6 Magocsi, Paul Robert, 1, 2 Maier, Charles, 20 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 8 Małowist, Marian, 9 Mann, Michael, 21 Mann, Thomas, 208 Martinescu, Pericle, 116, 118 Marx, Karl, 5, 7 Masaryk, Tomáš G., 225, 226, 233, 234, 237, 246 Matis, Herbert, 184 May, Ernst, 122 Milyutin, Nikolai, 122, 159 Morand, Paul, 107 Mrštík, Alois, 93 Mrštík, Vilém, 93 Németh, László, 59, 68 Niethammer, Lutz, 127 Nora, Pierre, 20 Odrowąż, Iwo, 126 Olăreanu, Costache, 111 Olariu, Constantin, 100 Olbracht, Ivan, 235 Papp, Alexander, 246 Plato, Alexander von, 127

Preda, Marin, 116 Ptaszycki, Tadeusz, 122 Pushkash, Andrey, 224 Putin, Vladimir, 49 Ránki, György, 38, 55 Raphael, Lutz, 26 Rašín, Alois, 233 Reagan, Ronald, 42 Röll, Viktor von, 183 Rosa, Hartmut, 8 Rostow, Walt, 6 Said, Edward, 225, 237, 239 Sándor, András, 68, 164 Schenk, Benjamin, 19, 20 Schwarz-Schilling, Christian, 28 Shestov, Lev, 107 Simić, Andrei, 24 Simmel, Georg, 5 Smetona, Antanas, 221 Sokol-Tůma, František, 93, 96 Spencer, Herbert, 7 Spengler, Oswald, 107 Stakhanov, Aleksey, 159 Stalin, Joseph, 121, 123, 159–162, 165, 167, 175, 223 Steinhaus, Hugo, 102 Švorc, Peter, 225 Széchenyi, István, 53 Szamos, Rudolf, 178 Szelényi, Balázs, 57, 179 Takács, Jenő, 174 Tapolczai, Jenő, 168, 173 Tăutu, Ion, 108 Thatcher, Margaret, 42 Ther, Philipp, 21, 22 Tito, Josip Broz, 157 Todorova, Maria, 10, 225 Touraine, Alain, 6 Troebst, Stefan, 19 Tyrš, Miroslav, 233 Vajda, János, 54 Voinescu, Alice, 106

Index |

Wajda, Andrzej, 130 Walder, Andrew, 163 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 9, 18 Walzer, Michael, 49 Ważyk, Adam, 130 Weber, Max, 5, 7 Wierling, Dorothee, 127

Wilson, Woodrow, 226 Wirsching, Andreas, 26 Wojtyła, Karol, 126 Wolff, Larry, 9, 225 Wyczański, Andrzej, 32 Żeligowski, Lucjan, 219 Zhatkovich, Gregory, 225, 229, 240

257