Nowa Huta: Generations of Change in a Model Socialist Town 0822963183, 9780822963189

Citation preview

Nowa Huta

pitt series in russian and east european studies

Jonathan Harris, Editor

GDAŃSK

POZNAŃ

WI

SŁA

WARSZAWA

ŁÓDŹ LUBLIN WROCŁAW KRAKÓW/ NOWA HUTA

POLAND

Nowa Huta GENERATIONS OF CHANGE IN A MODEL SOCIALIST TOWN

Kinga Pozniak

university of pittsburgh press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2014, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pozniak, Kinga. Nowa Huta: Generations of Change in a Model Socialist Town / Kinga Pozniak. pages cm. — (Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8229-6318-9 (paperback: acid-free paper) 1. Nowa Huta (Kraków, Poland)—History. 2. Nowa Huta (Kraków, Poland)—Social conditions. 3. Kraków (Poland)—History. 4. Kraków (Poland)—Social conditions. 5. Socialism—Poland—Kraków—History. 6. Social change—Poland—Kraków—History. 7. Memory—Social aspects—Poland—Kraków—History. 8. Collective memory—Poland—Kraków—History. 9. Intergenerational relations—Poland—Kraków— History. 10. New towns—Poland—Case studies. I. Title. DK4727.N69P68 2014 943.8'62—dc23 2014036089

This book is dedicated to those who built, and those who are building, Nowa Huta

CONTENTS acknowledgments  ix introduction  1

Chapter 1. Memory and Change in Nowa Huta’s Cityscape  21 Chapter 2. From Lenin to Mittal: Work, Memory, and Change in Nowa Huta’s Steelworks  64 Chapter 3. Between a Model Socialist Town and a Bastion of Resistance: Representations of the Past in Museums and Commemorations  100 Chapter 4. Socialism’s Builders and Destroyers: Memories of Socialism among Nowa Huta Residents  124 Chapter 5. My Grandpa Built This Town: Memory and Identity among Nowa Huta’s Younger Generation  156 conclusion  180 notes  195 references  205 index  219

KRAKÓW

Nowa Huta

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book owes its existence to the time, interest, and generosity of many people on two continents. First of all, this research would not have been possible without the residents of Nowa Huta who graciously shared with me their time and stories. While every Nowa Huta resident I met contributed to shaping this project, a few deserve special mention. During my stay in Nowa Huta I worked closely with three institutions: the OKN Cultural Center (Ośrodek Kultury im. C. K. Norwida), the Nowa Huta Museum (Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa Oddział Dzieje Nowej Huty), and the Museum of PRL (Muzeum PRL-u). I am grateful to the managers of these organizations—Anna Wiszniewska, Wiesława Wykurz, and Beata Waśko at the OKN Cultural Center; Paweł Jagło at the Museum of Nowa Huta; and Jadwiga Emilewicz at the Museum of PRL—for giving me an institutional home base and for facilitating access to both people and research materials. My life in Nowa Huta became so much more than just a research project thanks to Agata Dudkiewicz, Kasia Danecka-Zapała, Gosia Hajto, Joanna Kornas-Chmielarz, Barbara Cygan, Agnieszka Smagowicz, Wiktoria Fedorowicz, Marta Kurek-Stokowska, Kasia Nawrot, and Bożenka Gurgul. I benefited enormously from the many conversations with Danuta Szymońska and Krystyna Lenczowska, and I am extremely grateful for all their help in procuring materials and contacts. I also want to thank Paweł Derlatka for all the chats in his café. In the course of my stay in Poland I was able to reconnect with some family members and to discover new family connections. I thank my grandpa for giving me a home in Kraków; Wujek Jasiu and Ciocia Marysia for the many delicious dinners; Ciocia Lidka, Ola, Gosia, and Marta for the fun-filled evenings; and Ciocia Danusia and Teresa Grzybowska for being my substitute moms. The Department of Anthropology at the University of Western Ontario was a wonderful place to grow. The intellectual fingerprints of Kim Clark, ix

 

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Marta Dyczok, Randa Farah, Dan Jorgensen, Adriana Premat, and Andrew Walsh are all over these pages, and much of this book was written with their voices in my head. I especially thank Kim Clark for all of her guidance along the way and for all of her advice on academia and on life. Jenn Long was my partner-in-crime throughout all of graduate school. Different parts of the book’s argument have previously appeared in the journals City and Society, Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, and Economic Anthropology. A number of photos reproduced in this book belong to the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków, and I am greatly indebted to the museum and its director, Michał Niezabitowski, for allowing me to use this archival material. A special thank you to Paweł Jagło for helping to facilitate this process. The maps in this book were created by Anna Lovisa, whom I thank for lending me her graphic design skills. At the University of Pittsburgh Press, I thank Peter Kracht for his enthusiasm and guidance in bringing this project to fruition, and Alex Wolfe for managing the logistics of it. Two anonymous reviewers provided feedback which helped me sharpen my arguments. I also want to thank members of the Recovering Forgotten History workshop, and especially Marek Wierzbicki, for their comments on the manuscript. And finally, the most heartfelt thank you goes to my two favorite boys. My son, Jamie, accompanied me on his first trip to Nowa Huta even before he was born. I am grateful to him for turning my life upside down and teaching me what is truly important. My husband, J. J., supported me through every stage of this project and patiently put up with a Skype-based marriage during my fieldwork trips. I thank him for his understanding, for seeing the “big picture,” and most of all for the life and family that we are building together.

Nowa Huta

INTRODUCTION

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or much of the second half of the twentieth century, the global geopolitical landscape was shaped by two political-economic systems, socialism and capitalism. The two were seen as mutually exclusive and fundamentally incompatible with one another and thus divided the world into two opposing camps. In 1989, this arrangement came to an end as socialist governments across East-Central Europe collapsed one by one.1 Eastern European socialism is now largely relegated to history.2 And yet the legacy of socialist institutions, values, and social formations continues to inform present-day politics, economic programs, and people’s lives. How the socialist past is remembered has real consequences for all domains of life, including such diverse areas as work, urban development, education, and religion. This book uses the lens of memory to examine the “social life of socialism” (Berdahl 2010) in Poland. It asks how the socialist past is remembered in the context of present-day political and economic conditions, and what people’s reflections about the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL)3 can tell us about the political, economic, and social changes that have taken place over the past quarter of a century. In recent years, socialism has become “an object of significant historical curiosity, memory making and contestation” (Berdahl 2010, 123) across the region. There is a growing memory industry dedicated to socialism: this includes museums, archives, movies, popular and scholarly literature, and even communist tours, a relatively new form of heritage tourism that has recently emerged in that part of the continent. Let us begin our trip down Poland’s socialist memory lane by going on such a tour. Crazy Guides is a tour company offering “communist tours” around Nowa Huta, a district of the Polish city of Kraków. Nowa Huta was initially 1

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built after World War II as a model socialist town,4 and to this day many people continue to associate it with socialism. The tours target primarily foreign tourists, and their price, at forty-three euros per person, is steep by Polish standards. Piotrek, a tour guide in his late twenties, picks us up from our hotel in a little black Trabant, and we squeeze inside. Trabants are East German cars that were popular on Polish roads from the 1960s to 1980s but are now almost extinct. Riding in such a car is bound to be an adventure, for they shake and rattle as if they were perpetually on the verge of breaking down.5 Later on, the guide will pull over on an empty side road on the outskirts of Nowa Huta and allow us to try driving the Trabant for ourselves so that we may experience the thrill of driving a “typical communist car” that has no power steering. For now, we arrive in the heart of Nowa Huta. Our first stop is Stylowa (literally, Stylish), Nowa Huta’s oldest remaining restaurant, built in 1956. “Typical communist restaurant,” the guide tells us, and indeed, the décor seems to reflect the taste of decades past: pillars, marble floors, red tablecloths, clouds of cigarette smoke hanging over our heads. We sit at a table that has not been cleared of dirty plates. Piotrek asks the waitress to clear the table and take our orders, but when she disappears without doing either, he finally does it himself and goes searching for someone who can relieve him of dirty plates and bring us drinks.

On a communist tour: Trabant, a “typical communist car.” Photo by the author.

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On a communist tour: a “typical communist apartment,” with a popular socialist-era wall unit (meblościanka) stacked with “communist paraphernalia” for sale. Photo by the author.

Over beer, he tells us about Nowa Huta’s socialist history, beginning with the town’s construction in the late 1940s and early 1950s and ending with stories of martial law, shortages, strikes, and repression in the 1980s. His account incorporates some personal recollections; for example, he tells us of the time during the tumultuous 1980s when his father, who was a member of Solidarity (the political opposition), did not come home for two days. The entire family was worried sick that he had been arrested, until he finally returned, proudly bearing a sewing machine. It turned out that he had waited in line for two days to buy it and did not want to leave for fear of losing his spot. After the history lesson we drive around town, stopping at several important sites, many of which commemorate local resistance to the socialist government. Another mandatory spot along the tour is a meal at a milk bar, the socialist-era equivalent of a fast-food joint. Milk bars were government-subsidized institutions intended to provide quick and cheap meals for workers away from home. Although they are now a disappearing phenomenon, every town still has a few remaining. Once we fuel up on pierogi and cabbage rolls, the guide takes us to an “authentic communist apartment” in Nowa Huta.6 The apartment is furnished with objects that

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every Polish person over the age of thirty will remember having in their childhood home, such as the heavy wall unit meblościanka, a meat grinder, and paintings of Pope John Paul II. The walls of the apartment are lined with propaganda posters that promote “building socialism together” and pictures of Lenin. Piotrek turns on a black-and-white television set and puts on a movie entitled Kierunek Nowa Huta (Destination Nowa Huta), a socialist-era propaganda classic made in the early 1950s that depicts the town’s construction. As we watch, we are treated to some vodka and pickles—a “typical” communist-era treat. So what have we learned about socialism from this brief foray into the country’s past with Crazy Guides? Vodka and pickles, dilapidated cars, empty shelves, propaganda, strikes, and persecutions—while all of these undoubtedly have their place in Poland’s postwar history, taken together they depict this history principally in terms of repression, resistance, and inefficiency. Is this just socialism for western tourists, or is it how real Polish people remember it as well? What about the country’s youngest generations, too young to have any firsthand memories of the socialist period: Do they also associate socialism with Trabants, shortages, and posters of Lenin? Has Nowa Huta become a socialist theme park, frozen in time? These are the questions that led me to explore memories of socialism in Nowa Huta.

On a communist tour: a “typical communist treat” of vodka and pickles. Photo by the author.

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Socialism became the dominant ideology governing political, economic, and social life in Poland after World War II, when the country was brought under the Soviet Union’s orbit of control. Across the region, every Soviet Bloc state implemented socialist principles in a somewhat different way; what most of them had in common, however, was the rule of one political party (which, in theory, was supposed to govern in the name of “the people”), state ownership of the means of production, centralized economic planning, and the domination of Marxist-Leninist ideology in the public sphere (Verdery 1996). This system, with all of its variations from place to place and over time, lasted in East-Central Europe for almost five decades. The collapse of socialist governments across the region in 1989 ushered in major political, economic, and social changes. While each country followed a somewhat different path, the two key changes that were common across the region were the creation of a democratic, multiparty political system and a capitalist market.7 Because democratic reforms came hand-in-hand with capitalist ones, capitalism and democracy came to be perceived as two sides of the same coin. This conceptual association in turn informed which structures, institutions, and formations could be maintained from the past and which ones had to be discarded and replaced with new arrangements. Following the socialist government’s collapse, Poland adopted an economic reform program known as “shock therapy.” Its key tenets included the privatization of state-owned enterprises, the freeing of prices, the withdrawal of state subsidies, and free trade (Mandel and Humphrey 2002; Shields 2012b). These principles were advocated by international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and largely emulated the model of the United States and Britain—countries whose economies were, at the time, being reconfigured by neoliberalization processes.8 Poland, therefore, adopted capitalist reforms at the very time that capitalism was entering the neoliberal phase. The new economic and political solutions were shaped by neoliberal principles, ideologies, and discourses9 that were being formulated at the time by western states and institutions that served as Poland’s advisers, donors, and role models. These principles include individualism, flexibility, competition, private property, and mobility of capital (Ferguson 2010; Harvey 1989, 2005; Ong 2006).10 The reforms were often framed in terms of the country’s desire to “return to Europe,” a goal that was achieved in 2004 when Poland entered the European Union (EU). Since the EU is the principal “conduit through which the neoliberal economic and social model is being institutionalized in Europe” (Wahl 2004, 38), Poland’s entrance into EU structures provided a further impetus for the country to accept economic arrangements and modes of governing based on neoliberal principles.

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Much has changed in Poland over the past quarter of a century; the country is now hailed as a success story of the postsocialist transformation.11 And yet the past continues to enter into current politics, economic debates, and social issues, concerning everything from the retirement system to road construction for the 2012 European Football Championship. This mutually constitutive relationship between the past and the present is the focus of this book.

The Politics of Memory in Postsocialist Poland Major political, economic, and social upheavals and transformations are prime occasions when issues of memory come into play (e.g., Cole 2001; Jorgensen 1990; Passerini 1984). This, too, was the case in East-Central Europe. Following the collapse of socialist governments in 1989, former socialist states attempted to forge an entirely new political, economic, and social order. However, implementing major—and often painful—reforms required a good measure of popular consent (Hardy 2009). This was accomplished in part through a particular kind of remembering and forgetting. Across the region, different states adopted different ways of dealing with their socialist-era pasts. In Poland, the postsocialist period has been characterized by two different, and seemingly contradictory, trends. On the one hand, rapid political and economic changes occupied both the ruling elites and ordinary people with present concerns and questions about the future. As a result, some have prescribed leaving the past in the past and instead focusing on the present and future. On the other hand, those who wanted to break with the legacy of the socialist era and to build an entirely new political, economic, and social order pushed for an active reconsideration of the past that would effectively do away with socialist-era institutions, practices, and people. Over the past two decades, these two tendencies played out with varying intensities, depending in part on the political and economic climate at any given time. In the period immediately following the collapse of the socialist government, steps were taken to eliminate certain aspects of the socialist legacy in order to mark the arrival of a new political, economic, and social order. Many of these efforts concentrated on the symbolic domain, such as changing street names or toppling monuments to socialist-era heroes and erecting new ones. However, despite these symbolic changes, Poland’s first postsocialist government was focused primarily on overcoming past differences and building a new system (Śpiewak 2005). Not surprisingly, the idea of looking to the future was also readily embraced by the former socialist party, which was eager to reinvent itself in the changed political climate. In fact, only a few years later, that party’s leader won the country’s presidential election with the slogan “let’s choose the future.”

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In 1997, the past returned to politics with the return to power of the right-wing post-Solidarity party AWS (Akcja Wyborcza Solidarność, or Solidarity Voters’ Action). That year, a law on lustration was passed. Although the term “lustration” traditionally refers to purification ceremonies, in East-Central Europe it came to refer to the process of screening the past of influential public figures, in order to prevent people associated with the socialist-era secret police from participating in public life. In Poland, the law required high-profile public figures (including elected officials, lawyers, judges, university professors, school principals, and journalists) to declare any history they had of collaborating with the socialist-era security police (SB). In 1999, the government created an Institute of National Memory (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, or IPN), a state-funded agency whose goal is to preserve, manage, and disclose the material of state security agencies between 1944 and 1989, relating to both Nazi and communist-era crimes.12 Although over the years IPN has been plagued by numerous controversies, it is nonetheless a powerful agent in producting and disseminating ideas about the past. A few years passed, and the year 2004 marked what several historians identify as a turning point in the politics of history in Poland (Koczanowicz 2008; Nijakowski 2008). In that year, a major corruption scandal in the government was revealed and subsequently blamed on the remnants of the former socialist regime (Koczanowicz 2008). The political party in power at the time (incidentally, the Alliance of the Democratic Left, a party that grew out of the socialist-era governing party) was swept out in the 2005 elections and succeeded by the socially conservative party Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość), whose election program was explicitly based around an active politics of history and what its members termed “decommunization.” The lustration process intensified, leading to bitter public debates that quickly became polarized along political axes. Several more high-profile scandals followed, throwing into question the past of prominent public figures. Media attention to these events became tabloid-like, a fact that eventually dampened many people’s enthusiasm for “dealing with the past” and led to increased calls for the government to start dealing with more pressing issues in the present. Law and Justice ended up losing the subsequent 2007 election, and since then memory debates have somewhat calmed down. Nonetheless, the past remains a sensitive and often political issue. Different political parties are associated with different politics of memory; in fact, memory is one of the tools through which parties differentiate themselves from each other.13 Although different political parties deploy the past differently in their programs, for the most part they draw from the same repertoire of representations. These representations are produced by key opinion-forming

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institutions, including the media, schools, museums, and research institutions such as the Institute of National Memory or the Karta Center. They tend to focus on certain topics, including restrictions on people’s rights and liberties (for example, censorship or surveillance on the part of the state security police), political resistance (for example, strikes, demonstrations, and underground activism), and inefficiencies (for example, endemic shortages or empty shelves). From this we can observe that the socialist past tends to be depicted and perceived through the keywords of repression, resistance, and inefficiency.14 These keywords provide tools for people to think with and talk about the past, although they can also constrain what can be talked about and how. To be sure, Poland’s socialist-era history undeniably consists of experiences of repression, resistance, and inefficiency. However, it also consists of other experiences that are not as readily highlighted in dominant accounts of the past. These include near-universal employment, education, and literacy; postwar rebuilding; and industrialization. Although these factors could well be considered accomplishments of the socialist period, they are often undermined, explained away, or dismissed as small compensation for greater evils such as censorship and political repression (Majmurek and Szumlewicz 2010). Economic and political arrangements associated with the socialist state, such as a well-developed public sector or the separation between state and church, are generally presented as radical and communist, even though these same arrangements may also exist in contemporary western capitalist democracies (Majmurek and Szumlewicz 2010). I should clarify here that the narrative of repression, resistance, and inefficiency is not imposed on the population by force, and alternative views on the past are certainly not banned or persecuted. Poland is a democratic country with freedom of thought and speech enshrined in the constitution, and there is no government-run censorship office that screens all publicly disseminated messages, of the sort that existed during the socialist period.15 However, for the most part, alternative accounts do not achieve widespread resonance and tend to get co-opted into the dominant narrative without significantly disrupting it.16 This should not come as a surprise; after all, it is the victors who get to write history (Burke 1989). In Poland, these victors are people who were members of the political opposition in the 1980s, who likely had negative experiences of the socialist political and economic arrangements. Following the collapse of the socialist government, these people subsequently assumed influential political, economic, and intellectual positions as politicians, CEOs, owners of media outlets, directors of museums and research centers, and so on. It is not that these political and economic elites are manipulating the population or imposing a certain version of history by force. However, people who run these institutions have

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considerable power to shape public opinion. Furthermore, the narratives produced by various opinion-making institutions often inform and reinforce each other; for example, research institutions often organize commemorative events for school groups and produce educational materials for classroom use. And ultimately, the reason why the narrative of repression, resistance, and inefficiency has become so widespread is because it resonates with the experiences of a large portion of Poland’s population. However, all of this does not mean that everyone shares one uniform and static interpretation of the past. In fact, even state-owned or state-funded institutions do not always speak with the same voice. “The state,” after all, is not one monolithic entity; rather, it is made up of numerous institutions, networks, and people, who operate at different scales and pursue sometimes different agendas. “The state” can include both national- and municipallevel politicians; the national minister of education as well as teachers who are charged with implementing the educational curriculum; the head of a state-funded institution such as the Institute of National Memory but also historians who work at a local museum. All of these individuals may draw from a shared repertoire of keywords, but they can invoke them differently to construct different meanings. Furthermore, it is important to remember that no state exists in an enclosed bubble, separate from other global political, economic, and social processes. In Poland, representations of the past produced at the national level both inform and are informed by discourses produced by European Union (EU) institutions. Memory is an important component in the project of European integration, since it is seen as a means of forging a shared identity among EU member states (e.g., Shore 2000; Killingsworth 2010). In fact, European Parliament’s 2009 resolution on “European conscience and totalitarianism” states that “Europe will not be united unless it is able to form a common view of its history.”17 In order to achieve this integration, the EU funds educational and commemorative initiatives dealing with topics that have previously divided the continent, such as World War II or socialism. For the most part, the message conveyed through these projects is that socialism represents a dark stain on the continent’s history and that Europe must build a shared future based on leaving behind that legacy.18 On the one hand, these representations of the past set the tone for the representations produced at the national level in EU member states (although this does not mean that they cannot be contested). On the other hand, representations produced at the national level also inform these large representations; for example, many of the EU’s commemorative projects relating to the socialist legacy are spearheaded by former socialist states, Poland among them.

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In sum, the keywords of repression, resistance, and inefficiency provide a framework through which the socialist past is often discussed and perceived in Poland. However, as we will see throughout this work, there is considerable room for maneuvers within this framework. Keywords can be stretched so that their meaning can change over time. They can also be challenged altogether, and new alternative concepts can be introduced. As we have seen, the past is political. Furthermore, it is also religious. In Poland, the Catholic Church was an important agent of resistance to the socialist government in the 1980s, as a result of which it gained a tremendous amount of public authority. Following the socialist government’s collapse, the church emerged as a major political and social force, backed by the country’s two largest political parties. In particular, the church has a strong connection to Poland’s nationalist and conservative party Law and Justice. Civic Platform, Poland’s governing party since 2007 and still at the time of this writing in 2014, depicts itself as more secular; nonetheless, it is made up of many socially conservative and religious politicians and in general does not challenge the church’s influence on public life. Thus, the church enjoys a powerful platform for disseminating a narrative on the past that depicts the socialist state as a repressive force and highlights its own role as an agent of resistance. In these representations, Catholicism, nationalism, and anticommunism go hand in hand. Since most Poles identify as Catholic (to a greater or lesser degree), this narrative has considerable influence on contemporary Polish national identity. Above I have sketched out the contours of the politics of memory in postsocialist Poland. In this book I look at how debates about the socialist past are worked out in one concrete locality: Nowa Huta.

Nowa Huta Because of its unique location in the Polish history and imagination, Nowa Huta presents a particular set of opportunities and challenges for a study that seeks to explore the role of memory at a time of political, economic, and social change. Nowa Huta was originally built by Poland’s postwar socialist government as a model socialist town and thus occupied a strategic role in the national imagination. However, because of its association with socialism, Nowa Huta was widely contested in popular opinion (as opposed to official state-produced representations). Over time, the district became a site of resistance to the socialist government. At present, Nowa Huta continues to occupy an ambiguous place in the national imagination—a place that is currently being negotiated in local representations. This work is not only set in Nowa Huta—it is also about Nowa Huta.

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Anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues that a site such as a town or a village offers “a particular configuration in time and space of the processes that affect the nation. It is a ‘conjuncture,’ an empirical moment in which those processes merge concretely within the daily existence of specific historical actors” (1988, 184–85). And indeed, much can be learned about people’s experiences of socialism and the postsocialist transformation in Poland by looking at Nowa Huta’s history and the lives of its residents. Initially a pet project of the socialist government, Nowa Huta offers a vivid case study of how socialist ideas were made concrete in a real place and in people’s everyday lives. The district’s history illustrates that whereas some elements of the socialist project worked, others did not and were resisted and ultimately overthrown. Following the collapse of the socialist government, the country embraced neoliberal capitalist reforms, including the privatization of state enterprises and decline of state support for areas of public value. The case of Nowa Huta shows how these reforms were worked out in the cityscape and in the lives of the district’s residents. The experiences of Nowa Huta residents will certainly resonate with the experiences of residents of other Polish cities, as well as the residents of other former industrial cities from elsewhere across the former Soviet Bloc. However, Nowa Huta cannot be seen as a “typical” or “representative” Polish city, let alone a “typical” socialist industrial city. From an anthropological perspective, every city is different, although the case of any given city can contribute to our understanding of certain larger processes and phenomena. In this manner, for instance, a researcher interested in the fate of former industrial North American cities might choose to conduct research in, say, Detroit, Pittsburgh, or Youngstown, Ohio. None of these can be said to be the “typical” American city, and there are certainly differences between them; at the same time, each would tell us something important about the trajectory of industrialization and deindustrialization in North America. In a similar vein, although Nowa Huta cannot be seen as “representative” of Poland on the whole, it offers a very poignant concentration of events, processes, and experiences that have shaped the nation (and indeed, the region) since the end of World War II. The case of Nowa Huta also allows us to see how memories are produced, reproduced, and perhaps contested at different scales. As newly postsocialist states moved away from centralized planning, local regional and municipal communities assumed greater powers and responsibilities. Among other things, this means that cities are now more actively involved in producing local place-based identities, built in part on local memories and histories (Ochman 2013). In some cases, narratives produced at the local level can disrupt national historical narratives; in other cases, they reinforce

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and validate them. At times larger regional or supranational identities (for example, a pan-European identity) trump national ones. Throughout this book I examine how representations of the past produced by Nowa Huta institutions and residents engage with the representations produced at the national and supranational scales.

Frameworks, Perspectives, and Building Blocks The postsocialist part of Europe is a fruitful terrain for anthropological exploration, for the postsocialist transformation is a process that offers an opportunity to engage with some of the discipline’s central concerns, including the relationship among economy, politics, and culture; the construction and negotiation of national, ethnic, religious, and gender identities; the global and the local; modernity and tradition; and continuity and change (see also Berdahl 1999, 11). Anthropologists who conduct research in that part of Europe view the events of 1989 as a turning point that rearranged the global geopolitical landscape that had been in place since World War II and brought profound political, economic, and social changes to that part of the continent (e.g., Verdery 2002). Furthermore, anthropological research on postsocialist European states can illuminate our understanding of phenomena that transcend the socialist/postsocialist context. These include, for instance: the processes of industrialization and deindustrialization; the shift from a Fordist to a neoliberal relationship among the state, economy, and labor; and the relationship between socialism and capitalism. This work is about how people experience historical change and invest the past with meanings that reflect present conditions, needs, and concerns. I became interested in this topic when I realized that my fieldwork in the year 2009–10 would coincide with several important historical anniversaries. The year 2009 marked the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of socialist governments across East-Central Europe, as well as the sixtieth anniversary of the town of Nowa Huta. Since anniversaries are “conjunctures in which memories are produced and activated” (Jelin 2003, 64), it seemed particularly fitting to use the idiom of memory as a lens for looking at how historical change is experienced and negotiated by different people and at different sites and scales (e.g., people’s accounts, museum representations, school curricula). I was especially curious how a former model socialist town would celebrate its construction the same year that the rest of the country (and indeed, the rest of the continent) was celebrating socialism’s collapse. Furthermore, the previous year (2008) had brought a worldwide real estate crash and an ensuing global economic recession. I wanted to see how this issue was being addressed in Poland and whether people would draw on the country’s fairly recent experience of a fundamen-

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tally different political-economic system to propose alternative political and economic arrangements. My use of the memory framework is inspired by anthropological and historical works that have used memory as a lens for understanding the relationship between structural processes and people’s experiences at times of major political, economic, and social changes and upheavals, such as colonialism or dictatorship (e.g., Cole 2001; Dubois 2005; Passerini 1987). I also draw on the growing body of literature concerned specifically with memory of the socialist past in East-Central Europe (e.g., Berdahl 2010; Pine, Haukanes, and Kaneff 2004a; Rausing 2004; Ten Dyke 2000, 2001; Todorova 2010). These works deploy the lens of memory in various ways. Some examine the role of museums, archives, and textbooks in creating and/or contesting memories (e.g., Ten Dyke 2000; Khazanov 2000; Sarkisova and Apor 2008; Todorova 2010). Some focus on changes to landscape elements, such as museums or street names, or contestations over historical sites (e.g., Hałas 2004; Main 2005; Nadkarni 2003). Others look at the representations of the socialist past in fiction and popular culture (e.g., Sarkisova and Apor 2008). And last, there is a growing body of research concerned with the phenomenon labeled “post-socialist nostalgia” (e.g., Klumbyte 2008; Spaskovska 2008; Todorova and Gille 2010). What these works have in common is that they are broadly concerned with “how the past lives in the present” (Lemon 2008) and what people’s memories of the past can tell us about current political, economic, and social issues—a focus that I also adopt in this work. Classic memory theorists such as Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora envision memory as firmly separate from history; my work, however, is informed by more recent theoretical approaches that stress the overlaps and continuities between the two (e.g., Cubitt 2007; Iggers 2005; Kansteiner 2002; Olick and Robbins 1998). As historian Jay Winter points out, “in virtually all acts of remembrance, history and memory are braided together in the public domain, jointly informing our shifting and contested understanding of the past” (2008, 6).19 Memory, therefore, is never separate from the representations produced in politics, the media, and history. Recent theoretical approaches in memory studies also point to the mutually constitutive relationship between individual and collective memories. Individual memories are shaped and informed by a “common stock of social memories” (Brundage 2000, 4; see also Hodgkin and Randstone 2003; Misztal 2003; Middleton and Edwards 1990b). When telling stories about the past, people draw on existing cultural frameworks and interpretations, often disregarding or discarding elements that do not fit the prevailing conventions (e.g., Welzer 2010; Hewer and Kut 2010). At the same time, in-

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dividual memories in turn shape cultural systems of representations, so that “cultural memories are constituted by the cumulative weight of dispersed and fragmented individual memories” (Hodgkin and Randstone 2003, 5). In this work, I explore how this dynamic works in Nowa Huta. I show that memories of the socialist period as a time of repression, resistance, and inefficiency became legitimized in state-sanctioned representations, and now constitute the dominant narrative on the past. This narrative in turn informs how people structure their personal reflections and recollections. However, people do not always align their stories with the dominant historical narrative; on the contrary, they may consciously challenge it. Memory is also a mediator among the past, present, and future, always shaped and articulated in relation to larger political, economic, and social conditions and processes. Memory is not just about the past, but rather, about the “past-present relation” (Popular Memory Group 1982, 211); that is, we draw on the past to help us make sense of the present and guide future actions (Halbwachs 1992; Climo and Cattell 2002b; Misztal 2003; Lowenthal 1985). Memories are thus deployed to “make . . . the present meaningful” and to “support . . . the present with a past that logically leads to a future that the individual or group now finds acceptable” (Teski and Climo 1995, 3). One of the questions taken up in this book is how people’s memories of the socialist period inform their perceptions of current political, economic, and social conditions and, in turn, how their present-day experiences, needs, and concerns influence how they remember the past. Recent literature on memory also emphasizes the relationship between memory and identity. Memory, like identity, is always a process rather than a finished product. On the one hand, memory is a tool for forging and negotiating identities, since it provides people with “understandings and symbolic frameworks that enable them to make sense of the world” (Misztal 2003, 13). On the other hand, how people want to see and represent themselves, and be seen by others, also shapes what they choose to remember and how (Gillis 1996, 3). Memories are deployed to forge group solidarities and a sense of collective belonging, a function that is particularly important in societies undergoing major political, economic or social changes (e.g., Climo and Cattell 2002; Fentress and Wickham 1992; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Olick and Robbins 1998). Fentress and Wickham argue that “memory is widely called upon to legitimate identity because the core meaning of any individual or group identity is seen as sustained by remembering. . . . Social memory, according to this perspective, is an expression of collective experience which identifies a group, giving it a sense of its past and defining its aspirations for the future” (1992, 25). The past, accessed through “mnemonic practices and sites” such as cel-

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ebrations, heritage, heroes, language, monuments, and museums, serves as a “basis for social cohesion among groups, including nations, or creates the illusion of consensus, such as legitimizing a government” (Cattel and Climo 2002, 35). At times, former identities are forgotten so that new ones can be formed, especially in societies undergoing major upheavals or transformations. For instance, Natzmer notes that “in a society where the past is highly contested, the ability to create a social history or national narrative that can accommodate the memories of opposing groups may well determine the success of reconciliation efforts” (2002, 161). In Poland, following the collapse of the socialist government, a new narrative on the past was needed in order to (1) legitimize the new postsocialist government and a new political and economic order and (2) provide a shared identity with which the majority of the population could identify (at least to a certain extent). However, it is worth remembering that memories not only serve a cohesive function but can also be contested and become objects of identity claims and political projects (Hodgkin and Radstone 2003; Olick and Robbins 1998; Popular Memory Group 1982). This work looks at how people engage with, and sometimes contest, the dominant narrative on the past. It also reflects on whether alternate memories can constitute a challenge to the unwanted aspects of the political and economic status quo. Within a society, certain representations of the past are dominant; that is, they are produced and disseminated by the society’s influential institutions, such as the media, schools, or research centers (Popular Memory Group 1982). These dominant representations can become hegemonic, meaning they can gain popular resonance and become part of people’s system of “meanings, values and practices” (Williams 1977, 110–55). These meanings, perceived as “simple experience and common sense,” in turn constitute and reinforce the current political-economic order. However, hegemony is never complete; rather, it is always a process that “has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended and modified” (Williams 1977, 112). As William Roseberry notes, even within a “dominant culture,” there are always “lines of cleavage and conflict,” and while some meanings will find resonance with the experiences of ordinary people, other meanings “may directly conflict with lived experience” (1989, 47). To put it differently, there is no such thing as one uniform memory that is shared by all members of a group or society, although a particular version of the past may gain widespread acceptance. In her research on memories of repression in South America, Elizabeth Jelin observes: “At any time and place, it is unthinkable to find One memory, a single vision and interpretation of the past shared by a whole society (whatever its scope and size). There may be historical times when agreement is higher, when a single script of the past is more

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pervasive or dominant. That script will usually be the story of the winners in historical conflicts and battles” (2003, 54). To borrow Jelin’s language, the currently dominant “script of the past” in Poland is that of the socialist period as a time of repression, resistance, and inefficiency. This script is written primarily by the “winners” of the postsocialist transformation (meaning people who were active in the political opposition to the socialist government and, following that government’s collapse, assumed leading political, economic, and intellectual positions) and reproduced by opinion-forming institutions such as schools. Poland is a democratic country, and so this script is not imposed on the population by force. Rather, it has become hegemonic, meaning that the majority of the population identifies with it (at least to a certain extent). However, as Roseberry points out, hegemony is never complete. One of the questions taken up in this book is how people’s accounts of the past either reproduce or challenge the hegemonic narrative on the past. I also ask how much power so-called ordinary people have to frame and reframe the terms in which the past is remembered and whether these memories have the potential to critique, or offer alternatives to, present political and economic arrangements.20 There are many ways of studying memory, for it resides in countless sites and practices, including stories, rituals, books, statues, speeches, images, surveys, commemorations, and celebrations (Olick 2008). In this work I decided to capture memories of the socialist period in Nowa Huta by focusing on certain key contexts in which memories are produced, transmitted, and perhaps reworked or contested. These sites include: Nowa Huta’s urban landscape, such as street names and monuments; museums and commemorative activities; the steelworks; and the accounts of residents of different generations. This approach is loosely inspired by Pierre Nora’s concept of “lieux de memoire,” or sites of memory (1989).21 The concept of “sites” draws attention to the centrality of place and locality in shaping people’s identities and memories (see also Benjamin 1979; Casey 2000; Feld and Basso 1996; Stewart and Strathern 2003). My treatment of Nowa Huta as not merely a backdrop for social action, but as an object of analysis in itself, is inspired by similar approaches on the part of anthropologists who used a place, its landscape and history, to examine memory and identity at times of political, economic, and social change (e.g., Richardson 2008; Ten Dyke 2001; Weszkalnys 2010). This literature shows that people’s identities and memories of past events are constituted by places and articulated with relation to places. And in turn, places are inscribed with meanings and memories, which are often multiple, contradictory, and subject to change (Bender 1998; Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2003). A place has not one but many identities and

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histories, and these are always in the process of being constructed. The identities of place are always “bound up with the histories which are told of them, how those histories are told, and which history turns out to be dominant” (Massey 1995, 186). In this book I thus approach Nowa Huta as a place that is continually constructed through the interaction of numerous narratives about the past—narratives that reflect various (and changing) agendas, ideologies, and visions of the future. This book deploys the lens of generation to explore how people’s subjectivities are shaped by the intersection of personal and national histories. To that end, I ask how the socialist period is remembered by people who have lived through it and also how it is perceived by people too young to have any personal remembrances of it. This approach is informed by the work of theorists such as Karl Mannheim (1972) and Philip Abrams (1982), who have defined generations not only in terms of biological age or kinship descent (e.g., parent, child, grandparent) but also in terms of the historical events that have shaped a person. According to this approach generation is a social location occupied by people whose consciousness was shaped by the same historical events and processes and who thus share a similar “system of meanings and possibilities” (Abrams 1982, 256). This concept of generation can overlap with other ones, such as generation as biological category or generation as cohort (Kertzer 1982). However, generations are not “given” or “natural”; rather, they are “produced through common experience and through discourse about it” (Yurchak 2006, 30). Therefore, the concept of generation refers both to “characteristics resulting from shared experiences” and to characteristics that are “ascribed . . . from the outside . . . in the interest of establishing demarcations and reducing complexity” (Reulecke 2008, 119). Drawing on the above literature, in this work I make a broad distinction between people who experienced (and who remember) life in socialist Poland and those who do not. This approach assumes that the historical period dating from the end of World War II in 1945 (at which point the socialist government came into power in Poland) to 1989 (the socialist government’s collapse) is sufficiently different (politically, economically, and socially) from the period that began in 1989 and continues until the present so as to have given rise to different historical generations. This distinction between these two broad historical generations can be found in both scholarly and popular accounts (see, e.g., Markowitz 2000; Raleigh 2012; Roberts 2003, 2009; Yurchak 2006). However, I will also show that both of these broad historical generations can be further subdivided into cohorts. Furthermore, I recognize from the outset that generation is never the only factor influencing a person’s outlook or sub-

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jectivity; rather, these are always also shaped by an intersection of factors, including gender, socioeconomic status, place of residence, and others.

Finding Memory in Nowa Huta I ended up doing research in Nowa Huta partly by design and partly by serendipity. Ever since I began planning my research project I knew I wanted to carry it out in Kraków, the city of my birth and childhood. When I went back to Kraków for a preliminary research trip in the summer of 2008 and talked to people about wanting to study how the socialist period is remembered, I kept getting directed to Nowa Huta, the city’s industrial district. Having grown up in Kraków, I was not unfamiliar with Nowa Huta; as a matter of fact, I have some family connections to the district. My grandfather was one of the so-called builders of Nowa Huta, meaning one of the district’s founding residents who moved there in the early 1950s to work on the district’s construction as part of a mandatory youth work brigade. My mother was born and spent her childhood in Nowa Huta. My great uncle played basketball for Nowa Huta’s local team and then worked as a gym teacher and basketball coach in one of the local schools. Anthropologists are always mindful of the fact that both the research process and the type of information one collects are always influenced by the positionality of the researcher and his/her relationship to the people whom s/he is studying. Throughout my research, I was conscious of my own somewhat ambiguous position of simultaneous insider and outsider, or what Abu-Lughod terms a “halfie” (1991). By nature of having grown up in Poland, I speak Polish, and I am familiar with Polish social and cultural conventions. However, my adult life was spent in Canada, where I also permanently live and work. Nowa Huta residents who wondered why someone from Canada was interested in their district seemed satisfied when I explained to them my family history. Being seen as an outsider to local political agendas and networks certainly helped in procuring interviews, since to this day, the socialist period in Poland continues to be a sensitive and politically charged topic for some people. It also allowed me to ask certain “stupid,” “obvious,” or “inappropriate” questions with which I might not have gotten away had people perceived me as a 100 percent native researcher. At the same time, being aware of social conventions, I was more hesitant to broach certain subjects that a complete foreigner might have done with greater ease. For example, mindful of how bitter and divisive recent memory debates have been, and of their polarization along political-religious lines, I never directly asked people about their political affiliation or voting behavior. I conducted research in Nowa Huta from August 2009 to June 2010.

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During that time, I volunteered with the local cultural center and two local museums: I helped the museums with translations and with organizing exhibits and educational programs, and I held a weekly English conversation circle at the cultural center for its employees. I attended community events, including commemorative ceremonies, meetings pertaining to revitalization initiatives, and cultural events such as movie screenings or exhibit openings. I went on numerous walking and bus tours around the district, usually organized by the local museum or the cultural center. I gratefully accepted all dinner invitations from family members who lived in the area. I gave English lessons to three Nowa Huta residents. If I had time to spare in between meetings and events I would pop into the local coffee shop to read the local newspaper and catch up with the owner or stop by one of the organizations where I volunteered, where someone would always find time to offer me a cup of tea. In addition to participant observation in Nowa Huta I also held interviews with Nowa Huta residents or people who had strong work or personal attachments to the district. My goal was to reach people who could tell me about different aspects of life in Nowa Huta, past and present. For example, because the steel industry played a key role in Nowa Huta’s history, I sought out both past and present steelworkers. Since I was interested in change over time and in people’s experiences of different historical events, I looked for residents of different generations, from the district’s founding residents to their teenage grandchildren. In the end, the people with whom I spoke ranged in age from high school students to Nowa Huta’s first builders, who are now in their eighties, and in occupation from current and retired steelworkers to employees of cultural institutions such as museums or cultural centers. I do not claim that these people were “representative” of Nowa Huta’s population on the whole—to do so would assume that there is such a thing as a “typical” Nowa Huta resident. From an anthropological perspective, it is impossible to find a person who is “typical” or “representative” of any given group or community; and yet every person’s story can tell us something about the place, time, politics, economics, and society in which they live. My goal was to capture the voices of people who could speak to different aspects of Nowa Huta’s history and to current political, economic, and social issues affecting the district. I cannot pretend that this work reflects all the voices and experiences that exist in Nowa Huta; however, I hope that it captures some of that polyphony.22 The Nowa Huta residents with whom I spoke occupied different social locations, and part of my effort in this book consists of coming to an understanding of how these people come to hold (and to articulate) sometimes diametrically different reflections on the past. When I talked to very

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different people, from Solidarity leaders to former Party members, I often found myself getting pulled in different directions and empathizing with different points of view. Fortunately, it was not my task as an anthropologist to determine the “true” version of Nowa Huta’s history (if there can even be such a thing) or to judge the validity of different people’s interpretations of the past. Rather, my goal in this book is to showcase the richness, diversity, and messiness of people’s experiences and memories and to consider what role these messy memories play at a time of political, economic, and social change.

CHAPTER 1 Memory and Change in Nowa Huta’s Cityscape The city itself is the collective memory of its people. —Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City

I

f you and I arrive in Kraków and ask for directions to Nowa Huta, we will be told to take the streetcar to Central Square (Plac Centralny) and get off there. The square is actually more of a transportation circle where five streets converge. If we stand in the very center, in the small green area surrounded by streetcar tracks, we can see many defining features of Nowa Huta that speak to different aspects of the district’s history. The square is surrounded by buildings in the socialist realist style, although the tourist could be forgiven for confusing it with Renaissance style, for the buildings’ defining features are arches and columns. These buildings used to house some of the nicest stores in Nowa Huta, including the popular fashion boutique Moda Polska (literally “Polish Fashion”) and the popular bookstore chain Empik. Neither one is here anymore, and instead the store space is taken up by banks, a cell phone store, a grocery store, a flower shop, another bookstore, a German drug store chain, and a liquor store that is open around the clock. The top floors of the buildings are residential. In front of the storefronts stand a few kiosks selling newspapers and cigarettes, as well as a few pretzel stands, whose wares are hungrily snatched up by passersby rushing to and from work. From here, we can travel in several directions. To the north lies a square where a statue of Lenin used to stand. This is where May 1st parades1 would take place under the watchful eye of the leader of the Russian revolution. The square was renovated after Lenin’s eviction from Nowa Huta and is now a favorite location among skateboarders. The sound of their skateboards hitting the concrete echoes throughout the square, much to the chagrin of the residents of surrounding buildings who complain about the noise. The square is lined with benches, which on warmer days are occu21

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pied by seniors and parents or grandparents watching over small children who use the square for their first biking or rollerblading lessons. An ice cream stand under one of the archways tempts passersby with what is reportedly the best ice cream in Nowa Huta. The buildings surrounding the square house a milk bar and the town’s legendary restaurant Stylowa, both of which we would have visited if we had gone on the communist tour described in the introduction. There is also a dubious-quality pub, a bakery and pastry shop, yet another f lower shop, and a photographer’s studio. If we return to Central Square and look south, in the exact opposite direction, we will see Nowa Huta’s meadow, stretching out over an area of approximately half a square kilometer. This wetland is home to many bird and flower species and is now a protected area. Locals use the newly built path across the fields for strolling or walking their dogs. On hot summer days one can always spot several sun enthusiasts sprawled out on blankets. Far in the distance, beyond the meadow, we can see two fat smokestacks and two skinny ones—that is the power plant on the border area between Nowa Huta and Kraków, in a neighborhood called Łęg. The juxtaposition of green space with chimney stacks is quite striking and is used in many local representations of Nowa Huta.

Aerial view of Nowa Huta’s central core. Photo by Marcin Kaproń, from the archives of the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków.

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Aerial view of Nowa Huta’s oldest neighborhoods, with the steelworks looming in the distance. Photo by Marcin Kaproń, from the archives of the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków.

Central Square. Photo by the author.

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Avenue of the Roses. Photo by the author.

Nowa Huta’s meadows, with smokestacks from the power plant looming in the distance. One of the emblematic images of Nowa Huta, often used in local representations. Photo by the author.

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If we stand in the middle of Central Square once again and look down the road leading northwest, far in the distance we will see what looks like a castle perched on top of a gentle hill. From here we can just barely see buildings with crenellated roofs, reminiscent of the Doges’ Palace in Venice. That is not a palace, however—it is the administrative center and the entrance to the steelworks. We will go inside the gates in the next chapter. Right now, our focus is on the town itself. Nowa Huta (literally New Steelworks) is a district of the city of Kraków constituting approximately a third of its surface area and population. At present, its population stands at approximately 220,000 people. Originally built in 1949 as a separate town, in 1951 Nowa Huta became incorporated into the city of Kraków as one of its administrative districts. However, it has always maintained a very distinct identity from the rest of the city. The history of Nowa Huta can be seen in many ways as the history of postwar Poland “in a nutshell” (Stenning 2008). It was originally built by the postwar socialist government and intended to be the country’s flagship socialist town that would embody the processes of industrialization, urbanization, and the creation of a new working class—the basic tenets of postwar socialist philosophy. Ironically, over time Nowa Huta also became an important site of dissent to the socialist government. After that government’s collapse, Nowa Huta became transformed by the processes of economic restructuring, deindustrialization, and globalization. This chapter begins with an outline of Nowa Huta’s history from its construction to the present. The events and phenomena described here will be referred to throughout the book, for they recur in people’s stories and in the district’s public representations. I then examine how this history is reflected, negotiated, obliterated, or rewritten in the cityscape as Nowa Huta tries to reinvent its image and economy in the changed political and economic order.

A Model Socialist Town The history of the town of Nowa Huta begins in the period immediately following World War II, when Poland became governed by a socialist party backed by the Soviet Union. Socialist ideology emphasized industrialization and urbanization as vehicles to growth, modernization, and progress. Consequently, across the Soviet Bloc, new industrial sites and projects were being built along with new towns that were to house their workforce. Almost every Soviet Bloc country had its flagship town that was to embody socialist principles in urban planning, economic development, and social organization (Aman 1992). In Poland, this model socialist town was Nowa Huta.2

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The decision to build a new steelworks in Poland was made on May 17, 1947, and was the cornerstone of the socialist government’s economic plan (termed the Six-Year Plan) for the years 1950–56. At the time, Poland’s political and economic policy was heavily influenced by the Soviet Union under Stalin’s reign, and the Six-Year Plan reflected the Soviet Stalinist-era emphasis on the development of heavy industry. Two years later, it was determined that the country’s new flagship industrial project would be built on the outskirts of Kraków. Along with a new steelworks, a new town was to be built to house its workforce, the new socialist working class. Building Nowa Huta was thus “synonymous with building socialism itself ” (Lebow 1999, 167). The construction of the town’s first residential buildings began in 1949, the construction of the steelworks a year later. The labor power was recruited from all over Poland, composed of predominantly young work migrants who sought work in the growing town in the light of the postwar poverty in Poland’s countryside, as well as mandatory youth labor brigades called Service to Poland (Służba Polsce). Service to Poland was a national organization intended to provide youth between sixteen and twenty-one years of age with work-related training, military training, and physical education, and to inculcate in them a socialist political and ideological consciousness (Lebow 2013; Lesiakowski 2008). As the country’s model socialist town, Nowa Huta became the organization’s flagship assignment. As Katherine Lebow writes, building Nowa Huta was depicted as a “pedagogical project—both in the practical sense (as a kind of giant vocational school offering training for all) and also, more abstractly, as a site of personal formation and transformation” (2013, 54). And finally, newcomers to Nowa Huta also included former Home Army (Armia Krajowa, or AK) soldiers who could more easily lose themselves in the hustle and bustle of a new town to avoid persecution;3 a sizeable Roma minority, forcibly settled by the government in urban areas; and a small number of Greek refugees, fleeing civil war at home (Miezian 2004). Although work on the town’s construction was physically demanding and characterized by very high turnover, about one-third of the people who came to Nowa Huta in the late 1940s and 1950s ended up settling there for good (Lebow 2013). It is well documented that states often govern through the ordering of spaces, as well as people and objects within spaces (see, e.g., Hall 1996; Rabinow 1989; Scott 1998). This tendency is particularly visible in twentiethcentury modernist thought, which considered architecture and urban planning to be instruments of social change (Holston 1989). Many of the ideas and principles developed by modernist architects and urban planners were adopted in Soviet Bloc countries, where the physical transformation of space was an important element of the socialist project, aimed at creating a

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new form of society (Crowley and Reid 2002; Czepczyński 2008; Nawratek 2005). Geographer Mariusz Czepczyński argues that socialist ideology was characterized by a “strong structuralist belief that social and living conditions create the individual, his or her personality and value system” (2008, 67). Socialist leaders believed that “new ways of organizing the home, the workplace or the street would . . . produce new social relations that would, in turn, produce a new consciousness” (Crowley and Reid 2002, 15). The socialist architect and urban planner thus became an “engineer of the human soul” (Czepczyński 2010). Urbanization was one of the key tenets of the socialist government’s project of building a new society. Consequently, many elements of the urban landscape took on a political significance (Czepczyński 2010, 19). Nowa Huta epitomizes this tendency on the part of the socialist state to try to forge a new political, economic, and social order through the organization of space. The town’s very name (New Steelworks) signifies its role as Poland’s first socialist town, home to the first large steelworks in the country, named after Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. Many Nowa Huta streets and neighborhoods were also given names that depicted what was intended to be the new reality. For example, two of Nowa Huta’s neighborhoods were called “Steel” and “Youth,” and street names commemorated socialist heroes Lenin and Marx; Polish communist activists such as Julian Leński and Władysław Kniewski; and events such as the October Revolution, the Six-Year Plan, and Polish-Russian friendship. Poems and songs praised the growing town; for example, Polish poet (and later Nobel prize winner) Wisława Szymborska referred to Nowa Huta in one of her poems as the “town of good fortune” (miasto dobrego losu). School textbooks hailed Nowa Huta as a symbol of “fighting for socialism” and “fighting for the 6-year plan” (Samsonowska 2002). Movies, songs, and poems evoked images of happy shirtless bricklayers from the Service to Poland brigade singing at work, new buildings springing up, and smiling children playing in new playgrounds. In all, Nowa Huta was depicted as a town of youth and opportunity, a place where young people from all over the country came to escape the supposed “backwardness” and “misery” of peasant life to work, get an education, start families, and build their lives. The design of Nowa Huta’s urban plan and architecture was inspired by elements of modernist urban planning, adapted to socialist ideology and to the Polish context in particular. The town’s urban layout was designed by architect Tadeusz Ptaszycki, who combined certain Soviet solutions with modernist and utopian ideas from outside of the Soviet Bloc. For example, the design of Nowa Huta’s urban core, with streets radiating at a fortyfive-degree angle from the center, was inspired by the prevailing Soviet trends in urban design at the time. Also modeled on Soviet urban planning

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were large precincts, closed off from main streets (Aman 1992). On the other hand, a number of Nowa Huta’s design ideas were imported from outside of the Soviet Bloc. One such concept was the neighborhood unit, initially developed in New York City in the early 1900s (Perry 1974). According to this design principle, the town is divided into neighborhoods. Each neighborhood consists of a cluster of buildings, which, taken together, house between four and five thousand people. Each neighborhood contains all the basic infrastructure and services necessary for the everyday functioning of its residents, including a school, a day care, and a grocery store (Miezian 2004; Juchnowicz 2005). To this day, the neighborhood serves as a topographical reference point for Nowa Huta residents. When people are asked where they live, they give the name of their neighborhood instead of a street intersection, and Nowa Huta postal addresses contain no street names, making it initially confusing to navigate for anyone not familiar with the district. When I asked Nowa Huta residents what they like about their district, many people mentioned the urban design. This is noteworthy, because centrally planned neighborhoods of the socialist era now have a bad reputation in Poland: they are popularly seen as ugly, poorly constructed, and decaying. However, many Nowa Huta residents praise the proximity and availability

New life in a new town. Photo by Henryk Hermanowicz, from the archives of the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków.

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Nowa Huta’s urban plan, informed by the neighborhood unit principle.

of all essential infrastructure and services, which they favourably compare with recent trends in real estate development. Mr. Pawłowski, 4 a retired steelworker in his eighties, told me: “There are some beautiful new buildings being built around Nowa Huta. But you see how they are squeezed together; developers don’t care if people have any green space at all, or if they won’t have a store close by to get milk. So you see, there is a difference in the way of thinking between the new, good leaders and the old, evil [wredne] ones.” (The words “good” and “evil” were said in an ironic tone.) In these words, Mr. Pawłowski praised the aesthetics of contemporary real estate but critiqued the way commercial interests trump the public ones. Socialist-era central planning, he suggested, was comprehensive and intended to provide the residents with a good quality of life, whereas contemporary real estate development is piecemeal and driven solely by developers’ quest for profit. His comments were echoed by many Nowa Huta residents. Many seniors positively remarked on the walking-distance accessibility of grocery stores and pharmacies. A few mothers commented that the layout of the neighborhoods, with a courtyard surrounded on all sides by buildings, made it possible for children to play outside by themselves, since they were less likely to run out onto a busy street.

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A Nowa Huta neighborhood. Photo by the author.

Nowa Huta, the Garden City: feeding birds on the man-made pond (zalew). Photo by the author.

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Nowa Huta, the Garden City: a garden plot. Photo by the author.

Another principle that underpinned Nowa Huta’s construction was the “Garden City” concept, modeled on the utopian ideas of Ebenezer Howard (1966). Garden Cities were intended to be self-contained communities surrounded by greenbelts and containing proportionate areas of residences, industry, and agriculture. These principles subsequently influenced the construction of many towns in Britain, the United States, Latin America, and elsewhere (Miezian 2004). Nowa Huta’s first architects were also inspired by this concept. They envisioned a spacious city with wide streets and numerous parks and playgrounds, as well as water elements such as fountains and a man-made pond. Notwithstanding the later environmental havoc wreaked on the town by the steel industry, many of these principles in fact survived the socialist period. To this day, Nowa Huta residents favorably compare the amount of green space in their district with the cramped streets of Kraków’s downtown core. The trees that were initially planted in the 1950s by socialist-era “volunteer labor brigades” (czyn społeczny) are now tall and majestic. (In fact, when I tried to take photos of Nowa Huta’s architecture I always found that the trees got in the way!) The district has several community gardens where residents cultivate flowers and sometimes vegetables and fruit trees. Many residents also grow flowers on small garden plots in front of their apartment buildings. The greenbelts between the streets and the apartment buildings are dotted with benches, which from

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March to November are occupied by seniors enjoying a chat or stopping for a few minutes’ rest on their way home with groceries. As Nowa Huta grew and expanded over the years, the design of successive neighborhoods reflected the country’s changing political ideologies and economic realities. Nowa Huta’s first neighborhoods, whose construction began even before the town’s urban plan was finalized, are characterized by two-story buildings with peaked roofs. This design is loosely based on nineteenth-century models of small-town planning. Subsequent neighborhoods, erected in the 1950s under the newly developed urban plan, are strongly influenced by socialist realism. Socialist realism was an artistic and architectural style developed in the Soviet Union and prevalent during the Stalinist period. It was marked by a preference for classical elements such as arches, pillars, and elaborate decorative elements, as well as a tendency toward monumentalism (for example, monuments or grandiose structures) (Aman 1992). Socialist realism was to be socialist in content and national in form, meaning that each Soviet Bloc state looked to its own national tradition for design inspiration. In Nowa Huta, socialist realism took on a particular national form through the incorporation of Renaissance and Baroque elements inspired by the architecture of Kraków’s oldest core (for example, arches, pillars, balustrades, window pediments, and portals). This trend can be seen most clearly in the design of Nowa Huta’s Central Square and the administrative center of the steelworks.

One of Nowa Huta’s first neighborhoods. Photo by the author.

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A neighborhood in the socialist realist style. Photo by the author.

A “typical communist bloc”: a prefab high-rise from the 1970s. Photo by the author.

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Following the “thaw” of the mid-1950s, socialist realism was abandoned in favor of modernist solutions. The “thaw” (also known as the “little stabilization”) refers to the period following Stalin’s 1953 death. It was characterized by some political reforms, some lessening of censorship, and greater independence from the Soviet Union. From that point on, buildings lost all their ornamentality and were constructed using much cheaper precast concrete. The 1970s were characterized by the construction of the prefabricated high-rises so often associated with socialism—although similar buildings can be seen all over the world, including North America and Western Europe. No introduction to Nowa Huta would be complete without a mention of the steelworks, since the town itself would not have been built were it not for the need to house the workers who first built, and then worked in, the country’s flagship industrial enterprise. At its peak, Nowa Huta’s steelworks employed almost forty thousand people, or over one-sixth of Nowa Huta’s entire population. In practice, this meant that most Nowa Huta families were in some way connected to the steelworks. Like many large workplaces in socialist states, Lenin Steelworks provided subsidized meals at work, day care for the workers’ children, medical care, company-funded holidays, and other cultural and recreational programs for the entire family. The steelworks also owned and operated a vocational school, a cultural center, a sports club and stadium, movie theaters, and a local newspaper, and it assisted in the construction of a significant share of the town’s housing. In short, throughout the socialist period, virtually all life in Nowa Huta revolved around Lenin Steelworks.

Dark Creation Stories Although the postwar government sought to depict Nowa Huta as the epitome of socialist modernity, these representations overlooked some of the darker aspects of life in the new town and thus eventually engendered a backlash. Critiques of Nowa Huta as a socialist paradise began to emerge at the time of the “thaw,” at which point it became politically possible to critique the actions of the postwar Stalinist government. As that government’s pet project, Nowa Huta became an obvious target for criticism (Lebow 1999). In 1955, writer and poet Adam Ważyk wrote a scathing poem entitled “Poemat dla dorosłych” (A poem for adults), which revealed the hard working conditions and substandard living conditions of Nowa Huta’s residents and depicted the town’s population as primitive, uncultured, and morally flawed (Ważyk 1955). This poem caused quite a stir, since by critiquing the model socialist town, it also acted as a critique of the socialist government that built it. Ważyk’s poem was echoed by an equally famous

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Nowa Huta’s presocialist past: a prewar house located between the district’s central core and the steelworks. Photo by the author.

report by journalist Ryszard Kapuściński entitled “To też jest prawda o Nowej Hucie” (This is also the truth about Nowa Huta). Kapuściński rejected Ważyk’s description of Nowa Huta residents as a primitive faceless mass and underscored the hard work they put into building the town. However, he also noted an array of problems plaguing Nowa Huta, including severe housing shortages, rampant prostitution, lack of recreation and entertainment opportunities, and administrative inefficiency and corruption. In all, Kapuściński’s report pointed to the overall neglect of Nowa Huta’s population by the government that claimed to rule on behalf of the workers (Kapuściński 1955). Another stain on Nowa Huta’s reputation is the fact that the town was built on some of the best agricultural land in Poland, and its construction entailed the often brutal dispossession of farms and villagers (Chwalba 2004; Miezian 2004). To this day, stories of people who lost their homes and livelihoods continue to mar laudatory depictions of the new town. Such is the story of Józef Zielarski, a former steelworker in his mideighties whose family had a farm in the village of Krzesławice that was “swallowed up” by the growing town of Nowa Huta. When I interviewed him, I was interested in learning about what work at the steelworks was like in the early

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decades of the socialist period and how it changed over the years. However, the conversation kept circling back to the loss that his family suffered as a result of having their farmland taken away from them with no compensation and no possibility of appeal or recourse. For Mr. Zielarski, work at the steelworks was not an exciting opportunity to start a new life; rather, it was the only way to make a living to support his aging parents once the family farm was gone. Another contentious point in Nowa Huta’s history is the reason behind the government’s decision to build the new town literally on Kraków’s doorstep (Golonka 2006). Some historians explain this by citing economic and geographical considerations. These include the town’s location on the river; its proximity to major railway networks (which enabled the transport of iron ore supplies from Russia and Ukraine); and the availability of technical expertise from Kraków’s technical university, the Coal Mining and Steelworking Academy (Akademia Górniczo-Hutnicza). However, many historians and members of the general public also believed—and to this day continue to believe—that the town’s location was a political decision, intended to punish the traditionally conservative and “bourgeois” Kraków for the outcome of a 1946 referendum in which the city’s citizens overwhelmingly rejected the socialist Polish Workers’ Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza) (Chwalba 2004; Lebow 2013; Miezian 2004). To this day, many residents of Kraków remain convinced that Nowa Huta was built as a deliberate punishment for themselves and their city. Despite Nowa Huta’s positive image in the official socialist-era narratives, in popular opinion Nowa Huta was, and continues to be, perceived as a marginal part of Kraków. Nowa Huta’s residents were stigmatized by Kraków townspeople on three counts: they were peasants, they were manual laborers, and they were communists. Here, it should be explained that Kraków is a city traditionally associated with (high) culture, tradition, and aristocracy. On the other hand, the majority of Nowa Huta’s inhabitants hailed from the countryside. They wore mud-covered rubber boots and work jackets called kufajki and had a reputation for heavy drinking and aggression. Respectable Kraków townspeople were repulsed by stories of uncultured peasants who kept coal or firewood in their bathtubs and livestock (pigs, rabbits) in their apartments, as well as stories of violence (fighting over women) and moral decay (drinking, prostitution) that characterized life in Nowa Huta in the 1950s (Golonka 2006; Lebow 2013). The popular perception of Nowa Huta’s residents in Kraków was made all the worse by their association with industrial work. Although industrial work was glorified in official state discourses, it was nonetheless popularly perceived as inferior to intellectual work (praca umysłowa, or literally “mind

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work”). The notion of Nowa Huta’s population as less “cultured” than that of Kraków persisted throughout the socialist period—and, many would argue, still persists today. To this day, Nowa Huta continues to be associated with crime and social pathologies (Golonka 2006). During my stay in Kraków, several people who lived outside of Nowa Huta expressed their amusement at my interest in the district (“what do you want to go there for?”) and warned me to “be careful.” Many Nowa Huta residents told me about being stigmatized on account of their place of residence. Marta, a recent university graduate, told me that she never knew that Nowa Huta was a “bad” part of Kraków until she began to attend university (located in central Kraków) and learned this from her fellow students, who, ironically, were from out of town and had never even set foot in Nowa Huta.

A Site of Resistance Across the former Soviet Bloc, many model socialist spaces eventually became “key sites in the contestation of socialism” (Stenning 2004, 131). That, too, was the case with Nowa Huta. Local history now traces the district’s legacy of resistance to the socialist government to an event known as the Battle for the Cross (Walka o krzyż) in 1960, at which time Nowa Huta’s residents stood up en masse to demand that a church be built in town. Here, it should be explained that, in theory, socialist ideology was incompatible with religion—a fact vividly illustrated by Marx’s famous adage about religion being the opium of the people. Therefore, a model socialist town had to be “godless” and was consequently designed without a church. In a devout Catholic country like Poland, this was a very controversial move. Initially, Nowa Huta’s residents dealt with the situation by attending mass in the neighboring villages, as well as in the Cistercian monastery in the village of Mogiła, which became incorporated into Nowa Huta. However, the town’s growing population put pressure on these churches and stirred demands for a new church, which grew louder after the “thaw” of 1956. In 1957, government authorities granted permission for the construction of a church in Nowa Huta, and the local population erected a wooden cross at the designated construction site. A year later, however, the authorities changed their minds, reassigning the plot for the construction of a new school instead. On April 27, 1960, city workers were sent to remove the cross, and local residents gathered to defend it. The situation began to intensify, and by the afternoon, a crowd of four to five thousand people defended the cross from special riot squad forces (ZOMO). The protest cost Nowa Huta approximately five hundred arrests, an unrecorded number of injuries, and possibly even deaths. However, the cross remained, and in

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1965 another plot of land was approved for the church’s construction. The new church, built in the shape of an ark and hence popularly known as the Lord’s Ark (Arka Pana), is an important symbol of local resistance to the socialist government. Its construction was made possible by residents’ volunteer labor, combined with financial donations from Polish expatriates and organizations abroad, who funded the cost of building material. The church was finally consecrated in 1977 by Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II (Franczyk 2004; Gąsiorowski 2002).

Replica of Nowa Huta's cross, located on the site of the Battle for the Cross. Photo by the author.

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Lord’s Ark church (Arka Pana). Photo by the author.

Following the Battle for the Cross, the 1960s and 1970s were a somewhat quieter time in Nowa Huta’s history. When waves of strikes and protests periodically rolled across the country (for example, in March 1968 and December 1970), there were some rumbles of dissatisfaction in Nowa Huta, but not at a scale comparable to other cities (Musiał and Zblewski 2002).5 The first half of the 1970s was a period of relative prosperity in Poland, made possible by the government’s policy of spending and consumption financed by western credit. By mid-decade, however, the oil crisis hit, and the world economy went into a recession. As interest rates soared and the prices of Polish exports fell, the country found it difficult to meet its debt repayments. For Poland’s citizens, this translated into a rising cost of living, as well as shortages of products that were instead being diverted for foreign export. When on July 1, 1980, the government announced major price increases, a wave of strikes rolled across the country. Although strikes began in response to price increases, workers also began making other political, economic, and social demands. It was from this movement that Solidarity (Solidarność) was born. The Solidarity movement first emerged in the shipyards of the city of Gdańsk on the northern coast of Poland. Solidarity began as the country’s first trade union not controlled by the government. Its members demanded the right to form independent trade unions, the easing of censorship,

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greater religious rights, and the freeing of political prisoners (Hardy 2009). Solidarity quickly established branches around the country, including at Nowa Huta’s steelworks, whose Solidarity branch boasted a membership of thirty-seven thousand out of the total workforce of almost forty thousand (Chwalba 2004). By 1981 Solidarity membership across Poland stood at ten million, which at the time constituted just under half of the country’s total population. On December 13, 1981, the government declared martial law, and thousands of Solidarity leaders across the country were arrested. In response to the announcement of martial law, approximately ten thousand workers at Lenin Steelworks (or roughly a quarter of the workforce) went on strike. On the night of December 15, the steelworks was surrounded by tanks, and two thousand soldiers “pacified” the striking workers. The next day two thousand workers lost their jobs, and over the remainder of the month, thirty-eight Nowa Huta residents (mostly steelworks employees) were arrested (Zając 2002; Baziur 2002). This event marked the beginning of the strikes and demonstrations that intermittently broke out in Nowa Huta throughout the 1980s. Demonstrations often began outside the steelworks’ main gate when the first shift ended at 2 p.m. and continued as the chanting workers marched into the center of town. Demonstrations also frequently broke out after masses, usually on the street in front of Nowa Huta’s Lord’s Ark church, which came to be seen as an important site of local resistance to the socialist government. Martial law was lifted on July 22, 1983, temporarily halting the strikes. However, strikes began anew in 1986 and 1987 in response to worsening economic conditions, which people experienced most acutely through price increases. Although the government tried to implement some economic reforms, these did not prove effective at improving the state of the economy and did not pacify growing social unrest. In the end, the government reopened negotiations with Solidarity in the late 1980s (Hardy 2009). The spring and summer of 1988 brought another series of strikes at the steelworks. The postulates that were then formulated by the steelworks’ Solidarity branch were used shortly afterward during the Roundtable Talks between the government and the Solidarity-led opposition in April 1989 (Baziur 2002). In June of that year, the opposition won the country’s first semidemocratic elections in a landslide victory. The election date of June 4, 1989, is thus widely accepted in Poland as the end of the socialist era.

Nowa Huta after 1989 The collapse of the socialist government in 1989 brought major political, economic, and social changes, including democratic political reforms and

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capitalist economic reforms. As I note in the introduction, the collapse of the socialist state coincided with another set of changes that were taking place globally: the shift from an industrial society to a postindustrial one and from a Fordist organization of the economy to one that is now variously called “post-Fordist,” “late capitalist,” or “neoliberal.” This coalescence is important, because it explains why the reforms that were adopted at the time took the shape that they did. The reforms emphasized the privatization of state-owned enterprises, the elimination of price subsidies, and free trade—strategies that reflect the neoliberal rationalities of the western states and institutions that served as Poland’s donors, role models, and advisers (Mandel and Humphrey 2002). Political and economic priorities shifted from production to consumption and from industrial work to the service industry and new technologies (Berdahl 2010; Dunn 2004; Kideckel 2008). In this section, I examine how these reforms were worked out in Nowa Huta. Cities are sites where changes in the organization of the economy can be seen in particularly sharp relief (e.g., Brenner and Theodore 2002; Leitner, Peck, and Sheppard 2007). In accordance with new economic rationalities and priorities, postsocialist cities adopted many patterns of urban development seen in Western Europe and North America (e.g., Andrusz, Harloe, and Szelenyi 1996; Bodnar 2001; Smith 2007; Stanilov 2007).6 For example, as newly postsocialist states moved away from centralized planning, municipal governments were invested with greater responsibilities for urban planning, while also having to struggle with increasingly tighter budgets. Many municipal governments dealt with this by pushing for economic development, often through foreign investment. Manufacturing across the region declined and is being replaced by retail and financial services. Publicly owned infrastructure such as land, housing, and transportation is increasingly privatized. The more desirable urban areas are gentrified, while less desirable ones, such as former state housing neighborhoods, are largely left to decay. Across the former Soviet Bloc, economic reforms were particularly acutely experienced in former socialist spaces, such as industrial towns (Stenning 2004, 2005a). Because heavy industry lost its privileged position in the national economy and imagination, industrial workers became one of the groups most adversely affected by the reforms (e.g., Dunn 2004; Kideckel 2008; Stenning 2004, 2005a). This was also the case in Nowa Huta. In 1991, the steelworks began to reorganize. In effect, both production and employee numbers significantly decreased. The steelworks also cut the cord from most of the programs and services it used to own and finance, including the cultural center, medical clinic, sports club, and newspaper.

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In 2002 the steelworks entered into a consortium with three other steel factories located in the Silesia region of Poland. In 2004 the entire consortium was sold to Mittal Steel (now Arcelor Mittal), the world’s largest steel producer. While the new owner modernized some of the existing infrastructure (for example a new cold rolling mill was opened in 2009), the steelworks also significantly trimmed production and people power. At present, the Nowa Huta branch employs approximately thirty-five hundred people, with an additional estimated two thousand employed by the steel factory’s spinoff companies. The restructuring and decline of the steelworks had a ripple effect on Nowa Huta’s cityscape and community life. Unemployment, a phenomenon virtually unknown in socialist Poland, touched many Nowa Huta residents. Some of the job losses at the steelworks were offset by job opportunities in other parts of Kraków, which has a relatively low unemployment rate compared with other regions of Poland. Many people also turned to smallscale entrepreneurship (such as repairs) or to jobs in the informal sector. For example, Nowa Huta’s open-air flea market Tomex supports about seven thousand vendors—incidentally, double the number of current steelworks employees (Stenning 2005a). These jobs, however, do not offer the security or benefits that industrial labor once did. The decline of the steelworks also affected secondary industries in the district. Many residents remark on the disappearance of spaces of leisure and consumption and their relocation to the outskirts of town. The “better” stores were replaced by discount clothing shops; in fact, Nowa Huta is known for having the best secondhand clothing stores in Kraków. Several of the women I know regretfully noted the loss of famous Polish clothing boutique Moda Polska (Polish Style). Two of Nowa Huta’s movie theaters closed, leaving the district with only one small independent movie theater attached to a cultural center. One of Nowa Huta’s former movie theaters is now home to the large British grocery chain Tesco. The other is slated to house the new Museum of the People’s Republic of Poland, popularly known as the museum of communism. The lack of places to eat, drink, and hang out is a problem frequently cited by residents, especially (though not only) by young people. In a district of 220,000 residents, one only occasionally stumbles across a dubious-quality eatery. “There isn’t even a stupid McDonald’s!” a sixteen-year-old girl once said to me in exasperation. Since then, McDonald’s opened one branch in the border area between Nowa Huta and central Kraków. Nonetheless, the numbers are telling: Nowa Huta, a district that constitutes one-third of Kraków’s surface area and population, is home to only a handful of popular food franchises or movie theaters.

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Nowa Huta’s former movie theater Świt (Dawn), now home to a Tesco grocery store. Photo by the author.

The pub and coffee shop situation is similarly bleak. When going out for dinner or drinks, my Nowa Huta acquaintances generally preferred to head to the center of Kraków rather than choose from a handful of local bars, most of them on the shady side. The complaint “there is nowhere to go in Nowa Huta” was voiced to me by everyone from young and middle-aged acquaintances to my seventy-three-year-old great-aunt, who periodically heads to the center of Kraków with her friends to “sit in a nice coffee shop for a good coffee and a pastry.” I myself also felt the lack of coffee shops when trying to arrange for interviews. Many of the people whom I interviewed invited me to their homes or workplaces, but when someone wanted to meet outside of the home, there were very few feasible options for a coffee and a chat, and none of them were open until the afternoon. Many people also mourn the loss of Empik, a Polish bookstore and coffee shop chain, from Central Square. Although the chain has several locations across Kraków, there are none in Nowa Huta. During the socialist period, Empik was more than just a bookstore: it also had a reading room where, as several people pointed out to me, one could even read foreign newspapers such as the New York Times or the French Le figaro. “Yes, in that apparently totalitarian system, in Nowa Huta we could go and read the New York Times,” one man affirmed when I expressed my surprise at

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this. For people like him, the disappearance of Empik is symbolic of Nowa Huta’s cultural decline. The relationship between Nowa Huta and Kraków continues to be problematic and shaped by stereotypes inherited from the past. In 1990 the city’s administrative boundaries were redrawn, dividing the city of Kraków into eighteen smaller administrative districts. As a result, Nowa Huta now spans five different administrative districts.7 This blurs the boundary between Kraków and Nowa Huta, tying Nowa Huta more closely to Kraków’s decision-making structures. At the same time, Nowa Huta still exists as an imagined place that continues to be imbued with multiple, and often contested, meanings. Much like it was in the 1950s, Nowa Huta is seen as a marginal part of Kraków, commonly associated with crime, especially soccer-related violence. This stigma is reflected in real estate prices, as well as in prices of goods and services.

Revitalization and Reinvention Around the world, deindustrializing towns embrace various strategies intended to stimulate economic development. These strategies often include turning to the service, retail, and entertainment industries. In Nowa Huta, too, many locals cite economic development as the district’s most pressing issue. In what follows, I describe the economic development and revitalization initiatives currently at work in Nowa Huta, paying attention to what they reveal about changed political and economic conditions and priorities and about the ways in which the socialist past continues to infuse the present.

Economic Development Throughout history, every epoch had its own type of building that marked the spirit of the age as well as the prevailing political, economic, and social conditions, writes architect Charles Jencks (1984). Arguably, two hallmark projects associated with socialist development were high-rise housing neighborhoods and spaces of industrial production. Thus, it would seem fitting that the symbolic spaces of postsocialist capitalist development be the very antithesis of these: that is, single-family houses in the suburbs and spaces of consumption.8 And indeed, over the past three decades, the real estate and construction industries have flourished in Poland. The socialist period was characterized by endemic housing shortages (for example, it was not unusual for three generations to live together in a two-bedroom apartment), and housing construction usually took the form of apartment buildings. Now, the new Polish middle-class dream is to own a house in the suburbs. On the other hand, socialist-era housing neighborhoods (especially those built in the 1960s and 1970s, characterized by high-rise

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buildings made from prefabricated concrete) are popularly perceived as ugly and undesirable places to live, both because of their association with the previous regime and because subsequent postsocialist governments have not adequately kept up the existing housing stock. Socialist-era neighborhoods have thus acquired a pejorative image, similar to the conception of “the projects” in North American cities. The case of Nowa Huta both exemplifies this shift in values and problematizes it. Nowa Huta is the least desirable—and therefore the cheapest—real estate location in Kraków. However, since Kraków is one of the most expensive Polish cities in which to live, Nowa Huta’s real estate prices cannot help but appeal to the budget-conscious (for example, to young families). Although some of the district’s neighborhoods (especially the high-rise prefabs built in the 1970s) are indeed in need of a facelift, many locals continue to see their district as a good place to live. Nowa Huta’s oldest neighborhoods, built in the 1950s in the socialist realist style, are increasingly gaining appreciation as examples of good urban planning and interesting architecture and are starting to attract “creative” types. At the same time, the growth of single-family housing developments on Nowa Huta’s outskirts illustrates that a suburban home is the dream of many upwardly mobile Poles.

The new Polish dream: a single-family subdivision on Nowa Huta’s outskirts. Photo by the author.

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The fact that income disparities are mapped onto the cityscape will not come as a surprise to inhabitants of many western cities. However, this is a relatively recent phenomenon in former socialist cities, where class and income inequalities were supposed to be erased through the leveling out of living conditions. While this absolute equality was never fully achieved (for example, a manager at the steelworks would likely have a larger apartment, in a more desirable location, than a frontline steelworker), the discrepancy in housing conditions was nonetheless smaller than it is now. By way of example, all of the steelworks’ current managers whom I interviewed owned houses in the more desirable areas of Kraków or in the suburbs—none lived in an apartment building in Nowa Huta itself. Perhaps the most striking sign of capitalist development on the Polish cityscape is the proliferation of colorful shopping and entertainment complexes. Here, it is worth recalling that life in a socialist state was punctuated by periods of product shortages. In Poland, a popular saying has it that “there was nothing in the stores except for vinegar.”9 Consumption began to thrive in the 1990s, when the new postsocialist government removed restrictions on western imports. While glitzy new stores and shopping malls mushroomed in Kraków, in Nowa Huta this process has been slower. Nonetheless, in the past decade, a multiplex movie theater, a waterpark, and a shopping mall were built on the edge of the district, in the border area between Nowa Huta and Kraków’s city center. However, the presence of a large permanent flea market just down the street from the new shopping mall serves as a reminder that these new spaces of consumption are not financially accessible to everyone. The growth of new spaces of consumption demonstrates the overlapping of two concomitant shifts: one from socialism to capitalism and the other from a Fordist-Keynesian model of citizenship that was based largely on production to a neoliberal model where people are increasingly identified by, and derive their citizenship rights from, consumption rather than production (Bauman 2005). Zygmunt Bauman, for instance, contrasted a society based on production, in which work constitutes “an axis around which all other efforts at self-constitution and identity-building rotate” (2005, 32), with the consumer society, which “engages its members primarily in their capacity as consumers” (2005, 24). While Bauman was referring primarily to the post-Fordist Western state, his observation applies equally well to former socialist states of East-Central Europe. The anthropologist Daphne Berdahl, for instance, noted that in these countries the workplace no longer serves as a social unit that provides hospitality, educational, medical, and leisure services to workers, their families, and communities. Instead, these services are increasingly privatized and people are expected to purchase them for themselves. Thus, the ability to participate in the new postsocialist

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society is based on consumption rather than production, and people’s access to services is increasingly contingent on their ability to pay for them (Berdahl 2010). In Nowa Huta, it is noteworthy that the arrival of new shopping and entertainment areas has not, for the most part, been accompanied by the creation of new workplaces. To be sure, new stores and movie theaters do create some new jobs; however, these are likely to be of the unskilled and poorly paid kind. With heavy industry seen as a remnant of a bygone era, the city of Kraków’s current economic development strategy favors tourism, the service industry, and information technology. Many politicians, businesspeople, and other community leaders see special economic zones or technology parks as the panacea solution for stimulating economic development. In 1998, special economic areas were created in several parts of Kraków, including one in Branice, a village just outside of Nowa Huta. This zone presently houses a construction company and a printing company. In recent years there has also been talk of creating another special economic zone on a section of the steelworks’ grounds that is no longer being used for industrial production. This project, ambitiously titled “Nowa Huta of the Future” (Nowa Huta Przyszłości), envisions the construction of a new science and technology park for industries such as the life sciences, information technology, outsourcing, and other “creative industries.” City officials also promise that the project will include new recreational areas such as a waterpark and spas, in order to capitalize on the thermal waters that were recently discovered in the area. Taken together, these new developments are projected to create 150,000 new jobs for Kraków residents, with half of those going to the residents of Nowa Huta (Urząd Miasta Krakowa 2012; Żurawik 2013). The “Nowa Huta of the Future” plan illustrates the changed relationship among the state, the economy, and labor: as many people see it, the government’s job is to bring in business and help it thrive, with the hope that the benefits will eventually trickle down to the local population in the form of job creation (even if these jobs are in shopping malls or call centers). One person who extolled to me the benefits of special economic zones was Mr. Walczak, who in the 1980s was a prominent Solidarity activist at the steelworks. Following the collapse of the socialist government, he went on to hold a series of high-profile positions in both government and the private sector, spearheading the economic restructuring of various industries. When I spoke to him about the Nowa Huta of the Future project, he told me that the city of Kraków needs to “fight for investors” in order to create an atmosphere that is friendly to contemporary business needs: “like in the United States, where a company can buy land for a dollar.” Let us consider Mr. Walczak’s call for municipal politicians to “fight

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for investors” in light of what we know about the outcome of foreign investment in Nowa Huta’s steelworks. The steelworks was sold to the largest steel company in the world and since then has been reportedly posting a profit every year. And yet the company shed 90 percent of its workforce, production continues to decline, and the steelworks contributes to few local programs or projects. So did Nowa Huta and its residents experience the trickle-down effect? Certainly, one can argue that, had it not been for the sale to Mittal, the steelworks would have gone bankrupt, and then even more people would be unemployed. But what about all those who were laid off and have not been able to find secure and decently paid employment? When I asked Mr. Walczak why so many laid-off steelworkers have not fared well in the new economy, he replied, “In this economy you have to be creative, and steelworkers aren’t creative.” It was clear that he viewed the steel industry as a thing of the past and believed that former steelworkers need to reinvent themselves in order to succeed in the capitalist workplace. Mr. Walczak’s comments exemplify the extent to which neoliberal ideas about the relationship between the state and the economy have gained popular resonance. This former steelworks employee was clearly able to reinvent himself, and to succeed, in the new economy. Given his very positive experience with the changed economic order, it should not come as a surprise that he would accept the neoliberal rationality that (1) the government’s job is to create the right conditions for business to thrive; and (2) if people want to succeed in the new economy it is up to them to reinvent themselves and become marketable. As this book goes to print in the fall of 2014, the city of Kraków has secured the land needed for the project’s development. However, it is yet to secure both the funding from the European Union to help finance the project and the investors who will bring their enterprises to Nowa Huta. My Nowa Huta acquaintances are adopting a wait-and-see approach, having previously heard other ambitious revitalization plans that subsequently fizzled. At present, it remains to be seen whether this economic zone will ever actually materialize, what companies will relocate to Nowa Huta, and how this will affect the district and its residents.

Environmental Revitalization Another revitalization strategy often prescribed for postindustrial towns is environmental revitalization. In recent years, there has been a surge of such projects in Nowa Huta. Here, it should be mentioned that although Nowa Huta’s first planners, guided by the Garden City principles, envisioned numerous parks, greenbelts, and a man-made pond, the steel industry quickly took its toll on the district. Throughout the socialist period, Nowa Huta came to be seen as one of the biggest polluters in the country, and the

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pond became a deposit for the steelworks’ wastewater. Now, efforts are being made to overcome this negative legacy and to return the district to its original “green” principles. The man-made pond was cleaned up and is now a place where children can feed swans and sports enthusiasts can play beach volleyball on a man-made beach. The local cultural center organizes an assortment of environmental education programs for school groups, as well as community projects that seek to involve the local population in protecting and maintaining local green spaces. In the year 2006 several Nowa Huta residents organized a community association to protect Nowa Huta’s wetland meadow, home to many rare bird and plant species. The association created a walking path for dog walkers and joggers and put up information boards for birdwatchers and nature lovers. Unfortunately, for every successful greening initiative there is a development project that counteracts it. For example, two present contentious projects that are under way in Nowa Huta include the construction of a garbage incinerator plant and a crematorium. While there is a demonstrated need for both in the city of Kraków, popular opinion is sharply divided. Many residents, especially those who live close to the sites of these future developments, vocally oppose their location in Nowa Huta. They see these initiatives as evidence that their district remains the dumping ground for all municipal projects that are polluting and unappealing and thus unwanted elsewhere in the city.

Heritage Projects As many former industrial towns across the world lose their manufacturing bases, they often embrace development projects based on culture and heritage. This strategy, first adopted in the 1960s and 1970s in deindustrializing towns across the western world, promotes the creation of historic and art districts, museums, sports facilities, public art, festivals, and the adaptive reuse of old buildings (Grodach and Loukaitou-Sideris 2007; Stanton 2007). Former industrial spaces may be converted into museums, shopping districts, or conference facilities that retain the former industrial “vibe” (e.g., Cameron 2000; Frisch 1998; Stanton 2007). In the process, these towns’ industrial histories are reconsidered and reinvented in order to attract investors, customers, and tourists. This is often a contested process, since it brings up the question of whose past gets commodified; whose memory becomes the defining narrative of the past and whose gets silenced; and, most important, who benefits from all of this. The actors—including local policy makers, urban planners, investors and developers, and local residents—come to the table with very different experiences, interests, and agendas and also armed with different amounts of bargaining power.10 In postsocialist European states, many cities are similarly turning to

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heritage as a tool for economic development. There, however, the concept of “heritage” is even more problematic, since it inevitably brings up the socialist past, which to this day is politically charged terrain (e.g., Light 2000; Young and Kaczmarek 2008). In countries that are attempting to reinvent themselves as modern European capitalist democracies, policy makers, business elites, community leaders, tourism industry employees, and residents have to figure out how to make heritage out of a past that they wish to overcome. At times, the socialist past is silenced or sidestepped in order to emphasize values such as modernity and Europeanness. Alternately, historical narrations can edit out the socialist past and instead link the present to a presocialist “Golden Age” (Young and Kaczmarek 2008). In some places, socialism is invoked only to emphasize the history of resistance to it. Even when the socialist past is not silenced, it is often demarcated from everyday life, for example, by being locked up in a museum or a theme park (James 1999; Main 2008; Vukov 2008). In effect, across much of the region, socialism constitutes a “dissonant heritage” (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996), that is, the sort of heritage that is marked by discordance or lack of agreement and consistency as to its meaning. Debates about heritage are also taking place in Nowa Huta. In the early 2000s, the city of Kraków first began to show an interest in the district’s cultural potential. In 2005 the municipal museum opened up a branch in Nowa Huta that is focused on the district’s history. Another museum, dealing with the history of the socialist period on the whole, is currently in the works in one of Nowa Huta’s former movie theaters. The city is also starting to organize more events, festivals, and concerts on Nowa Huta’s territory. For example, Kraków’s prestigious contemporary music festival Sacrum Profanum is now held annually in the steelworks’ former tinning plant. Although the bulk of new housing and retail development in Nowa Huta is taking place on its outskirts, for the past few years Kraków’s city council has also been circling around the idea of revitalizing Nowa Huta’s oldest core, built in the late 1940s and 1950s. In 2005 this zone was added to a regional list of heritage sites on account of its urban plan and architecture in the socialist realist style, and there is periodic talk of adding it to UNESCO’s list of world heritage sites. In 2008 the city commissioned and developed a revitalization program for the district, and in 2011 it held an architectural contest for specific revitalization projects. Despite all the hype, however, to date all revitalization projects remain on paper, a fact that many residents attribute to Nowa Huta’s continued marginalization by Kraków. As in many other former industrial towns across the world, in Nowa Huta the decline of the steel industry is starting to give rise to a growing interest in the district’s industrial heritage. In Poland, however, this redef-

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inition of industry as heritage takes on a particular inflection on account of the historical association between industry and socialism. Industrialization was one of the key tenets of the socialist government’s project. Following that government’s collapse, heavy industry became popularly stigmatized as a remnant of the “old order” (Dunn 2004). In recent years, however, there has been a renewed interest in industry as heritage. On the rare occasions when the steelworks opens its gates to visitors, the tours book up within hours. The steelworks also recently started to rent out its former tinning plant for select high-profile concerts, which are always a big hit among audiences. Other former industrial spaces in Nowa Huta are similarly starting to be used for various creative activities. For example, a few years ago, an avant-garde theater relocated to Nowa Huta from another part of Kraków and is now housed in what used to be the workshop of a vocational school in metallurgy. Notwithstanding the growing interest in Nowa Huta’s industrial heritage, however, so far this heritage has not been very well integrated into Kraków’s tourism or economic development strategy. By way of example, a few years ago the city created a tourist information point in Nowa Huta but subsequently eliminated it, citing budget cutbacks. Again, locals perceive this as evidence of Nowa Huta’s continuing marginalization by municipal politicians. And indeed, it could very well be the case that industrial heritage does not sit very well in Kraków, which likes to see itself as a city of (high) “culture.” Perhaps municipal politicians feel that industrial heritage cannot compete with other tourist attractions (and Kraków has plenty to choose from). Or perhaps industrial heritage is still politically unpalatable because of industry’s association with socialism.

Communist Tourism A particular type of heritage tourism that has emerged in many former socialist states over the past two decades is “communist tourism.” Since the collapse of socialist governments across the region, sites associated with socialism (for example, the remains of the Berlin Wall in Germany; Ceauçescu’s Palace in Romania; and Statuepark, the open-air museum of socialist-era statues in Budapest, Hugary) have become tourist attractions. They appeal primarily to western tourists for whom socialist history constitutes a political and economic “Other.” Although communist tourism can be a valuable source of tourist revenue, it is also politically problematic in countries that are attempting to reinvent themselves as modern European capitalist democracies (see, e.g., Light 2000). Unlike the Berlin Wall, Nowa Huta lay off the beaten tourist path until the mid-2000s, when a local entrepreneur started the tour company Crazy Guides, whose tour I describe in the introduction. Since then, a few oth-

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er locals have followed in his footsteps. However, all these initiatives are relatively small-scale and bottom-up: to date, communist tourism has not been embraced by Kraków’s policy makers as a significant component of the city’s tourism strategy. I suggest this is because the socialist legacy is still too problematic to be openly embraced, despite potential economic incentives. In Nowa Huta (and, I would argue, in Poland generally) there also is not as much nostalgia for the socialist period as compared with other former socialist states, where the phenomena of “yugonostalgia” or “ostalgie” have been widely documented (Berdahl 2010; Spaskovska 2008). The reluctance on the part of local policy makers to capitalize on Nowa Huta’s socialist heritage may thus be due to the fact that Kraków, the country’s major tourist hub, already holds enough appeal for both native and foreign tourists and thus does not need to build a marketing campaign around a problematic heritage. Local opinion on communist tourism is mixed. The residents with whom I spoke claimed that they are glad to see that Nowa Huta is becoming more popular among tourists, which they perceived as a sign of vitality. On the other hand, many Nowa Huta residents are still reeling from the stigma attached to them over the past six decades and thus are quite sensitive to how they are portrayed to (and by) outsiders. They do not wish to see themselves or their district mocked or reduced to a communist theme park. At the same time, pub owners who host communist tours for “typical communist meals” do not seem to let those concerns interfere with their business.

Reinscribing the Past in Space Changes to the political order frequently bring with them changes to the public space (Levinson 1998). And indeed, across East-Central Europe, some of the fastest changes following the collapse of socialist governments were those to the cityscape. Street names honoring socialist-era heroes were replaced to acknowledge new heroes; socialist-era monuments were toppled and new ones erected; and landmark socialist buildings were assigned new functions or reinscribed with new meanings (e.g., Gelazis, Czaplicka, and Ruble 2009; Kliems and Dmitrieva 2010). These initiatives reflect people’s desire to reevaluate the past; create new memories; and, based on them, forge new identities and visions of the future (Hałas 2004). However, such changes frequently entail tensions and contestations over the interpretation of the past and the role that the past is to play in the present and future (see, e.g., Czepczyński 2008; Gelazis, Czaplicka and Ruble 2009; Nadkarni 2003). In Nowa Huta, most of the names that in any way hinted at the town’s socialist legacy were changed. To that end, Lenin Steelworks was renamed

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after Polish American engineer Tadeusz Sendzimir. New street names honor either Poland’s tradition of opposition to the socialist government or political figures from the presocialist period, usually associated with Poland’s independence movement. For example, Avenue of the Six-Year Plan became John Paul II Avenue, October Revolution Avenue was renamed after Poland’s World War II general Władysław Anders, and Lenin Avenue is now Solidarity Avenue.11 The new political order was also marked by the removal of old monuments and the proliferation of new ones. Monuments play an important role in the process of memory making, as they house memory and anchor it in material form (Zelizer 1995). Monuments can also be contested and become spaces where alternative memories are formed (e.g., Sturken 1997; Young 1993). On the other hand, it has also been suggested that erecting a monument can actually release people from an obligation to remember and thus induce forgetting rather than remembering (Young 1993). For the last two decades of the socialist period, Nowa Huta’s defining monument was the statue of Lenin. Although the statue was not erected until 1973, it quickly took on an important symbolic function. This was where delegations from fellow Soviet Bloc states came to lay wreaths; where celebrations such as May Day parades took place; and, later on, where people gathered to express their discontent with the socialist government. Since his arrival in Nowa Huta, Lenin the statue was not very warmly received by the local population and suffered many eviction attempts from the district. He regularly had paint thrown on him and was set on fire. On one occasion a group of people threw a rope around his neck and, using a tractor, attempted to drag him off his pedestal. He even survived a bombing attempt, as the bomb only succeeded in blowing off his heel (Miezian 2004). Lenin was finally taken down in December 1989 and eventually sold to a private Swedish collector for a price smaller than the value of the materials from which the statue was made. He now resides in a Swedish theme park called High Chaparral. Though the statue is no longer physically present, the “square where Lenin used to stand” (plac po Leninie) is nonetheless an empty monument, a mandatory spot on all Nowa Huta tours. In fact, because of the square’s central location in Nowa Huta, this is either where many tour groups begin or one of the first stops along the tour. Lenin’s absence thus becomes the defining feature of Nowa Huta. Once in a while, someone proposes that Lenin should return to Nowa Huta, albeit in a changed form (for example, toppled or spray-painted) to signify the changed political and economic order. However, a recent survey among Nowa Huta residents indicates that the majority of the population would not welcome Lenin’s return, in any form.12 In 2001, a local radio station erected a styrofoam replica of Lenin’s

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statue in the exact same spot where the original used to stand. The statue was quickly toppled by passersby, and a local city councilor called the police to report an attempt to install a totalitarian system, which is a punishable offense in Poland (Stanek 2007). In 2014, a similar experiment was repeated by Bartosz Szydłowski, director of the local avant-garde theater, and his wife Małgorzata Szydłowska. As part of a local festival of public art, they erected another miniature replica of Lenin’s statue—with one addition. The new statue was a lime green fountain with a strategically placed spout, depicting the leader of the Russian revolution urinating. The fountain was officially named the Fountain of the Future, but was quickly dubbed the Peeing Lenin (Sikający Lenin). Its creators claimed that they intended to generate public debate; in fact, Peeing Lenin even has his own facebook page.13 The Peeing Lenin was intended as a commentary and invitation to debate on two issues. The first was a recent proposal on the part of local district councilors to erect a fountain in Nowa Huta (in its early years, Nowa Huta actually had a few fountains in different neighborhoods, but none of them are still in working condition). Second, the artists wanted to trigger a more general debate about the politics of the past in Nowa Huta. It is beyond the scope of this book to delve too deply into the details of the case, but even a quick overview of newspaper coverage and discussion forums revealed a spectrum of views on the issue. Some people felt that Lenin—in any form—was a reminder of a despised regime. In fact, two city councilors wrapped up the statue with cling wrap: “We put a condom on Lenin so that he won’t infect people with communism,” they explained. Some people found the artists’ idea to be in poor taste, whereas others felt that humor is a powerful tool of critique, and that the fountain provided a creative way to symbolically discard the communist legacy (Gazur 2014; Skowronek 2014; Solecki 2014). The fact that Lenin’s statue continues to trigger controversies over two decades after its removal from Nowa Huta tells us a few things about the politics of the past in Nowa Huta and in Poland more generally. First, Lenin’s statue symbolizes a controversial part of both local and national history. For some people, it is socialism in general. For others, it is a particular feature of the socialist regime: Poland’s subordination to the Soviet Union. Second, Nowa Huta is still associated with socialism (both within the city of Kraków and, more broadly, in Poland’s national imagination), and this past continues to be contested and politically charged. Third, current issues, such as the proposal to build a new fountain, are framed by issues of political memory. The artists’ decision to invoke the ultimate symbol of the district’s socialist past brings up questions such as: Why is it that in the early years of the socialist period there were working fountains in several Nowa Huta neighborhoods, and now there are none?

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The legacy of resistance: a monument to the underground press. Photo by the author.

Lenin’s departure from Nowa Huta is offset by the proliferation of many new monuments, the majority of which commemorate local resistance to the socialist government. In front of the Lord’s Ark church stands a monument to commemorate Bogdan Włosik, a young steelworker shot by an undercover police officer following a demonstration in 1982. At the site of the Battle for the Cross stands a cross-shaped monument to commemorate the event. In front of the church in the Szklane Domy (literally “Glass

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Houses”) neighborhood stand two monuments: one to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Solidarity and the other a tribute to the underground press. Another monument to Solidarity, made and erected by steelworkers and originally housed inside the steelworks’ blooming mill, now stands in Nowa Huta’s Central Square. Nowa Huta also has three monuments to Pope John Paul II, a figure venerated partly because of his antisocialist stance and his support for religious opposition in Nowa Huta, as well as two monuments to Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, a Polish priest and chaplain of Warsaw’s branch of Solidarity, murdered in the 1980s by Poland’s secret police for his involvement in the political opposition. As the above examples show, the prevailing trend in Nowa Huta’s publicspace inscriptions is to represent the town as a site of resistance to the socialist government. However, if we take seriously Young’s caution about monuments inducing forgetting rather than remembering, then the proliferation of these monuments can also be read as an attempt to place the socialist past in the past and move on. Another visible sign of the changed political order that is unique to the Polish landscape is the explosion of churches (Czepczyński 2008). As I sketched out in the introduction and with reference to the Battle for the Cross, the socialist government had a problematic relationship with religion. Although religion was not officially outlawed, it was nonetheless frowned upon and discouraged in many ways. For example, for the greater part of the socialist era, church property was nationalized, religion was not taught in schools, few new churches were built, and Party members went to great lengths not to draw attention to their participation in Catholic rituals (for example, baptizing their children in the grandparents’ village as opposed to their own neighborhood) (Osa 2003; Kubik 1994). The collapse of the socialist government opened up the floodgates. In Nowa Huta, there is now a church within a few minutes’ walking distance of every neighborhood. A few of these churches were built in the 1980s and served as sites of resistance to the socialist government. These churches are now imbued with symbolic significance. For example, the parish in the Szklane Domy neighborhood provided support to striking steelworkers during the 1980s (Miezian 2004). The tiny church in the Teatralne (“Theater”) neighborhood marks the spot of the Battle for the Cross. The church in the Mistrzejowice neighborhood was another important site of religious opposition during the 1980s. It was here that Nowa Huta’s priest Father Jancarz held patriotic masses called “Thursday masses for the fatherland,” as well as organized various underground cultural activities, including poetry and photo exhibits, lectures, and an independent publisher. The changes to Nowa Huta’s cityscape outlined above suggest that, fol-

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lowing the socialist government’s collapse, policy makers, residents, and local community leaders sought to reinvent Nowa Huta’s public image from that of a bastion of socialism to that of a bastion of resistance to socialism. However, many of these changes have not gone uncontested. In what follows, I describe three recent debates around sites of memory that took place in Nowa Huta.

From Socialism to Capitalism? Central Square to Reagan Square In 2004, Kraków’s city councilors voted to rename Nowa Huta’s Central Square after Ronald Reagan. The official reason behind the change was to mark the recent passing of the staunchly anticommunist American president, while also ridding the city of “communist-sounding” names (Kursa 2004). At the time, the proposal was heavily protested by the local population, who even formed a Committee for the Defense of the Name of Central Square (Komitet Obrony Nazwy Placu Centralnego). Their actions led to a “compromise” that retained the word “Central” but also added “Reagan” to the square’s name. The official name of the square now reads “plac Centralny im. Ronalda Reagana,” or “Ronald Reagan Central Square.” By now, the debates have died down, although the majority of the residents I know continue to refer to the square by its original name. The residents with whom I spoke about this perceived the name change as political, although they could not understand why the name “Central Square” was deemed by their elected representatives to be so socialist sounding. When I asked one man in his eighties why the square was renamed, he replied succinctly: “Because we always have to kiss Americans’ asses.” And indeed, the name change signals a shift in Poland’s geopolitical orientation. Following the collapse of the socialist state, Poland’s postsocialist governing parties look westward—especially to Western Europe and the United States, rather than eastward to Russia—in matters of politics and economics. The United States in particular was one of Poland’s key role models when it came to economic reforms. And Poland’s successive governing parties, in turn, have supported the United States in matters of foreign policy; for instance, Poland was one of the very few European states to contribute troops to the war in Iraq. Therefore, the act of renaming a city square after an American president can be seen as yet another mechanism through which Poland’s political leaders are attempting to forge a new postsocialist geopolitical identity.

The Contentious Legacy of Building Socialism: Ożański Square In the mid-2000s another debate played out around a proposal to name Nowa Huta’s oldest square after local legend Piotr Ożański. Ożański

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was one of Nowa Huta’s first “work leaders” or “heroes of socialist labor” (przodownik pracy), who reportedly fulfilled 802 percent of his quota in laying bricks. His story subsequently became the inspiration behind a famous Polish movie entitled Człowiek z Marmuru (Man of marble). In reality, Ożański the man has a complex legacy among those familiar with Nowa Huta’s history. He can be seen alternately (or simultaneously) as a symbol of the hard work and sacrifice of Nowa Huta’s first builders, a communist hero, a victim of communism first used and then abandoned by the system, and a flawed human being who ultimately met his downfall by drowning in alcohol.14 In 2006, a young Nowa Huta resident and then–city councilor Maciej Twaróg proposed that Nowa Huta’s oldest square, at the time simply called “Square by the Post Office” (Plac przy poczcie), be renamed after Ożański. His initiative was supported by some of the oldest residents in the area, who even organized a movie screening of “Man of Marble” with special biographical information about Ożański. Twaróg’s intention was to pay homage to the men and women who built Nowa Huta by honoring the icon of the town’s early days. However, the proposal was opposed by councilors for district 18, in which the square is located. The city council decided to override these protests, and the square was consequently renamed “Ożański Square” (Plac Ożańskiego). However, the controversy did not end there. In 2009, city councilor Bartłomiej Garda proposed that the square be returned to its original name, arguing that the image of Ożański as local hero was “artificially fashioned by communist propaganda” (Kursa 2009). The majority of the council supported him, and in 2009 the decision was revoked. The plaque on the square again reads “Square by the Post Office.” In my conversations with Nowa Huta residents, I encountered a spectrum of views on the subject. Some Nowa Huta residents see Ożański as a symbol of Nowa Huta’s founding residents, who dedicated their lives to building the new town: “It’s good that the young generation wants to preserve the memory of people who made this town what it is today,” said a woman in her sixties. There are those who object to glorifying his persona on account of his somewhat dark history of alcoholism: “I knew Ożański personally, and I’m sorry, but he just doesn’t deserve that honor,” said a man in his eighties. And then there are people who see the game of naming and renaming streets as a frivolous distraction from important issues affecting the district, such as the sorry state of many roads and sidewalks.

Hero or Traitor? The Case of Kukliński’s Monument In 2009, a debate played out around a proposal to erect a monument to Colonel Kukliński in Nowa Huta’s Central Square. Colonel Kukliński is

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a contentious figure in Polish history. He was a colonel in the Polish army during the socialist period, and in the 1970s he provided the CIA with Soviet military documents dealing with issues such as nuclear weapons and plans for the imposition of martial law in Poland. In 1981 he fled the country for the United States but was tried and sentenced to death in absentia by the socialist government. Following the collapse of that government, he was exonerated of all charges in 1997. He is now buried in the row of honor in a military cemetery in Poland’s capital. Nonetheless, public opinion of Kukliński remains polarized between those who view him as a hero and those who see him as a traitor. The proposal to erect a monument to Kukliński in Nowa Huta received a similarly mixed reaction among my Nowa Huta acquaintances. “A national hero. No question about it. He definitely deserves a monument,” said a man in his seventies. A woman of roughly similar age took the opposite side: “What sort of a hero is that? The man is a traitor. They say he was acting in the best interest of the country. Well, if that was true, he shouldn’t have accepted money from the CIA for the information he gave them.” Many of the people with whom I spoke were undecided about Kukliński’s legacy but nonetheless not in favor of the monument: “I don’t see what Kukliński has to do with Nowa Huta, he’s never lived here,” one woman told me, and this seemed to be a common sentiment among Nowa Huta residents. Some opposed the monument on pragmatic grounds, again citing more pressing issues affecting the district. The most heated debates about the proposed monument played out not between residents, but between community organizations. The main local proponent of the monument was Jan Franczyk, district councilor as well as owner and editor-in-chief of Nowa Huta’s local newspaper. A number of local community organizations opposed his idea. Their position was that the old core of Nowa Huta had been declared a heritage site, and thus no new development should take place there that is not part of the larger revitalization plan for the area. Franczyk retaliated by accusing his opponents of being communist sympathizers. In the end, however, the proposed monument was moved from Nowa Huta to central Kraków and is now slated to stand in front of the train station. Taken together, the three debates outlined above exemplify the negotiations that take place around the creation of sites of memory. They reveal that the prevailing trend in Nowa Huta’s public space is to replace the legacy of socialism with that of resistance to the socialist government. However, these efforts do not go uncontested by the local population, which is itself diverse. Some people are inclined to support or oppose certain projects for ideological reasons, such as the association of certain figures with either

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“socialism” or “resistance,” broadly defined. Others try to move beyond political considerations and consider projects on other grounds, such as a person’s association with Nowa Huta. And then there are those who want to leave the past behind and focus instead on present needs and issues.

Placing Memory in Nowa Huta The design and organization of the urban built environment often express the ideals of political and economic elites (Levinson 1998). This chapter provides an overview of Nowa Huta’s history and considers how changing political, economic, and social conditions have been physically articulated in the district’s architecture, urban planning, and organization of space. I have sought to show that Nowa Huta is a place with a contradictory and contested history and that many of these contradictions are physically inscribed and reinscribed in the cityscape. Different societies or epochs are often associated with particular types of architecture or urban planning. However, Aman cautions that there is no intrinsic connection between ideology and built form; on the contrary, he writes, “ideological content is not a prerequisite of form, it is inserted into forms” (1992, 257). Following Aman, I caution against simply associating certain urban forms with either “socialism” or “capitalism.” In fact, Nowa Huta’s urban plan illustrates that socialist-era designs in fact drew on many solutions from outside of the former Soviet Bloc, whereas current urban development projects continue to be infused by the socialist legacy. Although urban projects are often developed with certain political or economic goals in mind, they often have unintended consequences—and modernist utopian projects in particular are known to have sometimes produced the very opposite of what they intended to achieve (e.g., Holston 1989; Scott 1998). For example, in his analysis of the construction of Brazil’s capital, Brasilia, James Holston shows that although the city’s very design was intended to eradicate social stratification, it in fact ended up reproducing it (1989). Like Brasilia, Nowa Huta also became the opposite of what it was intended to be. Designed to be a flagship socialist space, Nowa Huta became a site of resistance to the socialist government. In fact, historian Katherine Lebow argues that it was precisely Nowa Huta’s founding values and urban arrangements that laid the groundwork for the struggle that took place in the subsequent decades (2013). These values include collective action and the notion of industrial workers as the backbone of society. The rhythm of life and work in the city, though intended to engender socialist relations, also ended up facilitating political resistance. For example, the steelworks became a crucial nucleus of information during the political upheavals in the 1980s partly because nearly every Nowa Huta resident was

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somehow connected to it. The fact that the steelworks operated in three eight-hour shifts also facilitated collective action, since this meant that thousands of people started and finished work at the same time. In effect, many strikes in Nowa Huta took place shortly after 2 p.m., when the first and largest shift at the steelworks ended, and workers poured outside the factory gates. And finally, the urban design of Nowa Huta also aided the protesters of later decades. In contrast to spaces such as Kraków’s medieval town square, a place that could easily be surrounded and closed off by security forces, Nowa Huta’s labyrinth-like neighborhoods made it possible for strikers to disperse and evade police persecution. One of the questions taken up in this chapter is to what extent the legacy of the socialist period is manifested in Nowa Huta’s cityscape. We have seen that current urban development projects and commemorative initiatives (such as erecting monuments) reflect often contradictory and conflicting needs and agendas. Certain projects invoke, or build on, the socialist past (sometimes explicitly, oftentimes not), whereas other projects are constructed precisely in opposition to that past. These varied representations of the socialist past in the cityscape negotiate among residents’ experiences, national historical narratives, and political and economic considerations such as Poland’s membership in the European Union. The representation of Nowa Huta as a site of resistance to the socialist government is in line with hegemonic national discourses that depict the socialist period primarily as a time of repression, resistance, and inefficiency. Many of Nowa Huta’s current community leaders who spearhead local urban revitalization or commemorative projects (for example, district councilors, directors of community organizations) were active in the political opposition in the 1980s. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that this is the version of Nowa Huta’s history with which they most identify and that they want to see highlighted in the district’s public representations. On the other hand, many Nowa Huta residents voice their appreciation of certain aspects of their town’s socialist-era urban design and the rhythm of life engendered during the socialist period—though this does not mean that they long for the return of socialism itself. Political party affiliations may play a role in this, although there is no clear-cut association between a person’s political party membership and their stance on any given project. For example, the creation of a new special economic zone in Nowa Huta is popularly seen as the pet project of the center-right political party Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska), which currently holds the majority of seats on Kraków’s municipal council. However, many residents also attribute Nowa Huta’s cultural renaissance in the mid-2000s to the election of a left-leaning mayor, who allegedly did more for the district (at least at the

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beginning of his term in office) than any of his predecessors throughout the 1990s. Local discourses pertaining to the socialist past are also increasingly developed in relation to discourses produced in other European states and European Union institutions. One example of this is a project called ReNew Town, an urban development project carried out by a local community center in partnership with seven other public institutions from four former socialist states, and cofinanced by two European Union institutions: the Central Europe Project and the European Union Regional Development Fund. The project’s premise was that cities and districts across the region that were built during the socialist period are experiencing a score of problems, including poor urban infrastructure, unattractive public spaces, and low levels of social cohesion among residents. To that end, four small development projects were carried out in four cities (Prague in the Czech Republic, Velenje in Slovenia, Hnusta in the Slovak Republic, and Nowa Huta in Poland) in order to rectify some of the issues that are particular to each city. The project’s ultimate goal was to develop a set of guidelines for the revitalization of former socialist towns across the region.15 The ReNew Town project illustrates that narratives on the socialist past are increasingly deanchored from local—and even national—contexts. In order to procure EU funding for their project, people working at eight institutions in four former socialist states had to develop a common narrative on the socialist past that meshes with the narrative that informs the work of European Union institutions. The case of Nowa Huta has many common features with other postsocialist cities across the region. Following the collapse of socialist governments, these cities became arenas in and through which new national, political, religious, and ethnic identities are being constructed. These new identities are projected through history as much as against it (Gelazis, Czaplicka, and Ruble 2009, 3). Furthermore, Nowa Huta also bears many similarities to other deindustrializing cities outside of the postsocialist part of the world. These cities often face pressures to reinvent themselves and reinscribe their pasts in order to successfully compete for investors, tourists, and customers. However, in Poland, as in other former socialist states, this process of postindustrial revitalization and reinvention is additionally inflected by the socialist legacy. Changes in the city’s economic landscape, such as the decline of the steelworks and the construction of shopping malls, are framed by issues of political memory. And in turn, issues of political memory have real economic consequences. For example, the question of whether to rename Central Square after Ronald Reagan is not merely about the socialist past but also about Poland’s present position in the global

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political economy. The case of Nowa Huta, therefore, offers an example of how phenomena such as deindustrialization and neoliberal economic reforms in city planning intersect with local histories and politics (in the case of Nowa Huta, the socialist and postsocialist experience) to produce particular local formations. In this chapter I began my exploration of memory and change in Nowa Huta by looking at its cityscape. In the following chapter I turn to another site of memory: the steelworks. I examine the steelworks as an institution that reflects changing political and economic conditions and informs local memory.

CHAPTER 2 From Lenin to Mittal Work, Memory, and Change in Nowa Huta’s Steelworks

T

he castlelike administrative center of the steelworks looms majestically on a gentle hill on the eastern boundary of Nowa Huta. The administrative center is made up of two main buildings, and its characteristic arcade-studded design has earned it the nickname “Vatican” or the “Doge’s Palace.” In between the two buildings is the entrance to the steelworks, an industrial complex made up of dozens of buildings and warehouses spread over a surface area of approximately ten square kilometers and crisscrossed by numerous rail lines. The front gate is the end stop of many streetcar and bus lines. From here, workers who arrive by public transit transfer onto the steelworks’ internal shuttle buses that circulate between the main entrance and the various divisions. If we arrive here at 2 p.m., when the first (and largest) shift of the day finishes, we will see mustached men, mostly in their fifties, dressed in jeans, plaid shirts and denim or leather jackets rushing through the gates. The security guard at the gate carefully scrutinizes the identification badges of everyone who comes and goes. This evening is different, because we are not here for work but to watch the finale of Kraków’s film music festival. For the first time ever, this concert is taking place inside the steelworks, in the former tinning plant. The tinning plant is no longer in use, and in recent years the steelworks’ management has been renting it out for select important concerts. These concerts are a rare treat because the steelworks is normally a very difficult place to visit. The guard at the gate checks our ticket and waves us toward the waiting bus that will drop us off at the tinning plant and pick us up after the concert. During the five-minute ride, we pass by numerous worn-down buildings (some of them clearly no longer in use) and smokestacks and several

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The administrative center of the steelworks. Photo by the author.

rail crossings. It is difficult to see anything because of the rich foliage, but the quiet and emptiness are striking. Everyone who worked here in the past says that this used to be a hustling and bustling place, but now you hardly see a soul. The trees and shrubs have grown up so much that it is reportedly common to spot a deer or a hare. The bus stops in front of the former tinning plant, and we get out. On the inside, the empty plant looks like a giant warehouse. All the industrial equipment is long gone. For concerts, the organizer must bring in all the necessary infrastructure: a raised floor to even out the ground surface, a stage, seats, lights, speakers, and gigantic projection screens. This two-hundredmeter-long and thirty-six-meter-wide space can reportedly fit an audience of up to four thousand people. We sit down, and the concert begins. I wonder how many people in the audience are current or former employees and if any of them worked in this building when it was still a tinning plant. This chapter examines memories of the socialist period in Nowa Huta, and the changes that have taken place in the district over the past two decades, through the lens of Nowa Huta’s steelworks. The histories of Nowa Huta and its steelworks are inextricably tied, since the two have evolved together, with changes at the steelworks affecting the rhythm of life in the district.

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Therefore, the steelworks is an important feature of Nowa Huta’s physical and conceptual landscape, a site that invokes memories and whose history speaks to changing political, economic, and social conditions. This makes it a particularly fitting lens for an examination of phenomena such as industrialization and deindustrialization, the changing relationship between work and community, the changing norms and values associated with work, and the ways in which the socialist and postsocialist context gives these phenomena a particular expression in Nowa Huta.

From Lenin Steelworks to Arcelor Mittal Industry was seen as the cornerstone of modernity in many parts of the world and was often operationalized in various state- and nation-building projects.1 This was also the case in the former socialist part of Europe. Although Soviet-driven industrialization imitated the capitalist model (Braverman 1974, 12), socialist ideology imbued industry with a particular set of values. Industrialization was one of the basic tenets of the socialist project, viewed as the key to modernization, progress, and the creation of a new working class (Stenning 2005a, 2005b).2 Across East-Central Europe, new industrial enterprises were built, sometimes giving rise to entire communities that revolved around a particular industry (Stenning 2004). Many working-class communities based around steelmaking, coal mining, or collective farming thus became the “archetypal spaces of socialism” (Stenning 2005a, 3). In Poland, the showpiece socialist industrial and urban project was Nowa Huta. Nowa Huta’s steelworks (in 1954 named Huta im. Lenina, or Lenin Steelworks) was declared open on July 21, 1954, the day that the first blast furnace began to operate. Over the years, it continued to expand and soon became Poland’s largest steel producer, supplying the auto, construction, mechanical, and agricultural industries. At its peak capacity in 1978, the steelworks produced six and a half million tons of steel a year. However, Lenin Steelworks was more than just a steelworks—it was a gigantic industrial complex, consisting of hundreds of buildings situated on an area of approximately ten square kilometers. Here, all stages of the steel manufacturing process were carried out, along with other related enterprises needed for steelmaking, such as repairs or services for workers. The steelworks once even had its own dairy, on-site medical clinic, hospitality services, and newspaper (Choma 1999; Miezian 2004). At its peak in the late 1970s, Lenin Steelworks employed almost forty thousand people, or over one-sixth of Nowa Huta’s total population. In practice, this meant that most families in town were connected to the steelworks, whether by being employed there directly, working for one of its associated enterprises (for example, hospital-

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ity, medical, child care, cultural services), or taking advantage of the many programs and services it offered. Socialist ideology viewed the workplace as the central organizing principle of all spheres of life (Ashwin 2000; Kideckel 2002). As the country’s flagship industrial workplace, Lenin Steelworks epitomized this arrangement. The steelworks provided subsidized meals at work, child care for the workers’ children, medical care, company-funded holidays, and other cultural and recreational programs for the entire family. The steelworks also owned a vocational school, a cultural center, a sports club and stadium, movie theaters, and the local newspaper. It assisted in the construction of a large share of the town’s housing, which it then allocated to its workers. It donated materials for local projects such as the construction of schools and playgrounds and built and operated vacation resorts for its employees. In short, virtually all life in Nowa Huta revolved around Lenin Steelworks.

Lenin Steelworks in the 1950s. Photo by Henryk Hermanowicz, from the archives of the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków.

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Steelworkers parading through Central Square during Nowa Huta Days. Photo by Henryk Hermanowicz, from the archives of the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków.

By the late 1970s, local, national, and international political and economic conditions combined to produce growing dissatisfaction in Nowa Huta. After an economic boom in the early 1970s, in the second half of the decade the Polish economy went into a recession, leading to government cutbacks, inflation, and wage freezes (Choma 1999; Hardy 2009). Furthermore, in the 1970s the government’s strategic priority began to shift away from the Nowa Huta steelworks to the newly constructed Katowice Steelworks (Huta Katowice) in Poland’s Silesia region, resulting in a further withdrawal of investments from Nowa Huta (Stenning 2000). Although in 1978 the steelworks reached its production peak of 6.5 million tons of steel, the following year production began to decline. The early 1980s were also a time of increased environmental awareness, to the point where in 1982

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Kraków’s city council decided that the steelworks must cut its emissions, even if it meant reducing production (Stenning 2000). Popular frustration with product shortages and inflation reached its boiling point in 1980 with the emergence of the Solidarity movement. In Nowa Huta, approximately 97 percent of Lenin Steelworks employees joined the Solidarity trade union, in effect making the Solidarity branch at the steelworks the largest in the country (Stenning 2000). Furthermore, the fact that nationwide Solidarity membership at the time stood at approximately 70 percent illustrates the degree to which Nowa Huta’s steelworkers wanted change.3 Throughout the 1980s, the steelworks was a hotbed of oppositional activity, with numerous strikes and protests beginning at the steelworks and then spilling onto city streets. Ironically, the fact that Lenin Steelworks became a Solidarity powerhouse can be attributed to the strategic role it enjoyed during the socialist period (Lebow 2013). For example, despite the product shortages that were plaguing the country, the steelworks was relatively well supplied with various materials needed for the creation and distribution of oppositional materials. The sheer size of the workforce and the rhythm of work also proved conducive to collective action. For example, strikes often began at 2 p.m., when the first shift at the steelworks ended, and thousands of workers simultaneously poured outside the factory gates. Workers knew that there was power in numbers and that forty thousand strikers at the country’s pet enterprise enjoyed a strong platform from which to voice their dissent. This does not mean that the strikers could not be repressed; indeed, the steelworks was “pacified” by militia forces on two occasions, in 1981 and 1988.4 However, the size of the workforce gave workers the confidence to take to the streets. One former steelworker drove this point home for me when I asked him whether he was afraid to go on strikes: “No one was afraid at the time, because the entire steelworks was wrapped up in this. We were all aware that there were too many of us for the government to ignore us. Remember that the steelworks was the apple of the government’s eye. The entire country looked to us, to see what we will do. Because we were forty thousand people.” The socialist government collapsed in 1989, and the country’s new ruling elites adopted reforms that cut right at the heart of socialist enterprises such as Lenin Steelworks. The central tenets of the reform package included the privatization of state-owned enterprises and their reorientation toward “profit” and “efficiency” (which frequently entailed layoffs), coupled with the withdrawal of state subsidies and fiscal and budget discipline (Hardy 2009; Mandel and Humphrey 2002; Verdery 1996; Dunn 2004). The most immediate change at the steelworks following the collapse of

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the socialist state was the name change: in April 1990 Lenin Steelworks was renamed after Tadeusz Sendzimir, a Polish American engineer who made a number of important innovations in steelmaking. In 1991, the first restructuring program for the steelworks was developed. The program aimed to remove all secondary production functions and processes (such as repairs) and to relegate them to spinoff companies. Some of these companies are limited companies, some are cooperatives, and others are owned by trade unions (Stenning 2000). This reorganization instantly trimmed employment: whereas in 1990 employment at the steelworks stood at approximately twenty-seven thousand, the first restructuring program in 1994 eliminated approximately ten thousand jobs. Of these, approximately six thousand people found work in spinoff companies, and four thousand accepted early retirement packages (Choma 1999, 41). Throughout the 1990s, preparations for privatization continued. In 1997 Tadeusz Sendzimir Steelworks became incorporated. In 2001 it merged with the Katowice Steelworks, and a year later, a consortium of Polish steelworks (Polskie Huty Stali) was created, encompassing Nowa Huta’s steelworks as well as three other steel factories in the Silesia region. In 2004, the entire consortium was sold to Mittal Steel, which in 2007 merged with Arcelor to form Arcelor Mittal, currently the world’s largest steel producer. The year 2004 thus became a watershed in the steelworks’ history, with many people, especially steelworkers, temporalizing life at the steelworks and in Nowa Huta into the phases of “before Mittal” and “after Mittal.” As a result of the sale to Arcelor Mittal, the steelworks’ economic and political position changed from that of a big fish in a little national pond to that of a little fish in a big global pond. The company is owned by Indian-born steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, headquartered in Luxembourg, and has branches in more than sixty countries worldwide. Key decisions affecting the Nowa Huta site are thus made not locally but in the company’s head office in Luxembourg. Even the company’s national head office for Poland is not in Nowa Huta, but in Katowice, where its other four steel plants are located. Nowa Huta residents have mixed feelings about these changes. Since the collapse of the socialist government, Poland’s explicit goal was to “return to Europe,” with the country looking to the West for models on how to achieve “progress” and “modernity.” Several Nowa Huta residents told me that they hoped that the steelworks would be sold to either a European or an American company that would bring more “western standards” to Poland. These individuals approvingly noted that Mittal Steel’s merger with the German firm Arcelor three years after the sale indeed brought more “European standards” to the company. Engineers and managers— that is, highly skilled workers who are best equipped to succeed in the “new

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economy”—told me that they appreciate the possibilities of international exchanges and knowledge sharing with experts in other countries. At the same time, many people felt that since the company’s national head office is located in another city, the Nowa Huta plant is likely to be neglected, and its future is uncertain. For Nowa Huta’s population, the most painful consequence of the steelworks’ privatization and reorganization is unemployment. During the socialist period unemployment officially did not exist, and it was widely believed that workplaces kept unnecessary workers on the payroll simply to fulfill this political mandate. After 1989, newly privatized firms began to trim their employee numbers in the name of efficiency. At the Nowa Huta steelworks, these efforts began in the early 1990s and took a variety of forms, including early retirement packages, layoffs, and the creation of spinoff companies that absorbed a share of the workforce (Stenning 2000). As I write this in the fall of 2014, employment at the Nowa Huta steelworks stands at approximately thirty-five hundred people—notably, less than one-tenth of what it was during the company’s employment peak in the late 1970s. As employment numbers declined, so did production. For example, people often pointed out to me that whereas the steelworks used to have five operating blast furnaces, it now has only one. Notwithstanding the decline in employment and production, the new owner did make certain investments in the Nowa Huta site. A new hot rolling mill was opened in July 2007, and the cold rolling mill was modernized in November 2009. However, despite these modernization efforts, several employees complained to me that the steelworks’ infrastructure is deteriorating. “Beautiful on the outside, ruin on the inside,” one person commented. Marek Kurowski, who has worked in one of steelworks’ storage facilities for thirty-five years, offered this description: Our storage facility has a leaky roof, so when it rains we have to put down a bucket to catch the water. I’m worried that one day the entire roof will just cave in on our heads. And this past January was really cold and the water pipe going to the fire hydrant broke. It was never replaced, so there is no water in the fire hydrant, which is a huge health and safety violation. A lot of the older buildings are not being maintained; they are just left to decay. No one trims the grass or the trees anymore. The steelworks is starting to look like a park; it’s starting to grow into Puszcza Niepołomicka [a nearby forest].

At present, the future of the steelworks is uncertain and subject to much speculation among Nowa Huta residents. People are concerned that since four of the company’s steel plants, along with its head office, are located in the Katowice region, eventually all production will be moved there, and the

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Nowa Huta site will close altogether. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the steelworks has agreed to divest unused portions of its territory to the city of Kraków for the “Nowa Huta of the Future” project. There are also rumors that the company is looking to sell its two signature administrative buildings. As the steelworks’ significance as local employer and production facility declines, its role in the local imagination is starting to be more symbolic. The fact that Arcelor Mittal started to rent out its former tinning plant for concerts suggests that in Nowa Huta the steel industry is increasingly being commodified and turned into heritage. This is a common phenomenon in former industrial towns around the world: as manufacturing industries leave former industrial towns, the production of “real stuff,” such as steel, is increasingly replaced by the production of experiences—in this case, a concert (Harvey 1989, 2005).

The Changing Role of the Steelworks in Nowa Huta’s Life In October 2009 I attended a public talk at the OKN cultural center,5 at which geographer Karol Janas presented the preliminary results of his doctoral research on Nowa Huta. One of the questions in his survey was concerned with people’s perceptions of significant events in Nowa Huta’s history. Janas reported that only 36 percent of his respondents identified the construction of the steelworks as an important event in local history, whereas the construction of the Lord’s Ark church and “resistance to the communist system” were seen as significant by 64 and 67 percent of respondents, respectively. Once Janas finished talking and opened the floor for questions, an elderly man jumped up. The construction of the steelworks was the single most important event in Nowa Huta’s history, the man argued, without which the town itself would have never been built. I later learned that the man was Tomasz Szewczyk, the steelworks’ former director of social affairs. Mr. Szewczyk’s heated response illustrated an important phenomenon: the steelworks’ changing role in Nowa Huta’s community life and its changing image in the eyes of different generations of residents. At one point in time, essentially all life in Nowa Huta revolved around the steelworks, but now this is no longer the case. The steelworks now employs only a fraction of Nowa Huta’s population: less than 2 percent, as compared with approximately 15 percent in its heyday. At one point in time, young men in Nowa Huta grew up with the knowledge that they would go on to work at the steelworks just as their fathers (and maybe even grandfathers) did. This is the trajectory described to me by many steelworkers, including Władysław Kwiecień, director of one of the steelworks’ product divisions.

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In his youth, Mr. Kwiecień wanted to become a forest ranger, but after a few unsuccessful attempts at finding employment he eventually gave up and ended up working at the steelworks like his father, mother, and grandfather before him. He described his path in the following terms: “It was a kind of a tradition in Nowa Huta. A guy who lived in Nowa Huta would go to AGH [Akademia Górniczo-Hutnicza, Kraków’s technical university] and then to the steelworks. That was his fate. Everyone knew from the beginning that sooner or later he would end up at the steelworks.” However, although work at the steelworks guaranteed a secure and relatively well-paying job, not all people saw this as a desirable career. Jan Zubrzycki, a retired steelworker, told me that he did not want his children to follow in his footsteps: “If you worked at the steelworks you said to yourself: ‘My God, I work so hard, but I’ll never let my children work here.’ And you did everything so that they wouldn’t have to.” His two adult children graduated university and now both work in the banking sector. Mr. Zubrzycki’s desire to keep his children away from the steelworks at all costs illustrates that though there were definite material benefits that came with industrial work, the workers themselves did not romanticize it by any means. They knew that the work was physically demanding and that the heat, pollution, and shift work all took a toll on their bodies. Furthermore, though industrial work was glorified in official state discourse, in the popular imagination it was always seen as inferior to so-called mind work, a fact of which workers were also acutely aware as they planned for their children’s futures. At present, employment at the steelworks is no longer the projected fate of young Nowa Huta residents. When I spoke to teenagers about their employment aspirations, not one of them identified the steelworks as a place where they imagined themselves working in the future. Several of them had family members who worked for the steelworks, and some had even gone on holidays organized by their parents’ workplace. However, on the whole, the teenagers with whom I spoke viewed the steelworks as an obsolete institution that was on the decline and did not appear to give it much thought otherwise. In fact, they seemed surprised I was even asking them about it. Like many major socialist enterprises, Lenin Steelworks used to own and fund nearly all social, cultural, and recreational programs and institutions in town. The majority of these were offered to employees and other residents either for free or for a nominal fee. Throughout the 1990s, as the steelworks began to prepare for privatization, it eliminated the majority of these programs, including the sports club, cultural center, health clinic, and vocational schools. The handful that remain to this day include the steelworkers’ division of the Polish Tourist and Sightseeing Society (Polskie

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Towarzystwo Turystyczno-Krajoznawcze, or PTTK), an association that organizes hiking, skiing, and kayaking trips, as well as gives tours around the steelworks. The steelworks also funds salaries, space, and uniforms for the Steelworks’ Wind Orchestra. Since its inception in 1953, the orchestra has been playing at all important events at the steelworks, as well as events such as steelworkers’ funerals. In 2005 Arcelor Mittal’s plans to eliminate the orchestra generated such a strong public backlash in Nowa Huta—a local filmmaker even made a documentary about it—that a year later the orchestra was reinstated. The company also periodically contributes to certain initiatives in the name of what is now called “corporate social responsibility” (społeczna odpowiedzialność biznesu). For example, it contributed funds to a new gym and recreation center in Nowa Huta, as well as a community gardening program organized by a local community center. It also funded computer labs in two local schools and, a few years ago, sponsored Kraków’s marathon. It is important to note, however, that most of these initiatives entail only a onetime donation rather than a permanent relationship of the sort that existed during the socialist period. As the above description illustrates, the steelworks is now simply a place of business rather than the cornerstone of all life in town. The new owner has tried as much as possible to separate the steelworks’ socialist-era history from its current operations. For example, if we visit the company’s Polish web site6 and click on the history tab, we learn that the steelworks’ history began in 2004, the year that it was bought by Mittal Steel, commencing what the company terms a “new epoch in Poland’s steel working.” In the year following the steelworks’ sale to Mittal Steel, a monument to Solidarity was removed from the steelworks’ grounds and relocated to Nowa Huta’s Central Square. The monument was made in 1999 by steelworkers and located in front of the blooming mill division, the site of the strongest Solidarity branch in the steelworks. The steelworks also used to house a memorial room (izba pamięci) commemorating Nowa Huta’s Solidarity, which was similarly relocated outside the steelworks. In the above sections I outline the steelworks’ history, with a focus on its changing role in Nowa Huta’s community life. It becomes apparent that, once the cornerstone of all social life in town, the steelworks is increasingly becoming just one branch of a global company that, for the time being, happens to be located on Nowa Huta’s territory but could just as easily close its doors and move elsewhere. The steelworks’ history, I argue, reflects the different phases in Poland’s postwar history: first the construction of socialism; then its contestation and collapse; and finally the changes that accompanied the postsocialist transformation, in particular privatization and the fracture of the socialist-era connection among work, workplace,

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and community. More broadly, the steelworks’ history also speaks to the processes of industrialization and deindustrialization, the work-community dynamic typical of many industrial company towns, and the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist organization of work (Harvey 1989, 2005). In the following section I examine what people’s reflections on work, past and present, can tell us about their experiences of these phenomena.

Memories of Work Political and economic processes are often manifested in the changing organization of work and the ideas surrounding work and workers. Therefore, work, and industrial work in particular, can be an instructive site for examining the political and economic reforms that accompanied the postsocialist period in East-Central Europe (e.g., Buchowski 2008; Kideckel 2008; Ashwin 1999a, 1999b). During the socialist period, work was the foundation of citizenship; for example, health care, vacations, leisure, and other social provisions were allocated to people either through their workplaces or on the basis of their roles as workers (Stenning 2005a). This was true particularly of industrial work and workers, hailed as the vanguard of socialism. At the same time, however, the veneration of the working class in official accounts engendered a backlash on the part of white-collar urbanites. In effect, throughout the socialist period, representations of the working classes ranged from the “heroic” to the “ridiculous” (Stenning 2005a). Following the collapse of the socialist government and the country’s embrace of neoliberal economic reforms, political and economic priorities shifted away from production in favor of consumption and from industrial work to the service industry and new technologies (Berdahl 2010; Dunn 2004; Kideckel 2008). This is part of a larger trend that has occurred in many parts of the world, where flexible technologies and organizational forms (including part-time and contract work, outsourcing, or just-intime production) rendered obsolete the postwar Fordist work arrangement that granted industrial work a secure place (Harvey 1989). These changes, in turn, were accompanied by changing values and discourses relating to work. For example, Kathryn Dudley’s (1994) study of deindustrialization in Kenosha, a Wisconsin auto-producing town, shows that over the 1980s, the “culture of the hands” associated with work in the auto plant came to be publicly denigrated and replaced with a “culture of the mind” associated with middle-class values such as education. As this value shift took place, Kenosha autoworkers came to be popularly seen as lazy, entitled, and not deserving of their high salaries. A similar shift in values also accompanied the decline of industry in East-Central Europe. As we will see later on, the exact same critiques that

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were leveled against Kenosha autoworkers are also leveled against Nowa Huta steelworkers. Here, however, this shift is additionally inflected by the ideological stigma attached to socialist-era constructs and values (specifically, industrialization and the glorification of industrial work and workers). Devaluing industrial work and the values associated with it (such as collectivism) is a technique intended to exorcise socialist-era ideology. Unlike the postwar capitalism that was developed in Western Europe and North America, which was based on a compromise between labor and capital, neoliberal capitalism as it is being constructed in postsocialist Poland is based on excluding workers (Mrozowicki 2011). To that end, hegemonic discourses cast industrial workers “as either anachronistic artifacts of failed socialism or obstacles in the march to capitalist prosperity, or even as both” (Kideckel 2008, 8). These discourses resonate with, and are reproduced by, the country’s growing white-collar middle-class. One of the more drastic outcomes of the reforms undertaken in the early 1990s is unemployment. In a stark contrast to the socialist period, when unemployment officially did not exist, at the time of my last trip to Nowa Huta in 2013 the national unemployment rate hovered between 13 and 14 percent.7 Moreover, approximately one-third of working people are employed on the basis of part-time or temporary contracts—the most of any European Union country (Rae 2013). Such contracts are problematic for a number of reasons. First and most obvious, they do not offer income security and make it difficult to plan for the future; for example, many young people complain that banks will not give mortgages to individuals who do not have a permanent work contract. Second, they do not come with health benefits: people employed under such contracts have to buy their own private health insurance or pay for their health care expenses out of pocket. Third, the time spent working on such contracts does not count toward state retirement benefits, an issue that even young people worry about. In Nowa Huta, unemployment and job insecurity were frequently cited by the people with whom I spoke as the biggest social problems that accompanied capitalist reforms. As noted earlier, the Nowa Huta steelworks now employs less than 10 percent of its former workforce. However, steelworks’ management insists that, since layoffs began, no one was ever forcibly laid off and that employees who left chose to accept compensation or early retirement packages. And indeed, one of the conditions imposed on Mittal Steel by the Polish government at the time of the steelworks’ sale was that all the workers who were laid off within the first five years (that is, from 2004 to 2009) would receive compensation packages. When I spoke with trade union leaders, who negotiated and implemented the compensation process, they stressed that every worker’s case was different. For my part, I was less interested in the details of the layoff and compensation process,

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than in how the issue of layoffs was framed and understood by Nowa Huta residents and what people’s reflections on this can tell us about changed political and economic conditions and ideologies. In what follows let us examine a few different accounts of the layoff process. Union leader Wojciech Gąsowski, who has worked at the steelworks since 1962, described the layoff process in the following way: “In most cases, it was the workers themselves who decided to leave. Many people took advantage of this shot of cash they received and started their own businesses. Some people didn’t want to do it. The biggest problem for people was having to make a decision. Some people who got money didn’t think about the future at all; they blew it all on a new car or put it toward building a house. And now they complain.” In this quote, Mr. Gąsowski frames the layoff process in terms of individual responsibility, flexibility, and risk-taking— the very values associated with work in the neoliberal economy (Miller and Rose 2008). As he saw it, people who were able to take a risk and reinvent themselves in the new economy by starting their own business, ended up succeeding. On the other hand, those who didn’t “make it” have only themselves to blame. Ms. Kowalik, a former accountant in her late forties, had a very different story to tell. At the time that I met her, she had been unemployed for a little over a year, and her unemployment benefits had just run out. She said she was actively looking for a job, but to no avail. She spoke of her experience with bitterness: “First they relocated the accounting department to Katowice. So for a year I commuted to Katowice to work. . . . It takes two hours one way by train. Then they hired a new person, a young woman, and I had to train her. Once she was trained, they let me go and kept her. The company prefers young people who have English skills. They don’t care about older workers; our experience doesn’t count for anything anymore. And where am I going to find a job at my age?” In contrast to that of the union leader above, Ms. Kowalik’s account underscores her very limited agency as an employee. Her comment also points to the generational dimension of the new labor market, a topic to which I will return in the later pages. The layoff process was seen as problematic not only by workers who had been laid off. When I brought up the topic with Władysław Kwiecień, current director of one of the production divisions, he responded passionately. KP: I find that many former workers are quite bitter about the layoffs.

WK: Does that surprise you? People have worked hard and honestly for thirty years and then they get sent on early retirement [zasiłek przedemerytalny], which is seven or eight hundred złoty. For some people, it’s really hard to see that a friend who started a few months before them, or started at the same time but worked in a different position, gets to keep their job whereas they get laid off.

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But we have capitalism, and these are the rules. This is the way the world works. There is no certainty like there was before.8

Mr. Kwiecień clearly empathizes with workers who were involuntarily laid off. However, he seems resigned to the fact that unemployment is an inevitable consequence of capitalist reforms and that there are no alternatives to this (to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher’s famous quote).9 With the benefit of hindsight, people appreciate the guaranteed and stable employment of the socialist era. However, the socialist work arrangement had its problems as well, a fact that is also reflected in people’s stories. For example, even though unemployment officially did not exist, people who were seen as politically suspect were not only fired from their jobs but also often blacklisted from work altogether—meaning they would not be able to find employment anywhere. Mr. Krzemiński, an electrician whose story will be told in greater detail in chapter 4, was first fired from his department for taking part in the December 1981 strike and refusing to sign a statement affirming loyalty to the socialist government (lojalka). He subsequently had trouble finding another job at the steelworks until one manager who was a Party 10 member agreed to vouch for him. Then, when he wanted to leave the steelworks in 1985, he was initially not allowed to do so, a fact he attributes to being seen as a troublemaker who needed to be kept under close scrutiny. Another issue that problematizes any overly romantic recollections of socialist-era employment is that of mandatory work orders (nakazy pracy)—meaning people were often assigned to work in a particular company or geographic area based on political and economic priorities at the time. Mandatory work orders were first implemented in Poland in 1950 and lasted until the 1960s. During martial law (1981–83), similar work restrictions were implemented at certain key workplaces across Poland, including the Lenin Steelworks in Nowa Huta. Paweł Czajka, a former steelworker, told me that he first tried to leave the steelworks in 1983 for a better-paying job but was not allowed to do so for twelve months. In his case the motives behind keeping him at the steelworks were not political but economic: the 1980s was a time when the steelworks was experiencing a shortage of workers. This is how he described his experience: KP: What do you mean they wouldn’t let you leave?

PC: They wouldn’t. There was a mandatory work order and that’s it.

KP: So you were forced to work there, whether you wanted to or not?

PC: Yes, for twelve months. Then I could go. I was really angry that it took so long because the other job was waiting for me.

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After unemployment, the second most common issue that recurred in people’s work-related stories was that of pay. Public opinion held, and continues to hold, that during the socialist period industrial workers had high salaries and good benefits. At present, current Arcelor Mittal employees continue to receive salaries that are either on par with, or higher than, the national average. Marek Kurowski, a man in his early fifties with thirty-five years of work experience at the steelworks, talked about his salary in these terms: MK: This year is my thirty-fifth anniversary at the steelworks, so I get a bonus of five times my monthly pay. The workers who are still at the steelworks still get pretty good bonuses and a decent social package. The problem is, there are fewer and fewer of them. The company tries to get rid of older workers who have negotiated decent packages and hire new workers who are not offered these kinds of benefits. My job doesn’t involve heavy physical work, and I don’t work shifts, so all I make is the national average. People who do the heavy work, for example at the blast furnace, which is also shift work, make about 50 percent more. KP: Is that how it’s always been, even during PRL?

MK: Yes, I’ve always made approximately the national average.

It should be noted, however, that while those employed by Arcelor Mittal continue to receive relatively decent pay, this is not necessarily the case for steelworkers whose divisions were transformed into spinoff companies, since these are now independent enterprises. Such is the case of Jan Baryłka, a fifty-eight-year old man who worked at the steelworks from the early 1970s to the early 1990s, when his division was closed and transformed into a spinoff company. When I spoke with him in 2010, he was on temporary medical leave but was planning to return to the spinoff company until his planned retirement in 2012. Mr. Baryłka positively recalled the job security and salaries of the “old days,” which he contrasted with his recent forced pay cut. JB: From my point of view the old days were better, I didn’t have to look for work, but work looked for me. And now? After forty-three years of work, the steelworks is cutting people’s salaries because everything is going down. Recession. In my spinoff company, they cut our salaries. I used to earn about two thousand złoty [a month]; now I earn about fifteen hundred złoty. But the price of everything keeps going up. For young people this is a very good time. And for the old—the old positively look back on the old days. . . . KP: So you are saying that before people earned better money?

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JB: Yes before I could afford everything. And now I can’t afford practically anything. The stores are full, but I have no money to buy things. If I want to buy something, I have to save up for it.

Existing Arcelor Mittal’s employees also complain that their salaries are significantly lower than in the company’s Western European plants. One trade union leader told me, “We are a global company, our earnings should be comparable to those in Western Europe. Maybe the management makes good money, but the further you are from the gates [i.e., the administrative center], the further you are from getting a raise. . . . If the average salary in Luxembourg is forty-seven hundred euro, here it’s forty-seven hundred złoty.” Given the current exchange rate, this means that a steelworker in Luxembourg earns about four times as much as his Polish counterpart in absolute terms. Things become more difficult if we factor in the actual cost of living in Luxembourg versus Poland, although it is certainly not four times higher. In any event, then, the Luxembourg steelworker is still significantly ahead. However, workers were also aware that while their European counterparts earned decidedly more (in both absolute and relative terms), it is these very steel plants in Luxembourg, Belgium, and France that are presently being closed or are threatened by closures. This places workers in a catch-22: Should they be fighting for higher salaries, or should they be grateful to still have jobs? Although popular opinion holds that the socialist arrangement privileged industrial work and workers, a number of people problematized this claim. Such was the story of Paweł Czajka, the man who wanted to leave the steelworks but was forced to remain on a mandatory work order. Mr. Czajka worked at the steelworks from 1975 to 1984. He began in the Production Office of the Mechanical Division, which developed production plans and targets, then moved to the Main Automatic Division, which oversaw things such as temperature in the blast furnace. In 1984 he left the steelworks for a job as a repairman with a neighborhood housing cooperative (spółdzielnia), where he still works today. I asked him why he wanted to leave the steelworks so badly. PC: The pay wasn’t good. What the steelworks paid then, I could make several times that much money doing repairs. KP: But I thought steelworkers made pretty good money? PC: That was only if you were in the Party.

Here, Mr. Czajka raised a sentiment that I often heard in the course of my research, namely that high salaries, promotions, and perks such as vacations in desirable locations were reserved for members of the Party. He went on to tell me about the benefits of Party membership. He said that

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he was offered the opportunity to attend university if he joined the Party, but he refused. In the end he never ended up going to university, a fact of which he spoke with evident embarrassment. Because of his refusal to join the Party, he also missed out on some other opportunities. For example, certain workers were offered temporary work contracts in Algeria, building industrial complexes. They were paid well, and received so-called dollar coupons (bony dolarowe) that could be spent at Pewex, a special store that carried coveted (and otherwise unavailable) western products for purchase in American dollars. No account of the socialist work arrangement can be complete without a discussion of the redistributive role of the socialist workplace. The socialist state derived much of its legitimacy from its paternalistic role of redistributing resources to its citizens (Kornai 1992; Verdery 1996). These included “food, shelter, education, vacations and cultural goods and services” (Kornai 1992, 54). The primary vehicle through which this allocation and distribution took place was the workplace. However, the problem with this arrangement was that the state could never fulfill this obligation to people’s satisfaction. In fact, many historians and political scientists now attribute the collapse of socialist states across the region to the fact that they ultimately failed to “deliver the goods” (Borneman 1992, 252; see also Kornai 2002; Berdahl 2010; Verdery 1996). Let us now look at how this system of allocation and distribution worked at Nowa Huta’s steelworks. As the country’s flagship industrial enterprise, Lenin Steelworks had considerable resources at its disposal. Its employees thus enjoyed benefits unparalleled at other—whether smaller or less politically strategic—workplaces. Union leader Wojciech Gąsowski described this arrangement in the following terms: Work at the steelworks was always hard, but one could get an apartment and make decent money. You could get an apartment after five or six years of work. In the 1970s, it was a workplace to which you could tie your future. The steelworks even had its own collective farm [PGR] with pigs, vegetables, and so on! In the 1980s, when it became more difficult for the steelworks to make arrangements with the city regarding housing construction, the steelworks built the Oświecenie [Enlightenment] neighborhood all by itself, for the workers, then single-family houses near the Piastów neighborhood. . . . The cafeteria served one hundred thousand meals a day.

All of the past and current steelworks employees whom I interviewed (with the exception of two managers who had only worked at the steelworks since the 1990s) received their current apartments through the steelworks. Several of the older workers reported going on trips with the

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steelworks’ tourist association, and two of my interlocutors were still active members, even though one is retired and another now works for a spinoff company. Some people also saw the workplace-based trade union and Party secretary as sources to which they could turn for help. Katarzyna Balicka, a secretary at the steelworks, told me that when she got married and moved in with her husband and his parents, her relationship with her mother-in-law was so difficult that she feared for her marriage. So what did she do? “I went to the Party secretary and told him that if I don’t get an apartment I will have to get a divorce.” Within two years (which at the time was considered a very reasonable waiting period), she was allocated an apartment, and her marriage survived. A retired steelworks employee, Tomasz Szewczyk, former assistant director of social provisions, talked to me at length about the benefits that Lenin Steelworks offered to its workers. Mr. Szewczyk was in charge of so-called social affairs, including meals, holidays, children’s camps, garden plots, sports, and other cultural activities. When he assumed this job in the mid-1970s, the majority of his time was dedicated to developing a holiday base for the steelworks’ employees and their families, a task that included purchasing land, building vacation resorts, and arranging holidays abroad. This is what he had to say about it: The steelworks had a wonderful holiday base, we had contacts in the mountains, in Mazury [the lake region of Poland], regular vacations to [the former] Czechoslovakia, the GDR, and to Yugoslavia. Two and a half thousand people went on vacation to Yugoslavia every year. There was no other workplace in Poland that arranged foreign vacations on such a scale. Plus we built holiday resorts, modernized existing ones, we bought land for garden plots, we built resorts for children’s summer camps, we began building a large resort for youth on the sea. Of course then 1990 came, we didn’t finish it, and everything got sold.

Mr. Szewczyk also talked about the cultural and leisure activities organized by the steelworks: The OKN cultural center organized all our workplace events: holidays, anniversaries, because every division had its own anniversary of when it was built, every division had its own carnival ball. . . . The steelworks even had a theater on its grounds. Workers from the cultural center tried to have a presence in every division. Every division should have a band or a dance group, and then once a year they held competitions. That brought people together. Now, life goes on without this contact. People bonded, and they could also show off their talents and cultivate them. Take a break from everyday life and spend time differently. Now, when I look back on it from the perspective of so many years, this is what

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I think is the most important factor in bringing people together, the most important role of the steelworks in affecting workers’ lives.

Mr. Szewczyk summed up the role of the steelworks in the following words: The steelworks was the largest factory in Poland. So our political leaders had the ambition that if it is the largest workplace everything should be the best. On the largest scale, the best. So we tried, and essentially we had it. In the past, the workplace, and especially a workplace like the steelworks, was everything to the workers. Starting with housing, to holidays and summer camps. It had its own health care service. Whatever is needed. We need an ultrasound machine, we buy an ultrasound machine, if not this year then the next. Every division had its own clinic, complete with dentistry. . . . So the worker was supported by the workplace from beginning to end. There was even a workplace school, one could attend electrical or mechanical vocational school. . . . In the later years there were problems with purchasing furniture; the workplace helped even with that. The workplace was everything. It tried to help in every area. But after the year 1990 things look a bit different. Privatization, so no more apartments, the workplace does not give you garden plots, medical services have completely separated. So today everything looks very different. Before, every division had its own sports club. The steelworks had great athletes. Our soccer team played in the first league for a period of time, it was a team that counted on the national scale. Same with men’s and women’s basketball and handball. Now Mittal is not interested in sport. He’s not interested in culture either. He’s only interested in profits and production.

In contrast to Mr. Szewczyk, other people with whom I spoke resented the paternalistic socialist-era work arrangement, seeing it as evidence of the state’s attempt to control and manipulate the population. Tomasz Stasiewicz, a current trade union leader who has worked for the steelworks for forty years, spoke very critically about the steelworks’ system of provisions: TS: The steelworks’ social provisions were ridiculous. Every worker would receive a liter of milk, but not every worker would actually take advantage of it, later it would turn out that only 15 to 20 percent of workers would take the milk, and the remainder would have to be poured into the river because lots of people didn’t want it. . . . They gave away cigarettes, potatoes, every worker would sign up for a load of potatoes, which they would deliver to your home. . . . There was so much pathology there, too. . . . There were coupons for everything: for curtains, for pots and pans, for plates and spoons, for leather jackets. . . . My God. The Party secretary had these coupons, and either he allocated them or they would do some sort of a lottery. KP: Do workers still expect such things now?

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TS: Absolutely not, workers didn’t want these things back then either. People didn’t want these provisions; people wanted normality. Even back then some people knew what the world looked like because, for example, they traveled abroad. Everyone would rather go to the store and buy things for themselves; people didn’t want to have to demean themselves in front of the Party secretary in order to get scraps. . . . For example, my wife wanted a sewing machine, but I couldn’t find one anywhere. Finally I got connected with a man with whom I had worked in the past, then he became a member of the Party, and he got me a coupon. It took me about two years to get that sewing machine. Now everyone can go to the store and buy one, if not straight out then on credit. The point is that things should be normal, there shouldn’t be situations where people take advantage of you because on the one hand they give you something, but on the other hand they exert political pressure on you, try to bend you in some ways, because then they make you offers that you cannot refuse. That is how the communist system got built. .

Some workers also criticized the unequal distribution of benefits along Party lines. Aleksander Beliński, former head of the steelworks’ Department of Work Psychology, told me: I was never in the Party, and because I wasn’t an activist like some people, it later cost me when I was looking for an apartment. When I was assigned an apartment in this building, I wanted to live on the second or third floor—not too high because I had a dog to walk and there isn’t an elevator, and not too low in case of break-ins. But I was told that these were the best locations and were reserved for people who earned it [którzy się zasłużyli]. So I had a choice between the first or fourth floor. I chose the first floor, and this is where we are still living.

To this day, certain structures of social support for workers remain in place, and the nature of this support reflects changed economic conditions and philosophies. While steelworks employees no longer receive a supply of potatoes and other vegetables for the winter (which they received during the socialist period to offset the endemic shortages), they still have access to subsidized holidays for themselves and their children, regular medical checkups at the local health clinic (which formerly belonged to the steelworks but is now a separate, private enterprise), and free gym passes. Both current and retired employees can still eat a subsidized lunch in the steelworks’ cafeteria, consisting of soup and a second. Every year, female employees receive a small gift to celebrate International Women’s Day, a custom left over from the socialist period—except that whereas in the past they used to receive a carnation and a pair of pantyhose (a coveted item in times of shortages!), they now receive small chains, pendants, or jewelry

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boxes. For workers over fifty years of age, the steelworks annually funds a two weeks’ stay at a sanitarium, a health resort in the mountains, or on the sea. Management and administrative staff can take advantage of free business English classes. This last perk is particularly emblematic of the changed times and political-economic conditions: the steelworks is now a branch of a global company with integrated operations, whose employees need to communicate with each other across large distances in the international language of business. While many people’s accounts highlighted certain benefits that came with socialist citizenship, people also spoke approvingly of some of the changes that have taken place over the past two decades. Foremost among them was the modernization of equipment, which they associated with the arrival of capitalism. This association is noteworthy, for the conceptual link among technology, progress, and modernity was first invoked by the socialist government in the postwar period to legitimize the socialist project; now, six decades later, it is again being invoked to legitimize capitalist reforms. Let us look more closely at how this change came about. In the postwar period, socialist ideology depicted technology as the vehicle of modernity and progress. As it turned out, however, reality could not live up to ideology. In the subsequent decades, people disenchanted with the reality of living in a socialist state instead came to associate progress and modernity with the capitalist West. Following the collapse of the socialist government, policy makers as well as local and foreign experts prescribed the privatization of state enterprises as the solutions for fixing obsolete and inefficient socialist-era organization and technology. Private ownership, it was believed, would encourage investment, which in turn would make companies competitive in the global marketplace (Dunn 2004). As it turned out, privatized firms met very different fates, so the logic of the privatization recipe has been the subject of both popular and scholarly debates ever since. However, it must be admitted that though capitalism may not intrinsically bring modernization or progress, at the Nowa Huta steelworks some technological improvements were indeed carried out in the 1990s, in preparation for privatization. After purchasing the steelworks, Mittal Steel also made a few large investments, including building a new hot rolling mill and modernizing the cold rolling mill. In their conversations with me, many people praised the modernized hot and cold rolling mills. As they saw it, technological improvements ameliorate work conditions—notwithstanding the fact that they can also eliminate jobs. People’s accounts also reveal that they associate new technology with “modernity” and “progress.” For example, Jan Baryłka, the steelworker who earlier complained about having his salary reduced, nonetheless pos-

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itively commented on technological improvements that according to him improved working conditions. KP: Were working conditions better in the past, or are they better now?

JB: They are better now. Now the departments are modernized. Everything is made using new technology. Before there were lots of equipment failures, and the work was hard. I remember when the overhead crane would break down and just stop right over a stack of slabs of steel, I would have to put on my kufajka [a puffy workman’s jacket] and go fix it. The temperature over those hot slabs was about 50 to 60 degrees [Celsius, approximately 120 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit], so I had to wear that kufajka even in the summer, to keep out the heat long enough to give me time to fix that crane.

Mr. Krzemiński, the previously mentioned electrician who worked at the steelworks from 1966 until the early 1990s (and to this day sometimes acts as tour guide), talked excitedly about the new hot rolling mill: Before, work at the hot rolling mill was such that a worker had to stand beside the roll and turn the crank by hand, smeared with oil from head to toe. And often there had to be two workers there, because when one ran out of strength, the other had to replace him right away. Another worker who oversaw the process would have to run back and forth from one cage mill to another to keep up with the flow of the steel. Now, when you go into the rolling mill, you see four guys sitting behind the glass in an air-conditioned room, they don’t even have to push buttons because the computer reacts by itself, they just make sure everything is running smoothly. Now, even if something goes wrong the machine will stop by itself, no problem.

One trade union representative had visited other Arcelor Mittal plants abroad, including one in Canada. I asked him how he compares the Nowa Huta branch with its Canadian counterpart. He replied, “I have to say that I was surprised that the Canadian branch wasn’t really different from ours in terms of technology or organization, all the equipment was similar. In fact in some areas I would say their level was lower than ours.” Many of the workers also spoke favorably of the improved workplace safety rules, which they compared with a high accident rate in the past. Ms. Urszula Karkoszka, who worked at the blooming mill in various capacities from 1960 to 1990, told me that over the years she witnessed numerous accidents, some of them quite drastic (for example, people falling out of overhead cranes to their death). She herself had a close call when she once jumped on a stack of freshly rolled steel slabs to paint a serial code on it (a job nowadays done by a robot). She felt the steel give way under her feet and realized that it was not yet completely cooled. Luckily, a colleague who noticed her

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predicament tossed her a wooden board to allow her to get her grounding and jump off. “If he wasn’t there I don’t know what would have happened to me. I probably would have sunk right into that molten steel,” she told me. According to both frontline workers and managers with whom I spoke, health and safety conditions have improved exponentially “since Mittal.” Here, it should be noted that workplace safety happens to be one of the company’s favorite projects: the company continuously implements new health and safety initiatives and takes great pains to publicize its achievements in this area. One division manager told me, “One has to admit that since Mittal there is a lot more emphasis on workplace safety. In the old days it was ignored [dawniej zamykało się na to oko]. People were embarrassed to wear helmets [hełm to był obciach] and wanted to show off to their work friends how tough they were [ jaki to z niego chojrak]. Now there is no choice, they have to wear a helmet.”

From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Entreprenericus: On Work, Values, and Subjectivity11 The idiom of work also becomes a way to talk about the norms, values, and subjectivity associated with socialism and capitalism. The construction of a new political and economic order is not just about passing new laws; it is also about creating a new set of values, norms, and practices. Certain behaviors or personality traits are seen as conducive to prosperity in the new capitalist reality and are thus promoted, whereas those associated with a “socialist-era mentality” are denigrated (Dunn 2004; Muller 2004). These traits are often framed in the context of work. Anthropologist Elizabeth Dunn, who examined the privatization process in Poland’s largest baby food factory, shows that certain personality traits among workers were characterized by the company’s new management as either “socialist” or “capitalist.” She argues that socialism is associated with traits such as backwardness, stasis, rigidity, older age, obedience, collectivism, and drawing on personalized connections. In contrast, capitalism is associated with modernity and “civilization,” dynamism, flexibility, youth, critical selfreflection, individualism, and impersonal relations based on rational calculation (2004, 64). Furthermore, the successes or failures of certain people or groups are justified in terms of their “mentality” and ability or inability to “adapt to the new system.” For example, older workers, and industrial or public-sector employees in particular, are often depicted as passive, lacking initiative, and having an unreasonably inflated sense of entitlement.12 The socialist past thus becomes invoked in a negative way so as to legitimize and promote certain economic priorities, work styles, and values and to justify certain people’s failure in the neoliberal marketplace. This socialist-

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capitalist dichotomy is also mapped onto generational differences: younger workers are seen as uncorrupted by the socialist mentality, whereas older ones are seen as suspect because of their socialist-era upbringing and work history and thus have to prove their ability to operate in the new “capitalist reality.” This illustrates that “generational distinctions can be viewed through the lens of stereotypes associated with the contrast between socialism and postsocialism, and that socialism and postsocialism themselves are re-imagined through generational stereotypes” (Shevchenko 2008, 9). However, Dunn also shows that these associations do not go uncontested, although workers are losing their power to shape meanings surrounding work (see also Crowley and Ost 2001; Kideckel 2008). The ideas and values described above need to be viewed in the context of changes that have been taking place globally. It is well documented that the changing organization of the economy affects, and is reflected in, the organization of work (e.g., Harvey 1989; Miller and Rose 2008). The current phase of capitalism that we call neoliberalism is predicated on values such as flexibility, mobility, and risk taking. We are told that in order to remain profitable and competitive, companies must be able to constantly explore new opportunities, reinvent themselves according to market demand, and if necessary move their operations where labor or operating costs are cheaper. These same values are also promoted as necessary for success in the contemporary workplace. Workers, therefore, are expected to become “enterprising subjects”: autonomous, self-regulating, able to make choices and bear risk, and flexible in the face of change (Miller and Rose 2008). In Poland, these very traits are now held up as the key to success in the new economy. As the sociologist Krzysztof Jasiecki aptly puts it, if the model socialist citizen was an industrial worker, then the model capitalist individual is an entrepreneur (1996). Let us now look at how these new philosophies pertaining to work are treated in the accounts of Nowa Huta’s steelworkers. A few of the people with whom I spoke alluded to the changed organization of work at the steelworks, particularly following the company’s sale to Mittal Steel. The changes they identified include longer hours, increased demand for productivity on the part of the workers, and little tolerance of workers’ claims. Grzegorz Wierchoła, a former steelworker and now a tour guide, described the changed work conditions in the following terms: “The work conditions are a lot tougher now. A lot fewer workers are needed, so if someone doesn’t like something, they don’t have to work here. Mittal values good workers, but in the older days there was a lot more room for negotiations.” Władysław Kwiecień, manager of one of the product divisions, similarly talked to me about the changes that he has witnessed over the past twenty-

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five years that he has worked at the steelworks: “When I first started working here the workday was shorter. Eight hours and you go home. Now, I work up to twelve hours a day, and I still don’t leave my work behind at the end of the day because I check e-mails at home. New standards have been implemented especially after 2004 [the year steelworks was bought by Mittal Steel]. People work decidedly more, including weekends and even Sundays.” Mr. Kwiecień went on to discuss the changing profile of workers: WK: I recently sat in on job talks with new hires. I couldn’t believe it that graduates from AGH [Akademia Górniczo-Hutnicza, Kraków’s university of science and technology] could not answer the simplest questions, like what steel is made of, or what is the difference between steel and pig iron. But their asset is that they are mentally prepared to embrace change and to be flexible. KP: So does experience still count?

WK: I think it does. It should. New workers now have eight months of training during which they rotate around departments, but they are never given any real work to do because they do not stay long enough in any given department. I have worked my way up, and I had the opportunity to work in different departments. I think that’s very valuable, because I understand these processes from the bottom up, so when a bureaucrat from Luxembourg sends me a hundred PowerPoint slides on something he wants done, I can understand how it’s going to impact the people who actually work with this stuff.

Mr. Kwiecień is in an interesting position to reflect on the changes that have taken place at the steelworks over the past twenty-five years that he has worked there. He is clearly someone who has fared well in the current job market, and he accepts the changed norms, albeit not uncritically. He comments on the need for flexibility in the contemporary workplace, but at the same time, he defends the importance of experience that is acquired over time and cannot be replaced by an attitude of flexibility alone. A common argument that framed restructuring schemes in the early years of the postsocialist transformation was that workers needed to change their “mentality” (Dunn 2004). In the course of my fieldwork, I also heard this argument from a few steelworks employees. Union leader Wojciech Gąsowski told me, “In PRL you didn’t really have to think. At the steelworks, you were guaranteed that as long as you don’t do something exceedingly stupid, you will be able to work your entire life, then go rest at Grębałów [the local cemetery], and the steelworkers’ wind orchestra will even play at your funeral. With the transformation, you had to change people’s habits, but without pressure from the new employer this would have never been possible, because no one will ever say to their work friend ‘you don’t do anything around here.’”

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In these words, Mr. Gąsowski invokes some of the common critiques of the socialist workplace: that it was inefficient (partly due to overemployment) and that the workforce was both undisciplined (people slacked off on the job) and passive (since the state did all the thinking for them) (see also Dunn 2004; Mrozowicki 2011). People’s accounts also revealed that there is a generational dimension to work at the steelworks and that workers of different generations are associated with perceived distinctions between socialism and neoliberal capitalism. At present, the majority of steelworks’ employees are between fifty-one and sixty years of age. While I was not able to obtain reliable statistics on the age and occupation profile of new hires, existing employees were of the impression that the company is not hiring any new workers, except for a handful of skilled young engineers. This claim appears to be founded, given that as unskilled manual workers are increasingly rendered obsolete by technological improvements, new hires are expected to operate specialized computer equipment. Furthermore, young people are also more likely to possess an important skill in Poland’s job market: the English language. Wojciech Gąsowski observed the generational distribution of workers at Arcelor Mittal in the following terms: “All the workers getting hired now are younger, and they are kept separate, in different divisions of the steelworks. The company does not want them to interact with the older workers so that they don’t acquire ‘bad habits’ [said ironically] and don’t start making social claims.” Whether or not the steelworks’ management deliberately keeps younger and older workers separate is debatable, but they indeed seem to be located in different areas of the steelworks. The plant is divided into two main sections: the raw materials division, where the early stages of steel production are carried out (for example, the blast furnace or the coke plant), and the processing division, where steel is processed into various forms (for example, the hot and cold rolling mills). The two divisions are physically located in different areas of the steelworks. Due to the recent modernization of the hot and cold rolling mills, employment in these areas has declined but is becoming more specialized. This is where the majority of young engineers find jobs. In contrast, the raw materials division has been plagued by problems; for example, stoppages at the blast furnace halt all subsequent stages in the production process. This is the area where many of the older, manual, and unskilled workers remain. The two divisions are often invoked as metaphors for distinguishing between workers who are younger and older, skilled and unskilled, “stuck in the past” or fit to function in the new economy. For example, a young manager once said to me: “In the raw materials division people’s mentality has not changed. They have no education, but what they have instead is an attitude of entitlement.”

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A very poignant example of a confrontation between two generations, and two different attitudes toward work and workers, is a conversation I had with two workers, Damian Ryglowski and Ms. Kalicka. I first interviewed Damian, who subsequently became interested in my project, took me to meet his acquaintance Ms. Kalicka, and sat in on our conversation, making frequent interjections. Damian is an engineer around forty years of age and has been working at the steelworks since 1995. Dressed in a golf shirt and business-casual khakis, he has a cheerful and youthful disposition. He moved to Kraków from another city to study and remained upon graduating. He owns a house in Salwator, one of Kraków’s more affluent neighborhoods. Damian works for Arcelor Mittal’s new program called Academy of Advancement and Continuous Improvement (Akademia Postępu i Ciągłego Doskonalenia), and his title is “leader of change” (lider zmian). His job is to go over every division’s books, meet with management, and hold brainstorming sessions among workers, in order to develop strategies to trim waste at every level of the company. Damian’s acquaintance Ms. Kalicka is the head of the Repairs Division. Ms. Kalicka is a woman in her midfifties with short curly hair and greeted me wearing a heavy work apron over pants and a collared shirt. Ms. Kalicka moved to Nowa Huta with her parents as a child and began working for the steelworks in 1974. She first attended the steelworks’ vocational school and subsequently worked as an overhead crane operator for five years. She was eventually promoted to welder and then welding foreman. While working, she pursued a degree in mechanical engineering. Upon graduating, she moved to the Repairs Division, where she oversees the planning of repairs. She oversees quotes and documentation for repairs and orders replacement parts for equipment (many of which must be custom-made). She belongs to Solidarność ’80, a trade union that is seen as the most “militant” of all the unions in the steelworks, with a current membership of approximately four hundred workers, the majority of them manual laborers. She also sits as workers’ representative on various committees. I asked Ms. Kalicka what changes at the steelworks she has observed since 1989: “Nothing really changed until 2004. Now we have to work more, the owner expects more, now everything is someone else’s. Before, everything was ours. Before, three people did my job, now it’s just me.” I asked if workers on the whole feel overworked. Yes, she replied. This triggered a debate between her and Damian, who argued that even though she is now the only person in charge of repairs and even misses some days due to her participation on various committees, she is still able to fulfill all her work-related responsibilities. It does not take three people to do her job, he suggested.

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I asked Ms. Kalicka about her work with the Solidarność ’80 trade union. What were the most important issues currently of concern to the union? She replied that much of their time is taken up with negotiating layoffs and compensation packages. Many workers either do not want to accept layoff packages, or else would like to be offered a package and leave but are not offered one. Here, Damian interjected to point out that no one had ever been forced to leave the steelworks: if a person’s division was closed, they would have the option of accepting a layoff package or transferring to another division. He did concede, however, that there might have been pressure on certain people to accept packages and leave. Another issue of concern to the company’s trade unions is outsourcing and the hiring of temporary workers through employment agencies. These workers are then not eligible to receive the same benefits or protection as existing permanent workers. The union is also asking for more funding for workers who get sent on early retirement. In the recent past the union also fought against the closing of the steelworks’ gates (there used to be five possible entry points into the steelworks’ ten-square-kilometer facility, whereas now there is only one). Here, Damian again jumped in. “What do you think is better, closing four gates to keep one open, or keeping all five open but having to lay off workers instead?” he asked. “Well, what if someone needs to leave work to go see a doctor?” she argued. “They shouldn’t be going to the doctor during work hours anyway,” he retorted. This point triggered another discussion between them regarding workers’ mentality. They both agreed that “people’s mentality is the same as it was in the old days,” although they interpreted that statement in different ways. “People feel that the workplace should take care of them more,” Ms. Kalicka told me, citing examples of workers receiving apartments and vacations from the steelworks. “But the workplace still is taking care of people, just differently,” Damian insisted. “There are training sessions, the company is giving people opportunities to improve their qualifications, there are opportunities for advancement.” “Yes, but these things existed before as well,” she snorted. As Damian saw it, the problem is not that the company is not taking care of the workers, but rather than the employees have an elevated sense of entitlement and are afraid of change—two personality traits that they have inherited from the socialist era: People are afraid of change, even for the better. When I hold brainstorming sessions with workers, they always approach them suspiciously. They don’t

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realize that through these sessions they can also negotiate improvements for themselves. For example, the company recently renovated changing rooms in one division after workers complained that they haven’t been renovated since the 1950s. . . . People’s mentality hasn’t changed; they still believe that they are entitled to everything. Some workers still take advantage of the system, for example, leaving work early and coming late. The first shift finishes at 2 p.m., which means workers are supposed to leave their stations at 2 p.m., but I often see workers getting off the bus and being out the gates at 2 p.m. sharp. Some workers don’t even wait for their replacement, which means that everything [i.e., the entire production cycle] stops.

Toward the end of our conversation I asked Ms. Kalicka whether she thinks the steelworks should have been privatized. No, she replied, “enterprises in key industries should remain in state hands.” I heard Damian sharply draw in his breath as if he wanted to jump in again, but he stayed quiet. Damian and Ms. Kalicka clearly embody different values and philosophies pertaining to work. Damian embraces more individualistic values and is more concerned about issues such as productivity and profit. Ms. Kalicka, on the other hand, is more oriented toward collective needs. They are both dedicated to their work and care about the well-being of the company and the workers—albeit in ways that reflect the different ideologies and the historical, political, and economic conditions that framed their upbringing. Damian, it is worth recalling, is of the generation who came of age in the 1980s, and thus his experience of socialism was informed by the political and economic breakdown of that decade. He graduated university in the 1990s, meaning that his entire work experience was shaped by the climate of market-oriented reforms that characterized that decade. Ms. Kalicka, on the other hand, began working for the steelworks in 1974, in the decade widely perceived as the golden age of socialism in Poland. The steelworks is the only employer she has ever had, as well as the sponsor of all her education. Her subjectivity, like that of other workers of her generation, was informed by socialist-era ideology that emphasized the centrality of workers to the production process and the responsibility on the part of the state-owned workplace for the workers’ well-being. As Elizabeth Dunn argues, industrial workers at the time had a strong sense of ownership of their workplaces, since they “believed that by investing parts of themselves in an object through labor, they created some form of enduring property right to the product and an enduring relation to coproducers” (2004, 128).13 This belief was only reinforced in the 1980s, when the emerging Solidarity movement emphasized that workers in a workers’ state were the real owners of their enterprises and thus should have the right to make managerial decisions. As it turned out, however, once these enterprises became privat-

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ized, the workers became simply individuals who freely sell their labor as a commodity for wages but should have no pretensions about being owners and thus must leave operational decisions to the management (Dunn 2004; Hardy 2009). This sentiment is captured in Ms. Kalicka’s reflection: “Now everything is someone else’s. Before, everything was ours.”

A Deindustrializing Town in the Postindustrial Age So far in this chapter I have discussed the changes to the domain of work principally in terms of what they can tell us about the socialist and postsocialist condition in Poland. However, as I have also indicated throughout, the history Nowa Huta’s steelworks also speaks more broadly to larger phenomena that transcend the East-Central European context. These phenomena include industrialization and deindustrialization and the changing organization of the economy and work. These shifts are underpinned by values and principles of individuality, flexibility, private property, efficiency, and global integration. While it is beyond the scope of this book to provide a detailed comparison between Nowa Huta and other postindustrial towns, I will now briefly situate Nowa Huta in the context of literature on deindustrializing towns from outside of the postsocialist European context in order to draw out some of these processes. Despite all the undeniable political, economic, historical, and geographical differences between Eastern European socialism and North American capitalism, existing literature on the subject of North American industrial towns reveals many remarkable similarities to Nowa Huta.14 In both places the postwar era was characterized by a strong connection between industrial work and citizenship: although western capitalist democracies certainly did not imagine themselves as “workers’ states” in the manner of their socialist counterparts, the Fordist-Keynesian arrangement adopted in the West was nonetheless characterized by somewhat of a “truce” among state, capital, and labor (Ortner 2011). This truce allowed for more stable and predictable work, full-time jobs, and a long-term commitment between employers and employees, with workers granted increasing rights and guarantees on the basis of seniority and many benefits (such as health care) extended to people on the basis of their roles as workers (for example, through labor unions). These benefits, argue Chari and Verdery (2009), were extended to workers in western states partly in order to offset the appeal of worker-centered Soviet ideology. Here, we can see how socialism and capitalism constituted the context for one another: while socialist industrialization drew inspiration from the Fordist mode of production, the postwar Fordist-Keynesian arrangement in the West was in turn designed, at least in part, in response to the socialist ideology regarding work and workers.

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Descriptions of the work-community dynamic in North American company towns also bear many similarities to the case of Nowa Huta. The principal characteristic common to company towns everywhere was that the bulk of community life revolved around the town’s principal workplace, which often played a key role in financially supporting various community institutions and services for the resident workers.15 For example, Bruno’s (1992) account of life and work among steelworkers in Youngstown, Ohio, describes the way that workers’ sociability extended from the factory floor into neighborhoods, communities, recreational activities, sports teams, and children’s programs. As in Nowa Huta, many of these programs were funded by Youngstown’s steelworks, the principal employer in town. However, it should be noted that the type of activities or institutions that were funded, as well as the ideologies underpinning this support, were different in socialist company towns than in their capitalist counterparts (Domański 1997). For example, the steel plants in both Nowa Huta and Youngstown provided housing support for their workers. The form that this provision took, however, reflected the differences between political and economic conditions and ideologies between Polish socialism and American capitalism. In Nowa Huta, the steelworks assisted in the construction of apartment buildings and subsequently allocated apartments to its workers. In Youngstown, the steelworks provided workers with loans to purchase their own houses (Linkon and Russo 2002).16 Following the 1973 world recession, the Fordist-Keynesian system, along with its associated values, policies, philosophies, and techniques, began to be replaced by a new set of arrangements in political, economic, and social life (Harvey 1989). These new arrangements emphasized flexibility with respect to the labor processes (including unemployment, outsourcing, and the rise of short-term, part-time, unpaid, or informal work), the abandonment of traditional industrial manufacturing hubs in favor of servicesector employment, the decline of the welfare state, the deconcentration and geographic dispersal of economic enterprises throughout the globe, and the global integration of markets (e.g., Sennett 1998; Beck 2000; Bauman 2005; Harvey 1989, 2005). These arrangements began to be implemented throughout the 1980s especially in the United States and Britain, with deleterious effects on industrial communities and the lives and livelihoods of industrial workers. Approximately a decade later, these American and British arrangements were taken as models for the postsocialist economic and political reforms in Poland. Though some industry still exists, both in East-Central Europe and in North America, in both places it is decimated and popularly perceived as a remnant of a bygone era. The values that characterized the socialist arrangement in Poland and the Fordist-Keynesian

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arrangement in the United States, such as collectivity and responsibility on the part of the state for ensuring public welfare, are being replaced in both places by neoliberal values that emphasize the freedom of the market and individual responsibility and accountability. Once industry leaves town, its traces are often commodified as “heritage.” As I discuss in the previous chapter, heritage is often prescribed as an economic revitalization strategy for deindustrializing towns. For example, in Pittsburgh, the former steel capital of the United States, the city’s steel heritage plays a significant part in its economic development. The brownfield site of what used to be the Jones and Laughlin steel mill was redeveloped for an open-air retail, office, entertainment, and upscale residential complex. The city is also home to a Rivers of Steel Heritage Area, an initiative dedicated to promoting tourism and economic development related to the region’s industrial tradition. Unlike in Pittsburgh, in Nowa Huta the turn to heritage is just beginning and may never reach the same levels. Nonetheless, initiatives such as utilizing a former tinning plant as a venue for concerts suggest that the district may be experiencing an analogous shift from production to consumption and from the production of tangible things to the production of experiences (Harvey 1989). As this brief discussion shows, the trajectory of Nowa Huta in many ways parallels that of other industrial towns outside of socialist/ postsocialist East-Central Europe. While the similarities are not to be overstated, they nonetheless draw our attention to the existence of larger historical processes that unevenly articulate with local places, histories, and politics. The case of Nowa Huta, I argue, is one example of how these processes are being worked out in Poland and inflected by the country’s socialist and postsocialist experience.

Memories of Work and the Work of Memory This chapter focuses on Nowa Huta’s steelworks as a site of memory and an idiom of change. The steelworks’ history reflects major events and developments in Poland’s postwar history, and the accounts of steelworks’ employees illustrate how people experience these developments in their working lives. People’s reflections on work in the past and present speak to many dimensions of the socialist arrangement, as well as to the capitalist reforms that were adopted following the socialist government’s collapse. With the benefit of hindsight, people positively evaluate many aspects of the socialist work arrangement, founded upon the promise of full and stable employment, the allocation of benefits based on people’s roles as workers, and a tight connection between work and community. At the same time, however, they also point to issues such as the allocation of benefits based on

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Party membership and connections. These reflections serve as a reminder that the socialist work arrangement was not entirely rosy; if it were, 97 percent of Lenin Steelworks employees would not have joined the oppositional Solidarity trade union to demand change. Memories of work during the socialist period also serve as a frame of reference for how people experience the changes that have taken place following the country’s adoption of market-oriented reforms. These changes include the demotion of industry in the national imagination and national economy; the fracture of the socialist-era connection between work and community; the privatization of state enterprises and their sale to (often) foreign companies; and the ensuing unemployment and job precariousness. People’s accounts reveal that the reforms had uneven consequences for the steelworks and its employees. On the one hand, production and employment numbers declined, and the steelworks’ future in Nowa Huta is uncertain. On the other hand, the new owner implemented certain technological improvements that are positively evaluated by workers, and the Nowa Huta branch continues to turn a profit. Many benefits and perks that were allocated to employees by the steelworks have been eliminated, although some remain (albeit in a changed form), and certain new ones, such as English classes, were instituted. These benefits and perks reflect the changed political and economic conditions and ideologies. In this chapter I also show that ideas about socialism and capitalism are expressed through discourses relating to work. Hegemonic discourses devalue work habits and values associated with socialism and instead enforce and legitimize those associated with neoliberal capitalism. There is a generational dimension to this, as older and younger workers are associated with different subjectivities and skill sets and consequently with perceived differences between socialism and capitalism. In all, people’s accounts reveal a high degree acceptance of neoliberal ideas, a phenomenon that has been noted by many researchers working in the region (e.g., Dunn 2004; Mrozowicki 2011; Muller 2004; Ost 2005). It is noteworthy, for example, that many workers did not initially object to privatization measures; in fact, they wanted the steelworks to be bought by a “western” company that would bring with it “western” workplace standards. This, they believed, would translate into the sort of economic prosperity that was associated with the imaginary “West.” A number of workers—even trade union leaders—spoke critically of certain work-related arrangements associated with the socialist period, including inefficient use of materials, corruption, a culture of connections, lax work discipline, and an attitude of passivity and entitlement. In fact, a few of them even made references to the “unjustified overemployment” of the socialist era. With the benefit of hindsight, we can note the irony of workers fighting

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for reforms that ultimately cost them their jobs. This point was poignantly articulated by Piotrek Dukat, a Nowa Huta resident in his early thirties whose father and grandfather had worked at the steelworks. “Nowa Huta must be the only place in the world where the workers destroyed their own workplaces,” he exclaimed. Unfortunately, Nowa Huta is not the only place where this happened; in fact, this is a common phenomenon in Poland. In his analysis of the state of labor in postsocialist Poland, David Ost explains this contradiction of workers embracing market reforms that eliminate jobs. He writes that this attitude was typical of skilled, often welleducated workers, who saw themselves as “labor aristocracy.” These workers wanted to “reward qualified labor instead of all labor. . . . They defended their own factories because they believed that once these worksites got rid of their excess workers, they could be fully productive firms again. After all, they believed themselves to be good, productive workers, and they saw the products these firms were making as good and useful ones. The problem, they believed, was that their firms were not operating rationally. They thus wanted someone to take control and ‘rationalize’ the firm, which meant getting rid of the excess ‘unskilled’ workers” (2005, 139). Many of these “labor aristocrats” held important leadership positions in Solidarity structures and, following the collapse of the socialist government, assumed influential positions in both the public and the private sector. The role of these “labor aristocrats,” and the Solidarity trade union in general, in implementing and legitimizing market reforms is a complex issue and to this day is the subject of both scholarly and popular debates (see, e.g., Ost 2005). Briefly, one common critique leveled against trade unions is that after the collapse of the socialist government, they were more concerned with negotiating layoff packages for workers than with protecting jobs. The union officials with whom I spoke explained that since they believed economic reforms were inevitable, they were concerned with getting workers the best deal possible within the changed framework. This explanation illustrates the extent to which capitalist ideology enjoyed popular support and phenomena such as unemployment were accepted as inevitable outcomes of adopting the new economic system. Of course this does not mean that people are happy about the more painful outcomes of the reforms, such as widespread unemployment or job insecurity. We can thus see that there is a dissonance between market ideas and market realities (Ost 2005, 72). People like the recently laid-off Ms. Kowalik are quite bitter about the new rules of the game in the capitalist workplace. However, they also believe that there isn’t much that they can do to change these rules. Workers’ accounts also illustrate that though people recognize positive aspects of the bygone socialist order, they do not instrumentalize them into

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a comprehensive critique of the new organization and philosophy of work. I suggest that there are several possible reasons for this. First, any language inherited from the socialist era is now thoroughly discredited. Second, the new language of flexibility, risk-taking, and individual responsibility also precludes the possibility of collective action and critique. During the socialist period, everyone knew whom to blame for all of society’s problems, ills, and shortcomings: the government. Now, people who are unhappy about unemployment, layoffs, or pay cuts resignedly attribute these phenomena to “capitalism,” “recession,” or “the market”—forces that are diffuse and “out there” and thus appear impossible to change or fix. Many of the changes to the domain of work described in this chapter are not unique to Poland or even to the former socialist part of Europe; indeed, the case of Nowa Huta bears many similarities to the trajectories of other former industrial towns across the world, including North America. Therefore, the story of Nowa Huta’s steelworks can tell us much about how larger global historical processes—including industrialization and deindustrialization, the shift from a Fordist-Keynesian model of economy and citizenship to a neoliberal one, and the changing organization of work—are variously adopted, adapted, negotiated, and contested, in local places and in relation to local histories.

CHAPTER 3 Between a Model Socialist Town and a Bastion of Resistance Representations of the Past in Museums and Commemorations

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socialist-era “work leader” hurriedly lays down bricks to beat yet another record. In a peasant hut on the edge of town, the owner serves up a steaming plate of pierogi to his guests. In a pub down the street, the frustrated owner runs out of drinks to serve to his clients. In a nearby park, an American spy wearing dark sunglasses stations herself on a bench to watch life unfold in the country’s model socialist town. And the American spy is me. No, this is not the plot of a spy movie. It is May 2010, and Nowa Huta’s museum is holding a historical scavenger hunt around Nowa Huta. Described above are stations along the scavenger hunt, each picking up on a different theme in the town’s history: the town’s construction, its presocialist history, the ubiquitous shortages that characterized the socialist period, and the fear of western imperialism that pervaded the Cold War. As a volunteer with the museum, I am staffing the last station. I suspect that the museum’s manager designed the role of the American spy specifically with me in mind, and I cannot help but wonder whether he intended it as a joke or as a commentary on how he perceives the presence of a western anthropologist in Nowa Huta and in his museum. In chapter 1, I look at how the past is physically articulated and negotiated in Nowa Huta’s urban landscape; in this chapter, I turn my attention to the district’s “discursive landscape” (Linkon and Russo 2002, 88). I focus specifically on the representations produced in the course of the district’s sixtieth-anniversary celebrations, as well as those produced by the district’s two museums: the museum of communism (from here on called by its official name, the Museum of PRL) and the Museum of Nowa Huta.1 100

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Nowa Huta’s Sixtieth-Anniversary Commemorations Commemorations are occasions through which societies remember (Connerton 1989). They help establish collective memories and thus perform an important community-building function (Casey 2000, 235). At the same time, commemorations also bring to light the contradictions and silences in dominant narratives, revealing that any given place has not just one single history, but rather “plural histories” (Sider and Smith 1997). By its very nature, any commemorative activity “involves the coordination of individual and group memories, whose results may appear consensual when they are in fact the product of processes of intense contest, struggle, and in some instances, annihilation” (Gillis 1996, 5). In what follows, I examine the narratives on the past that were produced (and sometimes contested) during Nowa Huta’s sixtieth-anniversary celebrations. Anniversaries are occasions that often invite celebrations, but they can also trigger conflicts over contradictory interpretations of the past. Because of Nowa Huta’s contested place in Poland’s national imagination, its sixtieth anniversary posed a particular set of problems. Should the anniversary of building a model socialist town be celebrated in a country that is trying to shed its socialist legacy? And if yes, how should this legacy be remembered? Ten years earlier, when Nowa Huta celebrated its semicentennial (arguably more of a milestone), the event was hardly noted in local representations. At the time, there clearly did not exist the political will to commemorate the construction of a socialist town. Was Nowa Huta’s sixtieth anniversary to suffer a similar fate? Since Nowa Huta is a district of the city of Kraków, we must look to Kraków’s city council—the body responsible for organizing and funding municipal events—to understand the debates that framed this event. Some city councilors charged that celebrating Nowa Huta’s construction would be tantamount to glorifying the socialist past and thus promoting communist ideology (which is against the law in Poland). One councilor even went so far as to suggest that Nowa Huta’s construction was the biggest tragedy to befall Kraków in the course of the city’s 750-year history, so what was there to celebrate? Some argued that if there is anything at all to celebrate about Nowa Huta’s history, it is the history of local resistance to the socialist government. There is some indication that party affiliations were a factor in the debates, with politicians from the conservative-right Law and Justice party generally seen as the most vocal opponents of the project, and Kraków’s left-leaning mayor Jacek Majchrowski (whose electoral victories are popularly attributed to support on the part of Nowa Huta’s population) credited with making the celebrations happen after all. However we should

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be cautious about assuming a simple association between a politicaian's party affiliation and their attitude toward Nowa Huta. In fact, a few Law and Justice politicians actively supported the organization of commemorative activities in Nowa Huta (this was the case especially with those politicians who represented Nowa Huta ridings), and the councilor who called Nowa Huta’s construction the biggest calamity to ever befall Kraków was actually affiliated with the mayor’s left-leaning political faction. In the end, the sixtieth-anniversary celebrations did take place. They were funded by the city of Kraków and carried out by a number of local institutions, primarily the Nowa Huta Museum, the local newspaper Głos Tygodnik Nowohucki (Nowa Huta voice), the local theater (Teatr Ludowy, or the People’s Theater), and local schools and cultural centers. Altogether, these local “memory makers” (Kansteiner 2002) organized events ranging from walking and bus tours around Nowa Huta to indoor and outdoor photo exhibits, concerts, theater performances, and film screenings of recent and historical films about Nowa Huta. The Nowa Huta Museum put together a special exhibit featuring an oral history collection of stories of twelve Nowa Huta residents, as well as an outdoor photo exhibit in a nearby park. The museum also held numerous walking and bus tours around

Commemorating the past in Nowa Huta: an outdoor photo exhibit outside one of the cultural centers. Photo by the author.

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Nowa Huta, as well as educational talks for school groups and the general public. The OKN cultural center held a writing competition for the best nonfictional report dealing with some aspect of life in Nowa Huta. The center also organized the Nowa Huta film festival, a sort of a movie marathon featuring many of the three-hundred-plus movies that have been made about Nowa Huta. The Nowa Huta Cultural Center (Nowohuckie Centrum Kultury, or NCK) put together another outdoor photo exhibit, depicting Nowa Huta’s history from the 1800s to the present. The local theater held a series of public lectures dealing with different aspects of life in Nowa Huta (including culture, art, architecture, and literature) and put on several plays dealing with Nowa Huta–related topics such as the Battle for the Cross. Local schools developed their own extensive anniversary programming, including competitions, plays, and exhibits in virtually every subject area from physical education to information technology and dealing with all aspects of life in Nowa Huta.2 (I return to the topic of school programming in more detail in chapter 5.)

A Socialist Town The overarching question that framed Nowa Huta’s sixtieth anniversary was how to celebrate the construction of a town that was built as a pet project of the now-discredited socialist government. For the most part, local memory makers dealt with this by diluting the town’s association with socialism. Tour guides (usually museum employees or other well-known local personalities) emphasized the hard work and contributions of Nowa Huta’s first residents, popularly referred to as the “builders,” who literally built the town with their own hands. Museum representations also focused on the technical aspects of the town’s construction; museum exhibits featured maps, urban plans, and architectural designs and sketches. However, while Nowa Huta’s urban plan and architecture were praised for their functionality and aesthetic appeal, their association with socialism was often obfuscated. For example, tour guides and museum workers often pointed out that the architects who designed the town were prewar architects (meaning they were people whose training predated the implementation of the socialist system in Poland) and the town’s first neighborhoods were built according to prewar designs. Furthermore, as I note in chapter 1, many of the design principles that informed Nowa Huta’s construction were in fact imported from outside of the former Soviet Bloc, a fact also noted in local representations. The representations of the town’s construction also debunked some of the negative myths that have marred Nowa Huta’s image since its early days. Foremost among them was the idea that Nowa Huta was built as a

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punishment for the city of Kraków for its reluctance to accept the socialist government. In their talks and lectures, prominent local personalities underscored the need for industrial development after World War II, in particular the need for steel production for postwar rebuilding. This emphasis on debunking decades-old stereotypes likely stemmed from the fact that Nowa Huta residents to this day feel marginalized and stigmatized by the city of Kraków. However, not all the public representations of Nowa Huta’s construction were laudatory. On the contrary, it was often stressed that the construction of the new town entailed dispossessing farmers and therefore disrupting people’s lives and livelihoods. Many representations also addressed the difficult living conditions in the growing town, including ubiquitous mud, unsanitary or otherwise difficult living conditions in workers’ hostels (for example, overcrowding or forcing married couples to live apart in sex-segregated hostels), crime, and moral decay (such as drinking and prostitution). These representations of the darker side of Nowa Huta’s history are not new—as I have set out in chapter 1, the first critiques of the “model socialist town” date back to the early 1950s. However, the collapse of the socialist government opened up a discursive space where critiques of the socialist government and its projects can be articulated in publicly disseminated historical narratives. Thus, by acknowledging the problematic aspects of Nowa Huta’s construction, local representations mesh with national histories of the socialist period.

A Bastion of Resistance to Socialism One of the more prominent themes in the sixtieth-anniversary commemorative celebrations was Nowa Huta’s history of resistance to the socialist government. The two events that are most often held up as emblematic of that legacy are the Battle for the Cross in 1960 and the Solidarity activities of the 1980s. The Battle for the Cross has been a much-talked-about event in Nowa Huta ever since local filmmaker Jerzy Ridan made a movie about it in 1997. The event was widely featured in the sixtieth-anniversary celebrations, since it is now seen as the first instance of resistance to the socialist government on the part of Nowa Huta residents. Ridan’s movie was screened at the film festival, along with other movies on the subject, and a public talk followed movie screenings. The Nowa Huta Museum’s oral history collection featured the story of one woman who “fought for the cross” (an expression used in local parlance to refer to the people who took an active part in the events). The commemorations of the Battle for the Cross continued into the following year (2010), which marked the event’s fiftieth anniversary. On the

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day of the event, a mass was celebrated at the site, followed by the opening of an outdoor exhibit entitled Miasto bez Boga (A godless town), dealing with Nowa Huta’s history of religious opposition. Fifteen of the so-called defenders of the cross who are still alive were presented with bronze replicas of the cross. The Nowa Huta Museum marked the occasion by organizing an exhibit on the subject of Nowa Huta’s churches and holding a history competition for students on the subject of the role of religion in the district. The Museum of PRL put on a concert in the steelworks’ former tinning plant to honor the “defenders of the cross” and organized a reenactment of the battle, performed by local high school and university history students. A local rapper named Tater wrote a song about the event.3 The Battle for the Cross has become an important symbol of local resistance to the socialist government. The residents’ demands for a church are now seen as an act of resistance to the socialist state that tried to suppress religion by building a so-called godless town. However, this representation of Nowa Huta as “godless” was problematized by one local historian, who pointed out to me that the people who “fought for the cross” did not necessarily see themselves at the time as opposing the socialist system. They were simply demanding a church—the same way that any other protest for or against any given development project is not necessarily a protest against “the system” or “the government” on the whole. Furthermore, it is also worth noting that, even prior to the construction of a church in Nowa Huta, the district was not technically “godless”: the growing town of Nowa Huta incorporated within it the village of Mogiła, home to a twelfth-century Cistercian monastery. Thus, residents were able to attend mass either in the monastery or in the churches in the neighboring villages. Nonetheless, the narrative of the Battle for the Cross as the first instance of resistance to the socialist state and the first attempt to bring “God” to Nowa Huta has a lot of popular resonance in the district. Another important theme in the sixtieth-anniversary commemorations was the legacy of Solidarity in the 1980s. The Nowa Huta Museum displayed artifacts such as a prison shirt of a local Solidarity activist, Solidarity flags from demonstrations, and underground literature. The Museum of PRL organized a temporary exhibit entitled Od opozycji do wolności (From opposition to freedom), featuring photos and other images dealing with Solidarity activities in the 1980s, up until the Roundtable Talks of 1989. Many of the movies screened at Nowa Huta’s film festival described different instances of local resistance, including strikes,4 the role of the Catholic Church in resistance activities,5 and miscellaneous acts such as attempted assaults on Lenin’s statue.6

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The sixtieth-anniversary celebrations were not the only occasions when the legacy of resistance was highlighted in local representations; in fact, this legacy is a permanent feature of Nowa Huta’s “discursive landscape” (Linkon and Russo 2002, 88). Indeed, every year there is some important anniversary pertaining to resistance activities that invites commemoration. In 2009, Nowa Huta’s sixtieth anniversary overlapped with the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the socialist government. The following year (2010) marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle for the Cross, followed by the thirtieth anniversary of the declaration of martial law in Poland in 2011. In 2012 the steelworks’ branch of Solidarity celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the creation of the Secret Workers’ Committee at the steelworks (Tajna Komisja Robotnicza Hutników NSZZ Solidarność). The year 2013 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of an important Solidarity strike at the steelworks, an event that is now seen as the trigger for the subsequent 1989 Roundtable Talks and the country’s first semidemocratic elections. The year 2014 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the collapse of the socialist government, an occasion that was widely commemorated on both the national and local scales. All of the above anniversaries were celebrated in Nowa Huta with special masses, the unveiling of plaques, photo exhibits, historical talks and movie screenings, and historical reenactments or

Commemorating the legacy of resistance: an exhibit at the Nowa Huta Museum. Photo by the author.

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knowledge contests for students. Furthermore, many events of resistance are also commemorated annually. For example, every October the Solidarity branch at the steelworks organizes a run around Nowa Huta called “A Run for Włosik” (Bieg Włosika), held to commemorate the death of a young steelworks apprentice who was shot to death by a secret police agent after attending a demonstration in 1982.

The association between religion and resistance: from an exhibit on the Battle for the Cross at the Nowa Huta Museum. Photo by the author.

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The prominence of the theme of resistance in Nowa Huta’s public representations can be attributed to several factors. First, this narrative resonates with hegemonic national discourses, which tend to portray Poland’s postwar history as a trajectory of repression and struggle against the socialist system. Furthermore, this narrative can also be invoked to counteract Nowa Huta’s association with socialism, an association that continues to stain the district’s reputation in the national imagination. And finally, since many of Nowa Huta’s prominent public figures were members of the political opposition in the 1980s, it does not come as a surprise that this is the part of local history with which they most identify and want to see featured in local representations. The religious context of many of the above-mentioned representations also points to the connection between resistance and religion that exists in both the local and the national imaginations. For example, accounts of the Battle for the Cross conflate the quest for religious freedom with resistance to the socialist government. Accounts of Solidarity activism in the 1980s highlight the role of local priests and churches in supporting and enabling resistance activities. Local churches often collaborate with museums or the steelworks’ branch of Solidarity in organizing commemorative activities. In these representations, the Catholic Church is depicted both as a victim of the socialist state and as an agent of resistance to it (see also Musiał and Szarek 2008; Szczepaniak and Lasota 2008; Żaryń 2004). This depiction needs to be understood in the context of both national and local history. As I indicate in chapter 1, the Catholic Church had a complex and problematic relationship with the socialist state. The PRL was officially a secular state, much of church property was nationalized, and throughout the majority of the socialist period religion was not taught in schools. Nonetheless, over time, the church emerged as an important agent of resistance to the socialist government.7 For example, religion provided the language and symbolism necessary to resist the language and symbols of the socialist state (Kubik 1994). In the 1980s, churches provided space for meetings and organized assistance for people who had been arrested and for their families.8 The emphasis on the religious context of repression and resistance is particularly strident in Nowa Huta. The city of Kraków traditionally has a close relationship with the country’s Roman Catholic Church: Kraków is home to about 350 churches, monasteries, and other sacred sites and since 1945 has been the editorial home of Tygodnik Powszechny, a Catholic-run weekly publication (Chwalba 2004). Poland’s beloved Pope John Paul II, a staunch opponent of the socialist government, spent much of his life (prior to becoming pope) in Kraków and actively supported the initiative to build

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a church in Nowa Huta. In the 1980s, the church was one of the very few spaces where oppositional activity could flourish, and several Nowa Huta churches were sites of opposition to the socialist government. For example, churches provided spaces for meetings, and strikes and demonstrations often broke out following masses. When steelworkers organized occupational strikes at the steelworks, priests held masses on the factory floor to support the strikers. Churches also often received aid packages from organizations abroad and distributed them. One Nowa Huta woman in her midthirties whose father belonged to Solidarity told me that she recalls descending into the catacombs of the Cistercian monastery, where the monks distributed goods that were sent for Nowa Huta’s Solidarity branch by French labor unions. The intertwining of religion and resistance in historical accounts is also shaped by present-day politics. In the 1980s the church gained an unprecedented amount of authority and legitimacy for its role in organizing and supporting oppositional activities. Following the collapse of the socialist government, the church emerged as a major force influencing public life. It enjoys good relations with the country’s two major political parties and especially with the conservative and nationalist Law and Justice party. Therefore, the church plays an important role in shaping public policy in Poland. It is also an influential agent in shaping a particular version of the past that depicts the socialist period in terms of repression and resistance and highlights its own contributions to toppling the socialist government. This, in turn, further reproduces its authority and influence.

Resurrecting the Presocialist Heritage Many of Nowa Huta’s public representations also highlight the district’s presocialist history, which is now called the “forgotten heritage” of Nowa Huta. For example, the NCK created a permanent outdoor photo exhibit that depicts life in the villages that once stood on the site of the present-day town. The Nowa Huta Museum regularly organizes bus tours to and exhibits about the churches, palaces, and manor houses located on the district’s outskirts or in the neighboring villages.9 The Kraków archaeological museum also has a branch in Nowa Huta, located in a historical manor house in the village of Branice, just outside Nowa Huta’s borders. The museum publishes regular updates about its activities and historical tidbits in Nowa Huta’s local newspaper. Such stories, about Paleolithic flints or Celtic coins found on Nowa Huta’s territory, serve as a reminder that the town’s history goes a lot further back than 1949. The focus in Nowa Huta’s public representations on regional history prior to 1949 exemplifies the attempt on the part of local memory makers to

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reinvent the district in a changed political climate. First, highlighting the district’s presocialist history dilutes its association with socialism. Second, resurrecting this presocialist history is also a way of reversing the politics of memory constructed by the socialist government. Here, it should be explained that since the socialist project was supposed to be a complete break with the past, the socialist government either neglected presocialist history or scorned it as backward. For example, the official state narrative that framed Nowa Huta’s construction in the late 1940s and early 1950s extolled the benefits of urbanization and industrialization by depicting life in rural areas as brutish and miserable. Farmers whose lands were located on the site of the future town were unceremoniously expropriated with little or no compensation. Half a century later, the political tide turned yet again. The voices of people whose lives and livelihoods were then disrupted are now incorporated into Nowa Huta’s creation story and featured in the district’s anniversary commemorations. Presocialist history can now be reclaimed as a valuable part of local history—and the act of reclaiming this history is evidence that the town has nothing to do with socialism anymore.

The “forgot ten herit age of Nowa Hut a”: the wooden church of St. Bartholomew. Photo by the author.

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In the discussion above I set out the varied representations of Nowa Huta’s history that were produced during the district’s sixtieth-anniversary celebrations. Different narratives resonated with different residents. For example, the majority of the residents with whom I spoke seemed to subscribe to the connection between religion and resistance that was prevalent in so many representations. One man, however, challenged this narrative. Citing his own childhood experience of religious life in Nowa Huta in the 1950s, he argued that religion was not as persecuted by the socialist state as contemporary accounts have it: I’m really annoyed at all this talk about Nowa Huta being a “godless town.” When I was a child I went to religion classes in the monastery in Mogiła and to First Communion with all the kids from my building, and my parents were never persecuted because of it, even though my father was in the Party. I didn’t know it at that time; I only later realized that we lived in a building reserved for Party members. And yet all the kids from my building went to religion classes with me, and when I went into my friends’ apartments, they all had a picture of Matka Boska Częstochowska [the Polish Madonna] on the wall, and every year in January the priest would make his annual rounds [chodził po kolędzie] and visit all the families in our building. How is this a godless town?

While the theme of resistance reflected the experiences of many residents, others felt that this narrative overshadowed other, no less important, facets of the district’s history. Many older residents (popularly known as “the builders”) felt that the commemorative activities did not sufficiently recognize the work and effort they put into building the town. In an attempt to make up for this neglect, a new community association called “My Nowa Huta” (Moja Nowa Huta) held another event in May the following year to honor the work of the builders. The event organizers stressed that the event was “not political”; however, despite this disclaimer, their stated goal was to redress what they described as the “marginalization of people associated with the previous system.” They felt that the work of Nowa Huta’s builders deserved to be honored regardless of what political system was in place at the time. The event, held in a local cultural center, gathered approximately three hundred seniors, visually many more than I had seen at any other single event that was part of the sixtieth-anniversary celebrations. The guest of honor, Kraków’s mayor, handed out medals to people who had made significant contributions to building the steelworks and the town of Nowa Huta. This included current and former steelworks directors and directors of construction companies. A few of the individuals who were awarded with medals gave speeches in which they emphasized that Nowa Huta

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presented a life’s opportunity for people who moved there after World War II. For example, Jerzy Falfasiński, former director of a construction company that built the steelworks, stressed that the people who built Nowa Huta did their best regardless of the political system that was in place at the time: “We simply wanted to live. We wanted to be sure that tomorrow will be the same as today, that we will be able to live freely, that we will have family and work.” Another speaker reminded the public that “Nowa Huta residents knew both how to build and how to fight for the cross.” By linking the two, he suggested that both events were important in making the town what it is today and that the legacy of resistance does not preclude the legacy of building. Mr. Kwiecień’s account and the alternative commemorative event described above tell us several things about the politics of memory in Nowa Huta. Certain narratives—specifically, the story of Nowa Huta as a bastion of resistance to the socialist government and the connection between resistance and religion—are gaining prominence in local representations and enjoy widespread resonance. However, they alone do not do justice to the complexity of residents’ experiences. Residents, in particular those who built Nowa Huta with their own hands, feel that this legacy deserves to be featured in local representations, regardless of the fact that the district’s construction was a project of the now-discredited socialist government.

Museums as Sites of Memory Above I examine how Nowa Huta was represented in the course of the district’s sixtieth-anniversary celebrations. I now turn to look more closely at the representations produced by two local “memory makers”: the Museum of Nowa Huta and the Museum of PRL. At the time of my research in Nowa Huta, the first was celebrating its five-year anniversary, and the latter had just opened its doors. Museums play an important role in the process of forging collective memory and identity. They are popularly seen as “storehouses” of memory, places that house “collections that form the basis of cultural or national identity” (Crane 2000, 4). Thus, museums “fix” the memory of nations and cultures by determining what is to be remembered (and how) and what is to be forgotten (Crane 2000, 4). The accounts presented in museums are imbued with authority since they are “naturalized through the use of the concept of ‘history’” (Katriel 1999, 107). Through their selective rendering of the past, museums thus contribute to larger ideological projects (Katriel 1999; Climo and Cattel 2002). Because of their connection to society’s dominant institutions, museums “tend to validate the perspectives of the politically powerful” (Cattel and Climo 2002, 29). At the same time, museum

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representations are fraught with power relations and frequently subject to contestations (Handler 1993; Ten Dyke 2000). Therefore, museums can be particularly productive sites for examining the processes of nation building and identity formation at times of major social, political, and economic changes. The two museums that I describe in this chapter approach the socialist past from two different angles. The Museum of Nowa Huta is concerned strictly with Nowa Huta’s history, which includes, but is not limited to, the socialist period. The Museum of PRL, on the other hand, is concerned with the history of the socialist period in Poland on the whole, with the history of Nowa Huta constituting only a fraction of its focus.

The Museum of Nowa Huta The Museum of Nowa Huta is a branch of the City of Kraków Historical Museum, which has several branches in the city, each of them dealing with a different aspect of Kraków’s heritage. The Nowa Huta branch was opened in 2005. The museum is located on Nowa Huta’s main street, albeit in a very small space (the locale was previously a store with camping equipment, and the museum’s total exhibit area is approximately the size of a boardroom). Because of this, it cannot display a permanent collection and instead holds rotating exhibits dealing with different aspects of Nowa Huta’s history. It also organizes walking, bus, and bike tours around Nowa Huta, as well as various educational and outreach programs for school groups and the general public. Many of the museum’s representations deal with Nowa Huta’s presocialist heritage. Nearly every other rotating exhibit organized by the museum is dedicated to what the museum calls the “forgotten heritage” of Nowa Huta—that is, the manor houses, churches, and palaces located in Nowa Huta’s neighboring villages, which predate the socialist period. Educational lessons about Nowa Huta’s history for school groups begin with the legend about a mysterious seventh- or eighth-century mound (called Wanda’s mound) located on Nowa Huta’s territory and attributed either to Celtic settlement in the region or to early Slavic tribes. Walking tours around the district usually include a visit to a twelfth-century Cistercian monastery and the wooden church of St. Bartholomew, whose origins can be traced back to the thirteenth century. The museum also frequently organizes bus tours to churches and palaces in nearby villages that are not accessible on foot. Museum employees describe this focus on presocialist heritage as an attempt to remind the public that “Nowa Huta is not just communism,” as one of them put it. The museum’s interest in this part of Nowa Huta’s history resonates with many locals. This includes the most senior residents,

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who still remember village life prior to the town’s construction, as well as teenagers who are often surprised at how much “old history” there is in the area. Notwithstanding that there was certainly life in the area prior to the town’s construction, the fact remains that the town of Nowa Huta itself was indeed a project of the postwar socialist government. Thus, the socialist period constitutes a crucial chunk of the town’s history, a fact that must be reflected in museum representations. The museum’s walking tours around Nowa Huta dedicate significant attention to the town’s urban design, as well as architecture in the socialist realist style. The history of local resistance to the socialist government is also an important theme in museum representations. For example, mandatory points along the museum’s tour route include the “Square after Lenin” (Plac po Leninie), where the statue of Lenin used to stand, the site of the Battle for the Cross, and the Lord’s Ark church. When I asked museum employees to identify the key ideas about Nowa Huta’s history that the museum wants to convey, they stressed that the museum is “not political” and does not attempt to judge the socialist period in any way. “There are a lot of people in Nowa Huta who have very positive memories of the socialist period, and we don’t want to offend them,” the manager told me. Nonetheless, the museum collaborates with many community leaders who have a history of participating in the political opposition in the 1980s (for example, the editor of the local newspaper), and many of its representations and activities deal with Nowa Huta’s legacy of resistance to the socialist government. Many of my Nowa Huta acquaintances enthusiastically applauded the museum’s activities. People perceived the opening of a museum in Nowa Huta as evidence that the district’s unique history is finally starting to be recognized on Kraków’s cultural map. However, some of the people with whom I spoke also felt that the museum’s representations of the socialist past privilege accounts of repression and resistance—the “Solidarity version,” as one person put it. Ms. Arutowicz, a woman in her midsixties, told me that she was approached by the museum to contribute her story to their sixtieth-anniversary oral collection but refused when she learned that the museum retained ultimate control over the editing of the material: “I heard that the exhibit was going to be called ‘Man of Marble,’ and I didn’t want to be part of that. I didn’t want my words to be used to create the impression that I was a victim of socialism because I don’t feel used or oppressed by that system.”10 A similar sentiment was expressed by Mr. Skóra, an eighty-four-yearold man who first arrived in Nowa Huta as part of the youth labor brigade

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called “Service to Poland” (Junacy SP). He told me that he has never been to the museum because the museum staff are “all Solidarity activists [Solidarnościowce], the same people who destroyed everything that the earlier generation had built, and now they’re making a museum about it.” It is indeed true that positive accounts of the socialist period generally do not make their way into the museum’s representations. This gap was acknowledged in the printed catalog that accompanied the museum’s sixtiethanniversary oral history collection: “We are missing stories of people such as members of Service to Poland [Junacy SP, the youth brigade] and Party officials. We wanted to hear them out, but people whom we approached refused to collaborate with us once they heard that they will be videotaped” (Sibila 2009, 32, my translation). While there is no reason to doubt that museum employees indeed made a sincere effort to incorporate those missing voices into their oral history project, the reflections of people such as Ms. Arutowicz or Mr. Skóra suggest that they must have felt that their perspectives would be either unwelcome or misrepresented. In all, the museum’s activities reflect several trends in local memory making. Nowa Huta’s history is increasingly stretched back in time beyond the beginning of the town’s construction in 1949. The legacy of resistance to the socialist government is also an important aspect of local history. However, certain aspects of the district’s socialist-era legacy are also starting to gain appreciation, for example, the architecture and urban plan. Let us now turn to examine how these depictions of the past compare with the representations produced by the Museum of PRL.

The Museum of PRL The Museum of PRL (Museum of the People’s Republic of Poland) is the baby of the famous Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda (the director of Man of Marble, the movie based on Ożański’s life story) and his wife, Krystyna Zachwatowicz-Wajda, a screenwriter who took part in the Roundtable Talks of 1989 on the side of Solidarity. The museum is co-financed by the city of Kraków and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, and is located in Nowa Huta’s former movie theater, called Światowid.11 The movie theater was built in 1955–57 in the socialist realist style and continued to operate until 1992. To this day, the building is one of Nowa Huta’s architectural gems, frequently pointed out on walking tours. Many buildings erected in Nowa Huta during the Stalinist period contained nuclear shelters in preparation for a possible attack, and the movie theater was built with a shelter designed to fit up to two thousand people. The activities and representations that I describe here took place at the time of my fieldwork,

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in the years 2009 and 2010. At the time, the museum was in the process of developing its permanent collection and designing its permanent exhibit. In the meantime, it organized rotating exhibits, as well as various outreach and educational activities. Since then, the museum has been undergoing significant administrative and organizational changes. As this book goes to press in the fall of 2014, the museum is not operating but is slated to reopen under new management—and most likely with a somewhat different vision of how to represent the socialist past. The museum’s thematic scope, as suggested by its title, is the history of the People’s Republic of Poland, a period that technically dates from 1948 to 1989, although in common parlance it is used to denote the socialist period in general (that is, from the end of World War II in 1945 to 1989). So what key messages about socialism did the museum want to convey? In an interview with me, the museum’s then-manager Jadwiga Emilewicz explained that her intended take-home message for visitors was that “communism was bad and should never happen again. . . . I see the role of the museum as making people aware of what PRL was really like so that it doesn’t happen again, because totalitarian projects are very attractive. . . . Everyone who comes to the museum has to realize that it was a bad system so it doesn’t happen again.”

From the “Poland-Jaruzelski war” exhibit at the Museum of PRL: a prison scene. Photo by the author.

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Let us now look at how this message was being conveyed through the museum’s representations. When I first visited the museum in the summer of 2009, it had a temporary exhibit to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the socialist government. Entitled “Od opozycji do wolności” (From opposition to freedom), the exhibit focused on the history of the political opposition in Poland. It consisted of photos and stories of events starting with acts of political resistance in the 1970s and ending with the semidemocratic elections on June 4, 1989.12 The message of the exhibit was unequivocal: it portrayed the period from the late 1970s to 1989 as the road to freedom through struggle against a repressive system. The next exhibit put on by the museum was the “Wojna polsko-jaruzelska” (Poland-Jaruzelski war) exhibit, organized to coincide with the twentyeighth anniversary of the declaration of martial law in December 1981. The title itself made a strong moral assertion, for it depicted martial law as a war that was waged on the Polish population by General Jaruzelski, who at the time was first secretary of the Polish Workers’ Party (the highest political position in the country). Upon entering the museum, the viewer was greeted by a TV recording of General Jaruzelski announcing martial law. The main exhibit area depicted the general in front of TV crews, with a mass of people hunched over in front of him. Downstairs, the museum’s nuclear shelter was decorated so as to re-create the experience of imprisonment. The shelter’s rooms represented prison cells, dimly lit with green light, barely revealing silhouettes squatting in the corners. The exhibit sent a strong moral message about martial law, portraying it as a time of terror and fear. In addition to creating temporary exhibits, museum workers organized many educational and outreach programs, the majority of which targeted high school- and university-age students. For example, the museum developed a historical game entitled the Decade of 1978–1989, similar to the Game of Life. The player’s goal was to collect points to support him/herself in the People’s Republic of Poland during the years 1979–89. The player gained points by correctly answering questions and fulfilling tasks from ten domains, including culture, economy, religion, and politics. For example, a player might be sent on a quest to buy staples such as sugar or coffee or have to unscramble the lyrics of an oppositional song popular in the 1980s. As we can see from even this brief description of museum exhibits and activities, the overall message that the museum conveyed about the socialist period was that it was a time of repression, resistance, and inefficiency. Since the museum is a state-funded institution, it should not come as a surprise that its representations of socialist-era history reproduce the currently hegemonic national narrative on the past. History teachers who brought their students to the museum for educational programs did so because the

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messages that students receive are in line with the version of history taught in school. And indeed, this narrative resonates with many people’s experiences of the socialist period. However, some Nowa Huta residents with whom I spoke about the museum felt that its representations of the past did not reflect their own experiences. For example, Ms. Arutowicz saw a preliminary temporary exhibit organized by the museum’s foundation in 2008, and it dissuaded her from any further interaction with the museum: I’ve never been to the museum because I was really put off by that exhibit they organized earlier. It was just a collection of old stuff: a Frania laundry machine, a laborer’s dirty outfit. . . . Is this what socialism was all about: laundry machines? And then that new exhibit [on martial law] that they have on now. Piotr [her acquaintance] went to see it, and he was telling me about the figures of people crouching in terror and the sense of fear that it evoked in him. It really made an impression on him, but it put me off from wanting to see it. I don’t feel that those kinds of images actually represent what socialism was like, or at least this wasn’t my experience.

In these words, Ms. Arutowicz critiqued what she perceived as the museum’s reduction of the complexity of life during the socialist period to either “laundry machines” or accounts of repression (even though she admitted that she has never actually been to the museum to see it for herself). She further noted that such a depiction of the socialist past does not reflect her own experiences. I once raised this point with one of the museum’s volunteers, Ms. Kalinowska, a woman of approximately the same age as Ms. Arutowicz. At the time, we were standing in front of one of the museum’s exhibits, a television set playing General Jaruzelski’s announcement of martial law. She motioned toward the television and responded: “True, different people had different experiences, and different people chose to participate differently in the state that was PRL. Some people were involved in the political opposition, while others were content with just staying home and watching these events on TV.” Ms. Kalinowska’s words conveyed a subtle critique of people who do not identify with the museum’s version of the past. As she saw it, certain people chose not to participate in acts of political resistance (and thus not to expose themselves to the danger of repression) because they were simply “content with just staying home” and watching history unfold on television. Other critiques of the museum that I encountered centered on the persona of Andrzej Wajda, the museum’s founder. An often-noted fact is that Wajda, who made his best movies during the socialist period and received multiple awards from the socialist government, is now this government’s most vocal critic. And indeed, it is noteworthy that Wajda’s Man of Marble, a strident critique of the socialist government, was made in 1976, with the

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sequel Man of Iron following in 1981—well before the collapse of the socialist state in 1989. “Perhaps Wajda should give back all the awards he received from that ‘evil’ government. Or maybe the museum should have the titles of Wajda’s movies written on the walls,” one woman remarked. Her comment suggested that whereas Wajda’s own life history reflects many sides of life in a socialist state, the version of history that is now being produced in his museum does not do justice to that complexity. Some Nowa Huta residents also resented the closure of the movie theater and perceived the museum as something that was intended for outsiders rather than for the local population. One visitor to the museum, a Nowa Huta resident in his fifties, complained: It saddens me to see what they’ve done to this place. I used to come to the movies here when I was a teenager. I saw so many great Westerns here. You probably don’t even know those movies, you are too young for that. . . . They closed the movie theater because it wasn’t profitable, but now they’re opening this museum that isn’t going to make a profit either and will have to be subsidized by the city. . . . This will not become a place for community integration, but a movie theater would have been. There are so many social problems in Nowa Huta, partly because young people have nowhere to go. And those big Cineplexes are expensive and outside of Nowa Huta. Maybe things would be better if young people had somewhere to go close to home.

I asked the man whether he did not think it important to have a museum of PRL. “Not at the price of a movie theater, no,” he replied. Since many of the museum’s activities are directed at young people, it is also worth mentioning some of the reactions that I witnessed on the part of students who visited the museum on school trips. Many students who attended educational lessons at the museum with their classes did not seem terribly interested in the content. For example, on one occasion the museum invited the Nowa Huta Solidarity hero Mieczysław Gil to speak to a school group. While the museum’s employees and the teacher were engrossed in Gil’s story about strikes at the steelworks and his own subsequent imprisonment, the students listened politely but restlessly and were clearly relieved when the talk ended and it was time to go home. On the other hand, the museum also attracted some young people who were keenly interested in the history of the socialist period. During my stay in Nowa Huta, the museum organized a history club for high school students. The club met once a month on Saturdays for educational talks dealing with different aspects of the socialist period. The students, many of whom planned to pursue university studies in either history or political science, self-selected to participate and voluntarily attended history talks on Saturday mornings.

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Many of my Nowa Huta acquaintances had never been to the museum. I once raised this issue with my aunt Alicja and nineteen-year-old cousin Jola, who live directly across the street (a literal stone’s throw away) from the museum and frequently asked me about the museum’s activities. K: Do you think it’s a good idea to have the museum there?

A: Sure it’s a good idea. It’s good that Nowa Huta is starting to be popular, that there are things happening here. And that building stood empty for a long time, so it’s good that something will be going on in there. K: But you’ve never been there yourself? A: No.

K: Why?

A: You know I think about going sometimes, but I’m always on my way to work, or from work with groceries in my hand, or rushing to catch the bus. . . . You know, you get wrapped up in your life, and there just isn’t the time. K (to Jola): What about you? Why don’t you go?

J: I would go if they had something interesting there. K: Like what?

J: Like medieval torture instruments.

The above accounts illustrate the spectrum of reactions to the museum on the part of Nowa Huta residents. Some people, such as the teachers who brought their students to the museum for history lessons, felt that the museum fulfills an important function in conveying knowledge about the socialist period. Others objected to the museum’s representations of the past, seeing them as overly one-sided. Some people were critical of the museum because of issues that had nothing to do with historical representation, as in the case of the man who felt that the museum is directed at outsiders and will not benefit the local population. And then there are people like my aunt, who get wrapped up in everyday life and do not have much time to think about the past. They remember the socialist period and therefore may feel that they already know what it was like and do not need to go to a museum to learn about it. Young people like my cousin may not be very interested in the socialist period, feeling that it is far away and in any case not nearly as fascinating as medieval torture instruments—although the museum’s history club is testament to the fact that at least some young people are keenly interested in the socialist past.

Narratives of Contention and a Narrative of Community In this chapter I describe Nowa Huta as a place constituted by the interaction of different narratives about the past: narratives produced by different

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actors and molded by different interests and agendas. On the surface some of these narratives appear incompatible; for example, it may seem difficult to reconcile the image of Nowa Huta as a model socialist town with that of Nowa Huta as a site of resistance to the socialist government. However, when put together, these representations manifest different aspects of the town’s history and the diverse experiences of its residents. Such complexity inevitably occasions contestations; and yet, though these representations indeed invoke “contrary themes,” these themes are nonetheless “commonly shared” among the district’s population (Billig 1990, 70). What this means, in effect, is that these different narratives add up to a shared language through which people are able to articulate different (and sometimes competing) interests and experiences. While people may have different experiences of the past, they are at least talking about it using the same language. It is precisely this polyphony of voices and memories that constitutes Nowa Huta’s discursive landscape. The presence of multiple threads of memory in Nowa Huta’s public representations needs to be viewed in the context of the larger processes of memory making and identity building in Poland and East-Central Europe more generally. Public representations of Nowa Huta as a site of resistance to the socialist government feed into the currently hegemonic national narratives of the socialist period as a time of repression, resistance, and inefficiency. Poland is not unique here; similar messages about the socialist past can be found in state-sanctioned narratives produced in other former East-Central European socialist states (e.g., Berdahl 2005; Sarkisova and Apor 2008; Ten Dyke 2000; Todorova 2010). The resurrection of presocialist history in Nowa Huta’s public representations may seem surprising, given that the town was built precisely as a pet project of the socialist government. However, this is in fact a common phenomenon across the region. Cities in postsocialist states often look back to their presocialist pasts for material from which to construct their futures. This allows them to edit out their socialist-era histories in order to build new identities based on shared European political, economic, and cultural values (Young and Kaczmarek 2008). In Nowa Huta, bringing back presocialist history is a mechanism for transcending the district’s association with socialism. Local representations of the past in Nowa Huta also need to be viewed in the context of the recent trend in Europe toward the “decentralization of national collective memory” (Ochman 2013, 39) and the pluralization of memories at the local scale. According to Ewa Ochman, this decentralization and pluralization are especially poignant in former socialist states such as Poland. She explains: “In Poland during the PRL, the communist

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party firmly controlled the space of commemorative activity, so interpretations of the past being promoted by local leaders had to conform to the narratives determined by the center. After the fall of communism, the role of the nation-state in memory production has been increasingly contested and vernacular memory interests are becoming more prominent” (2013, 102). Across the continent, municipalities and even entire regions are now producing their own memories and histories, some of which challenge the “coherent and nationalizing version of the historical past propagated by the state” (Ochman 2013, 164). The case of Nowa Huta offers an instructive example of how representations produced at the local level need to achieve some sort of a balance (albeit often an uneasy one) between the experiences of local residents and the dominant narratives that shape Poland’s public sphere. For example, institutions such as the two Nowa Huta museums are ultimately state funded, a fact that influences how they represent the past. However, these institutions also operate in local contexts and thus need to be responsive to local concerns. The museum manager’s reflection that the Nowa Huta Museum tries “not to offend anyone” illustrates this attempt to balance competing interests and experiences. In a place like Nowa Huta, this is not an easy task. Some Nowa Huta residents literally built the town with their own hands and want their hard work to be respected regardless of what political system was in place at the time. Some lost their way of life and livelihood as their farmlands were expropriated by the socialist state for the construction of a new town. Some took part in resistance activities such as the Battle for the Cross or the Solidarity strikes of the 1980s. Certain residents may also occupy more than one subject position; for example, they might both have worked on the town’s construction and taken part in the Battle for the Cross. The sixtieth-anniversary commemorations were an occasion when different representations of Nowa Huta’s history confronted each other. On the one hand, the very fact that this anniversary was even recognized and publicly celebrated (unlike the fiftieth anniversary, a decade earlier) attests to a greater acceptance of the socialist legacy in both the local and the national imaginations. On the other hand, certain Nowa Huta residents, especially the town’s “builders,” felt that their history of work invested in building the town was overshadowed by the history of resistance to the socialist government. In the months following the initial celebrations, these residents were able to organize an alternative commemorative event that better reflected their experiences. From this we can cautiously conclude that in Nowa Huta, a space may be opening up for a more nuanced consideration of Poland’s postwar history. However, different people have different

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amounts of power when it comes to producing and disseminating representations of the past. Many prominent public figures (politicians, directors of community organizations, chief editors of newspapers) are people who were involved in (or at least supported) the Solidarity movement in the 1980s. These people now have the platform to produce and disseminate versions of the past that reflect their experiences. On the other hand, the voices of people who are associated with “building socialism”—people like Nowa Huta’s builders—are now largely marginalized in state-sanctioned discourses. While in Nowa Huta these people are able to carve out a discursive niche for themselves, this niche is still at the fringes of the town’s public representations. Commemorations and museum representations convey public representations of history. At the same time, however, they also provide opportunities for these narratives to be interrogated and contested. The sites of memory discussed in this chapter illustrate that there is not one single memory of the socialist past, although certain versions of the past are privileged over others. This process of memory making takes place on different scales (including the local, the national, and the supranational) and through a negotiation among present and past needs, agendas, and ideologies. I continue this exploration in the following chapters, where I examine how different generations of Nowa Huta residents remember and/or perceive the socialist period and how their accounts draw on, reproduce, or challenge the representations of the past outlined here.

CHAPTER 4 Socialism’s Builders and Destroyers Memories of Socialism among Nowa Huta Residents

A

1987 Polish movie titled Papieros od prezydenta (A cigarette from the president) depicts a clash of values between two generations of Nowa Huta residents. The father, who in his youth worked on the construction of Nowa Huta’s steelworks in the early 1950s, recalls a visit to the construction site by then–Polish president Bolesław Bierut. Touring the construction site, the president talked with workers and gave them cigarettes. The father kept his cigarette for years as a memento of that day. In the movie, he recalls the hard work he and his contemporaries put into building Nowa Huta: they worked hard for everything they have, he says, starting with their first own fork and spoon. Now, the younger generation has a better life and access to opportunities that were undreamed of in those days. The father’s memories are juxtaposed with the voice of his son, a thirtyfour-year old teacher frustrated with the socialist system. The son complains that the government does not appreciate people’s work. He has been waiting for an apartment for five years now, and in the meantime his life has been put on hold, as he cannot marry and start a family. The only real option for his generation, the son claims, is to emigrate to the West. The movie was made in the late 1980s, but the generational dynamic depicted in it continues to both reflect and shape popular perceptions of Nowa Huta’s residents. The oldest residents are popularly associated with “building socialism” and are thus seen as being nostalgic for the old days, whereas their children are associated with resistance to the socialist government. In this chapter I interrogate these popular associations: I ask how the socialist period is remembered by the eighty-year old residents who literally built the town with their own hands and by their middle-aged children who 124

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participated in Solidarity strikes in the 1980s. In the course of my fieldwork I talked with members of both generations about their lives in Nowa Huta: their work, their families, and the events in the town’s history in which they took part or that they found important. In their accounts, people invoke both national events and their local manifestations, including postwar rebuilding, the relative prosperity of the 1970s, the decade of strikes in the 1980s, the collapse of the socialist government in 1989, and the subsequent political and economic changes that ensued. When telling their stories, Nowa Huta residents selectively draw on elements of both national and local narratives, in effect alternately reinforcing and challenging hegemonic discourses on the past. Their narratives reveal how present conditions affect how people remember the past and, conversely, how people’s experiences of a different political and economic system influence their perceptions of present-day conditions.

Generations of Memory in Nowa Huta The focus of this chapter is on people who lived a substantial portion of their lives during the socialist period and had significant life experiences during this time.1 This historical generation consists of multiple cohorts and can encompass people ranging in age from their forties to their nineties. In Nowa Huta, popular discourses frequently draw a distinction between the generation of the town’s “builders” and the generation of their “children.” The term “builders” refers to the town’s founding residents, who arrived in Nowa Huta from 1949 throughout the 1950s. During that time, many of this generation literally built the town with their own hands as they worked on the construction of the steelworks and the town itself. Other builders contributed to the town’s development in other ways, for example, by planting trees as part of organized volunteer labor brigades (czyn społeczny, literally “civic act”). The majority of these individuals were then in their teenage years and twenties and are now in their eighties. Many of them have lived almost their entire lives in Nowa Huta, where they also worked and raised children (Chwalba 2004). In popular opinion, this is the group most often associated with “building socialism” and with fond memories of the socialist period. The generation of “builders” is often juxtaposed with the more diffuse generation of their “children” (literally or proverbially), who are now in their forties to sixties. This generation is roughly synchronous with what Yurchak (2006) terms “the last Soviet generation,” that is, people born between 1950 and the early 1970s. This group was born and came of age during the socialist period and is now popularly associated with opposition to the socialist government in the 1980s. People in this age group are also sometimes re-

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Seniors playing cards in Nowa Huta’s park: one of the emblematic images of the district. Photo by the author.

ferred to as the “Solidarity generation” (e.g., Gutkowski 2008), although I did not encounter this term used in Nowa Huta. Popular opinion in Nowa Huta holds that these two generations are characterized by very different experiences. For example, Nowa Huta resident and writer Tadeusz Binek titled one of the chapters of his book on Nowa Huta’s history “Fathers built it, sons destroyed it” (“Ojcowie zbudowali, synowie zburzyli”) (Binek 2009). The title is poignant, for it can be read in more than one way. It can mean that the fathers built the socialist system, and the children dismantled it. Or it can mean that the fathers built Nowa Huta, and the children, through participating in Solidarity activities that ultimately toppled the socialist government, in effect destroyed Nowa Huta along with it. In what follows I will examine how these ideas are reflected in the accounts of these two generations.

A New Life and a New Opportunity In the early postwar years Nowa Huta was represented in official statesanctioned accounts as a place where one could start a new life. Movies and literature were replete with images of shirtless young men laying bricks, steelworkers at the blast furnace, and children waving flags at May 1st pa-

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rades.2 Nowa Huta was depicted as a socialist paradise where young people from backward villages were able to acquire an education and training, work, raise their families, and live happily ever after. Such accounts are now more critically approached and have given way to narratives that highlight the darker aspects of life under the socialist system. Notwithstanding the backlash against overly laudatory representations of life in the new socialist town, the notion of Nowa Huta as an “opportunity” for people to build new lives is still alive and well in the stories of some of its first builders. Such is the story of Mr. Pawłowski, an eighty-one-yearold retired steelworker who came to Nowa Huta in 1954 from a small village in northern Poland. He remembers his village as being impoverished: “my village was so poor that before the war [World War II], there were only four bicycles in the entire village.” Against his parents’ wishes and without their knowledge, he left the village and eventually ended up in Nowa Huta. When he arrived in Nowa Huta, Mr. Pawłowski first worked on the construction of the steelworks and then on the construction of the town’s other infrastructure. For the first few years he lived in a workers’ hostel (hotel robotniczy), in a complex then colloquially called “Mexico” on account of the reportedly abysmal living conditions. I asked him what those living conditions were like. He replied that they were adequate for young people. Workers lived in barracks, each barrack divided into twelve rooms and a washroom, with about eight people to a room. Workers received dinner3 coupons and bought their own breakfasts and suppers. Their time was divided between working and studying. The opportunity to get an education was important for Mr. Pawłowski: “At that time I was almost illiterate. I had completed only four years of primary school: two years in Polish and two in Russian, because my village was under Russian occupation from 1939 to 1941. And still, I could barely read or write.” In Nowa Huta he finished primary and secondary school and started postsecondary training but never completed it. After a few years of living in a workers’ hostel Mr. Pawłowski was allocated a one-room (i.e., bachelor) apartment: “In those days the government gave you an apartment and you only had to pay for the key.” A few years later he and his wife had two children and were allocated a two-room apartment where he lives to this day. After the steelworks began to operate, Mr. Pawłowski worked in the refractories division and then in the small mill. He worked his way up to brigade supervisor and then foreman. I asked him how he recalled that work: “It was hard work of course, but I didn’t mind, I was young.” He claimed that the organization of work was better than it is today and that workers received more support from official structures: “People who worked

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together helped and supported each other. . . . Work teams were better organized; now everything’s fallen apart. Everyone knew how much everyone else was making and who received what awards. Young people have it more difficult now; a young person nowadays has to be dynamic [przebojowy] in order to get ahead. Before, everyone had support. Workers weren’t laid off; you couldn’t be fired for just any reason, for example, if your brigade supervisor didn’t like you. There were active trade unions and Party organizations, people who could help you.” Like some of the other steelworks employees whose accounts appear in chapter 2, Mr. Pawłowski argues that during the socialist period workers were better supported by official structures such as state-controlled trade unions. Mr. Pawłowski himself was Party secretary of his division at the small mill and a member of the Factory Committee for the entire steelworks (Komitet Fabryczny Huty). In addition to working at his job, he also did a lot of community work: for example, he was the president of his neighborhood committee that looked after neighborhood green spaces. Mr. Pawłowski says he is proud of what he accomplished: “I provided for myself and my family. My children are educated, my grandchildren too. It was here that I was educated, I got a job, I earned a good salary, I was probably a very good mechanic, I got promoted, I never missed a day of work, and I was never in trouble with the law. . . . Nowa Huta gave me an opportunity. . . . I don’t complain about that system because they helped me, they helped me get out of that village and gave me the opportunity to get an education, housing, and work.” The idea of Nowa Huta as an opportunity was also invoked by Tomasz Szewczyk, whom we first met in chapter 2. A man in his early eighties, Mr. Szewczyk first started working at the steelworks in the late 1950s, eventually working his way up to assistant director of social affairs, a post he held until 1990, when he left the steelworks. This is how he explained his decision to build his life in Nowa Huta: Today when young people want an apartment, to start a family and so on, they leave Poland for Canada, England, and such. In those days, they came to Nowa Huta. Even for people who worked in Kraków, it was nearly impossible to get an apartment there, but in Nowa Huta you could get an apartment in two to six years. And I am one of those people, who, having worked in Kraków, in the Main Square, but with no prospect of getting an apartment, I switched jobs and came to the steelworks. I did it because I had friends who did it before me and from them I knew there was an opportunity to get an apartment. Plus the salaries, you know, in Kraków I earned 1,400 złoty after a few years of work, and at the steelworks 2,600 złoty at the start, almost twice as much.

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Mr. Gawęda, an eighty-one-year-old retired photographer, similarly spoke of Nowa Huta as a “life’s opportunity” for many people. Mr. Gawęda was born in 1930 in Lwów, a city on Poland’s eastern border that is now part of the Ukraine. During and after World War II his family was displaced, and he ended up in Nowa Huta. In 1960, he began working as a photographer for Nowa Huta’s local newspaper Głos Nowej Huty (Nowa Huta voice). Ever since then, he has been capturing events in Nowa Huta’s history with his camera: “Nowa Huta gave many people a chance. After World War II, steel was needed to rebuild the country, and so the steelworks was needed as well. For many people, living in Nowa Huta was a dramatic improvement in their standard of living. People learned to read and write; some of them saw a sink for the first time. The steelworks had its own health clinic, and in Nowa Huta’s stores you could buy things that weren’t available in other parts of Kraków.” The image of Nowa Huta as an “opportunity” for people was most often invoked in the stories of people in their seventies and eighties, that is, the generation of builders, for whom living in Nowa Huta was indeed an opportunity for social mobility. These people had lived through the hardships of World War II and thus perceived postwar rebuilding in positive terms. The war had destroyed much of the country’s existing infrastructure, industry, and even farmland, and the government’s postwar rebuilding projects offered work, food, and housing. Many of the builders with whom I spoke hailed from war-ravaged parts of the country, and as a result they appreciated a roof over their heads, regular meals, free schooling, and the opportunity to work and earn money. People’s references to the “opportunity to work” deserve some attention, for they reveal that work had a special place both in socialist ideology and in Nowa Huta’s place identity. In a historical account of Nowa Huta during the Stalinist period, Katherine Lebow argues that socialist ideology depicted work “both as a collective effort in pursuit of shared goals and as a vehicle for personal transformation” (2013, 93). As a physical embodiment of socialist ideology, Nowa Huta thus figured as a “moral community of labor, based on a certain understanding of work itself ” (Lebow 2013, 77). And indeed, people’s stories illustrate that working allowed them to improve their individual life chances, especially since in the early postwar years many workers received free housing. For many builders, however, working was about more than just making money and receiving an apartment: through their collective work invested into building a new town, they were also rebuilding the country and building a new future. The builders’ reflections on work, education, and housing are particularly poignant if we read them in the context of present economic conditions,

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characterized by unemployment, an increasingly two-tiered education system, and skyrocketing real estate prices (especially in the city of Kraków). While the builders themselves are well past working age, they have grandchildren who are faced with rising tuition costs or who are struggling on the job market. Although seniors’ pensions generally do not keep up with the rising costs of living, they do provide some measure of security in a volatile job market: unlike working adults, retirees are at least guaranteed an income every month. In effect, retirees often financially assist their children and grandchildren. My own great-uncle and great-aunt, both retired teachers with comfortable (though by no means extravagant) pensions, played a large role in financing their granddaughter’s education and transition to employment. They paid her university tuition in a physiotherapy program and bought her a used car and a massage table so that she had all the necessary equipment to start working. When the builders were young, they lived in workers’ hostels until they were allocated an apartment, an arrangement that resulted from the overall housing shortage during the socialist period. Now, many of the builders’ adult grandchildren still live at home, not because there is a shortage of housing but because they cannot afford to move out. A few of my acquaintances in their twenties and early thirties were still living at home with their parents and sometimes grandparents. Many were promised that they would eventually inherit their grandparents’ apartments. Naturally, not all young adults are in this situation. Young people from higher socioeconomic backgrounds or those who are lucky enough to hold high-paying, permanent jobs are able to receive bank loans or to summon their families’ assistance in order to buy their own apartments or build their own houses. The narrative of Nowa Huta as the epitome of the “good life” continues to have much resonance in the district, especially among the oldest generation. However, not everyone ascribes to this narrative. As I show in the previous chapter, public representations of Nowa Huta’s history contain plenty of references to the difficult living conditions in the new town. These include, for instance, cramped living spaces, married couples forced to live apart in sex-segregated workers’ hostels, alcoholism, violence, and prostitution. One person whose story synced with these dark creation stories was Mr. Krzemiński, a retired steelworker. Mr. Krzemiński moved to Nowa Huta in 1952 at the age of seven, with his parents and younger brother. At first he lived with his mother and brother in a workers’ hostel, while his father lived in another. After a few years his parents received a communal apartment that the family shared with two other families for another twenty-two years, until he finally moved out as an adult in 1971. This is how he described it: “It was a nightmare. There were three rooms,

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and there was a family in each room, with a shared kitchen. Over the years one of the families moved out so we had two rooms, but at the time when I moved out there was still one lady sharing an apartment and a kitchen with my mother.” Mr. Krzemiński’s account challenges stories of Nowa Huta as an oasis of opportunity. Here, we should take note of the fact that he is between fifteen and twenty years younger than the three builders whose accounts appear above. This puts him closer to the “middle” generation of Nowa Huta residents, that is, the children of the builders who grew disillusioned with the socialist government.

Living the “Good Life” in Nowa Huta: Culture, Athletics, and Recreation When I talked to people about their lives, I was surprised by how many of them were involved (or had been involved in the past) in extracurricular activities such as sports teams, dance groups, choirs, photography clubs, and the like. To put it simply, people did stuff. The socialist government was keen on organizing its citizens’ time in order to engender in them the values and behaviors that were consistent with socialist philosophy. In effect, many cultural and recreational opportunities were available to people either free of charge or for a nominal fee. In Nowa Huta, such activities proliferated especially after the mid-1950s, following the publication of the first critiques of the despicable living conditions and the moral decay in the country’s model socialist town. In an effort to fix the morale and mold the sensibilities of the local population, the authorities decided to provide the new town with a theater, cinemas, and a number of cultural centers and sports clubs. Many cultural and recreational activities were also provided through the steelworks. In their conversations with me, people fondly recalled the various programs and events—dinner and dance parties, hiking excursions, scouts, sports teams, and competitions—in which they had participated. Two people who lived that lifestyle to the fullest are my uncle Jarek and aunt Magda. Uncle Jarek and Aunt Magda, both in their late seventies, are former athletes and gym teachers. Uncle Jarek was a professional basketball player, first for one of Nowa Huta’s teams and then for Poland’s national team. After completing university he worked as a gym teacher and coached the school’s girls’ basketball team until his retirement in 1985. Aunt Magda similarly worked as a gym teacher but after graduating university began to seriously play tennis—she was a national gold medalist in doubles and a silver medalist in her age category. The socialist government promoted athletic activities and physical

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well-being. Both Uncle Jarek and Aunt Magda held sports scholarships in university, which Aunt Magda frequently praised in her conversations with me: “I’m telling you, if it were not for that system, I would have never been able to go to university, considering how little money my family had. I always say, that was the one good thing about that system.” The living conditions in college residences were spartan, and the food was despicable, she says, but at least it was free, and as athletes they received additional rations. They were also able to take part in many sports camps, including international ones in Egypt and the former Yugoslavia. These camps were heavily subsidized so that they would be affordable to students. Uncle Jarek and Aunt Magda positively recalled the variety of athletic programs for youth that were provided by the socialist state through schools, community clubs, and organizations. They pointed out that Nowa Huta used to be known for its athletics at all levels and in a variety of disciplines, including soccer, volleyball, handball, boxing, track-and-field, bowling, and motorcycle speedway (a Nowa Huta tradition). They bemoaned the decline of sports clubs and the decreased emphasis on physical education in schools, which they saw as indicative of the government’s lack of concern for youth programming and “lifestyle” programming in general: “There were so many opportunities for young people to be involved in sports. Now it’s all gone down,” they told me. People’s reflections on the decline of athletic and recreational opportunities struck a particular chord at the time of my fieldwork, since that very year Nowa Huta’s signature sports club Hutnik (Steelworker) had just declared bankruptcy. Hutnik was formerly owned by the steelworks and used to organize a large assortment of sports activities for men, women, and children, at all levels. When the steelworks stopped financing the team in the 1990s, Hutnik tried to stay afloat but ended up eliminating all of its sports programs except men’s soccer. The topic of Hutnik’s decline surfaced in the stories of many people, from seventy-year-olds to soccer fans in their twenties. Later that year, Hutnik was revived under new management. At the time of writing, the team is still playing, although it continues to struggle financially. Many of the people I knew also fondly recalled the rich cultural life during the socialist period. In the course of my research I had a lot of interaction with workers at the OKN cultural center, an institution formerly owned by the steelworks. I talked to Ms. Dorota Prażmowska, the center’s retired director, about what the center’s activities were like during the socialist period: DP: Oh, so exciting. There was always something going on: art exhibits, concerts, poetry readings, film screenings. We organized all the events for the

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steelworks: dances, holiday parties, award ceremonies. . . . Money for programming was no object because the steelworks’ directors always wanted to show off how much money the steelworks had. You only had to go and ask. KP: Really? They actually wanted to give away money for things like poetry recitals and photo exhibits?

DP: Yes, they understood that it was important to have activities and entertainment for workers. There was always money for culture, as long as you had good ideas.

Since 1989 cultural institutions are increasingly being forced to trim their budgets, and my acquaintances at OKN were struggling to maintain the sort of programming to which they were accustomed. One employee told me: Before when I wanted to organize an event I went to our [former] director, and I have to admit, she was not stingy, and she had a vision. If I told her what I wanted to do and explained why it was important, she always understood, and she would find the money for it somewhere. Now when we want to organize an event or start a program, our new director tells us we can do whatever we want as long as we find the money for it ourselves. So we’re using up most of our time writing grant applications for EU funding, rather than actually running programs.

Amanda Mazur, a woman in her forties and a music instructor at the center, reflected on how quickly career prospects in the cultural domain changed after the market reforms in the 1990s: When I was starting music high school in the mid-1980s there was a certainty that a musician could always find work somewhere, in a philharmonic or opera or something [she plays the piano and harp]. But by the time I finished high school, times were already starting to change. Now artists get paid per project, so, for example, I might get called from Warsaw and told to come play at a concert at their philharmonic for one night. That means they pay me for just that one concert, and all the expenses of travel, hotel, and so on are not covered. It’s impossible to live like that. I can’t even practice anymore because I don’t have my own harp, and I can’t afford one; the price of a good harp is like buying a BMW.

Mr. Gawęda, who by nature of his job as a photographer for the local newspaper used to be up to date on all that was going on in Nowa Huta, commented: “There was always something going on. There were events, organizations, lots more opportunities for young people to get involved. Sure, these organizations had a political accent to them, but at least they existed. People went on trips and excursions—sure, these were named after Lenin [rajdy Lenina], but really, they were just normal trips, the same way that

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nowadays people name trails after John Paul II. . . . Before, everything was planned and looked after, now everything is in mayhem [bez głowy, literally ‘without a head’], and it costs money. Money rules the world.” The appreciation of socialist-era cultural, athletic, and recreational programming was a recurring theme in the stories of people of all ages, men and women, manual workers and professionals. These reflections need to be read in the context of the decline of public spending on cultural and recreational initiatives, which in turn renders them increasingly pricey and thus less accessible (Stenning 2004, 2005b). The time of my fieldwork, the beginning of the austerity era in Europe, was a particularly charged moment to be exploring this issue. In the fall of 2009 Poland’s former finance minister Leszek Balcerowicz (the guru behind “shock therapy” economic reform in the early 1990s) electrified the audience at the national Congress of Polish Culture by advocating that culture should be privatized, that is, deprived of government funding and subjected to the market laws of supply and demand. In recent years, the city of Kraków has been increasingly trimming its cultural budget. The issue has triggered heated public debates, especially given the city’s centuries-old status as the cultural heart of Poland. While some people protest the privatization of cultural centers for youth, others argue that in the climate of austerity, some things are simply unsustainable and need to be reformed so that they can pay for themselves. Undoubtedly, both sides have a point. I want to suggest, however, that people who positively recall the cultural, athletic, and recreational activities during the socialist period do not long for the return of socialism. Rather, these recollections should be read as a call for an “alternative moral order” (Berdahl 2010, 47): an order that values activities that enhance human spirit or creativity, deems such activities a public good that should be available to all regardless of income, and sees them as important and worthwhile even if they do not generate a profit.

Repression and Resistance As I outline in earlier chapters, repression and resistance are the main themes found in both local and nationwide representations of the socialist period. These themes were also prevalent in the individual accounts of Nowa Huta residents. In the 1980s the district was a hotbed of oppositional activity, and everyone who had lived through that period was caught up in these events at least to some degree. Some of the residents with whom I spoke were directly involved in oppositional activities, others had friends or family members who were involved, and even those who did not directly participate in the protests nonetheless witnessed them from their windows. My uncle Jarek and aunt Magda were not active members of the political

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opposition and did not attend strikes and demonstrations, but these events nonetheless entered into their lives. They live near the Lord’s Ark church, a site where many demonstrations and clashes between the strikers and the riot police took place throughout the 1980s. This is what Aunt Magda told me about those days: “It’s terrible what kinds of things went on around here, you can’t imagine. We would see ZOMO [riot police] chasing young men right under our windows. . . . And the teargas was so dense that you couldn’t open the windows for months. The whole neighborhood was shrouded in teargas. You know, the only good thing about that time is that the teargas killed off all the Pharaoh ants.”4 They recall being stopped and asked to show their identification a few times while walking back from playing bridge with friends at a nearby building and being followed by individuals in civilian clothing who they were convinced were undercover police agents. In the 1980s Uncle Jarek and Aunt Magda taught at a high school near the steelworks, located alongside the road that connects the steelworks to town. Aunt Magda told me about being concerned for her students’ safety during workers’ strikes: AM: When it was 2 p.m. and the first shift at the steel factory ended, the workers would all march into town together chanting “Solidarity.” It was difficult to keep students in school; they all wanted to leave and go march with the workers. . . . Once the principal locked down the school so nobody would leave. But usually we would let the students go home early so that they would be out of there before the workers marched by. K: But why didn’t you want students joining the workers?

AM: Well, something could happen to them! You never know what could happen! They could get caught, hurt, killed, who knows! You know what happened to Bogdan Włosik, how he was killed? One student from our school was arrested. As teachers, we were responsible for the students’ safety while they were at school.5

In the course of my fieldwork I also spoke with residents who were more actively involved in oppositional activities. One such person was Jan Baryłka, who at the time was an electrician at the steelworks’ blooming mill, a division known as the steelworks’ “cradle of Solidarity.” This is how he recalled the day that martial law was announced: JB: In 1981 I was home when martial law was announced. I had the day off. I get up in the morning, I turn on the television: nothing. Then I was doing something, then Jaruzelski appeared and announced what’s going on. And I was supposed to be going to work that night. By that time, they were talking about martial law on the radio. So I somehow managed to get into the steel-

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works, and I ended up staying for a few days to be with my workmates. We guarded the steelworks to make sure there was no devastation from anyone. We watched the gates, we had patrols. We slept on styrofoam, on benches, on our kufajki [puffy workmens’ jackets]. . . . And then after Solidarity was defeated, our leaders told us not to hide but to stay together, not to use any heavy equipment, to surrender if we have to. So the ZOMO came in and surrounded us. And their leader tells us to disperse. And we don’t. So he tells us again. And we don’t. Finally we all grabbed each others’ hands; we knew that they would start hitting us with batons [pałować], so we stuffed our kufajki with pillows and rags. I was in the second row. We all squatted down. The ZOMO would approach and try to pull us out, and when they couldn’t they would hit us across the backs with those batons.6 KP: That must have hurt a lot.

JB: No, I told you, we stuffed our kufajki so we could bear it. Then they finally dispersed us. Our leaders escaped, and later on we organized a collection to help their families. The more active Solidarity leaders were locked up by the Security Service. They were locked up, taken away.

Another person who talked to me about strikes at the steelworks was Mr. Krzemiński, another former steelworks employee in his early sixties. When the steelworks went on an occupational strike on December 13, 1981, he was a member of the strike committee for his department, the Department of Electrical Repairs. The strike committee decided to hook up the steelworks’ gates to an electrical current to protect the entrance from being stormed by the army tanks that were lined up outside the steel factory’s gates, ready to “pacify” the striking workers. His involvement in the strike ended up costing him his job. PK: Because our department was hooked up to electricity we were the last department to be pacified. But not brutally, like other departments; it was through persuasion, that everyone else had already stopped striking. So, for endangering the lives of those who attacked us, I received this punishment [i.e., getting fired]. The rest of the men signed lojalki [statements affirming their allegiance to the socialist government], and I didn’t want to. The manager asks me: “Why don’t you just sign?” I said, “I’m not going to sign.” And at that time I was wearing the Solidarity pin. He asks me, “Why do you still wear that pin when everyone else has taken theirs off?” I said, ”Because they are not the ones who pinned it on me, I pinned it on myself.” In the end, I was the only person fired from my department. Everyone signed lojalki, and I was fired. No one even asked what happened to me. K: I guess there wasn’t much solidarity after all.

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PK: They were afraid, I can understand that. For a few years after that I had serious problems. I guess you could say I had a moral hangover [kac moralny] because no one was interested in what happened to me. K: You weren’t afraid to go strike?

PK: Sure I was. When you are determined, you don’t think about possible consequences. I was married too, at that time I had been married for eleven years. My wife was terribly worried about me. . . . But this was stronger, not just the emotion, but the conviction that I was supporting a just cause.

Finally I turn to the case of Ms. Prażmowska, former director of the OKN cultural center, who experienced repression in a different way and also reflected on it differently from the others. This is how she recalled the Solidarity era in Nowa Huta: DP: Everyone supported Solidarity when it first emerged.7 Even people in management positions who really should not have done so because of their Party membership. KP: How did you support it? You, personally?

DP: How? Well, I was a member of Solidarity, first of all. I let the organization be as active at OKN as it wanted to be. When my employees went on demonstrations, I went with them to support them. I had some trouble after that. The director [of the steelworks] called me in and hinted that if I signed the sign-in book to say that I was at work, that I didn’t go to the demonstration, it would be taken as proof that I was indeed at work. KP: Did you do it?

DP: No. I said I went along to support my employees, I wasn’t going to deny it.

One of Ms. Prażmowska’s employees at OKN was arrested for carrying oppositional leaflets and imprisoned for two years. When martial law was declared in 1981, she decided to give up her Party membership. DP: I decided I’m not going to belong to a party that uses violence against people, so I gave up my Party membership. A few days after, the director [of the steelworks] called me in and asked for my resignation as director of OKN. KP: That’s terrible.

DP: Not really. I knew that I would have to resign when I gave up my Party membership. I was expecting it.

Not much changed after she stepped down, she said. For two years the center was without a director, so she continued in all her former duties despite not having the title (her title at the time was program manager). Then another person was brought in from the outside to replace her, so she became assistant director. She and the new director worked very well

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together, she said. After 1989, the replacement director gave her back her title and herself assumed the assistant director position. They continued in this manner for almost two decades, until Ms. Prażmowska’s retirement. I asked Ms. Prażmowska what work was like in OKN in the 1980s: DP: Once martial law ended, it was business as usual. We still did all the same things. KP: Was there more political pressure, surveillance?

DP: Not really. For example, I used to order two copies of all major newspapers for the center: one for the center’s library, one for myself. I did this even after I wasn’t the director anymore. I even ordered Tygodnik Powszechny! I knew nobody at the steelworks would check up on what newspapers we are ordering at the center. In the 1980s we organized a lot of lectures and meetings once we realized that there were so many blank spots in the Polish history that was taught in schools. We even organized lectures on topics like Piłsudski. Sometimes at these meetings there were people who looked like maybe they were informants, but I never heard anything about it afterward.8

The accounts above speak to the politically charged atmosphere of the 1980s, characterized by popular dissatisfaction with the socialist state and the state’s (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to quell dissent. Different Nowa Huta residents experienced that decade differently, some more directly involved in oppositional activities than others. The people whose accounts appear above experienced repression in different forms, from physical assault to dismissal from work. They also resisted the political status quo in different ways, from participating in strikes to organizing lectures on topics that were politically risqué. Ms. Prażmowska’s narrative stands out from the others as it offers somewhat of a challenge to the notion of the 1980s as a time characterized by all-pervasive repression. Although she would certainly be justified in seeing herself as politically repressed, she explicitly refuses this characterization. Accounts of repression and resistance have much resonance among Nowa Huta’s residents. I suggest that there are a few reasons for this. First, such accounts indeed reflect people’s experiences. Many residents either took part in strikes and demonstrations themselves or had friends or family members who were involved in oppositional activities. Many also experienced and witnessed repression in different forms. Second, memories of repression and resistance are heavily bolstered by both national and local memory-making institutions, including newspapers, museums, cultural centers, and schools. A number of former Solidarity leaders and activists at the steelworks went on to work as government ministers or to head newly privatized companies; some have tried their hand in local politics; a few

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still remain in upper leadership positions in local and regional Solidarity structures. Many of these people are thus in influential positions to create and disseminate accounts of the past that reflect their experiences. In Nowa Huta, for instance, the Solidarity trade union regularly organizes commemorative activities, and former Solidarity activists give talks to school groups and, on special occasions, serve as tour guides around the district.

“Nothing on the Shelves but Vinegar”: Shortages and Inefficiencies No representation of the socialist period would be complete without a mention of the infamous shortages. Stories of empty stores, long lines, and ration coupons recur in virtually all historical and popular representations of the socialist period (even though in reality shortages were mostly a feature of the 1980s). For instance, when I regularly complimented my great-aunt Magda on her delicious dinners, she dismissively responded that cooking nowadays requires no effort at all, since the stores are well stocked, and there are lots of shortcuts available in the form of frozen, canned, jarred, or otherwise preserved and ready-to-eat products. In the old days, however, she would get up at 4 a.m. on Saturdays and travel by train to another city to procure good-quality meats, and she and my uncle would pick an assortment of fruit and vegetables from their families’ garden plots in the village and do much of the canning, jarring, and pickling themselves. Shortages are often cited as the prime example of the socialist system’s inefficiency. Many scholars also argue that shortages and price increases were the primary issue that triggered popular resistance to the socialist state (Borneman 1992; Kornai 1992). (In fact, it is worth remembering that some of Solidarity’s demands formulated in 1980 included increasing wages to offset price increases and eliminating exports in order to alleviate shortages.)9 When I spoke to retired steelworker Jan Zubrzycki about his involvement in Solidarity, he cited shortages as the reason why so many people got involved in the Solidarity strikes in the 1980s: JZ: People hoped that this might keep the government from price increases. And also there was nothing in the stores. Imagine, there were certain times when you needed to have more food at home, for example, before Christmas or before a family birthday. So after my evening shift, at 10:30 p.m., I would go straight to the store so that I would be able to buy some things the next day when the store opened at 11 a.m. KP: You waited in line all night?

JZ: That’s what people did. I remember when I first got my apartment and wanted to buy a washing machine. At 11 a.m. on a Sunday my father-in-law

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lined up on my behalf, so that on Monday I could put my name down on a list to buy this washing machine. That’s how tough the times were. And for me it was a regular thing to take the train to Silesia, usually at night when I was going to have the next two days off. . . . In those days Silesia was very well supplied compared to Kraków. And back then I thought that Silesia was so close: two hours by train, and I’ve got all my shopping done! Now if I have to travel twenty kilometers to get somewhere it seems far to me. This is how people fought for food. And finally people got sick of living like that.10

However, having voiced this critique, Mr. Zubrzycki paused to reflect: “But you know what, I have to say, back then we still had a lot of meat. My allocation was five kilograms [a month], my wife had four, my children also had four each. And even though that meat was so difficult to procure, we still managed to get it and eat all of our allotment. And now that all this meat is widely available, we don’t eat as much.” Mr. Zubrzycki’s reflection is not unique. Another steelworker, Jerzy Baryłka, also told me: Yes, there were empty shelves, but if you wanted to find something to buy you would. It was during martial law [1981–83] that I got married, I had a baby, and I got an apartment from the steelworks. . . . Now if you want to have an apartment you have to have money. And I don’t complain about the empty shelves. My wife would look after our daughter, and when I had a day off I’d take shopping bags and go stand in line. When I came home after a day of standing in lines I would have heard so much news and so many stories. I have good memories of that.

Mr. Zubrzycki’s and Mr. Baryłka’s words offer somewhat of a counternarrative to the popular accounts of “nothing in the stores but vinegar.” While they clearly do not intend to deny the shortages or the difficulties this posed, their accounts also problematize the reduction of half a century of history to stories of empty shelves.

Between a Cradle of Socialism and a Bastion of Resistance As I outline in earlier chapters, Nowa Huta is represented alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) as a model socialist town or as a bastion of resistance to the socialist government. The previous sections relate people’s memories of Nowa Huta’s glory days, as well as its darkest period in the 1980s. In between those two extremes, however, lie the stories of everyday life. Such stories neither demonize nor glorify the socialist system, reminding us that most people were neither passive victims nor active resisters, but rather sought to live their lives within the set of opportunities and constraints available to them (Dunn 2004; Yurchak 2006). In this section

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I attempt to capture some of this “in-betweeness” and the negotiations in which people engaged as they went about their lives. In addition to the more outright forms of repression, the socialist state was known for its attempts to control the population through propaganda and censorship. These topics inevitably came up in people’s stories; however, they were frequently framed as everyday constraints with which one simply had to cope. For example, when I asked Mr. Gawęda to tell me about his job as a photographer for Nowa Huta’s newspaper, he described it in the following terms: “It was tremendously exciting work. . . . Regardless of the political system in place, it is an incredible adventure to see a new town come to life.” I asked what sort of things he documented for the newspaper: There was a lot of visual propaganda. I took pictures of steelworkers at work by the blast furnace, steel factory delegates laying wreaths at some monument or another, or a steelworkers’ brigade making production pledges or beating a record. All of Poland would see a picture of a youth brigade at Lenin Steelworks pouring steel on the front cover of the newspaper. Sometimes the workers had no idea that the management had made a pledge on their behalf to increase production targets. I would arrive at the production hall, line up the workers for the picture, and they would be asking why they were getting their picture taken. They had no idea that they had just committed to beating a record!

I asked if in his work he felt constrained by ideological pressures or censorship. “Not really,” he responded. Certainly there were particular topics that needed to make their way into the newspaper, such as work brigades beating records or photos from party meetings. There were also certain topics or photos that the censors deemed politically unpalatable: for example, his picture of a woman crossing the street with a set of toilet paper rolls tied on a string around her neck was tossed because it was seen as too political.11 “But other than that we tried to make a normal newspaper,” he said. Mr. Gawęda’s story problematizes the notion of socialism as a repressive system, ideologically driven and all controlling. On the one hand, he does acknowledge a certain amount of ideological pressure and censorship. However, he stresses that censorship and propaganda aside, he and his colleagues made a “normal newspaper.” The concept of “normality” deserves a brief mention here, for in Poland the expression “normal” is often used to denote not what is, but rather what should be (see also Wedel 1986). What Mr. Gawęda suggests is that, notwithstanding certain ideological requirements or constraints, he and his colleagues tried to produce a newspaper that reported on local events, the way a “normal” newspaper should. It is well documented that institutions such as newspapers, cultural centers, museums, and schools reproduce the dominant ideas and values of the

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nation-state through their activities. This was the case during the socialist period and is still the case today. The director of one cultural center drove this point home for me when she said that whereas in the 1980s she had to prepare programs to celebrate the October Revolution, ten years later the emphasis had changed to European Union–related events, in preparation for the country’s entrance into the European Union in 2004. As we can see, regardless of the political and economic arrangement in place, the state tries to build consent for that arrangement by disseminating certain values and ideas through its institutions. What people do with these messages, however, is another matter. I became aware of this when I asked Ms. Prażmowska whether she was under a lot of pressure to promote socialist ideology through the activities of her cultural center. DP: Not really. I pretty much did whatever I wanted because I knew that nobody at the steelworks would actually check up on us. Of course there were certain requirements that could not be avoided. For example, we had to do something for the anniversary of the October Revolution or for May 1st. So for the October Revolution I would order a Russian movie for the movie theater [the cultural center has its own small movie theater]. I never especially promoted it, and nobody came to check how many people actually showed up to see it. . . . But there were certain times when the director [of the steelworks] called me in to explain certain things. For example, when I invited a priest as a speaker at an event. KP: And what happened?

DP: Nothing. I had to explain why I had invited him, and then everything was fine.

Sorting through Ms. Prażmowska’s picture box, we came across a picture from an event celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the creation of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR). The picture depicted people dancing and drinking with a few posters visible on the walls behind them. “See, this is what these things were like,” she told me. “The posters would be hanging on the walls, and people wouldn’t care what they were or why they were there, they were just there to eat, drink, dance, and have a good time.” Ms. Prażmowska’s comment challenges the popular notion that socialist ideology permeated every aspect of life—a notion that is frequently found in contemporary historical accounts of life during the socialist period. Her reflection illustrates that people frequently invested state symbols and activities with their own meanings and purposes, as in the case of using a socialist anniversary as an opportunity to go out and have a good time. The stories of Nowa Huta residents illustrate that people balanced their

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personal beliefs with practical considerations. For example, for many people the decision to join the Party was a pragmatic one: they joined because “it helped with a lot of things,” because “it made things easier,” or because they needed Party membership for a certain practical purpose. That was the case for Ms. Prażmowska, for whom joining the Party was a prerequisite for a promotion. Ms. Prażmowska’s first job was that of a librarian and event planner at OKN. She quickly moved up the ranks and was approached about the possibility of applying for the center’s director position. She said she gave this idea a lot of thought, since it required her to join the Party. She did not make this decision lightly, she said. At that time, it was a given that if you wanted to be in a management position you had to be in the Party, that was just a requirement. And I hesitated for a long time, because I’ve never been affiliated with any party, and I don’t like parties. But then the employees convinced me. They said to me, “Look you’ve been here for so long, we want you to be the director. If you pass on it, God knows who they’re going to send us.” Because then they would send someone from the outside, competent or not, but with Party connections. I thought about it for a long time. But then the Seventh PZPR meeting took place, and it seemed to me that things were changing. So I decided to join.12

She joined and received her director’s appointment in 1978. In her account, Ms. Prażmowska acknowledges that people had to conform in certain ways in order to advance professionally. She does not dwell on this, but rather accepts that these were the rules that needed to be followed. In the course of my fieldwork I heard many other accounts of people navigating the structure of opportunities and constraints posed by the system and leveraging it against their own beliefs and personal projects. For example, Mr. Musiałek told me that he first joined the Party in the 1950s because he thought it would make it easier for him to obtain a passport so that he could travel to the United States to visit his father, who had been displaced there after World War II. When Solidarity was first established in 1980, he was one of the first employees at his division to become a member, even though at that time he was still a member of the Party. During martial law, when all the workers were summoned before the Party committee to sign lojalki (statements affirming their loyalty to the socialist government and socialism as an ideology), he hesitated as to what he should do. In the end, he went before the committee but, before they had a chance to ask him anything, thundered as loudly as he could: “I’m a member of the Party, and I know the meaning of Party discipline!” He said his statement must have made an impression on the committee, for they never bothered him again. Another steelworks employee, Ms. Kowalczyk, told me that she

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attended strikes in the 1980s but would only walk along with strikers for the first part of their usual route and leave before reaching the point where the riot police usually waited. She did this, she said, because at the time she was also completing a university degree in engineering and was concerned that if she were arrested she would get thrown out of university. People’s stories also illustrate that ideological or political divisions between people were often bridged by relationships at the everyday level, such as within the workplace. For example, Mr. Woźniak, a former Solidarity activist at the steelworks, told me that in between periods of intense strike activity in the 1980s (meaning for much of the time between 1982 and 1988), the relations between the steelworks’ management and the Solidarity trade union was characterized by a degree of mutual cooperation, even though Solidarity at the time was outlawed and officially did not even exist: For those years [1982–88] we existed, we worked, the trade union operated underground. Before every anniversary [for example, the anniversary of martial law or the anniversary of the creation of Solidarity] we would put up banners and posters around the steelworks. After a while, before every anniversary I would get a visit from a management representative, and he would say to me: “You know what, Marcin, don’t put up so many posters, just a few, because then these bastards from the Office of Public Security [the socialist-era secret police] come and tell us to fire you, and the manager doesn’t want to do that. So don’t go overboard.” I would say “Okay. We’ll do it so that everything will be okay.” And that’s how we did it. And there were times when we needed something from the management. As a trade union we didn’t have legal status, but say that someone was fired or someone was persecuted at work, we wouldn’t get involved directly, but we would approach a trusted person and say that we have such-or-such a request. In general they accommodated us. I think they were also aware, maybe not from the beginning but from 1985 onward, that all this had to collapse, that in a year, two, or five, they would have to sit down at the table with us and talk.

To be sure, the degree of accommodation between people of different political affiliations should not be overstated; in fact, quite a few people did get fired from the steelworks for their political activism. Nonetheless, Mr. Woźniak’s account is a useful reminder that whereas hegemonic accounts of the socialist period tend to depict “the people” as struggling against a repressive state, party, and system, real life was in fact more complicated. People who occupied different positions were entangled in all sorts of relationships with each other and quite often had to find ways to work together and coexist. The above accounts do not deny the presence of propaganda, censorship, or other repressive or otherwise constraining characteristics of the socialist state. However, people like Ms. Prażmowska

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or Mr. Musiałek do not portray themselves as victims or as actively resisting repression. They accept that the prevailing political-economic system imposed certain requirements and restrictions, and they exercised agency within this framework, balancing their own needs and beliefs against practical considerations, requirements, and constraints.

Postsocialist Nowa Huta When I talked with people about their lives in Nowa Huta, I asked them about what had changed in the district since the collapse of the socialist government. Some people talked about Nowa Huta’s decline, usually citing the case of the steelworks; the decay of the urban infrastructure; and the disappearance of entertainment, recreational, and cultural opportunities. They contrasted the vibrant life in Nowa Huta in the past with the current state of things, where “all the nice stores are gone, and the only thing left is a discount clothing shop on every corner.” On the other hand, many people also positively remarked on the fact that in recent years “there is more going on” in Nowa Huta. They recalled the hustle and bustle of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and they welcomed new revitalization initiatives in the hope that they would generate similar energy and activity. Many people began their reflections on the changes with issues specific to Nowa Huta but then used them as a springboard to reflect more broadly on larger political, economic, and social issues. These issues included growing income disparity, declining social welfare, and Poland’s unequal integration into the European political economy. Mr. Pawłowski, for example, responded to my question about what had changed in Nowa Huta in the following words: “Borders are now open so people are free to go anywhere they want in the world. . . . The availability of products, there is such a variety, you can buy whatever you want. . . . And freedom of speech. In the old days, there were restrictions on what you could say, but then again, when you had a problem people would listen and help you. Now you can say whatever you want, but nobody is listening.” Censorship and restrictions on mobility (for example, difficulties with obtaining passports to travel abroad) are nowadays frequently cited as examples of the socialist state’s repressive nature. Conversely, freedom of speech and mobility are extolled as some of the biggest accomplishments of post-1989 reforms and are often invoked to justify the present political and economic status quo. In the quote above, Mr. Pawłowski acknowledges that democratic reforms indeed brought increased civil liberties, including open borders and freedom of speech. However, he also points out that freedom of speech “in theory” does not guarantee that one’s concerns will actually be addressed. The idea that “open borders” constitute an accomplishment of post-1989

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reforms was also problematized by some of the people with whom I spoke. People pointed out that the hypothetical freedom to leave the country anytime does not do much for those who cannot afford to vacation abroad anyway. They also resented the commonly cited argument that if they are unhappy with their lot (for example, if they cannot find work in Poland) they are “free” to leave and move anywhere within the European Union in search of work. One retired steelworker perceived freedom of speech and open borders as issues that were more important to intellectuals and political elites than to “ordinary people.” This is what he told me: It’s true that in those days we didn’t go abroad. But we didn’t really need to anyway. It was more the elites who fought for freedom. And the workers were just a tool. . . . Maybe people like professors, if they weren’t allowed to go abroad for a research fellowship or something, they found it harder to deal with than I did. Now that we have won our freedom back and we can go anywhere, I’m not dying to do it. I’ve been to Austria, [the former] Yugoslavia, and Russia, but nowhere else because I don’t think it’s really necessary for me to go.

Other issues raised by Nowa Huta residents in their conversations with me included Poland’s unequal position in the global economy and the growing gap between the rich and the poor. Mr. Gawęda, the retired photographer, used the case of the steelworks to talk about this: “After the transformation it all went down [siadło]. It makes me sad that all national wealth got sold off so easily. It was always the case that people in management positions made more than workers, but now the discrepancy between the salaries is crazy.” Like some of the steelworkers cited in chapter 2, Mr. Gawęda described the steelworks’ sale to Arcelor Mittal as the “selling off of national wealth.” This expression commonly surfaced in people’s descriptions of the changes that have taken place over the past two decades. People invoked it as a commentary on Poland’s unequal position on the European playing field, where wealthy western corporations simply swept in and “cherry picked” the best of Polish enterprise (see also Hardy 2009). Mr. Gawęda transitions from the steelworks’ privatization to growing wage disparity, an understandable concern given that he is a pensioner. He retired in 1990, at the age of sixty, with a meager retirement package. He says that under the “old system” he would have been entitled to a steelworker’s pension and received two thousand złoty a month, but since the newspaper separated from the steelworks, he ceased to be the steelworks’ employee and receives only twelve hundred złoty, a paltry amount by Polish standards. The topic of wage disparity was also addressed by retired steelworks electrician Mr. Krzemiński: “We still have the same problem we had during

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communism. We still have a class of people who earn very good money, but a regular worker can barely make ends meet. What’s more, there are no social benefits, benefits for the family. . . . None of the governments that have been in power in our new reality improved things for the working person. People’s salaries are unjustly low. If you earn one thousand złoty, even fifteen hundred złoty, it is not really worth it to work. That is something that went wrong.” In this quote, Mr. Krzemiński speaks of the “unjustly low” salaries as a negative outcome of market reforms. Interestingly, he perceives this as a continuation of the socialist period, where disparities in salaries and access to benefits also existed, albeit on a different scale and under different terms. Mr. Krzemiński used to be the president of the Association for Nowa Huta’s Development (Stowarzyszenie na Rzecz Rozwoju Nowej Huty), and in his conversation with me, he stressed the need for new investment in Nowa Huta. This, he said, is the responsibility of the government: “People have good ideas, but it’s really difficult to implement them because of barriers like high taxes or high rent. I tried opening up my own small repairs business, and I also have friends who have their own small businesses. For all of us, it’s really difficult to even break even [odbić się od dna, literally ‘to bounce off the bottom’].” Mr. Krzemiński believed that market reforms benef ited large foreign-owned corporations rather than small domestic businesses. This is a complaint I often heard from many people who were trying to start or maintain their own small businesses. For example, Ms. Stępień, owner of a small women’s clothing and fabric store, complained about the new shopping complexes on Nowa Huta’s outskirts, which purportedly draw all business away from the center. She talked about her business as I sat with her behind the counter, watching her sell ribbons, buttons, zippers, handkerchiefs, and the like. Young people do not come into the smaller stores anymore, she said; they go to the large malls. It is also difficult to procure brand-name clothes that are attractive to younger people because clothing suppliers prefer to deal with large chains and will not trouble themselves with small stores like hers. In response, she began to carry more products that shopping malls will not carry because they are not profitable, such as buttons, sequins, ribbons, and zippers. I remarked that small businesses have it difficult everywhere, in North America as well as Poland. True, she agreed, but in Poland the terms of the reforms were such that small businesses never had a fighting chance: “Capitalism happened too fast, rich foreign firms came in too fast, and small businesses never had a chance to make enough money to be able to compete. . . . We [i.e., Poland] are a colony.” Mr. Krzemiński’s and Ms. Stępień’s accounts bring up two interrelated

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issues: the role that the state plays (or should play) in regulating economic activity and Poland’s position in the global economy. In the course of my fieldwork, many entrepreneurs and small business owners complained to me about unfavorable laws and regulations that make it very difficult for small businesses to survive, especially after the 2008 economic downturn. One man who owned a home repairs business dissolved it and presently conducts repairs for his former clients “under the table.” My friend Szymon, a self-employed graphic designer in his midthirties, chose to register his company in England rather than in Poland (which is legal according to European Union law). This is how he explained his decision: “For many years I thought that since I live in Poland it is my responsibility as a citizen to pay taxes here, and I looked down on people who did otherwise. But finally I realized that the state doesn’t care about you at all. On the other hand, unlike Polish law, the English law actually exists to help entrepreneurs. They want to help you, rather than hinder you, from doing business.” Szymon claimed that even with a very unfavorable currency exchange rate (one British pound is worth approximately five Polish złoty), it is still cheaper for him to pay taxes and operating costs in England rather than in Poland. Small business owners blame the different levels of government for pandering to large (mostly foreign) corporations and not creating favorable conditions for small entrepreneurs, for high taxes and additional fees (such as high health premiums for employees) levied on small businesses, and for unclear and often contradictory laws that reportedly make bureaucracy a nightmare. If one wants to run a “clean” business and abide by all the laws, one will not be able to stay afloat, several people told me. The issues raised by small business owners are sufficiently complex to warrant a separate book. For the purpose of our discussion here, I want to focus on what these comments can tell us about people’s perceptions of the changed relationship between the state and the economy. People’s comments point to a paradox that I note in relation to workers’ accounts in chapter 2: namely, the dissonance between market ideas and market realities (Ost 2005). In Poland, socialist-era centralized economic planning engendered a backlash once it became clear to the population that the state could not provide the sort of living standards they witnessed in the capitalist West. The post-1989 economic reforms were thus framed as letting the market do its work unhindered by the state—an argument that in many ways resembles the demonization of “big government” that began in North America around the 1970s. However, once the so-called free market proved to disadvantage small entrepreneurs in favor of large (and often foreign) corporations, some people began again looking to the state to step

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in and protect their interests. People like Mr. Krzemiński and Ms. Stępień envision the role of the state as creating the right conditions for business to thrive—an idea that is very much in line with the tenets of neoliberal capitalism. People, however, are selective about which businesses should be helped to thrive; inevitably, small entrepreneurs champion the rights of small business owners vis-à-vis large foreign corporations. Ms. Stępień’s comment about Poland becoming a “colony” of the West is a poignant commentary on the country’s position in the global economy. Many of the people with whom I spoke felt that the privatization process was detrimental to national interests. In many cases, national enterprises were taken over by foreign corporations, attracted to Poland by low operating and labor costs (relative to other European Union states). A commonly cited concern is that these companies simply mine the country’s resources and labor pool but subsequently take their profits elsewhere—a concern that we previously witnessed in the stories of steelworkers who resented that their salaries were disproportionate to those of steelworkers in Arcelor Mittal’s Western European plants.

Looking Back on “the System” People’s stories often included a summary reflection on the socialist system. While many of the people with whom I spoke acknowledged certain positive aspects of the socialist period, they were careful to disavow their support for the socialist system on the whole. Aunt Magda, for instance, told me on several occasions that “the only good thing about that system” was the opportunity to get an education, and Mr. Gawęda conceded that “even PZPR [the Worker’s Party] wasn’t all bad. There were a lot of people in party committees who did a lot of good in that damn system.” Mr. Kalisiak, a sixty-year-old avid cyclist and kayaker, like many people talked to me about the decline of athletic opportunities: “In those bad communist times—and I’m not saying they were good times—but there was money for this sort of thing. Now there is no money for coaches, for equipment. Our kayaking club used to be thriving. I’m not a fan of the May 1st parades, but when they took place, our club was represented by sixty members with rows.” Mr. Szewczyk, former director of social affairs at the steelworks and a former member of the Party, critiqued the socialist system on the whole but noted that the economic arrangement that was put in place in the 1990s is also problematic. His comment echoes some of the earlier concerns we heard about Poland’s national well-being in a globalized world where “national wealth” is sold off to foreign corporations, and national production has declined in favor of foreign imports:

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That entire system [i.e., socialism] was sick. The steelworks produced seven million tons of steel a year, but it was a miracle to receive a coupon to buy a small Fiat [maluch]. When someone got one everyone would point them out with their fingers. Now cars don’t fit on the streets. But it’s not our steel, it’s foreign steel. Before the system was different: the steel did not go toward the products that were needed, but it did go toward investments. New workplaces or shipyards were being built. The saddest thing for me is that our primary industries are sold to foreign companies. The fact that there are new supermarkets, that there is a tanning salon on every street, that’s very good. But the basic thing that brings profit is industry. It doesn’t have to be steelworking; it can be making construction materials, electronics, but something that is made, not processed. But everything we have now is from China. If you go to the store you can’t find any Polish-made products. Regardless of what politicians say about future perspectives, this does not forecast anything good. . . . You can’t criticize everything about that system. It was what it was. That is what Poland was like, and that is the Poland we worked in. What else could we have done? If all of this didn’t get built then, it wouldn’t be here now. The system was what it was. We appreciate that the changes that took place were inevitable and had to happen, sooner or later.

The only one of the people with whom I spoke who claimed to have an overall positive memory of the socialist period was Ms. Prażmowska, who nonetheless finally conceded that she does not long for its return: If I were to sit down and do a sum-up of PRL I think it would be mostly positive. I don’t see myself as oppressed or used by the system. So much great literature, film, poetry, art, were produced during that time. So many wonderful, talented people were educated. As a matter of fact, all the Solidarity activists were also educated during that time. That was a good thing about that system; it actually did elevate those who were bright and driven. People who were good had a chance to get ahead. Of course, that only worked up to a certain level, the higher up the party ranks, the more political things got. I don’t long for the return of the old system, but I wish that the country had been governed more wisely since then.

The above reflections illustrate how people try to come to terms with the complexity of their experiences and resist the reduction of five decades of history to the keywords of repression, resistance, and inefficiency. The people whose voices we hear in this chapter distance themselves from support of the socialist system but nonetheless appreciate certain things that it provided, including education, social spending on culture and recreation, and the protection of national industries.

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Narrating Nowa Huta: The Memory Work of Generations In this chapter I address people’s memories of the socialist period using the idiom of Nowa Huta as a frame of reference and a springboard for triggering memories and reflections. The accounts of Nowa Huta residents speak to both larger national events and their local manifestations, including postwar rebuilding, the relative prosperity of the 1970s, the political and economic breakdown of the 1980s, and the everyday life in between. The people with whom I spoke occupied different social locations, both during the socialist period and in the present, and they also chose to emphasize different aspects of their experiences in their conversations with me. The accounts related throughout this chapter alternately reproduce and challenge currently hegemonic discourses on the past.13 Many people invoked the themes of repression, resistance, and inefficiency—themes that make up the hegemonic narrative on the socialist period. I suggest that this narrative resonates with a large section of the population because it does indeed reflect people’s experiences. Martial law, persecution of strikers, censorship, and even the allocation and removal of benefits on political grounds can all be viewed as more or less direct forms of repression. The notion of the socialist period as a time characterized by inefficiency, repression, and resistance thus provides a shared version of history with which most people can identify, albeit to different degrees. However, people’s reflections also suggest that at least some of them perceive these narratives to be excessive or reductive. This can be seen, for instance, in Ms. Prażmowska’s explicit refusal to see herself as “repressed” by the system (even though her experience of demotion could certainly be interpreted in these terms) or Mr. Gawęda’s insistence that, censorship and propaganda aside, he and his colleagues made a “normal newspaper.” The stories told throughout this chapter illustrate that Nowa Huta residents have a variety of narratives of the past in their discursive repertoires. These narratives are produced at both the local and national levels. As I illustrate in the preceding chapter, local representations of the past are diverse: sometimes they agree with and other times they challenge the hegemonic national discourse on socialism. In their accounts, Nowa Huta residents selectively draw on many of the same themes and images that we encounter in Nowa Huta’s public representations in the previous chapter. These include, for example, the notion of Nowa Huta as the epitome of the “good life” and the narrative of repression and resistance. At the same time, however, people can also explicitly reject the discourses available to them and offer alternative interpretations. People’s reflections on the socialist past emerge in response to contem-

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porary political, economic, and social circumstances. And conversely, the ways in which people perceive present conditions are informed by their past experiences. Memory, as I set out in the introduction, is about the present as much as it is about the past (Halbwachs 1992; Climo and Cattel 2002; Misztal 2003; Lowenthal 1985) and is often deployed to “validate the view of the past that has become important . . . in the present” and to “support . . . the present with a past that logically leads to a future that the individual or group now finds acceptable” (Teski and Climo 1995, 3). At present, the dominant memory “script” (Jelin 2003) of which contemporary Polish national identity is made views the socialist period in terms of repression and resistance, a framework that explains and legitimizes the political and economic reforms that were instituted in the 1990s and paves the way for a future that is politically and economically tied to the European Union. The accounts cited throughout this chapter indicate that many people do identify with this version of the past. I suggest that doing so allows them to situate themselves in the current national project. It also validates, and gives meaning to, their past actions, since many of them were involved in (or at least supported) the political opposition in the 1980s. People also frequently invoke the past in order to critique present conditions, whether consciously or not. People whose voices we heard throughout this chapter positively recalled postwar rebuilding; regular and stable employment; publicly funded and accessible education; and state funding of culture, athletics, and recreation. These reflections need to be viewed in the context of current political and economic conditions, including unemployment, the privatization and sale of national enterprises to foreign firms, and the decline of social provisions (including pensions or funding for social services). While people’s objective is not to revive the old system, they nonetheless object to having lost certain areas of social welfare that were discarded by the country’s post-1989 ruling parties as part and parcel of the socialist package. Many similar critiques have been documented in other former socialist states (e.g., Berdahl 2010; Boym 2001; Dragomir 2009; Enns 2007; Pine 2002; N. Vodopivec 2010). Positive recollections of the socialist past are often dismissed as “nostalgia” in hegemonic narratives, and this nostalgia is often attributed to people who have “lost out” in the reforms (Klumbyte 2008; Spaskovska 2008; Todorova and Gille 2010). I, however, tend to side with anthropologists who view such positive recollections not as the longing for a romanticized past, but rather as a commentary on present political and economic conditions and perhaps as a call for an “alternative moral order” (Berdahl 2010, 47; see also Dragomir 2009). Anthropologist Frances Pine observes, “When people evoked the ‘good’ socialist past, they were not

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denying the corruption, the shortages, the queues and the endless intrusions and infringements by the state; rather they were choosing to emphasize other aspects: economic security, full employment, universal healthcare and education” (2002, 111). The accounts in this chapter can also contribute some insights about how people relate to state projects and ideologies—whether projects of the socialist or the neoliberal capitalist state. In contemporary Polish historical accounts, PRL is generally depicted as a repressive, inefficient state that sought to impose on the people an ideology that was not acceptable to the majority of the population and hence was eventually overthrown. While I do not by any means deny the repressive history of the socialist state, people’s accounts suggest that they engage with state projects selectively, adopting what is acceptable or useful to them and ignoring or getting around what is not. For example, people’s recollections of dealing with censorship or propaganda tell us that they did not passively absorb all the messages they were fed—rather, they did their best to get around, or ignore, requirements or ideas that did not suit them. The stories of Nowa Huta’s builders suggest that they were more concerned with building their lives, families, and communities than with the ideological project of “building socialism.” Nonetheless, by participating in state projects, people in effect reproduced socialist ideology and made it concrete. In their accounts, people invoked themes such as postwar rebuilding, industrialization, the protection of the national economy, education, secure employment, and public funding for culture and recreation—all of which constituted the tenets of the socialist project. Thus, although contemporary accounts depict PRL as a state and system that never gained people’s acceptance, with the benefit of hindsight we can see that certain aspects of it may have in fact become more widely accepted than is currently acknowledged in popular discourses on the past. People’s accounts also reveal that they can simultaneously identify with elements of the bygone socialist ideology and elements of the neoliberal ideology that frames contemporary discourses on the present and the past. For example, many of the people with whom I spoke accepted the nowprevalent idea that the collapse of the socialist state was inevitable, as illustrated by Mr. Szewczyk’s words: “we appreciate that the changes that took place were inevitable and had to happen, sooner or later.” People also accept other tenets of neoliberal ideology, such as the notion that the government’s job is to create the right kind of conditions for (private) business to thrive. At the same time, people are conscious of the neoliberal project’s shortcomings (especially when they affect their own lives), and they selectively draw on the past to critique contemporary phenomena such as unemployment or Poland’s unequal position on the European playing field.

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The focus of this chapter is on the memories and experiences of the two older generations of Nowa Huta residents: the “builders” and their (real or proverbial) “children.” As illustrated by the movie Papieros od prezydenta, the builders are associated with building socialism and thus popularly perceived as nostalgic for the socialist past. On the other hand, the “middle generation”—that is, the builders’ children—is popularly associated with resistance to socialism. There is, indeed, something to be said for that characterization, although the builders cannot be equated solely with support for socialism and their children solely with resistance to it. In a study of how people in Madagascar remember the 1947 anticolonial rebellion, Jennifer Cole shows that different generations draw on different narratives to make sense of the event. She attributes these variations in memory to people’s different “moral projects”: that is, the way in which their “private concerns and existential predicaments” fit within the “wider social and historical political ideologies and material contexts” (2003, 122). Let us consider how the different “moral projects” of the two older generations of Nowa Huta residents shaped their experiences and memories. The majority of people who spoke of Nowa Huta as a “life’s opportunity” were people in their eighties who remembered World War II and who found in Nowa Huta a new home and a place to work and build their lives. And yet people of that age also voiced critiques of the socialist system, as in the case of Mr. Gawęda, who called it a “damn system,” or Mr. Szewczyk, who claimed that “that entire system was sick.” On the other hand, stories of repression and resistance, particularly in the 1980s, were most often voiced by the middle generation, who would have been between their twenties and forties when martial law was declared in 1981 and many of whom supported or participated in the oppositional Solidarity movement. This, however, does not mean that people of this generation did not recognize positive aspects of the socialist period, such as free higher education and guaranteed employment. Neither does it mean that the builders unequivocally supported the socialist government and did not want political, economic, and social change. Rather, the 1980s were a time when the builders were entering retirement age; thus, many of them probably felt ready to pass on the torch of activism to the younger generation. Those who were already retired would not have been connected to the Solidarity networks that grew out of the steelworks. Some might have decided not to get involved in the political opposition, preferring to stick it out and retire peacefully rather than risk potentially losing their jobs along with their hard-earned retirement benefits. And some, like the father in Papieros od prezydenta, might have felt that their children did not appreciate how good they had it. So does the clash between socialism’s “builders” and “destroyers” ac-

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tually exist? In the course of my fieldwork I asked a few former Solidarity activists how their parents felt about their political activism in the 1980s. One man, an active member of Solidarity in the 1980s who now holds a high-ranking leadership position in the trade union’s regional structure, teared up when talking about his father. He told me that when he left the steelworks after a three-day occupational strike in December 1981, he saw his father waiting for him outside the factory gates. The father handed him a loaf of bread, which by then had become stale; it turned out that he had stood outside those gates for three days, wanting to show support for his striking son. Another man, also a prominent Solidarity leader from the 1980s, related a diametrically different story. His father had been a Party member and the director of a construction company that built industrial complexes, including parts of Nowa Huta’s steelworks. The family was thus comfortably off, and the father could never understand why his son would want to engage in political activism in the 1980s: “Watch out, you’re going to get yourself locked up,” he would warn his son. The son, on the other hand, disapproved of his father’s membership in the Party: “I have to pay your debts,” he would respond. In the end, the two were never able to reconcile their differences. In this chapter I address memories of the past among the generation of Nowa Huta residents who have firsthand memories and experiences of the socialist period. Taken together, the accounts cited throughout this chapter reflect people’s diverse experiences, shaped by different events at different points in time. This multivocality contributes to a more complex and nuanced understanding of what life was like during PRL. In the following chapter I turn to the younger generation of Nowa Huta residents, those born either in the last years of the socialist period or after the socialist government’s collapse.

CHAPTER 5 My Grandpa Built This Town Memory and Identity among Nowa Huta’s Younger Generation

I

t is the morning of April 27. A group of workers arrives with shovels to dig out the wooden cross that was put up by the local population to mark the site of the future church. A few passersby, all women, stop and take notice. They flock to the cross, hitting the workers with their purses and shopping bags, and force them away. They kneel down at the cross and begin to pray and sing. After some time, a special riot squad (ZOMO) arrives and begins to disperse the praying women with the aid of rubber batons. A few unmarked police cars pull up, and the more vocal women are dragged inside and driven away by secret security police members dressed in civillian clothing. The event I am watching is a reenactment of Nowa Huta’s Battle for the Cross on its fiftieth anniversary, and the women as well as their persecutors are high school and university history students. Historical games and reenactments of socialist-era events are becoming increasingly popular, especially among young people. The usual formula requires participants to fulfill some potentially subversive or otherwise difficult tasks, such as carrying an underground leaflet or buying a kilo of ham, while trying to evade persecution by the citizens’ militia, or worse, the riot police or the secret security agency. But what messages about the socialist period do these games convey to their participants and spectators? In the previous chapter I looked at how the older generation of Nowa Huta residents remembers the socialist period. In this chapter I turn my attention to the younger generation, that is, people who have little or no personal memories or experiences of that time. I treat the collapse of the socialist state as a historical event that constitutes a generational boundary between 156

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Reenactment of the Battle for the Cross on its fiftieth anniversary. Photo by the author.

those who experienced life under the socialist system and those who did not. In Poland, this latter group is defined as a generation on the basis of not having lived during the socialist period and instead having been shaped by the political, economic, and social arrangement that was put in place after 1989 (Roberts 2009; Zdziechowska and Sachno 2009). Existing literature on generation and memory teaches us that people’s identities can be shaped by events they did not directly experience themselves, but memories of which have been passed down to them through various “media of memory” (Watson 1994), including architecture, monuments, ritual, storytelling, and film (Halbwachs 1992; Watson 1994; Hirsch 2008). However, as these memories get passed down through generations, they do not stay intact but change in content and meaning as they get reworked in light of changing conditions and experiences. I thus ask what Nowa Huta’s young people learn about the socialist past at school, from family histories, and from community programs and activities—and what these inherited memories can tell us about the role that this past plays in contemporary Poland. As with the older generation discussed in the previous chapter, this younger generation can also be divided into cohorts. For example, people who were born in the 1980s and entered adulthood in the 1990s see them-

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selves as being very different from those who were born a few years later, but already after the collapse of the socialist government in 1989. As my discussion will show, there are indeed some differences between these older and younger cohorts in terms of their interest in, and knowledge about, the socialist past. The older cohort, composed of people in their late twenties and early thirties, holds some early childhood memories of life during the socialist period and thus constitutes somewhat of a bridge between the older and the younger generations of Nowa Huta residents. When it comes to knowledge about the socialist period, today’s “young people” are popularly seen as not knowledgeable about, or interested in, the past (Roberts 2009; Zdziechowska and Sachno 2009). For example, when I first asked teenagers and people in their early twenties what they know about the socialist period, many of them initially responded that they do not know anything and advised me to speak to their grandparents instead. They claimed that their parents and grandparents do not talk much about “those days” and that they themselves do not ask. A few told me that their grandparents are more inclined to recall war stories than stories about the socialist period, and as a result they know more about World War II than about socialism. Parents and teachers, for their part, agreed that young people do not know much about the socialist period and for the most part are not interested in learning about it. Some bemoaned this fact; others saw it as inevitable. For example, a few middle-aged parents compared their children’s ignorance of the socialist period to their own ignorance of World War II. Although they acknowledged the two to be incomparable, they drew analogies between the fact that, just as they themselves could not relate to their parents’ war stories, so their children cannot possibly understand what it was like to live in a socialist state. Nonetheless, young people surely must know something about the socialist period. References to the socialist past regularly surface in media discourses on current political or economic issues, in popular culture, in history classes, and in family stories. What impressions about the past do young people derive from these sources? In the course of my fieldwork I sat in on the meetings and activities of the history club organized by the Museum of PRL for high school students. Twenty students had been recruited from different schools across the city and were brought together for biweekly talks and movie screenings dealing with different aspects of life during the socialist period. Participation was entirely voluntary, and participating students (all of whom hailed from the “better” high schools in Kraków) planned to pursue university degrees in history or political science. Before the club’s first meeting, students were asked to fill out an application form. One of the questions on the form was

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intended to gauge their knowledge of the socialist period. The question read: “When you think of PRL you think of . . . ?” In their responses, the students came up with forty terms that they associated with the People’s Republic of Poland. By far, the majority of these terms pertained to political events, mostly repressive or otherwise negative ones. These included “Iron Curtain,” “Gierek’s decade,”1 “martial law,” “May 1st parades,” “propaganda,” “voluntary labor brigades,” “security police,” “lack of trust,” “Polish United Workers’ Party,” and “censorship.” Some students referred to the legacy of resistance with keywords such as “Solidarity,” “opposition,” “workers’ strikes,” and “my Grandpa in Radom during the 1976 strikes.”2 A few young people also alluded to the infamous shortages: “chocolate-like products” (wyroby czekoladopodobne),”3 “no choice of products,” “ration coupons,” “waiting in lines,” “empty shelves,” “homemade sweaters,” and “absurdities.” While we certainly cannot treat this questionnaire as “representative” of what young people know about the past, it does tell us some things about the sorts of associations they have—and it appears that they overwhelmingly perceive the socialist period as a time of repression, resistance, and inefficiency. But where do they get these ideas from? Existing research from across the former Soviet Bloc identifies school, media, and family as the principal sources of knowledge about the socialist period among the postsocialist generation (e.g., Todorova 2010). Although I recognize that memory is the product of multiple and interacting discourses and representations, in what follows I focus specifically on school and family as vehicles of information about the past.

Socialism as History Formal educational institutions play an important role in instilling the worldviews and ideologies of ruling elites (Gramsci 1971; Bourdieu and Passeron 1990). The history that is taught in school is thus invested with legitimacy and authority. However, education is not solely a top-down process and does not merely reproduce official versions of history; rather, teachers, students, and students’ families engage with textbook histories in multiple ways that sometimes challenge and at other times reinforce them (see, e.g., Richardson 2004). During the socialist period, school curricula were written so as to reinforce a political, economic, and historical worldview that was in accordance with the prevailing political agenda (although political agendas also changed from decade to decade). Following the socialist government’s collapse, history was rewritten, and school curricula were changed to teach students the “new past” (Dimou 2010; Hranova 2010; P. Vodopivec 2010).

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In the course of my research I spoke with a dozen history teachers and about thirty high school students about what students now learn in history class about the socialist period. In Polish schools, information about the socialist period is usually conveyed to students in two subject areas: history and social studies (Wiedza o Społeczeństwie, or WOS). However, much depends on the school and on individual teachers and students. When I asked students what they learned in school about the socialist period they typically replied “nothing” or “not much.” They explained that postwar history always falls at the end of the school year and that teachers typically either do not get around to it or else cover the material in June when “nobody comes to class anymore.” My conversation with Agnieszka, an eighteen-year-old high school student, is emblematic of the sort of responses I often received from students: KP: What did you learn about PRL in school?

AG: I don’t know. Nothing. We don’t really talk about it. Maybe we’ll talk about it if there is some anniversary or something.

KP: There was just an anniversary this past June [the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the socialist government]. AG: Really? Oh well then I don’t know.

When I spoke to educators about teaching Poland’s postwar history in the classroom, they complained that the present curriculum does not allow them sufficient time to cover the essentials. At the time of my research, students learned postwar history in the last grade of each school level: primary school, middle school (gimnazjum), and high school (liceum). Ms. Grzybowska, a high school history teacher, told me that students who take a basic history program have one history lesson per week; students enrolled in an advanced program (for example, if they plan on studying history or political science at the university level) have four lessons. A basic history curriculum allows for about seven or eight forty-five-minute lessons on postwar history. The teacher typically divides up this time into the following topics: (1) Europe after World War II; (2) world issues after World War II, with a focus on decolonization; (3) Stalinism; (4) the “thaw” of 1956; (5) the 1970s; (6) martial law; and (7) the collapse of the socialist government in 1989. If students happen to have a field trip somewhere in there (which is often the case toward the end of the school year) she might lose a lesson. Since she also teaches social studies, she tries to use that time to squeeze in an extra lesson about the Roundable Talks of 1989 and Lech Wałęsa (one of the leading figures of the Solidarity movement in the 1980s and subsequently the first democratically elected Polish president after 1989). Other history teachers outlined similar lesson plans. Mr. Nowak, a mid-

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dle school history teacher, told me that students come to middle school having learned nothing in primary school, so he has to teach them everything from scratch. He said that depending on how quickly he can cover the program, he can usually devote about four to six classes to Poland’s postwar history. Similar to Ms. Grzybowska, in his lessons he places emphasis on key political events such as the “thaw” of 1956, the Prague Spring and Polish strikes of 1968, subsequent strikes in 1970 and 1976, martial law of 1981, and the collapse of the socialist government in 1989. The teachers’ lesson plans tell us several things about the treatment of the socialist past in the education curriculum. First, the amount of lecture time dedicated to this subject is fairly limited, with fifty years of very rich history squeezed into six or seven hours of class time. Second, the focus is primarily on political events (rather than, say, social life), which are presented as a trajectory of resistance that eventually culminates in the collapse of the socialist government. I asked teachers how students respond to the lecture material: Are they interested in learning about the socialist period? Do they ever bring alternate accounts from home? Ms. Ciępińska, a primary school history teacher, told me that her students have an easier time understanding very distant history than recent history: “It’s much easier for them to imagine kings and castles than to imagine a world that looks sort of like theirs but all the shelves in the stores are empty.” Mr. Nowak, for his part, observed a declining interest in history on the part of his students: “A decade ago more students were interested in history than there are now. . . . Many students of that cohort had parents who were active in the student strikes in the 1980s, and you could tell that this was talked about at home. But today’s students, in the 1980s their parents were the same age as they are now, so they weren’t as politically aware.” Ms. Górska, an art history teacher, related an anecdote about a time when she off-handedly referred to the socialist-era phenomenon of “empty shelves.” A student put up his hand and asked with disbelief whether in a store such as Tesco (a British superstore) all the shelves were really empty. For Ms. Górska, this incident was testament to the inability on the part of present-day students to piece together the fragments of information about socialism that they receive from different sources. The student was trying to fit the concept of “empty shelves” into his existing worldview, not realizing that in socialist Poland there was no market as he knows it and no western companies. Teachers also told me that students sometimes, though infrequently, bring stories from home that challenge the version of history they learn at school. For example, students may hear from their grandparents that in

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PRL it was easier to find work, easier to get an apartment, and that even though there wasn’t much in the stores, people nonetheless had money to buy things. Ms. Ciępińska told me: AC: Some children hear at home that their parents did not have as many great toys, but they were still happy because families had more time to spend together. . . . Or, a few children have told me that their grandparents received medals for their service to the country. KP: And what do you say to that?

AC: I could never tell a child that their grandpa got a medal from a bad system.

From Ms. Ciępińska’s response to my question, we can surmise that she herself has a fairly critical outlook on the socialist period, perceiving it as a “bad system.” At the same time, she respects the fact that her students come from different families with different experiences and histories. Indeed, this seemed to be the case with the majority of the teachers with whom I spoke. For example, Mr. Nowak told me that he does not shy away from the complexities of history and welcomes class debates on the topic, although with every year that passes there are fewer and fewer students who bring alternative histories from home. Although Mr. Nowak took part in students’ strikes in the 1980s, he said that it is important not to paint an overly one-dimensional picture of the socialist past. He recalled a time during martial law when he and his friend were stopped by a patrol of the citizens’ militia (the socialist-era police), when walking home from a student group meeting late one evening. It was past curfew, meaning that if they did not have special permission to be out on the street (which they did not), they could have been stopped, ID’ed, and possibly arrested. The officers pulled up in a car, asked them where they were heading, and offered to give them a ride home. He gave them his home address, convinced that he was really being taken to a police station for questioning. To his surprise, the officers indeed drove Mr. Nowak and his friend home, leaving them with the parting words: “Remember boys, we are not ZOMO [the riot police]; we are the citizens’ militia.” This incident, he said, taught him to appreciate the nuances and complexities of the socialist system. He told me that he tries to convey to students that there were both good and bad things about the socialist period, but that on the whole the system was repressive and inefficient. Teachers’ observations and lesson plans suggest that the overall message they try to convey to their students about the socialist period is that socialism was an inefficient, repressive, and widely unpopular system. Mr. Filipowski, a middle school teacher in his late twenties, took this even further.

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Like others, he viewed the socialist period as an overall failure. In fact, he even questionned the point of teaching about it in school: I want to show them [i.e., the students] what a hopeless system communism was. But I would much rather show them positive examples of past successes, wisdom, justice, courage, etc. This is how I understand the point of history. With PRL the problem is that the system spoiled all these values, and often there are no positive examples. . . . To put it differently, I would prefer that they remember that Mieszko I was a wise courageous ruler who united different lands, than have them remember that fifty years ago in order to buy a laundry machine one had to finagle, stand in line for two days, demean oneself, etc. The thousand years in between don’t make a difference to me; the important thing is that they have a positive example. . . . The Japanese adopted a method of collective amnesia after World War II. They knew that there was so much evil that there is no sense remembering it all; it had to be sentenced to being forgotten. I wonder if it would not be best to implement the same method with relation to PRL.4

Taken together, the teachers’ reflections tell us several things about the role of schools in disseminating a particular version of Poland’s socialist-era history. First, there does not seem to be much top-down emphasis on teaching about the socialist period in schools, as evidenced by students’ responses that they learned “nothing” about it in school and teachers’ complaints that the curriculum does not dedicate sufficient time to recent history. Second, history curricula concentrate mainly on political events, especially those of resistance and repression. This narrative of the past seems to resonate with the personal beliefs of the teachers with whom I spoke. At the very least, none of them voiced any critique of it to me. One possible explanation for this is that teachers whose views on the past diverge from the dominant version that is entrenched in the school curriculum probably do not feel very comfortable in the present education system. Thus, such individuals may keep their views to themselves, opt to teach subjects other than history, or “not get around” to covering postwar history in the classroom. Although school curricula are produced at the national level and thus ref lect dominant state-sanctioned narratives, it is worth remembering that lesson plans are ultimately implemented by individual teachers in local schools and communities. Therefore, what children learn in schools is heavily shaped by the ideas of their teachers and principals, who in turn must also take into account the needs and wishes of parents, as well as the histories of the communities in which they work. This interaction between the history curriculum developed at the national level and local historical

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narratives is especially clear when we look at the ways local history is treated in Nowa Huta classrooms. Since the history of Nowa Huta is so closely intertwined with the history of the socialist period, students indirectly absorb historical knowledge while learning about local affairs. And indeed, many Nowa Huta schools try to foster in their students a knowledge of local history and get them involved in local initiatives. This is often done through extracurricular activities that are developed in collaboration with local institutions such as cultural centers, the Nowa Huta Museum, or the local newspaper. Many teachers also try to incorporate information about Nowa Huta’s history into the curriculum even when it is not strictly part of the program. Ms. Sikora, a high school history teacher, described her efforts in the following way: There is no reference to Nowa Huta in history textbooks, except maybe for a brief mention of it as a punishment for Kraków. It is up to the teacher to debunk this negative stereotype and to tell students about the tremendous effort made by people who built Nowa Huta. . . . Then [in the textbooks] there may be another mention of Nowa Huta with relation to Solidarity strikes in the 1980s, but the emphasis is on Solidarity activities in Gdańsk, not in Nowa Huta. I try to add in information about Nowa Huta’s role in Solidarity and emphasize Nowa Huta’s contribution to fighting for freedom. . . . Over time, a lot of knowledge about Nowa Huta’s history is lost, and students need to be taken to important places and told why they are important.

Ms. Sikora went on to tell me that on several occasions she had taken her students to the Lord’s Ark church and been surprised to find that even students who are parishioners of that church and have been attending masses there for years do not know much about it. “By now, not all students hear at home who Bogdan Włosik was and need to be taught this at school,” she remarked. Ms. Ciępińska, a primary school teacher, told me that she tries to bring in knowledge about Nowa Huta’s history under the umbrella of “regional education,” since the history curriculum in primary school does not cover postwar history until the sixth grade. Students in grades one through three begin by learning about their immediate neighborhood, including the names of streets and their significance, the significance of their church,5 and stories about interesting places around Nowa Huta and their history. In grades four through six students interview family members on topics such as “a day in the life in the 1980s” or “what life was like when you were my age.” In addition to complementing the curriculum with information about Nowa Huta and its history, many teachers also try to get their students

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involved in various extracurricular activities that promote a sense of local identity and knowledge about local history. One initiative that I followed closely throughout my stay in Nowa Huta was an annual history program for middle and high school students called“Od Wandy do Sendzimira” (From Wanda to Sandzimir).6 This contest is a partnership among the OKN cultural center, the Nowa Huta Museum, and a number of local schools (during my stay in Nowa Huta, seventeen schools participated). The program involves Saturday field trips to important historical sites located in Nowa Huta (from the twelfth-century Cistercian monastery to the steelworks), lectures, field games, and a final knowledge competition. Student teams composed of three to five students from each school, along with their supervising teachers, work on their own time on various assignments and tasks, as well as prepare for the final competition. Students who participated in the program told me that they learned new interesting things about Nowa Huta and visited places that they do not normally get to see. A big hit among them was a trip to the steelworks, which is nearly impossible to visit otherwise. Students also commented on how much they enjoyed seeing the pretty manor houses and churches on the outskirts of town, for it made them realize how much “old history” there is in Nowa Huta. Many schools also organize activities to coincide with occasions such as anniversaries of important local events. Below I describe some of the activities organized by two local schools that I found to be particularly involved in local events. High school #11 (Liceum XI) is the oldest high school in Nowa Huta, built in 1956. It is considered one of the top high schools in Nowa Huta. Several of the school’s present-day teachers attended the school when they were children, with some of the older teachers having taught some of the younger ones. In the year 2009, the school marked Nowa Huta’s sixtieth anniversary by organizing an array of activities for students. Hallways were filled with displays about every aspect of Nowa Huta’s community life and history, including architecture, churches, sports, green spaces, and underground publications. The school gym, built on the site of Nowa Huta’s first movie theater, Stal (Steel), again became a movie theater for a day, a place where students watched movies about Nowa Huta. The school’s former teachers (now retired) and some of its first students came to talk to current students about what life in Nowa Huta was like in the 1950s. A few of the students interviewed their family members and produced Nowa Huta family sagas. Students and teachers also brought in objects from the past sixty years, including old TVs and money—even the first Polish laundry machine, Frania (Franny). Such artifacts, a teacher told me, particularly appeal to the students’ imaginations, and thus the exhibit was the biggest

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Learning about the legacy of resistance: a Solidarity altar at a Nowa Huta school. Photo by the author.

hit among them. Students also developed maps of walking or bike tours around Nowa Huta, created a coat of arms for Nowa Huta, and made short films about current local issues. Another Nowa Huta school that is particularly concerned with instilling in students a sense of historical consciousness is primary school #85. The school’s principal was an active member of Solidarity in the 1980s and is now a champion of initiatives that showcase Nowa Huta’s legacy of resistance. When I first walked into the school, I was struck by a sizeable display in the main hallway entitled “Ołtarz Solidarności” (Solidarity altar), consisting of crosses, statues, and other Solidarity paraphernalia made by political activists and trade unions during the 1980s. The walls in the hallways were covered with displays of student projects dealing with different aspects of Nowa Huta’s history of resistance. The majority of projects featured at the time of my visit were students’ interviews with parents and grandparents on the subject of martial law. Many projects also dealt with the role of the church in the political opposition. In fact, a few years ago the school changed its patron from the Polish Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski to the former local priest Father Jancarz. Father Jancarz was the chaplain of Nowa Huta’s Solidarity during the 1980s. He organized weekly patriotic

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masses called “Thursday masses for the Fatherland,” as well as other oppositional activities such as meetings and conferences. The school’s librarian, herself a passionate collector of Nowa Huta archival material, explained to me that Father Jancarz was an important figure in their neighborhood of Mistrzejowice and that the school wanted more of a local patron. She also noted that since the adoption of the new patron, the school had become more active in promoting historical consciousness among its students. Nowa Huta schools are sites where national and local narratives confront each other. Many of the messages that students receive from participating in school activities reinforce what they learn in history class: that the socialist period was a time of repression and resistance and that the socialist system was inefficient and widely unpopular.7 However, students who participate in activities such as sixtieth-anniversary commemorations also absorb a knowledge of the past that goes beyond what they learn in history classes. For example, they learn that the history of a “socialist town” is still interesting and important, that this town can have valuable architecture, and that the hard work of the town’s builders deserves to be respected—particularly since many of the builders were the students’ own grandparents.

Learning about the legacy of resistance: a display of student projects at a Nowa Huta school. Photo by the author.

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Socialism as Memory In addition to schools, another important vehicle of memory transmission across generations is the family (Halbwachs 1992; see also Bertaux and Thompson 1993; Middleton and Edwards 1990b). Existing research in this area shows that young people often derive historical knowledge from family stories.8 These family memories then “become part of one’s personal archive of experience, informing one’s subjectivity as well as one’s relationship to the present and future” (Landsberg 2004, 28). However, the family cannot be seen as simply a “storage for memories” (Welzer 2010, 5). For example, Harald Welzer observes that “family memory consists of highly controversial, inconsistent and incoherent stories, on whose courses and contents not even the family itself agrees” (2010, 5). His research on the transmission of World War II memories illustrates that accounts of the older generations “are always interpreted by members of the follow-up generation on the basis of their experiences of their own culture and time” (2010, 10). In effect, these accounts take on a different meaning as they are inherited and reworked by children and grandchildren. In a similar vein, Middleton and Edwards note that in the “conversational remembering” that happens within families, the goal is for participants to “create together, a joint version of remembered events,” rather than to accurately reproduce every detail of the past (1990b, 23). Many young Nowa Huta residents derive their knowledge about their district’s history from family histories pertaining to local events. When I talked with them about what they had heard about PRL, the majority of them said they perceived it as a time characterized by repression and resistance. A few of the students mentioned their families’ involvement in the Battle for the Cross: “My Grandma prayed at the Cross”; “My Grandma watched it from her apartment across the street. She tells the story of how she had to take her baby, my uncle, to another room, because rocks were flying in through the windows.” Many more students referenced the political unrest of the 1980s—a fact that is not surprising, given that this is a more recent event in the district’s history and thus is part of the “living memory” (Nora 1989) of the generation of people who now have teenage children. Many of the students spoke about their relatives’ involvement in the strikes. One teenage boy proudly told me, “My Dad threw rocks at ZOMO [the riot police].” Another one said, “My Grandpa was active in Solidarity and lost his job because of it. . . . He was intimidated, and he had to stop being active.” One girl told me that she is very proud of her grandfather, a former judge, who refused to preside over trials of strikers, even though his career suffered because of it. One boy related that because of the clouds of teargas that shrouded the district in the 1980s, his sister developed asthma. One

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fifteen-year-old boy perceived the socialist period as a time when “people were getting killed on the streets.”9 Several students referred to the religious context of resistance. They referenced the Battle for the Cross and the strikes and demonstrations in front of the Lord’s Ark church. Two young people from the Mistrzejowice neighborhood mentioned the famous “green shack” (zielona budka), a compound that was used for religious teaching before a church was built in the neighborhood and that subsequently became a symbol of resistance to the socialist government. A few young people also spoke of their families’ attendance at mass during Pope John Paul II’s visits to Nowa Huta.10 And finally, young people also associated socialism with shortages. They related knowledge such as “there were empty shelves, nothing to buy,” “you had to stand in lines for hours to buy anything,” or the infamous line “there was nothing in the stores except for vinegar.” The above responses indicate that young people’s impressions of the socialist period are shaped by a combination of hegemonic national narratives on the past (the sort they learn in history class) and local representations of Nowa Huta’s history. Accounts of the Battle for the Cross, Solidarity strikes, and the role of Nowa Huta’s churches and priests in the political opposition appear in many public representations of Nowa Huta’s history. These accounts in turn feed into the hegemonic national narrative of the socialist period as a time of repression, resistance, and inefficiency. At the same time, however, some young people related alternative memories. For example, a few of them pointed out that their parents or grandparents fondly remember employment security during PRL: “Back then there was work and money, and now there is neither”; “Back then work looked for people, and now people are looking for work.” Ania, a sixteen-year-old student, noted a diversity of memories within her own family: AL: My family is sort of divided on this. My grandma says these were better times than now, except that there was nothing in the stores, and my grandpa says back then at least there was order when it came to politics. KP: And your parents?

AL: My dad is very different. He likes possibilities.

KP: How do you feel when you hear different accounts of the past? What do you think about PRL? AL: Well, I like the time that I’m living in now. I can’t imagine what life was like during PRL.

Ania’s comment about liking the time in which she is living supports Kenneth Roberts’s observations about the postsocialist generation of East Europeans. Roberts argues that today’s young East Europeans are “over-

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whelmingly pro-reform” and “share little of their elders’ nostalgia for the old system” (2003, 493). While young people may have heard about certain benefits of the socialist system, they nonetheless “prefer the new insecurities to the old guarantees” (2003, 494). And indeed, for today’s twenty-yearolds, phenomena such as unemployment or lack of job security are not a departure from the norm, but rather how things have always been during their lifetime (see also Markowitz 2000). Even young people who see these phenomena as problematic do not look to the past for inspiration on alternatives, since the socialist past is effectively discredited by being reduced to accounts of strikes, persecutions, and empty shelves (Majmurek and Szumlewicz 2009). One person who exemplified this attitude was Tomek Ciepły, a twenty-four-year-old recent graduate from an environmental engineering program. Tomek was a very involved Nowa Huta resident: he did outreach work with at-risk children in the district and worked on the creation of an outdoor science and technology park with one of the local cultural centers. When I asked him what he could tell me about the socialist period in Nowa Huta, he replied: “I hate communists of course, but to be honest I don’t know much about it. . . . I’m more interested in what’s happening here right now.” In these words, Tomek disavows knowledge of the socialist past, yet it is clear that he has heard enough about it to feel that “of course” he is supposed to perceive it negatively. While teenagers answered my questions mostly in one-line keywords or short phrases,11 people in their late twenties or early thirties told more in-depth family histories, frequently supplemented by some of their own childhood recollections. One such person was thirty-three-year-old Zosia Hajduk. Zosia was born in Nowa Huta, and her parents were basketball coaches for Nowa Huta’s sports club Hutnik (Steelworker), which until the early 1990s was owned by the steelworks. Her parents were both active in Solidarity and suffered repercussions because of it. Zosia spoke bitterly about her father’s experience: “Over the years that my father coached Hutnik, he made it into a first-league team. But then when he became active in Solidarity he was removed. He just stopped to exist for the team. When he passed away the team did not even send a banner to his funeral! But a year later they reconsidered that and sent one to his memorial service.” On the other hand, Zosia and her friend Monika once began reminiscing about their childhood summer camp experiences in the 1980s. As children of steelworks employees, they went to summer camps that were organized and financed by the steelworks. They took turns fondly recalling objects and foods associated with these trips, such as grain coffee (kawa zbożowa, a roasted grain beverage that is caffeine free and was frequently given to children) and milk soup (zupa mleczna, a thin oatmeal floating

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in a sea of milk). They concluded their trip down memory lane by telling me: “When people talk about PRL they always talk about martial law, but nobody remembers the joy of drinking burned milk soup from a steel canteen.” Another person of that generation with a very detailed knowledge of her family history was Joanna, a thirty-four-year-old administrative assistant at the OKN cultural center. Joanna was born in Nowa Huta, where she lived all her life until a few years ago, when she and her husband moved to a house in the suburbs. She began her account of life in Nowa Huta by telling me about her grandfather who came to Nowa Huta after having lost everything in World War II. Joanna’s mother was an accountant at the same cultural center (which used to be owned by the steelworks), and her father, now retired, was a manager at the steelworks’ coke plant. In the 1980s he became involved in Solidarity and was subsequently fired from the steelworks for distributing underground materials. He was blacklisted from work and for years could not find employment anywhere. He returned to the steelworks in the early 1990s. I asked Joanna about her own memories of life in socialist Poland. Her family lived in the Urocze neighborhood of Nowa Huta, close to the Lord’s Ark church, where many demonstrations and battles with the riot squad took place throughout the 1980s. This is what she remembered of those years: I remember seeing my grandma cry when she found out that her children [Joanna’s uncles] were arrested. . . . My aunt’s wedding dress was burned to a crisp the day before her wedding. It was hanging in a window and a riot squad member threw a firecracker at the window. He probably thought it was a person standing there, observing the demonstrations. . . . I also remember playing Solidarity and ZOMO [the riot squad] with my friends. There was a hill near our building. So half the children would be Solidarity and would stand at the bottom of the hill yelling “solidarity!” and the other half would be ZOMO and would run down the hill and attack the protesters with sticks. The neighbors would often look out the windows to see who was demonstrating so loudly and would see that it was only a group of children playing!

In addition to the strikes, Joanna also recalled the ubiquitous shortages: “I remember empty shelves of course. But ever since I can remember there were also private entrepreneurs at Plac Bieńczycki [Nowa Huta’s biggest market square] who sold bananas and real chocolate with hazelnuts. That was the only place in Nowa Huta where you could get bananas. . . . Also, the churches received parcels from abroad. [In the 1980s, charitable organizations from abroad sent aid parcels, which were distributed through

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churches.] I remember the priest handing out Juicy Fruit gum to students during religion classes.” Joanna’s parents were active in the political opposition in the 1980s, and she reflected on what she knew about their activities at the time: “They would frequently organize meetings in our apartment, late at night. The entire apartment would be filled with cigarette smoke. They even had a secret knock! Because of them, I was very politically aware as a child. I knew the names of all important political figures.” Taken together, Joanna’s and Zosia’s accounts touch on many of the themes found in hegemonic accounts of the socialist period. Their childhood memories are of the 1980s, a time characterized by shortages, strikes, and repressions. Both of them had parents who were active in the political opposition and persecuted because of it, and Joanna actually played “strikes” with her childhood friends. These childhood experiences shaped Joanna and Zosia’s perception of socialism as a repressive and inefficient system. Even so, they still cherish some memories that speak to shortages but also to the small childhood joys of everyday life: Joanna’s of a priest handing out Juicy Fruit gum during religion classes and Zosia’s of summer camps. As the cases above show, when asked about the socialist period, young people primarily relate stories of repression, resistance, and shortages. At the same time, it is worth keeping in mind Olga Shevchenko’s observation that “history comes in many guises” (2008, 9). Young people who disavow any knowledge of or interest in history, as well as those who perceive the socialist period largely through the framework of repression, resistance, and inefficiency, may nonetheless possess a repository of historical knowledge that they may not even consciously acknowledge or do not articulate in interviews. In Nowa Huta, many young people have a strong sense of local identity that is rooted in local history and knowledge of local places, people, and events. Many of the young people I met are engaged in various communityoriented initiatives or pursue education or employment-related projects that are inspired by local history. For these people, local history may carry more meaning and relevance than national history (although in fact Nowa Huta’s history cannot be separated from Poland’s postwar national history). Ola, a sixteen-year-old high school student at a Nowa Huta school, has never lived in Nowa Huta but chose to attend high school there because of her family’s connection to the district. Both her parents lived in Nowa Huta until shortly before she was born, and ever since she can remember she has been coming to the district to visit her grandparents and aunts who still live there. “Since I was young, I have associated Nowa Huta with family, good food, and the smell of good cake,” she says of those visits. She attends the previously described high school #11, a school that actively tries to involve its students in various community initiatives. This, she says, gave her the

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opportunity to pursue her interest in local history. As part of the school’s sixtieth-anniversary programming, Ola researched her family’s history and produced a “Nowa Huta family saga.” She learned, among other things, that her grandfather was an electrician and wired a number of sites around Nowa Huta, including the soccer stadium, the theater, the lights around the man-made pond (Zalew), and even one of Nowa Huta’s landmarks, an electronic clock on Central Square. Ola spends a lot of her time in Nowa Huta. After school she frequently goes to her aunt’s house, across the street from her school. She babysits her nephews and likes to take them on walks around the district. One of the sites she likes to visit is an old Soviet tank parked in front of the Combatants’ Museum. The tank has sentimental value for her because she was told that before her parents were married and her father was in the military and stationed in Cambodia, he came home on a short leave and went on a date there with her mother. Like Ola, many other young people I met also had a strong sense of local identity, often as a result of their family’s history (see also Dargiewicz 2007). A number of people I met in the course of my fieldwork underscored their family’s contributions to making Nowa Huta what it is today. I often heard comments such as “My grandfather built this town,” or “My grandfather planted trees here when he was in the volunteer work brigade [w czynie społecznym].” For these young people, the fact that their elders’ labor contributed to building Nowa Huta gives them a sense of ownership. Piotrek Dukat, a twenty-eight-year-old man (and the grandson of Mr. Pawłowski, whom we met in the previous chapter), talked to me about the importance of respecting the work of Nowa Huta’s first builders: “People who came here worked very hard to rebuild Poland after the war, and their work can’t just be written off as communist ideology. Right now, people like work leaders [przodownicy pracy] are mocked, but really they were just people who took pride in their work. A bricklayer who was a work leader was just a worker who wanted to put up a good brick wall. He saw himself as a good bricklayer, not as a communist. . . . Really, this was no different than companies like McDonald’s having ‘employee of the month’ awards.” In these words, Piotrek refers to Nowa Huta’s reputation as a “communist town” and the fact that the district’s residents are frequently stigmatized as puppets of the socialist system. Piotrek himself developed a strong sense of local identity in response to these negative stereotypes, which clashed with his own happy childhood memories of growing up in the district: “Growing up in Nowa Huta, my childhood was rosy. . . . All my school friends lived in the same neighborhood as me, so it was always easy

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to get a group of people together for a soccer game after school. Because of where I lived [a neighborhood on the edge of Nowa Huta, near an old Austrian fort], there was so much space to run around, we could play in the fort, light campfires.”12 He was not conscious of how Nowa Huta and its residents were perceived by residents of other parts of Kraków until he turned fourteen and chose to attend high school outside of Nowa Huta: All of a sudden I was told that Nowa Huta is a bad place, a town of communists, that it pollutes the entire city of Kraków, that people get murdered all over the place, and that my parents were peasants [wieśniacy, a derogatory term in Polish]. All these opinions came from people—and not just students, teachers too!—who never set foot in Nowa Huta. I had problems with some teachers because they expected me to be stupid and I wasn’t. They would say things like “Piotrek, you’re such a big Nowa Huta fan, well, let’s see if you can come up to the board and solve this equation.” . . . We [i.e., Nowa Huta residents] are always portrayed negatively. First they called us peasants and made fun of our rubber boots. Then Nowa Huta became a town, and a new generation was born. At that point we weren’t really peasants anymore, so they called us communists. Then that generation proved themselves to be politically active, they fought for the cross, and then in the 1980s they brought down communism. After that we couldn’t be called communists anymore, so instead Nowa Huta became a place ridden with crime, where all the soccer hooligans [dresiarze] live. Now, that too is starting to change because Nowa Huta is becoming trendy, artists are moving here, young people are inheriting their grandparents’ apartments and starting their own families. I wonder what new label they will come up with for us next?13

As a result of his experiences, Piotrek made it his mission to change the stereotypes associated with Nowa Huta, one person at a time. He opened Klub 1949,14 a coffee shop that he envisioned as a “private cultural center,” dedicated to promoting a sense of community in Nowa Huta. A coffee shop was a much-needed place in Nowa Huta, a district starved for places to eat, drink, and hang out. In addition, Klub 1949 was a space where for a very small fee, people could organize art exhibits, poetry readings, public talks, or any other event they wanted. Piotrek frequently collaborates with other Nowa Huta institutions in organizing community events; for example, his pub hosted several talks and meetings that took place as part of Nowa Huta’s sixtieth-anniversary celebrations. In addition to running Klub 1949, Piotrek and a group of his friends also recently took over the management of Nowa Huta’s soccer team Hutnik (Steelworker) after the previous management filed for bankruptcy. In

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March 2011 the team began a new season under new management and is still playing at the time of this writing. In explaining his efforts to “save Hutnik,” Piotrek invoked the team’s role in Nowa Huta’s history: When I was a little kid my dad took me to Hutnik’s games, and when I have children I want to take them to these games as well, because they are part of the Nowa Huta tradition. It’s important to support Hutnik, not because it’s a particularly high-profile team [as this book goes to press in the fall of 2014, it is in the third league], but because it’s our team, a team from Nowa Huta. The players are boys from the neighborhood [chłopcy z osiedla]; they’re guys with whom I went to school, my friends and my neighbors. And they play for this team not for the money, but for the love of the game.

Although Piotrek told me on several occasions that he is not particularly interested in history and that he cares about the future and not the past, his sense of identity as a Nowa Huta resident is clearly informed by the town’s history. In his account, he locates Nowa Huta’s current socioeconomic marginalization in the larger historical context of the district’s relationship with the city of Kraków. His two projects—the coffee shop and the soccer team—bridge Nowa Huta’s history with current needs and issues. In the course of my fieldwork I met many other young people whose education or career-related projects were in some way informed by their identities as Nowa Huta residents. A number of my acquaintances wrote their master’s theses on current issues affecting the district. For example, Marta Kurek, a young landscape architect, created a revitalization plan for Nowa Huta’s historic core as part of her master’s research project. Jacek Dargiewicz, owner of another Nowa Huta pub, conducted research with Nowa Huta’s youth for his master’s degree in sociology. Nowa Huta is also home to several young local rappers and other musicians,15 as well as artists and photographers16 who take up local issues in their artistic expressions. A film group associated with the OKN cultural center, composed primarily of young people, recently reinvented a socialist-era tradition of screening public service announcements and chronicles at movie theaters prior to show times. The group’s chronicles document current local events and are screened at OKN’s movie theater and made available online.17 The names of two Nowa Huta pubs, both owned and operated by young people, are inspired by the town’s history. The first, mentioned earlier, is Klub 1949, alluding to the year of Nowa Huta’s construction. The second is Kombinator, a name derived from kombinat, the Polish word for an integrated industrial complex. Taken together, these initiatives illustrate that for many young people, memory resides in, and is disseminated through, local events, places, and

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people. Although young Nowa Huta residents may disavow knowledge of or interest in history, they in fact absorb a lot of historical knowledge through their involvement in community affairs. When asked directly about the socialist period, they may draw on the hegemonic framework of repression, resistance, and inefficiencies, but their actions in fact reveal a deeper level of historical consciousness and engagement with the past. This “community memory” (Orr 1990)18 allows them to incorporate local history into their identities and life-projects. However, just as we should not overestimate the role that education plays in shaping young people’s ideas about the past, so we should not assume that all young Nowa Huta residents learn local history from their families. Not all young people have generational ties to Nowa Huta, and as time goes on, more and more families are moving into the district from other parts of Kraków or even other parts of the country. These families have not personally experienced significant events in local history and thus will not be able to pass on that knowledge to their children and grandchildren. Furthermore, not all born-and-bred Nowa Huta residents talk about the past, for many different reasons. Some families may have had difficult experiences that they do not wish to bring back in conversations. Some may have had experiences that do not conform to currently hegemonic narratives and thus may prefer to remain silent on the topic. And last, with every year that passes, “living memories” (Nora 1989) fade. Increasingly, the parents of present-day teenagers may themselves not have many firsthand memories of the socialist period to share with their children. Such is the case of Majka, a forty-three-year-old office administrator and the mother of two teenage children, aged nineteen and fourteen. Majka grew up and to this day lives in a building overlooking the Lord’s Ark church. I asked her what she remembered about the strikes and demonstrations that took place literally right under her windows. “You know what, I wasn’t really paying attention,” she replied. “Back then I was still in high school. . . . I was too stupid to understand what was really going on. We never spoke about politics at home.” Although Majka told me that she believes that knowledge of history is important, she admitted that she herself does not spend much time talking about the past with her children. “There are so many things going on, we just never get around to it,” she explained. A similar point was poignantly made by Barbara, a woman in her forties who works as a ticket agent in the Nowa Huta Museum. I asked her what she tells her teenage son about life during PRL. She replied: “Listen, he’s seventeen. When he’s actually at home and not out with his friends, I’m more concerned with talking to him about smoking, drinking, and drugs. And PRL, it’s not the most important topic for me right now.”

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The Future of the Past: Memories in the Hands of the Younger Generation The collapse of the socialist government in 1989 constituted a major historical watershed that ushered in a very different political and economic arrangement from the one that had been in place since the end of World War II. It thus constitutes a turning point that creates a generational boundary between people who experienced (and remember) life during the socialist period and those who did (and do) not. To put it differently, generational categories are assigned in part on the basis of people’s memory of the socialist period (or lack thereof). Young people are seen by their elders as not knowing or caring much about the past, and for the most part they themselves agree with this characterization. To borrow an expression from David Lowenthal, for young people the socialist past is “a foreign country” (1985). However, the older cohorts of the younger generation (that is, people in their late twenties or early thirties) have patches of personal memories and a better knowledge of their family histories than teenagers. This cohort can thus be seen as a somewhat of a bridge between the older and younger generations. The experiences of Nowa Huta’s younger generation can give us some insights into the treatment of the socialist past in contemporary Poland. For example, the accounts of both young people and their teachers attest to the relative lack of emphasis on teaching socialist-era history in schools. Some of the teachers with whom I spoke attributed this to the policies and priorities of the political party currently in power (Platforma Obywatelska, or Civic Platform). This party is seen as strongly promarket and pro–European Union and thus as likely to promote “market-oriented” disciplines such as business or information technology at the expense of the humanities and social sciences—and especially at the expense of history, which is seen as best left in the past.19 A few teachers also perceived the waning importance of history more broadly. Today’s world, they observed, is oriented toward the present and future rather than the past. Such musings echo the observations of theorists who see the decline of historical consciousness as characteristic of postmodern society (see, e.g., Hobsbawm 1995; Huyssen 1995; Jameson 1998). Historian Eric Hobsbawm, for example, argues that “the destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late 20th century” (1994, 3). His observation certainly holds relevance for the case of Poland. The majority of the young people I met feel disconnected from the socialist-era past and find no use for it in dealing with present-day issues. And yet the accounts of Nowa Huta res-

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idents like Piotrek show that history continues to infuse their present-day identities and actions. Whatever knowledge of the socialist period young people do possess is largely informed by the keywords of repression, resistance, and inefficiency and lacks some of the complexity and nuance captured in the accounts of the older generation in the previous chapter. At the same time, family and community memories can provide alternate interpretations of the past. While young people may not be interested in the sort of historical narratives they find in school textbooks, they do find meaning in local histories dealing with their families and communities. Many young Nowa Huta residents, for example, have a strong sense of local identity, shaped by events such as their elders’ contributions to building the district or the district’s history of marginalization by the city of Kraków. As a result, while young people may be quick to disavow knowledge of, or interest in, the socialist period, they in fact might be engaging with this history in other ways. This history might become sanitized of contentious ideological or political references and only then become incorporated as part of their identities. Ola’s story of taking walks by the World War II Soviet tank (a tank that, incidentally, happens to be named Joseph Stalin 2!) is a good example of this phenomenon. The tank could certainly have a number of meanings for Nowa Huta residents; for example, its presence on the district’s landscape could have become just as symbolic of the history of Soviet domination as the statue of Lenin once was. However, the fact that to this day the tank continues to stand on the street outside of the Combatants’ Museum suggests that the majority of Nowa Huta residents do not find its presence to be contentious; rather, the tank has become an intrinsic part of the cityscape. For Ola, the tank’s significance lies not in its place in World War II history, but rather in the role it plays in her personal family history. Ola is not alone in investing the tank with a meaning that surpasses its historical context; in the course of my fieldwork I encountered the tank in various local representations, the most interesting of which was in a Nowa Huta–themed nativity scene.20 However, it is important to acknowledge the diversity among young people. Some know more about their family histories than others, and some are more interested in history than others. Many young people claim that they are not interested in the past and do not know much about it. Perhaps they are tired of the contestations about socialism in the public sphere, or perhaps they are so inundated with accounts of strikes, repressions, and empty shelves that they find little use for the past in addressing contemporary issues. In this and the previous chapter I examine memory in Nowa Huta through the lens of generation. This completes my quest to pursue the

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production, reproduction, and contestation of memories in Nowa Huta through several different lenses and in different contexts. In the conclusion I tie together the insights derived from examining these various sites of memory to consider what they can tell us about the relationship among memory, identity, place, and generation and the role that the socialist past plays in present-day Poland.

Conclusion

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his book uses the framework of memory in a former Polish flagship socialist steel town to explore the relationship between historical change and people’s experiences. It examines how the socialist period is remembered and represented in various contexts and what these memories and representations can tell us about people’s experiences of the political, economic, and social changes that have taken place since the collapse of the socialist government in 1989. It also asks how people’s memory, identity, and sense of place are shaped and articulated with relation to events that have taken place in a concrete locality. In the process, it weaves together the themes of memory, place, and generation.

Memory, Place, and Generation The case of Nowa Huta highlights the salience of locality in shaping memories and identities. Nowa Huta remains a frame of reference for people’s reflections on the past and present. For example, local events shaped many people’s experiences of larger historical processes such as postwar rebuilding and resistance to the socialist government in the 1980s. Many young people have a strong sense of local identity, developed in reaction to Nowa Huta’s history of marginalization by the city of Kraków, as well as their families’ contributions to building the town. As people’s memories, identities, and subjectivities are constituted by places, places in turn are inscribed with meanings and memories. These memories are often multilayered, contradictory, and subject to change in relation to changing political, economic, and social conditions. For example, as Nowa Huta’s steelworks ceases to be the principal employer and the cornerstone of all social life in town, it means something different to Nowa 180

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Huta’s teenagers than it did to their grandparents who first built it and then worked there for their entire lives. Ultimately, Nowa Huta itself takes on different meanings over time. Since its construction, it has been represented differently by different agents and in response to changing political and economic agendas and ideologies (Golonka 2006; Stanek 2007). Built by the country’s postwar socialist government as a model socialist town, Nowa Huta is now being reinvented by local memory makers as a site of resistance to the socialist government. The case of Nowa Huta also illustrates the ways in which places are created through the intersections of memories, discourses, and agendas that are produced and negotiated at multiple scales. Throughout this work I use the terms “local” to refer to representations that are produced specifically in Nowa Huta and “national” to refer to those representations that are part of larger nationwide discourses that exist in Poland. While I do so for the purpose of clarity, it is not my intention to reify these categories; on the contrary, the case of Nowa Huta reveals that national and local memories are always in the process of negotiation and change as they interact and inform one another. As we have seen, many local institutions and policy makers are attempting to redeem Nowa Huta’s reputation as a socialist town by highlighting the local history of resistance to the socialist government. These representations seek to bring Nowa Huta’s history in line with the hegemonic national narrative on the socialist past (even as this national narrative is always in the process of being negotiated). Poland’s membership in the European Union constitutes yet another scale at which memories are constructed and negotiated. Local heritage projects often seek to mesh with larger European ones; for example, institutions that receive funding from European Union sources have to frame their projects in a way that aligns with the European Union’s agendas and priorities. At the same time, the European Union’s discourses and agendas are informed by the voices of its member states—and Poland happens to be an active and vocal participant in debates involving the politics of memory. The accounts of Nowa Huta residents also illustrate the way in which private and collective memories inform one another. The private remembrances of repression and resistance on the part of residents who took part in oppositional activities in the 1980s became part of the town’s public memory—a memory that in turn dovetails with the larger national narrative of socialism as an inefficient and repressive system. Private remembrances and dominant narratives are thus mutually constitutive and reinforcing: as people draw on local and national narratives in telling their stories, they in effect reproduce them. And, in turn, publicly disseminated national and local memories grant legitimacy to private memories that agree with their

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script. However, residents’ accounts also show that people’s experiences do not always conform to the currently hegemonic narrative of the socialist period as a time of repression, resistance, and inefficiency. This diversity of experiences and memories “on the ground” is something with which local memory makers have to contend. Thus, even state-funded institutions such as museums or schools are constantly negotiating the discursive frames of memory to make room for people’s varying experiences and interpretations of the past. We can see this, for example, in local representations that highlight the achievements of Nowa Huta’s builders. Memory also articulates with, and is mediated by, factors such as generation. Major historical events, and memories of these events, often constitute fault lines that delineate generations. In Poland, the collapse of the socialist government in 1989 is such a watershed event that it creates a generational divide between people who experienced, and who remember, life in socialist Poland, and those who did (and do) not. Furthermore, the past constitutes a framework through which generations are imagined and constructed: for example, socialism and capitalism are associated with certain qualities and characteristics, which are then mapped onto generational categories. People of different ages are differently positioned with relation to political, economic, and social events, which in turn variously inform their experiences, subjectivities, and memories. For example, Nowa Huta’s founding residents, who built the town with their own hands, often articulate different experiences than their children, who, three decades later, organized into a massive resistance movement against the socialist government. It is worth remembering, however, that generational categories are partly self-ascribed and partly imposed from the outside (Reulecke 2008; Shevchenko 2008; Yurchak 2006). For example, even though the builders are popularly associated with support for the socialist project and their children with resistance to it, the accounts of the people with whom I spoke sometimes supported and sometimes problematized this association. Memory also sets out certain political and economic possibilities or constraints on the part of different generations. In Poland, memory of the socialist past has become the currency through which the older generation claims knowledge of the past and authority to act in the present. The majority of the country’s current political, economic, and intellectual elites belong to the generation that was coming of age in the 1980s. Members of this group experienced socialism as a repressive and inefficient system, and many of them took part in oppositional activities. They therefore tend to perceive capitalist reforms as inevitable and to reject economic or political solutions that are reminiscent of the socialist arrangement. The authority

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of this “Solidarity generation” to define the past and set the agenda for the present and future is largely reinforced by a slightly younger cohort, that of people who were born in the late 1970s and 1980s but entered adulthood in the 1990s. Their childhood experiences of socialism are informed largely by the political and economic breakdown of the 1980s: they recall shortages, strikes, and demonstrations. Therefore, they are likely to support and reproduce the currently hegemonic narratives on the past. On the other hand, people in their early twenties or younger are popularly perceived, and in turn see themselves, as being very removed from the socialist past. This group, by and large, tends to accept the representations produced by their elders. The accounts of Nowa Huta residents illustrate that people’s experiences in their youth and early adulthood play an important role in shaping their subjectivities and worldviews, a notion frequently encountered in the existing literature on generation (e.g., Mannheim 1972; Schuman and Scott 1989). In fact, some theorists argue that youth and early adulthood are an especially critical period in terms of shaping people’s views on political issues (Brown, Shevell, and Rips 1986). This would go some way toward explaining why Nowa Huta’s builders are so often associated with support for the socialist system and their children with resistance to it and why people who grew up during the political and economic breakdown of the 1980s tend to view socialism in such negative terms. Finally, the metaphor of generation can also be used to speak more broadly about change over time. For example, in the 1950s, official state discourses hailed Nowa Huta as the “town of youth” (miasto młodości), both because the majority of its population consisted of young work migrants and because the town was to symbolize a better future in the new socialist reality. Sixty years later, I often heard people say “Nowa Huta is old.” This comment pertained both to the district’s aging population and to its physical and social decline (see also Hołda 2010). It is worth remembering, however, that after every generation comes a new one. Today’s twenty-yearolds are inheriting their grandparents’ apartments, and the district’s lower real estate prices are attracting young families. Recent years have witnessed a growing interest on the part of both residents and local institutions in making the district a better place to live. To use a generational pun, Nowa Huta is regenerating.

Memory and Change One of the questions posed in this book is what role the past plays in the present at times of political, economic, and social change. Existing literature on memory teaches us that we draw on the past in imagining present and

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future possibilities (e.g., Halbwachs 1992; Climo and Cattell 2002; Misztal 2003; Teski and Climo 1995; Haukanes and Trnka 2013). However, at times of major changes or upheavals, the future may be envisioned precisely in opposition to the past. Writing about the transition from the Franco regime in Spain, Joan Ramon Resina argues that “if . . . society is itself a form of memory, then a profound reorganization of the state must also reform social memory along with the institutions that promote it” (2000, 88). In Poland, as in other former socialist states, the dynamic between the past, present, and future has a unique history. The socialist project was supposed to constitute a complete rupture with the presocialist past. It was the future that mattered, and this future was presented as certain and knowable: inevitably, the future would bring the fulfillment of the socialist project (Verdery 1996; Watson 1994; Haukanes and Trnka 2013). Official state-produced narratives on the past thus made the past fit this prescribed trajectory. Over time, these official accounts kept changing in response to changing political, economic, and social conditions, for example, as certain political figures fell in and out of favor. This tendency on the part of socialist states to keep rewriting the past was so widespread that a popular joke held that whereas predicting the future was no problem, the past kept on changing (Verdery 1996). The collapse of socialist governments across the region ushered in new political and economic arrangements. Implementing these arrangements entailed reconsidering and rewriting socialist-era histories, a process that continues to this day. As Susan Brandstadter aptly observes, just as the socialist revolution in the first half of the twentieth century was defined directly in opposition to capitalism, so the new neoliberal order that was put in place after 1989 was defined in direct opposition to the socialist one that preceded it (2007, 133). Once again, the ways in which the past is represented sets out the parameters of political and economic possibilities for the present and future. As I argue throughout this book, the current hegemonic narrative on the past depicts the socialist period primarily in terms of repression, resistance, and inefficiency. This narrative has made it possible for the country’s postsocialist elites to implement neoliberal political and economic reforms, since these reforms were presented as being the opposite of the unwanted socialist past. Memory, therefore, is a tool for legitimizing certain political and economic solutions and precluding others. Economist Jane Hardy writes: “From the national level to the workplace, those in privileged situations have attempted to marginalize old ways of doing things, especially if they involve notions of collectivity, and engender what are regarded as new and appropriate understandings that are compatible with the market and integration with global capitalism” (2009, 55).

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In a related vein, Ewa Charkiewicz contends that Poland’s post-1989 elites were able to gain popular consent for often painful economic reforms partly because they created and disseminated discourses that pathologized socialism and everything associated with it (2007). Drawing on philosopher Michel Foucault’s writings on power, she asserts that these discourses are both a “technology of rule,” intended to legitimize economic reforms, as well as a “disciplinary technology” that presents these reforms as inevitable, in effect precluding the emergence of alternative discourses (Charkiewicz 2006, 2). Political scientist David Ost (2005) makes a related argument. He contends that the post-1989 political and economic elites managed to keep at bay popular critiques of economic conditions by channeling people’s economic concerns into national, political, or cultural issues. For example, economic phenomena such as rapid inflation were explained in political terms and blamed on the remnants of the former communist order. Ost’s argument invites the observation that the memory games played by political elites—for example, scrutinizing the past of prominent political leaders or arguing over who does or does not deserve a monument—in effect serve as a distraction strategy from economic issues (though the people who engage in these memory debates may not consciously intend to do this). This certainly seems to ring true for Nowa Huta, where issues such as the need for more workplaces and the physical decline of urban infrastructure are often sidelined by political debates such as whether Central Square should be renamed after Ronald Reagan or whether Colonel Kukliński deserves to have a monument. As we have seen throughout this work, the narrative of the socialist period as a time of repression, resistance, and inefficiency has become hegemonic in Poland (although the accounts of Nowa Huta residents illustrate that this hegemony is always in the process of being contested and negotiated). Accounts that do not conform to this script certainly do exist in the public sphere; however, for the most part they are marginalized and discredited, often by being dismissed as “nostalgia.” This nostalgia is attributed to the proverbial “losers” of the postsocialist transformation, that is, people who have “lost out” in the reforms and for whatever reason have not been able to “find themselves” in the changed political and economic order.1 This includes people such as former industrial workers, employees of collective farms, and the elderly. In many cases, these “losers” are blamed for their own fate. Industrial workers, for example, are popularly depicted as spoiled by socialist-era privileges, entitled, lazy, and unwilling to work hard and reinvent themselves in the new economy. This demonization of people who voice alternate memories is a very effective strategy for preventing the

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emergence of alternative discourses that might seek to challenge the present political or economic arrangements. Memory, therefore, becomes a tool through which future possibilities are defined and circumscribed. We have seen that it can be a tool for legitimizing and reproducing particular political and economic arrangements. However, can it also serve as a tool of critique? How much power do “ordinary people” actually have to determine what aspects of the past are remembered and how? In Poland there certainly exists a precedent of deploying memory as a tool of resistance to the political and economic status quo. During the socialist period, memory became one of the tools of resistance to socialist rule, in Poland as in other states across the socialist camp. At the time, memories of certain events, such as Soviet crimes against the Polish population during World War II, were silenced in official state-sanctioned accounts. However, though not included in history textbooks, popular memories of these events nonetheless percolated beneath the surface. In the 1980s, these memories began to reemerge through forums such as underground meetings and lectures. At this point, memory became one of the tools of resistance to the socialist state.2 Following the collapse of the socialist government, these resurrected memories became the material of which contemporary Polish history and identity are made. In the 1980s, then, memory was one of the tools of resistance to unwanted political, economic, and social arrangements. Following the collapse of the socialist government, subsequent governing parties sought to completely change these arrangements. Many of their reforms, however, had painful consequences for large sections of the population. The accounts of Nowa Huta residents illustrate that they are troubled by phenomena such as high unemployment and the lack of stable and secure jobs, the privatization of social services that subsequently became increasingly inaccessible, and growing social inequality. They are by no means nostalgic for the socialist past, nor do they want its return; they simply recognize that the bygone socialist arrangement provided certain benefits that were discarded along with it. Therefore, it seems fitting to ask whether memory can again provide the tools for articulating alternatives to the political and economic status quo, in Poland and elsewhere. This question takes on a particular relevance in light of the post-2008 global economic recession and the wave of protest movements that have been sweeping across the world since. In Europe, popular frustration with the continent’s economic recession and austerity politics found expression in large-scale protests in places such as Greece, Spain, and, in the postsocialist camp, Romania and Bulgaria. However, to date, nothing of similar scope

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has transpired in Poland.3 On the contrary, recent research shows that, for the most part, people find ways to accommodate, justify, and otherwise “domesticate” neoliberal reforms in their everyday lives, rather than attempt to resist them (Stenning et al. 2010; see also Hardy 2009; Ost 2005). For example, they might cope by working “on the side” or growing some of their own food. These strategies are inherited from the socialist era but adapted to new conditions. However, they are not consciously or deliberately deployed as critiques of, or resistance to, the current political and economic arrangements; in fact, they only enable and reproduce these arrangements. The accounts of Nowa Huta residents seem to support Stenning’s assertion. People whose voices speak through these pages feel that phenomena such as unemployment, growing wage disparity, and the decline of state funding for areas of public value are inevitable consequences of capitalist reforms— reforms that they readily admit they wanted and brought on themselves. One reason why neoliberal arrangements appear to people as inevitable, or at least as the lesser evil, is because in Poland these arrangements were instituted as part of a package of democracy, progress, and European integration. Freedom in the marketplace is thus seen as inextricable from freedom of speech, freedom to travel, and so on. Because of this, neoliberalism means something very different in Poland than, say, Chile, where neoliberal reforms were originally instituted by a brutal dictatorship.4 A related reason for people’s overall acceptance of neoliberal solutions is that, to this day, socialism and capitalism are envisioned as the antithesis of one another (Brandtstadter 2007). This polarization is evident in the accounts of people who conclude their stories with any version of “oh well, but this is the system that we wanted, so this is what we got.” Such comments illustrate that people feel that the only alternative to the political and economic status quo would be to go back to the shortages and repressions of the socialist period—which none of the people with whom I spoke wanted or advocated. The hegemony of the narrative of socialism as a time of repression, resistance, and inefficiency tells us that contemporary Polish identity is based primarily on rejection of the socialist legacy. This identity is currently shaped and negotiated primarily through the forces of nationalism, Catholicism, and Europeanization (see, e.g., Koczanowicz 2008; Myant and Cox 2008; McManus-Czubińska et al. 2003; Ochman 2013; Wangler 2012). These forces sometimes reinforce and other times contradict each other.5 What they have in common, however, is that none of them leave much room for the past as a source of critique of the current political and economic problems afflicting the country (and the continent in general). Europeanization discourses are mostly future oriented: they advocate moving beyond

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the socialist legacy and building a future that is politically and economically entrenched in European Union structures. Nationalist and Catholic discourses are also unlikely to look to the socialist past for inspiration on how to deal with current economic and social issues, albeit for different reasons. During the socialist period, popular opinion often juxtaposed the interests of “the nation” with the interests of the socialist state, a construction that was reinforced by the Catholic Church. In these discourses, socialism was presented as a Soviet imposition on the Polish nation. Following the collapse of the socialist government, this discourse continues to hold sway among sectors of Poland’s population, especially since it continues to be fueled by many factions within the Catholic Church. The church, therefore, continues to legitimize its influence on public life by invoking its history of opposition to the socialist state. What is ironic about all of this is that, to date, the most organized opposition to neoliberal reforms has come precisely from the religious, conservative, and nationalist right, generally associated with the Catholic Church and the Law and Justice political party (Ost 2005; Kalb 2009a, 2009b).6 However, since both Law and Justice and the church have fashioned their current identities on the legacy of opposition to the socialist government and system, neither of them is likely to instrumentalize memories of the socialist past in their critiques of the status quo. One might expect that the agent most likely to instrumentalize the past in articulating critiques of the status quo would be the political left. In Poland, however, the political faction that calls itself “the left” is not only decimated but, more importantly, also does not have an economic agenda that most people would associate with left-leaning thought. In fact, it was the so-called political left (that is, the political party that grew out of the socialist-era governing party) that pushed through some of the more radical economic reforms in the 1990s. In terms of its politics of memory, this party has actively worked to distance itself from its socialist-era roots, emphasizing the future over the past. Thus, at present, the political left is not very likely to instrumentalize the past in order to critique the political and economic status quo.7 In all, it is fair to say that in Poland, the past does not have much currency in terms of its ability to offer viable alternatives to present arrangements, at least for the time being. And yet if we look at the accounts of Nowa Huta residents, we see that people manipulate the hegemonic narrative of repression, resistance, and inefficiency, at times reproducing and at other times subverting it. On the one hand, this narrative really does resonate with many people’s lived experiences and memories. On the other hand, Nowa Huta itself is testament to many positive aspects of life during the

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socialist period, a fact also noted by residents. It is emblematic of postwar rebuilding, successful urban planning, stable and guaranteed work, strong community ties and social institutions, and collective action. These legacies inform people’s views on phenomena such as unemployment, growing social disparity, the decline of state spending on areas of public value, and Poland’s unequal place in the European political economy. While Nowa Huta residents do not long for the return of socialism, their disclaimers such as “I’m not saying socialism was good, but . . .” tell us that the existing frames of memory are constraining. All these carefully worded “buts” are an attempt to stretch these discursive frames, to make it possible to remember good things about the past without being accused of nostalgia for socialism. The keywords of repression, resistance, and inefficiency clearly do not reflect the complexity of people’s experiences. It is worth remembering, however, that the meaning of keywords can either change over time, or they can fall out of favor and be replaced by new keywords.8 We have already seen instances where Nowa Huta residents challenge these keywords; Ms. Prażmowska, for instance, explicitly refuses to see herself as persecuted or repressed. Many residents also speak of positive aspects of Nowa Huta’s history without explicitly linking it to socialist politics or ideology. After all, there is nothing intrinsically socialist about Nowa Huta’s urban plan, a legacy of work, or strong social institutions and community networks. Liberating these concepts from their socialist-era connotations can do much to relegitimize them in the popular imagination. Of course, people’s positive memories of stable jobs at the steelworks or public funding for culture and recreation should not be automatically read as “resistance to neoliberalism”; however, they can be seen as a kind of chipping away at the current political and economic framework that might eventually change its shape. To borrow an expression from Gramsci, they can be read as “flashes” of alternate visions, even if the total vision is not complete (1971, 327). As Stenning et al. (2010) argue, active resistance is not the only way to remake the present, and people’s everyday (and often unconscious) actions have the potential to create new arrangements. In her account of Nowa Huta’s history during the Stalinist period, Katherine Lebow makes a case for the relationship among generation, memory, and change. She argues that Nowa Huta’s Solidarity-era generation was able to mount effective resistance to the socialist government in the 1980s precisely because they used the “social solidarities and mechanisms for self-organization” initially forged by their elders during the Stalinist period (2013, 154). She writes, “the generation that turned Nowa Huta into one of the most important and militant seats of Solidarity in the 1980s had learned crucial lessons from the new town’s past, forging some of its most

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powerful political weapons out of selective memories of its parents’ and grandparents’ experiences” (2013, 154). If the builders’ experience of “building socialism” could lay the groundwork for its dismantling by this generation’s children a few decades down the road, then both sets of experiences and memories can now become the material for the district’s youngest generation to make their own “moral projects” (Cole 2003) that will respond to current political, economic, and social needs and conditions. There is much in Nowa Huta’s history that is valuable: a legacy of work, strong community ties and social institutions (for example, trade unions and community centers), and a history of collective action. Many young people are already beginning to incorporate some of these legacies in their identities, subjectivities, and life projects. In time, they may draw on these memories to respond to present-day challenges such as high unemployment; poorly paid part-time or contract jobs; and the privatization of public infrastructure and services such as education, housing, and child care. Finally, the question remains whether the case of Nowa Huta can contribute any insights about the potential of memory to serve as a tool for critique outside of just the Polish context. Anthropologist David Nugent argues that contemporary protest movements that emerged following the 2008 economic recession, such as Occupy or the indignados, are articulated precisely in opposition to the past: they are explicitly about breaking with existing social, political, and economic structures, such as capitalism and representative democracy (2012). Does this mean that memory in general is not a viable resource for challenging the unwanted aspects of the political and economic status quo, in Poland and elsewhere? Indeed, this might seem to be the case. In North America, for instance, it will not do much good to advocate the return of Fordism as a way of combatting unemployment or the unequal distribution of wealth, just as in Poland no one will score any points by advocating any solutions that remotely smack of anything to do with socialism. However, before we dismiss the potential of the past to offer any useful lessons for the future, we should keep in mind that old ideas can make a comeback in a repackaged form as they get applied to new conditions and situations by new generations. For example, when young Nowa Huta residents proudly talk about their grandfathers planting trees in the 1950s, they gloss over the ideological context in which these activities took place. Their comments illustrate that they appreciate the legacy of work and collective action but do not need to invoke the language of socialism in order to talk about this. Many of the tenets that underpinned bygone arrangements are still sound—we only need to work out a language for talking about them in a way that makes sense in the changed political, economic,

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and social context. In his research on the rise of conservative, right-wing populism in Poland, anthropologist Don Kalb argues that opposition to the neoliberal arrangements draws on “ethnonational or religious symbolic sources eclectically combined with items of the classical Left” (2009a, 208). If such an eclectic combination is possible, then it should certainly be possible for positive memories of the past to be eclectically combined with other ideas and discourses to respond to present-day political, economic, and social issues.

An Industrial Town in the Postindustrial Age Many Soviet Bloc states had their own equivalents of Nowa Huta: industrial towns built around industrial workplaces, intended to create a new socialist working class and forge a new socialist modernity (e.g., Kotkin 1995; Kurti 2002; Stronski 2010). The ways in which socialist principles were first applied and then contested in Nowa Huta, and the changes that have taken place there since the socialist government’s collapse, bear many similarities to the trajectories of other former industrial spaces across the region (e.g., Kideckel 2008; Stenning et al. 2010). However, it is worth remembering that every place is different and that there are things about Nowa Huta that are unique to the Polish context; this includes, for example, the connection between religion and political opposition and the ways in which this connection is highlighted in contemporary representations of the district’s history. The case of Nowa Huta can also tell us something about larger processes that go beyond the postsocialist part of Europe. For example, despite the obvious political, economic, social, and geographical differences between North America and East-Central Europe over the past century, there are in fact many parallels between Nowa Huta and North American industrial company towns (e.g., Dudley 1994; Linkon and Russo 2002; Bruno 1999; Nash 1989). On both the European and the North American continents, industry was seen as the cornerstone of modernity and was tied to state- and nation-building projects. In both places, large industrial employers created various social institutions for workers, in effect engendering a particular work-community dynamic: people lived, worked, and played together. Under both the socialist arrangement in East-Central Europe and the Fordist arrangement in North America and Western Europe, industrial work was (at least for some time) a type of work that guaranteed stability, reasonably good wages, and benefits such as health care and housing. And in both places, this arrangement eventually came to an end. As Fordism waned in North America and Western Europe, and socialist governments collapsed across East-Central Europe, industrial towns on both continents

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were transformed by the same processes: deindustrialization, unemployment, and urban decline. National and municipal governments attempt to combat these negative trends through a variety of strategies. They turn to service, retail, and entertainment industries; they court new investment by creating special economic zones; they pursue revitalization and urban renewal initiatives such as heritage or greening projects. Such strategies reflect a changed relationship among the state, the economy, and labor—an arrangement that is often termed neoliberalism. To be sure, these similarities are painted in broad brushstrokes. It is beyond the scope of this book to engage in a detailed comparison between Nowa Huta and any other industrial town, nor is such a comparison the object here. Rather, my intention is to highlight the presence of certain processes that transcend ideological (socialist-capitalist) and regional (EastWest) dichotomies. For the most part, studies of postindustrial spaces in the former socialist part of the world tend to fall under the umbrella of “postsocialist studies”—and this book is no exception. To date, such studies are not integrated very well into the existing literature on deindustrialization in North America and Western Europe.9 I propose that paying attention to the similarities and differences between the cases of Nowa Huta and other postindustrial towns from outside of the postsocialist part of the world can contribute much to our understanding of how changes in the relationship among the state, the economy, and labor are inflected by local politics and histories and thus are variously adopted, negotiated, and “domesticated” (Stenning et al. 2010) in different places and in ways that are highly uneven. The fact that Nowa Huta is situated (politically, economically, ideologically, and geographically) in the former socialist camp does not mean that it is (or ever was) insulated from global processes; however, the ways in which these processes have been adopted, negotiated, and “domesticated” (Stenning et al. 2010) have certainly been inflected by the socialist context.

From “Lieu de Memoire” to “Lieu D’avenir” In their research on the former American steeltown of Youngstown, Ohio, Sherry Linkon and John Russo argue that communities require a shared sense of their past if they are to thrive in the present and future. Linkon and Russo attribute Youngstown’s plethora of social problems to its “failure of memory” (2002, 245). They claim that following the decline of its steel industry, the town has tried to forget rather than to celebrate its rich history of work and struggle for labor rights. They argue that this memory must be reclaimed, because the “recovery of a positive memory of itself is the first important step toward reconstructing a sense of place, belonging and ownership” (2002, 4). Fortunately, unlike Youngstown, Nowa Huta is

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very much attuned to its past. Although different people and groups may emphasize different aspects of this past, this multivocality creates a situation where all residents are able to find narratives that resonate with their experiences and memories. In this work I approach Nowa Huta as a “site of memory”: a place that both shapes and is shaped by local and national memories of the socialist period. However, following Gisa Weszkalnys, who examines the revitalization of Berlin’s Alexanderplatz following the collapse of the socialist government, I want to suggest that Nowa Huta is not only a “lieu de memoire” but also a “lieu d’avenir,” that is, a “site of arrival, onto which expectation and desires for particular futures are projected” (Weszkalnys 2010, 31). Memories of the past shape current projects and visions of the future. As the district’s economy and public image are being reconfigured in Poland’s so-called new reality, its socialist legacy continues to infuse current revitalization projects in a myriad of ways. At times, these projects explicitly build on elements of the district’s socialist-era history; at other times, the future is explicitly projected against the past. The varied representations of the socialist past in Nowa Huta’s public representations negotiate among local residents’ experiences (which are themselves diverse), hegemonic national histories, and political and economic considerations such as Poland’s participation in the “global economy” and membership in the European Union. Nowa Huta occupies a special place in Poland’s national imagination. To this day, Nowa Huta means different things to different people and frequently many things all at once. As a former model socialist town, it fits somewhat uneasily into Poland’s new political and economic reality. There are many people—historians, journalists, and politicians, as well as “regular” residents of Kraków—who view the town as a symbol of socialism’s failure. For example, in a recent best-selling book, journalist Anne Applebaum describes Nowa Huta as a symbol of “failed planning, failed architecture, and a failed utopian dream” (2012, 385). And indeed, Nowa Huta’s history of resistance is testament to the fact that the socialist state ultimately did not fulfill its promises to its citizens and that residents of this model socialist town were not willing to accept these shortcomings. On the one hand, this can certainly be read as the failure of the socialist project. On the other hand, it can also be seen as evidence that the residents actually learned the lessons of socialism all too well: when the socialist government failed to deliver on its promises, industrial workers, raised to believe that they were entitled to certain benefits and standards that the state had the responsibility to provide, collectively organized to demand change. Now, over six decades following the socialist government’s launch of the utopian project that was Nowa Huta, residents’ accounts reveal that many

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aspects of this project in fact did work. To be sure, the district continues to have many problems, most notably unemployment and urban decline. These problems, however, are by and large the unintended consequences of the post-1989 economic reforms. In all, Nowa Huta is a place that embodies the contradictions and contestations pertaining to the socialist past that exist in Poland and in East-Central Europe more generally. The story of Nowa Huta is a story about how a place becomes the setting and material for the construction and negotiation of local, national, and supranational memories and identities within a matrix of political, economic, and social changes: the change from a one-party state to a multiparty one, from a Soviet Bloc country to a European Union member state, from central planning to a market economy, and from an industrial- to a service-based economy.

Notes

Introduction 1. I use the term “East-Central Europe” to refer to states that fell under the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence after World War II and remained in that position until 1989. However, I use this term cautiously, given the ideological connotations entailed in dividing Europe along an East-West axis (see, e.g., Wolff 1994). 2. The terms “socialism” and “communism” are often used interchangeably to refer to the political, economic, and social systems that were implemented in East-Central European states after World War II. There has been much scholarly debate about these terms, and people’s choice of terminology varies depending on the conventions of their discipline. Some of the semantic ambiguity stems from the fact that, while socialism was seen as a stepping-stone to a communist society, communism as envisioned by Marx or Lenin was never actually achieved in any of the Soviet Bloc states. In Poland, the term “communism” is often used in popular parlance as well as by many historians, sociologists, and political scientists. In this work, however, I opt to follow the lead of anthropologists, the majority of whom prefer to speak of socialism. The only exceptions to this are when I directly quote people who use the term “communism.” 3. In both scholarly and popular Polish discourses, the socialist period is often referred to by the keyword “PRL,” an acronym for People’s Republic of Poland (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa), which was the country’s official name from 1952 to 1989. PRL is a popular shorthand for referring to the socialist period in Poland, similar to the expression “GDR” in the former East Germany. 4. Throughout this work I refer to Nowa Huta alternately as a “district” or a “town.” This semantic confusion stems from the fact that, although Nowa Huta was initially intended to be a separate town on Kraków’s doorstep, it quickly became absorbed into the city as one of its administrative districts. To this day, residents alternate between the two terms. In this work I refer to present-day Nowa Huta as a “district” and to Nowa Huta in the early postwar period as a “town.” 195

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5. For a colorful description of Trabants and their social life in postsocialist Eastern Europe see Berdahl 2010. 6. Pierogi are Polish dumplings, usually stuffed with either potato filling, sauerkraut, ground meat, or fruit. 7. The adoption of capitalist reforms is commonly associated with the immediate postsocialist period, since it is the post-1989 ruling parties that pursued market-oriented policies with the greatest zeal. However, Shields (2012b) argues that in the Polish case, the groundwork for these reforms was actually laid earlier, in the 1970s and 1980s. This is because the economists and other experts who directed the course of economic reforms in the early 1990s actually began to develop their ideas in the 1970s and 1980s, often through exchanges with foreign think tanks and organizations such as the World Bank. It was also in the 1970s that the socialist government began to pursue a policy of economic growth financed by western credits. In the 1980s, this government introduced further market-oriented reforms in an effort to combat recession and popular protests. Thus, while it is a convenient shorthand to think of socialism as simply being swept out and replaced by capitalism in the early 1990s, we should keep in mind Shields’s caution that the capitalist reforms of the 1990s were planted in what was already fertilized soil. 8. Following writers such as Shields (2012b) and Stenning et al. (2010), I speak of “neoliberalization” rather than “neoliberalism.” This term captures the fact that neoliberalism is not a single coherent unified project that gets diffused from one point of origin throughout the globe; rather, it is a set of policies, techniques, models, and practices that are adopted, negotiated, and “domesticated” (Stenning et al. 2010) differently in different places and that also change over time. 9. Throughout this work I define “discourses” in a Foucauldian sense, both as statements that provide a language for talking about a particular topic and as systems of representation (that is, the rules and practices that regulate what is or is not talked about). Discourse, therefore, defines and produces the object of our knowledge, since it governs what can be talked about and how (Foucault 2002). 10. However, see Ganev’s (2005) caution about overapplying the concept of neoliberalism to any and all changes and reforms that have taken place in East-Central Europe since 1989. 11. Over the past decade, anthropologists who conduct research in former socialist European states have debated whether the terms “postsocialism” and “postsocialist” are still relevant for referring to countries that followed very different trajectories since the collapse of socialist governments (see, e.g., Hann, Humphrey, and Verdery 2002; Mandel and Humphrey 2002). One of the arguments made by these scholars is that these terms will remain relevant for as long as the ideologies and practices of socialism continue to serve as a reference point for understanding present conditions. Since this work is concerned with how memories of the socialist past shape the present, I feel justified in retaining these terms for the purpose of this discussion. 12. This combined focus on both Nazi and communist-era crimes is noteworthy, for it illustrates a larger trend in the production of collective memory, both in Poland and across the European continent more generally. Since 1989, many Eastern and Central European countries have been reconsidering not only their socialist-era histories but also their histories of World War II. Though the connection between World War II and

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socialism may not seem obvious, it becomes clear once we realize that, following the war, Eastern and Central European countries fell under the Soviet Union’s political, economic, and ideological sphere of influence. This in turn had important consequences for how the war (and the Soviet Union’s role in it) could be remembered in official state accounts. Following the collapse of socialist governments across the continent, it became possible for East-Central European states to critically examine the historical accounts of World War II that were disseminated during the socialist period. Thus, in Poland, reconsiderations of World War II history are not only about World War II but also about the history of Polish-Soviet relations from the postwar period until 1989. For more in-depth discussions of the reconsideration of World War II histories in Poland as well as in Europe and the post-Soviet world more generally, see, e.g., Lebow, Kansteiner, and Fogu 2006; Ochman 2013; and Watson 1994. 13. For excellent summaries of how Poland’s various political parties since 1989 have invoked the socialist past in their programs, see Koczanowicz 2008; Nijakowski 2008; and Śpiewak 2005. 14. My use of the concept of keywords is inspired by Raymond Williams’s (1976) work. The linchpin of Williams’s argument is that the meanings of words change over time, as people use language to give meaning to changing political, economic, and social conditions. 15. In socialist Poland, all publicly disseminated information was screened by the Main Office of Control of Press, Publications and Shows (Główny Urząd Kontroli Prasy, Publikacji i Widowisk). 16. Examples of publications that offer alternative (usually left-leaning) perspectives on the past as well as present issues include Krytyka Polityczna (Political critique), Przegląd (Overview), Zdanie (Opinion), Bez Dogmatu (Without dogma), and the Polish edition of Le monde diplomatique. 17. The resolution is available at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do? pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+TA+P6-TA-2009-0213+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN, last accessed May 9, 2014. 18. The resolution on “European conscience and totalitarianism” recognizes and mourns Europe’s legacy of totalitarianism, which is defined as Nazism, fascism, and communism. By lumping together these three regimes (even though this does not mean that communism is equated with Nazism), the resolution thus imposes a particular way of remembering the socialist experience. In the following year, a number of prominent European politicians, human rights advocates, and historians signed a Declaration on Crimes of Communism (http://www.crimesofcommunism.eu/declaration.html, accessed May 9, 2014). The declaration condemns communism and calls for Europe-wide initiatives that include education about communist crimes and establishing an international court for the prosecution of communist criminals. 19. Some writers capture this interdependence by using the term “social memory” (e.g., Climo and Catell 2002; Fentress and Wickham 1992; Olick and Robbins 1998), whereas others speak of “living history” (Richardson 2008) or “mnemohistory” (Assman 2011). 20. My use of the concept of “framing” is inspired by Irwin-Zarecka’s work Frames of Remembrance (1994), which examines the different ways in which the past is “framed” in, and through, various representations and practices.

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21. Nora (1989) originally used the term to refer to sites such as museums, archives, anniversaries, celebrations, eulogies, treaties, monuments, sanctuaries, or books, which are created to convey particular ideological, political, or national ideas. However, my use of the term departs from Nora’s in a number of ways. For example, Nora argues that we create sites of memory at times when there is a break with the past, and thus “spontaneous memory” is lost. I do not believe this to be the case in Poland. Although I agree that the collapse of the socialist state constituted a “break with the past,” there is still plenty of “spontaneous memory” of socialism left. Furthermore, Nora’s work has also been subject to various critiques, for example, for omitting areas of historical conflict and division and thus denying the multiplicity of histories that exist within a national framework (e.g., Anderson 2004). I, on the other hand, am interested precisely in the multiciplity of narratives on the past that exist in Nowa Huta. Nonetheless, I borrow his concept of sites of memory as it constitutes an evocative metaphor for thinking about the different contexts in which memories about the past are produced and perhaps contested. 22. For example, one group whose voices are not well reflected in this work is that of the young cohort of oppositional activists of the 1980s—members of organizations such as Federacja Młodzieży Walczącej (Federation of Fighting Youth) or Niezależne Zrzeszenie Studentów (Independent Students’ Union). (I thank Marek Wierzbicki for drawing my attention to this.) This is not an intentional omission on my part; rather, my research simply led me down certain paths and not others.

Chapter 1. Memory and Change in Nowa Huta’s Cityscape 1. May 1, International Workers’ Day, was a holiday during the socialist period and remains one to this day. During the socialist period, the day was celebrated with parades, speeches, and athletic competitions. 2. For an excellent historical account of Nowa Huta during the Stalinist period, see Lebow 2013. 3. AK (Armia Krajowa, or the Home Army) was a Polish resistance movement during World War II, led by the Polish government in exile. Due to its ties to the government in exile, AK was perceived as an obstacle by Soviet forces. After the war ended many of its members were persecuted by the socialist government. 4. In Poland, it is customary to address strangers (and particularly one’s elders) with the polite form Mr./Ms. (Pan/Pani). In this work I retain the same forms of address for people as I used when speaking with them in real life. 5. However, Musiał and Zblewski (2002) note that the relative absence of conflict in Nowa Huta at that time might have been due to special efforts on the part of the authorities to prevent, identify, and suppress any evidence of dissent in the country’s model socialist town (see also Lebow 2013). 6. However, Szelenyi (1996) cautions that postsocialist cities have distinct patterns of development and cannot be seen simply as evolving toward the western model. 7. Nowa Huta is now composed of five administrative districts: Czyżyny, Mistrzejowice, Bieńczyce, Wzgórza Krzesławickie, and Nowa Huta. 8. However, see Fehervary 2011 for a nuanced discussion of the relationship between socialist and postsocialist housing in Hungary.

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9. Dramatic as this sounds, it is not entirely true. While shortages were indeed widespread, in fact the availability of products fluctuated from time to time, and despite stories of empty shelves, people always somehow managed to procure the necessities of life. 10. For examples of how the process of revitalization has been worked out and negotiated in different North American postindustrial towns, see Frisch 1998; Cameron 2000; Dudley 1994; High and Lewis 2007; Linkon and Russo 2002; Power et al. 2010; Stanton 2007. 11. For more on the process of renaming streets in Poland following the socialist government’s collapse, see Hałas 2004; Ochman 2013. For more on Nowa Huta street names in particular, see Stenning 2000. 12. Karol Janas, personal communication, October 26, 2009. 13. Peeing Lenin’s facebook page can be viewed at https://www.facebook.com/sika jacy.lenin.znowejhuty.krakow, accessed July 10, 2014. 14. For a more detailed account of Ożański’s life and legacy, see Kobylarczyk 2009; Lebow 2013. 15. More information about the ReNew Town project can be found at www.renew town.eu, accessed May 11, 2014.

Chapter 2. From Lenin to Mittal: Work, Memory, and Change in Nowa Huta’s Steelworks 1. There is an abundance of literature on the subject of industrialization in different places around the world. See, e.g., Nash 1979 for Bolivia; Nash 1989 for the United States; Ong 1987 for Malaysia; Chandavarkar 1994 for India; Drinot 2011 for Peru; and Ferguson 1999 for Zambia. 2. For a compelling discussion of the process of creating a working class in a “model socialist town” in Hungary, see Kurti 2002. 3. I thank Marek Wierzbicki for pointing this out. 4. I thank Marek Wierzbicki for drawing my attention to this. 5. The center’s full name is C. K. Norwid Cultural Center (Ośrodek Kultury im. C. K. Norwida), after famous Polish poet Cyprian Kamil Norwid. 6. The company’s web site is at www.arcelormittal.com/poland, accessed May 16, 2014. 7. This is the official figure from Poland’s main statistical office, available at http: //old.stat.gov.pl/gus/5840_2047_PLK_HTML.htm, accessed May 16, 2014. 8. Seven hundred złoty is less than one-third of the national average salary in 2013. In terms of buying power, it is roughly equivalent to seven hundred dollars a month in North America. 9. The phrase “there is no alternative” (popularly known as TINA) was often used by former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher to explain her decision to implement neoliberal economic reforms in the 1980s. 10. “The Party” is a colloquial expression for Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (PZPR), or the Polish United Workers’ Party, the socialist party that governed the country from 1948 to 1989. 11. The term “homo sovieticus” was first coined by Soviet writer Aleksandr Zinovyev and then picked up by a number of Polish intellectuals (e.g., Tischner 1992, Sztompka

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2000). It refers to a number of traits allegedly associated with the socialist worker, including passivity, learned helplessness, lack of initiative, and an elevated sense of entitlement. 12. These same traits, it is worth recalling, are often attributed to North American industrial workers (e.g., Dudley 1994). 13. However, this claim can be problematized if we consider that both popular and scholarly accounts of work in socialist states report instances of workers stealing from their workplaces, using company time and equipment to perform side jobs, or otherwise slacking off on the job (e.g., Dunn 2004, Mrozowicki 2011, Verdery 1996). Such behavior seems to suggest that rather than seeing themselves as the “true owners” of their companies, workers in fact believed that publicly-owned resources are in fact nobody’s, and thus up for grabs. 14. See for example Nash (1989), Dudley (1994), Bruno (1992), Linkon and Russo (2002), High and Lewis (2007), Doukas (2003). 15. For studies of company towns around the world see for example the collection by Dinius and Vergara (2011) for the Americas, Garner (1992) for Europe and North America, Horvath (2005) or Kurti (2002) for Hungary, and Kotkin (1995) for Russia. 16. For a comprehensive discussion of the differences between socialist and capitalist company towns in terms of the types of activities and institutions that were sponsored by the company, and the different motives underpinning this support, see Domański (1997).

Chapter 3. Between a Model Socialist Town and a Bastion of Resistance: Representations of the Past in Museums and Commemorations 1. The official name of this museum is the Historical Museum of the City of KrakÓw, Nowa Huta Division. However, in Nowa Huta the museum is popularly referred to as the “Nowa Huta Museum,” or “the Museum of Nowa Huta,” and therefore I also adopt these terms throughout this chapter. 2. A list of the various cultural, athletic and educational activities that took part under the banner of the sixtieth-anniversary celebrations can be viewed at http: //www.60nh.pl/pl/3/0/1/miasto-walki-i-pracy, accessed July 13, 2014. 3. Tater’s song can be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=K34vB1tnrj4, accessed May 16, 2014. 4. For example: Wiosna Solidarności (The spring of Solidarity), Miasto Gniewu i Nadziei (Town of anger and hope), Lekcja Historii (A history lesson), Dymy nad Arką (Smoke over the Lord’s Ark). 5. For example: Kapelan (Chaplain), Miasto bez Boga (A godless town), Na Środku Czerwonego Morza (In the middle of the Red Sea). 6. For example: Pięta Lenina (Lenin’s heel). 7. For the sake of brevity, my discussion of the church-state relationship is painted in broad brushstrokes. However, it is important to remember that neither “the state” nor “the church” is a homogeneous institution. Indeed, the church can simultaneously pursue “different, sometimes conflicting, goals at different levels of the organization,” from a cardinal down to the bishops and then to local priests (Osa 2003, 64). For example, during the 1980s the Catholic Church as an institution officially did not get

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involved in politics—though local priests certainly did. For detailed accounts of the role of the Catholic Church in Poland during the socialist period, see Dudek and Gryz 2003; Kubik 1994; Osa 2003; Żaryn 2003. 8. However, there is also some evidence that at different points throughout the socialist period, the church-state relationship was in fact much more collaborative and symbiotic than current hegemonic accounts would admit (Agnosiewicz 2010). 9. Nowa Huta’s neighboring villages include Ruszcza, Branice, Kościelniki, and Łuczanowice. 10. Człowiek z Marmuru (Man of marble) is the title of a classic Polish movie set in Nowa Huta, based on Piotr Ożański’s life history. It depicts the life of “work leader” Mateusz Birkut, a socialist hero who is ultimately used by the system. 11. Światowid is the name of a Slavic pagan god. 12. The events featured included the 1976 strikes in the towns of Radom and Ursus, the creation of the workers’ committees KOR and ROBCiO, the creation of Solidarity, martial law, strikes and clashes with ZOMO (the riot police), the role of priests in Solidarity activities, the role of Pope John Paul II, and finally the Roundtable Talks of 1989.

Chapter 4. Socialism’s Builders and Destroyers: Memories of Socialism among Nowa Huta Residents 1. In this chapter I focus on how people’s subjectivities are shaped by their generational position. However, I acknowledge that experiences, memories, and subjectivities are also mediated by a host of other factors, including age, life stage (e.g., parent, child), gender, and socioeconomic status. 2. May 1st is International Worker’s Day, which was a holiday similar to Labor Day in the socialist part of Europe. 3. In Poland dinner is served between 1 and 2 p.m. and is considered the main meal of the day, traditionally consisting of a soup and second. 4. Pharaoh ants are particularly large ants that at the time plagued the entire city, until teargas accidentally proved to be an effective method of extermination. 5. Bogdan Włosik was a vocational school student and an apprentice at the steelworks. He was shot to death by a secret police agent when heading home after a demonstration. 6. General Jaruzelski was at the time the first secretary of the United Workers’ Party, the leading political figure in the country. 7. In the years 1980–81, Solidarity membership stood at almost ten million people— just under half of the country’s total adult population at the time. Throughout the 1980s popular support for Solidarity fluctuated, but eventually culminated in a landslide victory for Solidarity-backed political candidates in 1989. 8. Tygodnik Powszechny was a Catholic weekly newspaper. Although not technically banned at the time, it was not officially accepted either. Józef Piłsudki was an important Polish statesman in the interwar period and a hero of Poland’s independence movement. During the socialist period his name was not mentioned in historical accounts because of his strong anti-Russian and anti-Soviet politics. Following the collapse of the socialist government, he is again depicted in state-sanctioned accounts as a national hero.

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9. A list of the Solidarity postulates formulated in 1980 can be found at http://www .solidarnosc.org.pl/21-postulatow, accessed May 17, 2014. 10. Silesia was one of the best-supplied areas in the country because it is Poland’s coal-mining region, and coal mining was one of the socialist state’s most prioritized industries. Furthermore, Edward Gierek, first secretary of the Workers’ Party (the highest political position in the country, equivalent to a president or prime minister) from 1970 to 1980, was himself from Silesia, and it was popularly believed that he “looked after his own.” 11. The sight of a person bearing several rolls of toilet paper strung on a rope was not unusual during periods of shortage. This picture was probably deemed “too political” because it drew attention to the failure on the part of the socialist state to supply the basic necessities of life. 12. The seventh PZPR meeting (VII Zjazd PZPR) was a meeting of the Workers’ Party that took place in 1975. Ms. Prażmowska implies that the resolutions that were undertaken at the meeting convinced her that the Party was committed to making changes. 13. For similar examples of how people manipulate state-sanctioned discourses see, e.g., Passerini 1987; Richardson 2008.

Chapter 5. My Grandpa Built This Town: Memory and Identity among Nowa Huta’s Younger Generation 1. Gierek’s decade refers to the decade of 1970 to 1980, named after Edward Gierek, who at the time was first secretary of the Workers Party, the highest-ranking politician in the country. The decade was characterized by rapid economic growth in the first half, followed by recession in the second half. 2. Radom is a Polish city where in June 1976 a major wave of strikes broke out, in which twenty thousand people took part. 3. Chocolate-like products (also known as compound chocolate) were produced in Poland in the 1980s as a way of coping with the shortage of imported cocoa. They had the look of chocolate, but were made from less expensive hard vegetable and tropical fats instead of cocoa butter. They were, and continue to be, perceived as inferior products. 4. Mieszko I was a Polish prince who ruled circa 960–92 AD. He is credited with bringing Christianity to Poland and consolidating the Polish state. 5. This particular school is located in Nowa Huta’s neighborhood of Mistrzejowice. During the 1980s, the local parish (St. Maximilian Kolbe) was a major site of political opposition. It was there that Father Jancarz, chaplain of Nowa Huta’s Solidarity, held his weekly Thursday “masses for the Fatherland,” attended by thousands of people. The church also organized meetings and conferences, as well as coordinated financial help for members of Solidarity who were imprisoned or fired from work. 6. The title refers to Nowa Huta’s history from its legendary beginning until the present. Wanda was a mythical Slavic princess after whom a mysterious mound located in Nowa Huta is named. Sendzimir was a Polish American engineer after whom Lenin Steelworks was renamed in the early 1990s. 7. In their respective analyses of German and Croatian textbooks, Dimou (2010) and P. Vodopivec (2010) arrive at a similar finding. Vodopivec, for instance, notes that “the dominant image of communism that Slovene and Croatian students will most likely

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get from recent history textbooks . . . [is] that communism was a politically repressive, popularly unattractive and economically inefficient system” (343). 8. This phenomenon has also been referred to as postmemory (Hirsch 2008) and prosthetic memory (Landsberg 2004). 9. In fact, the number of fatalities resulting from repression on the part of the state apparatus fluctuated over time. Periods of relative peace and stability were punctuated by periods of more intense repression. For example, during Martial Law (1981–83), dozens of people across the country were killed by special security forces during strikes or demonstrations (Dudek 2011). It is likely events such as these that make teenagers associate socialism with “people getting killed on the streets.” 10. Pope John Paul II is by far the most venerated figure in Poland, praised especially for his stance against the socialist government. In the 1970s he was the cardinal of Kraków and championed the construction of the Lord’s Ark church. After becoming pope he visited Nowa Huta in 1983 and consecrated another church that was built in the Mistrzejowice neighborhood. Many local representations emphasize his special connection to Nowa Huta. 11. This could be due to the fact that I spoke with many of the teenagers in small groups, which might have discouraged them from more in-depth personal reflections. It could also be a sign of young people’s limited knowledge of the past, which is being reduced to keywords such as “empty shelves.” 12. There are a number of Austrian forts around Kraków, remnants of the Austrian occupations of the city from 1848 to 1916. 13. The word dresiarze is largely synonymous with “hooligan,” stemming from the word dres, or track suit, a clothing style associated with soccer hooligans. 14. Klub 1949 has since reopened in a new location under the new name C-2 Południe. 15. For example: Wu-Hae, Tater, Szajka, and Proforma. 16. For example: Grzegorz Ziemiański and Paweł Suder. 17. Nowa Huta chronicles can be viewed at http://www.kronika.com.pl/odtwazacz /index.php?KID=last, accessed May 17, 2014. 18. Orr defines “community memory” as the knowledge that most members of the community share. Although “social distribution of this knowledge is not perfectly uniform . . . members of the community also know who of their number is most likely to know those answers which they do not” (1990, 169). 19. As this book goes to press in the fall of 2014, Poland’s Ministry of Education is implementing a new education curriculum. At present, it is too soon to tell how this will affect the teaching of socialist-era history. The new curriculum plan can be viewed at http://www.men.gov.pl/index.php/2013-08-03-12-10-01/podstawa-pr ogramowa/197-podstawa-programowa-wychowania-przedszkolnego-oraz-ksztalce nia-ogolnego-w-szkolach-podstawowych-gimnazjach-i-liceach#Tom4, accessed May 17, 2014. 20. The creation of Nowa Huta nativity scenes was a local initiative that improvised on Kraków’s tradition of nativity scene design. Kraków’s nativity scenes are characterized by the incorporation of local architecture as a backdrop for the setting of Jesus’s birth. Nowa Huta nativity scenes played on that tradition by using architectural elements specific to the district.

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Conclusion 1. The literature on the subject of nostalgia in former socialist states is abundant and still growing. See, e.g., Klumbyte 2008; Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004; Spaskovska 2008; Todorova and Gille 2010. 2. For similar findings on the role of popular memory in other former socialist states, see Watson 1994. 3. This does not mean that there has not been any organized opposition to government policies in Poland. However, the majority of protests break out in response to political or cultural issues (such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, the legalization of homosexual partnerships, or in vitro fertilization), rather than economic ones. Exceptions to this include periodic strikes by trade unions representing occupational groups such as nurses, rail workers, or coal miners. These protests, however, tend to be fairly isolated and short-lived. They also receive relatively little popular support and tend to be demonized in the mainstream media. This is the case especially when strikers hail from occupational groups that were privileged under the socialist arrangement (e.g., coal miners). 4. For discussions on the implementation of neoliberal arrangements in Chile, see, e.g., Grandin 2006; Taylor 2006; and Tomic, Trumper, and Hidalgo Dattwyler 2006. 5. In Poland, nationalism and Catholicism have been mutually enforcing forces for centuries (Porter-Szücs 2011) and continue to be so today. However, both hardcore nationalists and conservative Catholics are somewhat suspicious of the European Union’s influence on Polish society. For example, conservative Catholics in Poland often fear that the European Union’s laws and policies impose secular values on its member states—values that are said to be at odds with “traditional” Polish and Catholic values. Such value clashes take place most often around issues such as abortion, in vitro fertilization, and same-sex partnerships. 6. The rise of conservative, right-wing populism in Poland (and in Europe more generally) and its role in challenging aspects of neoliberal arrangements have in recent years become topics of growing scholarly attention. See, e.g., Ost 2005; Kalb 2009a, 2009b; Kalb and Halmai 2011; Shields 2012a. 7. It should be noted, however, that there are some pockets of left-leaning critique not associated with the “official” leftist party. One such example is the intellectual circle based around the publishing house Krytyka Polityczna (Political Critique). Over the past decade, this group has been developing and disseminating alternative perspectives on political, economic, and social issues. In time, these ideas may crystallize into a more widespread social critique of the political and economic status quo. 8. The publication of New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Bennett, Grossberg, and Morris 2005), thirty years after Raymond Williams’s seminal work Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), is an excellent example of the fact that keywords change over time. 9. One notable exception to this is Alice Mah’s (2012) Industrial Ruination, Community and Place. Mah’s work is a comparative study of three former industrial communities in the United States, England, and Russia.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures.

Abrams, Philip, 17 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 18 Academy of Advancement and Continuous Improvement (Akademia Postępu i Ciągłego Doskonalenia), 91 activism, 8, 144, 155 administrative center (steelworks), 64–65, 65 AGH. See Coalmining and Steelworking Academy AK. See Home Army Alliance of the Democratic Left (Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej), 7 Anders, Władysław, 53 Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, 204n3 apartments, 3, 83, 84, 128; described, 3–4; steelworks and, 81, 92, 95. See also Housing Applebaum, Anne, 193 Arcelor Mittal, 42, 79, 86, 90, 91, 146; Lenin Steelworks and, 66–72; orchestra and, 74; salaries at, 80; Western Europe and, 149 Architecture of the City, The (Rossi), 21 Arutowicz, Ms., 114, 115, 118 Association for Nowa Huta’s Development (Stowarzyszenie na Rzecz Rozwoju Nowej Huty), 147 athletics, 131–34, 152 Avenue of the Roses, 24 Avenue of the Six-Year Plan, 53 AWS. See Solidarity Voters’ Action Balcerowicz, Leszek, 134 Balicka, Katarzyna, 82

Baryłka, Jan, 79, 85, 135 Battle for the Cross, 37, 39, 55, 103, 106, 108, 114, 169; commemorations of, 104–5; exhibit on, 107; fiftieth anniversary of, 156, 157; involvement in, 168; local resistance and, 105; socialist government/religion and, 56; Solidarity and, 122 Bauman, Zygmunt, 46 Beliński, Aleksander, 84 Berdahl, Daphne, 46 Bez Dogmatu, 197n16 Bierut, Bolesław, 124 Binek, Tadeusz, 126 Birkut, Mateusz, 201n10 Brandstadter, Susan, 184 Branice, 47, 109, 201n9 Brasilia, construction of, 60 builders, 112, 125, 154 capitalism, 5, 41, 44, 50, 60, 99, 147, 149; adoption of, 196n7; neoliberalism and, 88; objection to, 184; postwar, 76; shift to, 46, 85; socialism and, 1, 12, 57, 87, 94, 97, 182, 187. See also Neoliberalism capitalist reform, 5, 76, 85, 96, 182, 187; layoffs and, 78; neoliberal, 11 Catholic Church, 56, 187, 204n5; public life and, 10, 109; resistance by, 10; role of, 200–201n7; socialism and, 188; socialist government and, 108–9 Ceauçescu Palace, 51 censorship, 8, 34, 39, 141, 144, 145, 151, 153, 159 Central Europe Project, 62 219

220 

index

central planning, 29, 41, 194 Central Square (Plac Centralny), 21, 22, 23, 25, 32, 43, 56, 57, 68, 173; monuments in, 58–59, 74; renaming, 62–63 change: economic, 1, 5, 6, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 20, 40, 97, 154, 180, 194; exploration of, 63; historical, 180; memory and, 183–91; political, 1, 5, 6, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 20, 40, 110, 154, 180, 194; social, 1, 5, 6, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 20, 26, 40, 154, 180, 189, 194 Charkiewicz, Ewa, 185 church-state relationship, 8, 108, 200n7, 201n8 CIA, 59 Ciępińska, Ms., 161, 162, 164 Ciepły, Tomek, 170 Cistercian monastery, 37, 113, 165 citizenship, 94; Fordist-Keynesian model of, 46, 99; neoliberal, 99; socialist period and, 75, 85 City of Kraków Historical Museum, 113 cityscapes, 56–57, 60, 61, 63 Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska), 7, 10, 61, 177 Coalmining and Steelworking Academy (Akademia Górniczo-Hutnicza) (AGH), 36, 73, 89 Cole, Jennifer, 154 collective action, 60, 61, 87, 96, 99, 184, 189 Combatants’ Museum, 173, 178 commemorative events, 9, 19, 101–12, 122, 123, 139, 165, 174; alternative, 122; sixtiethanniversary, 167 Committee for the Defense of the Name of Central Square (Komitet Obrony Nazwy Placu Centralnego), 57 communism, 84, 122, 174; criticism of, 197n18, 203n7; hopelessness of, 163 communist meals, typical, 52 communist paraphernalia, 3 communist tours, 1–2, 2 communist treat, 4 community: association, 49, 111; building, 101; narrative of, 120–23; ties, 95, 189, 190; work and, 96, 97 Congress of Polish Culture, 134 contention, narratives of, 120–23 corruption, 7, 35, 153 Crazy Guides, 1–2, 4, 51 creation stories, dark, 34–37 crime, 37, 44, 104

cross, 156; replica of, 38. See also Battle for the Cross cultural activities, 19, 73, 82–83, 134 cultural centers, 19, 102, 111, 131, 137, 141, 143, 165, 174; privatization of, 134 culture, 14, 50, 67, 103, 117, 131–34; dominant, 15; funding, 152, 153, 189; memory of, 112; spending on, 150 culture of the hands, 75 culture of the mind, 75 curriculum, 9, 159, 164–65, 203n19; history, 160, 163–164; socialist past and, 161 Czajka, Paweł, 78, 80 Czepczyński, Mariusz, 27 Dargiewicz, Jacek, 175 Decade of 1978–1989 (historical game), 117 Declaration on Crimes of Communism, 197n18 deindustrialization, 11, 12, 25, 44, 49, 62, 63, 66, 75, 94–96, 192 demonstrations, 8, 40, 135, 138, 169, 176, 183 development projects, 49, 62, 105 discourses, 100, 106, 151, 153, 181; alternative, 186; Europeanization, 187; Foucauldian, 196n9; national, 108; state-sanctioned, 123 Dukat, Piotrek, 173, 174, 175, 178; on postsocialist labor, 98 Dunn, Elizabeth, 87, 88, 93 economic arrangements, 8, 149, 157, 181, 186, 187, 188 economic conditions, 14, 44, 60, 63, 66, 68, 84, 93, 129–30, 152, 159, 182, 190 economic development, 25, 41, 50, 68, 96, 97; stimulating, 44–48; strategy, 50, 51 economic issues, 6, 13, 19, 145, 158, 187, 188, 191 economic order, 6, 15, 48, 53, 185 economic planning, 5, 26, 148 economic zones, 47, 48, 61 economy, 19, 57, 117, 192; Fordist-Keynesian model of, 99; national, 41, 153; neoliberal, 99; regulating, 41, 148; state and, 148 education, 8, 9, 73, 75, 113, 129, 131–32, 150, 152, 153, 160, 163–64; programs, 19; regional, 164; talks, 119; training and, 127; worldviews/ideologies and, 159 Empik (bookstore), 21, 43, 44 employment, 8, 34, 48, 73, 79, 130, 152; full, 153; peak of, 71; public-sector, 87; secure, 153; socialist-era, 78

index  

entertainment industry, 44, 46, 47 environmental awareness, 31, 68 environmental revitalization, 48–49 European Football Championship, 6 European Parliament, resolution by, 9 European Union (EU), 5, 48, 62, 76, 142, 146, 148; agendas/priorities of, 181; commemorative projects by, 9; Poland and, 61, 62, 149, 152, 193; secular values and, 204n5 European Union Regional Development Fund, 62 experiences, 96, 182, 188, 190, 193; personal, 156; socialist period, 118, 155 Falfasiński, Jerzy, 112 Federacja Młodzieży Walczącej (Federation of Fighting Youth), 198n22 festivals, 49, 50, 54, 64, 103 Filipowski, Mr., 162–63 Fordism, 12, 41, 75, 190, 191 Fordist-Keynesian model, 46, 94, 95–96, 99 Foucault, Michel, 185 Fountain of the Future, 54 Frames of Remembrance (Irwin-Zarecka), 197n20 Franczyk, Jan, 59 Frania (Franny) washing machine, 165 freedom of speech, 145, 146 Garda, Bartłomiej, 58 Garden City, 30, 31, 48 Gąsowski, Wojciech, 77, 81, 89, 90 Gawęda, Mr., 129, 133, 141, 146, 149, 151, 154 Gdańsk, 39, 164 generation, 189; historical, 17; memory and, 125–26, 151–55, 157, 177, 178–79; themes of, 180–83 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 195n3 Gierek, Edward, 159, 202n1, 202n10 Gil, Mieczysław, 119 global economy, 25, 149, 193 Głos Nowej Huty (Nowa Huta voice), 129 Głos Tygodnik Nowohucki (Nowa Huta voice), 102 Gorska, Ms., 161 government policies, 204n3; corporations and, 148 grain coffee (kawa zbożowa ), 170 Gramsci, Antonio, 189 green spaces, 31, 49 Grzybowska, Ms., 160, 161

221

Hajduk, Zosia, 170 Halbwachs, Maurice: memory and, 13 Hardy, Jane, 184 health care, 76, 84, 94, 153, 191 heritage, 59; debates about, 50; dissonant, 50; presocialist, 109–12, 113–14; projects, 49–51; socialist, 52; tourism, 1 High Chaparral, 53 high-rises, 33, 34 high school #11 (Liceum XI), 165, 172 historical conditions, 93, 159 historical consciousness, 167, 172, 177 historical events, 19, 182 Historical Museum of the City of Kraków, 200n1 history, 20, 25, 119, 160; concept of, 112; local, 11, 114, 164, 172, 173, 176; memory and, 13; multiplicity of, 198n21; national, 172; politics of, 7; presocialist, 110, 121; producing, 122; program, 165; regional, 109–10; socialistera, 3, 163, 177, 196n12 Hobsbawm, Eric, 177 Holston, James, 60 Home Army (Armia Krajowa) (AK), 26, 198n3 Homo Entreprenericus, 87–94 Homo Sovieticus, 87–94, 199n11 housing, 50, 83, 129, 190, 191; conditions, 46; cooperatives, 80; postsocialist, 198n8; postwar, 129; prewar, 35; shortage of, 35, 44, 130; single-family, 45; socialist, 198n8. See also Apartments Howard, Ebenezer, 31 Hutnik (Steelworker) (sports club), 132, 170, 174–75 identity, 15, 176, 179, 180, 190; building, 113, 121; collective, 112; ethnic, 12; gender, 12; local, 172, 178; memory and, 14; national, 10, 12, 152; place-based, 11; postsocialist, 57; regional, 12; religious, 12; sense of, 175; shaping, 16, 180 ideology, 17, 143, 153, 159, 178, 189, 192, 196n11; capitalist, 98; communist, 173; MarxistLeninist, 5; political, 32, 154; requirements, 141; socialist-era, 76. See also Socialist ideology IMF. See International Monetary Fund in vitro fertilization, 204n3, 204n5 income inequality, 46 income security, 76

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individualism, 5, 87, 94 Industrial Ruination, Community and Place (Mah), 204n9 industrial work, 36, 41, 75, 94; devaluing, 76; pay/benefits for, 79, 80 industrialization, 8, 11, 25, 51, 75, 76, 96, 99, 104, 110, 153, 199n1; processes of, 12; socialist, 94; Soviet-driven, 66 industry, 31, 65, 66; decline of, 75–76, 97; as heritage, 51; protecting, 150; socialism and, 51 inefficiency, 10, 14, 16, 117, 121, 139–40, 150, 151, 159, 167, 169, 178, 182; narrative of, 8, 188, 189; socialist period and, 176; information technology, 47, 103, 177 Institute of National Memory (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej) (IPN), 7, 8, 9 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 5 International Women’s Day, 84 International Workers’ Day, 198n1, 201n2 IPN. See Institute of National Memory Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona, 197n20 Janas, Karol, 72 Jancarz, Father, 56, 166, 167, 202n5 Jaruzelski, General, 117, 118, 135, 201n6 Jasiecki, Krzysztof, 88 Jelin, Elizabeth, 15, 16 Jencks, Charles, 44 job security, 76, 79, 98, 130, 170 John Paul II, Pope, 4, 38, 56, 169, 201n12; naming after, 53, 134; socialist government and, 108; veneration of, 203n10 John Paul II Avenue, 53 Jones and Laughlin steel mill, 96 Joseph Stalin 2 (tank), 178 Junacy SP. See Service to Poland Kalb, Don: neoliberalism and, 191 Kalicka, Ms., 91, 92, 93, 94 Kalinowska, Ms., 118 Kalisiak, Mr., 149 Kapuściński, Ryszard: on Nowa Huta, 35 Karkoszka, Urszula, 86 Karta Center, 8 Katowice, 70, 71, 77 Katowice Steelworks (Hula Katowice), 68, 70 Kierunek Nowa Huta (Destination Nowa Huta) (movie), 4

Klub 1949: 174, 175, 203n14 Kniewski, Władysław, 27 Kochanowski, Jan, 166 Komitet Fabryczny Huty, 128 Kowalczyk, Ms., 143–44 Kowalik, Ms., 77, 98 Kraków, 22, 26, 31, 48, 49, 72; apartments in, 128; architecture of, 32; clothing stores in, 42; conservative/bourgeois, 36; cost of living in, 45; cultural map of, 114; economic development strategy of, 51; film music festival in, 64; history and, 164; Nowa Huta and, 18, 25, 36, 37, 42, 44, 50, 61, 101, 102, 174, 175, 176, 178, 180; socialist government and, 104 Krytyka Polityczna (Politica l critique), 197n16, 204n7 Krzemiński, Mr., 136, 146–48, 149; firing of, 78, 86; market reforms and, 147; on salaries, 147; stories of, 130–31 Kukliński, Colonel: monument to, 58–59 Kurek, Marta, 175 Kurowski, Marek, 71, 79 Kwiecień, Władysław, 72–73, 77, 78, 88, 89, 112 labor, 26, 192; capital and, 76; costs, 149; market, 77; moral community of, 129; pool, 149; postsocialist, 98 landscapes: geopolitical, 1, 12; physical /conceptual, 66; urban, 16, 27, 100 language, 121; religion and, 108; socialist era, 99 Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość), 7, 10, 101, 109, 188; commemorative activities and, 102 layoffs, 76–77, 78, 92 Lebow, Katherine, 26, 60, 129, 189 Łęg neighborhood, 22 legacy, 105, 190; communist, 54; resistance, 55, 106, 112, 114, 115, 166, 167; socialist, 1, 6, 9, 52, 57–58, 60, 101, 115, 187, 188, 193 Lenin, Vladimir, 4, 27, 133, 195n2; statue of, 21, 53–54, 55, 105, 114 Lenin Avenue, 53 Lenin Steelworks, 34, 52, 73, 78, 81, 82, 141, 202n6; Arcelor Mittal and, 66–72; Nowa Huta and, 67, 67–68; Solidarity and, 97; strike at, 40; subsidies by, 67

index  

Leński, Julian, 27 lieu d’avenir, 192–94 lieu de memoire, 16, 192–94 Linkon, Sherry, 192 Lord’s Ark (Arka Pana) church, 38, 39, 40, 55, 72, 114, 135, 164, 169, 171, 176 Lowenthal, David, 177 Mah, Alice, 204n9 Majchrowski, Jacek, 101 Man of Iron (movie), 119 Man of Marble (exhibit), 114 Man of Marble (Czł owiek z Marmur u) (movie), 58, 115, 118, 201n10 Mannheim, Karl, 17 market economy, 85, 96, 97, 98, 134, 194 martial law, 3, 59, 117, 118, 137, 143, 151, 154, 159, 161, 166, 171, 203n9; declaration of, 106; end of, 40, 138; shortages and, 140; Solidarity and, 40; work restrictions and, 78 Marx, Karl, 27, 195n2 May Day parades, 53, 149, 159 Mazur, Amanda, 133 McDonald’s, 42, 173 memory, 1, 12, 50, 66; alternate, 15, 53, 169, 185; change and, 183–91; childhood, 158, 172, 173; collective, 13, 101, 112; community, 176, 178, 203n18; cultural, 14; diversity of, 20, 121, 182; family, 168, 178; finding, 18–20; framework, 13, 180; generations of, 125–26, 151–55, 157, 177–79; individual, 13, 14, 101; literature on, 14, 183; living, 168, 176; local, 11, 63, 181, 182; past/present/future and, 14; personal, 156, 177; placing, 60–63; political, 54, 62, 182; politics of, 6–10, 112, 181, 188; popular, 186, 204n2; positive, 150, 191, 192; producing, 11, 16, 122, 179; resistance and, 186; selective, 190; sites of, 59–60, 112–20, 123, 198n21; socialism as, 168–76; socialist period, 14, 50, 65–66, 114, 120, 123, 125, 151, 155, 176, 177; studying, 13, 16, 63; themes of, 180–83; variations in, 154; work of, 75–87, 96–99 memory making, 102, 112, 115, 121, 123 mentality, socialist-era, 87, 88, 89 Miasto bez Boga (A godless town), 105 Mieszko I, 163, 202n4 milk soup (zupa mleczna), 170–71 Ministry of Culture, 115 Ministry of Education, 203n19

223

Mistrzejowice, 167, 169, 202n5, 203n10 Mittal, Lakshmi, 70 Mittal Steel, 42, 48, 70, 76, 83, 89; changes at, 74; workers at, 88; workplace safety and, 87 Moda Polska (Polish Fashion), 21, 42 modernity, 50, 66, 70, 85, 87, 119 modernization, 34, 66, 85, 86, 90 monuments, 54, 55; caution about, 56; debates about, 59; erection of, 53, 58–59; memory and, 53 moral order, alternative, 134, 152 moral projects, 154, 190 movie theaters, 43, 46, 47, 50, 67, 102, 115, 119, 142, 165, 175 Museum of Nowa Huta, 100, 112, 113–15, 200n1 Museum of the People’s Republic of Poland (Museum of the PRL), 42, 100, 105, 112, 115–20, 158; exhibit at, 116; socialist period and, 113 museums, 13, 49, 50, 51, 141; exhibits at, 117; nation building/identity formation and, 113; representations, 123; as sites of memory, 112–20 Musiałek, Mr., 143, 145 “My Nowa Huta” (Moja Nowa Huta), 111 narratives, 8, 17, 151–55, 181, 184, 188, 189; community, 120–23; hegemonic, 14, 151, 152, 176, 182, 183; historical, 11, 104, 178; multiplicity of, 198n21; national, 15, 117, 167, 169; state-sanctioned, 121, 163 nationalism, 10, 187, 188, 204n5 Natzmer, Cheryl, 15 neoliberalism, 5, 41, 48, 63, 76, 87, 96, 97, 99, 149, 153, 184, 188, 192; capitalism and, 88; layoffs and, 77; opposition to, 191; principles, 5, 187; shift to, 12; socialism and, 90. See also Capitalism Niezależne Zrzeszenie Studentów (Independent Students’ Union), 198n22 Nora, Pierre, 13, 16, 198n21 Norwid, Cyprian Kamil, 199n5 nostalgia, 13, 52, 152 Nowa Huta, 23, 24, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 45, 102; after 1989, 40–44; central core of, 22; as communist town, 173; construction of, 26, 101, 103, 104, 110, 112; as district/ town, 195n4; good life in, 130, 131–34; growth of, 31–32; heritage of, 59, 109, 110, 113; history of, 20, 25, 104, 105, 113–14, 173;

224 

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(Nowa Huta cont.) Kraków and, 18, 25, 36, 37, 42, 44, 50, 61, 101, 102, 174, 175, 176, 178, 180; memory in, 60–63, 112; narratives of, 17, 151–55; as opportunity, 128–29, 154; positive image of, 36–37; postsocialist, 145–49; representations of, 22, 57, 108, 109–10, 130; sixtieth-anniversary commemorations of, 101–12, 122, 165, 174; as socialist town, 11, 127, 181; Solidarity and, 40, 109, 164, 166; studying, 10–12; urban plan of, 29 Nowa Huta Days, 68 Nowa Huta Museum, 100, 105, 109, 122, 164, 165, 176, 200n1; exhibit at, 106, 107; oral history collection at, 104 “Nowa Huta to the Future” (Nowa Huta Przyszłości) (project), 47, 72 Nowak, Mr., 160–62 Nugent, David, 190 Ochman, Ewa: on decentralization/pluralization, 121–22 October Revolution, 27, 142 October Revolution Avenue, 53 Od opozycji do wolności (From opposition to freedom), 105, 117 “Od Wandy do Sendzimira” (From Wanda to Sandzimir), 165 OKN cultural center, 72, 82, 103, 132, 133, 137, 138, 143, 165, 171, 175, 199n5 Ost, David, 98 Oświecenie neighborhood, 81 overemployment, 90, 97 Ożański, Piotr, 57, 58, 199n14, 201n10; movie about, 115 Ożański Square, 57–58 Papieros od prezydenta (A cigarette from the president) (movie), 154; described, 124 past: commemorating, 101–12, 102; future of, 177–79; historical, 122; interpretation of, 9, 20, 52; narratives of, 120, 184; political parties and, 7–8; reinscribing, 52–57; representations of, 12, 15; stereotypes of, 44. See also Socialist past Pawłowski, Mr., 29, 127, 128, 145, 173 Peeing Lenin (Sikający Lenin), 54, 199n13 People’s Republic of Poland (PRL), 1, 195n3; memory of, 176; as secular state, 108; summing up, 150, 153, 155, 162, 163, 168, 169, 171; terms for, 159 Pewex, dollar coupons for, 81

Piastów neighborhood, 81 pierogi, 100, 196n6 Piłsudski, Józef, 138, 201n8 Pine, Frances: on socialist past, 152–53 Plac Bieńczycki, entrepreneurs at, 171 place, 179; themes of, 180–83 “Poemat dla dorosłych” (Ważyk), 34 Polish steelworks (Polskie Huty Stali), 70 Polish Tourist and Sightseeing Societ y (Polsk ie Towarz yst wo Tur yst ycznoKrajoznawcze) (PTTK), 73–74 Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza) (PZPR), 142, 143, 149, 159, 199n10, 202n12 Polish Workers’ Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza), 36, 117 political agendas, 18, 159, 181 political arrangements, 8, 157, 186, 187 political conditions, 14, 44, 60, 63, 66, 68, 93, 97, 152, 159, 182, 190, 197n14 political economy, 15, 63, 85, 145, 189 political issues, 13, 19, 145, 158, 183, 187, 191 political opposition, 8, 108, 152, 172 political order, 6, 15, 53, 185 politics, 7, 19, 57, 117, 150, 187; austerity, 186; memory and, 13; socialist, 189 Popiełuszko, Jerzy, 56 populism, 191, 204n6 postindustrial society, 41; deindustrialization and, 94–96 postsocialism, 6, 12, 74, 88, 94, 96, 121, 196n11 postsocialist government, 6, 45, 46 poverty, postwar, 26 power plant, 24 Prague Spring, 161 Prażmowska, Dorota, 132–33, 136, 143, 150, 151, 189; resistance by, 144–45; retirement of, 138; socialist ideology and, 142 present, 125; political/economic possibilities for, 184 privatization, 41, 46, 69, 71, 73, 74, 83, 85, 97, 134, 146, 149, 190 PRL. See People’s Republic of Poland production, 5, 41, 47, 93 propaganda, 144, 151, 153, 159; communist, 58; film, 4; visual, 141 Przegląd, 197n16 Ptaszycki, Tadeusz, 27 public life, Catholic Church and, 10, 109 PZPR. See Polish United Workers’ Party

index  

Reagan, Ronald, 57 real estate development, 29, 44, 45 recession, 12, 39, 68, 99, 186 recreation, 73, 131–34, 132; funding, 152, 153; public funding for, 189; spending on, 150 reform, 41; capitalist, 5, 11, 76, 78, 85, 96, 182, 187; economic, 5, 25, 40, 57, 75, 95, 98, 134, 148, 152, 185, 188, 194; market, 98, 133, 147; political, 75, 95, 152; popular consent for, 6; unemployment and, 76, 78 reinvention, 44–52, 62 religion, 40, 105, 117; language/symbolism and, 108; resistance and, 109, 111, 112; socialist government and, 37, 56, 108, 111 ReNew Town, 62, 199n15 repression, 3, 10, 14, 16, 117, 121, 144, 145, 150, 159, 163, 167, 169, 172, 178; accounts of, 138; forms of, 141; narrative of, 8, 151, 152, 188; remembrances of, 138, 181, 182; resistance and, 134–39; socialist period and, 162, 187, 189 Resina, Joan Ramon: on society/memory, 184 resistance, 8, 10, 14, 16, 60, 121, 140–45, 150, 152, 159, 163, 167, 169, 178, 182, 189; history of, 114, 138, 166, 181; legacy of, 55, 106, 112, 114, 115, 166, 167; memory and, 138, 181, 186; narrative of, 8, 151, 188; political, 117, 118; religion and, 109, 111, 112; repression and, 134–39; site of, 37–40; socialist period and, 176 revitalization, 44–52, 62, 96, 145, 175, 199n10; projects, 48, 50, 59, 193 Ridan, Jerzy: movie by, 104 Rivers of Steel Heritage Area, 96 Roberts, Kenneth: on postsocialist generation, 169–70 rolling mills, 85, 86, 90 Ronald Reagan Central Square, 57, 62–63 Roseberry, William, 15, 16 Rossi, Aldo: quote of, 21 Roundtable Talks (1989), 40, 105, 106, 115, 160, 201n12 “Run for Włosik, A” (Bieg Włosika), 107 Russo, John, 192 Ryglowski, Damian, 91 Sacrum Profanum, 50 St. Bartholomew church, 110, 113 SB. See Security police school, 129, 141, 167 Secret Workers’ Committee, 106

225

security police (SB), 7, 8, 56, 155, 156, 159 Sendzimir, Tadeusz, 53, 70, 202n6 service industry, 41, 44, 47, 75, 95, 194 Service to Poland (Służba Polsce) ( Junacy SP), 26, 27, 115 Shevchenko, Olga, 172 shopping complexes, 46, 47, 50, 147 shortages, 3, 4, 8, 39, 84, 100, 153, 159, 170, 171, 172, 178, 183, 202n11; housing, 35, 44, 130; product, 69; socialism and, 169; socialist period and, 161; thoughts on, 139–40 Sikora, Ms.: on Nowa Huta/history, 164 Six-Year Plan, 26, 27 Skóra, Mr., 114–15 soccer team, 174–75 social affairs, 72, 82, 128, 157, 186 social conditions, 14, 60, 66, 152, 182, 191, 197n14 social issues, 6, 13, 19, 73, 76, 145, 188, 191, 192 social locations, 17, 19–20, 151 social memory, 13, 14, 184, 197n19 social order, 6, 25, 27 socialism, 5, 9, 11, 54, 60, 93, 95, 110, 178; archetypal spaces of, 66; benefits of, 170; building, 26, 27, 34, 44, 74, 124, 125, 153, 154–55, 190; capitalism and, 1, 12, 57, 87, 94, 97, 182, 187; Catholic Church and, 188; contestation of, 37–40; criticism of, 87; destroying, 154–55; as dissonant heritage, 50; experiencing, 96, 182, 183; as history, 159–67; as ideology, 143, 196n11; industry and, 51, 75; legacy of, 1, 6, 9, 52, 57–58, 60, 101, 115, 151, 187, 188, 189, 193; memory of, 4, 168–76, 198n21; neoliberalism and, 90; perceptions of, 172; postsocialism and, 88; resistance to, 57, 104–9, 140–45, 154; return of, 61, 134, 189; shift from, 46; support for, 154 socialist buildings, landmark, 52 socialist government, 7, 11, 103, 110, 115, 121; athletic activities and, 131–32; Catholic Church and, 108– 9; col lapse of, 5, 6, 12, 15, 17, 40–41, 47, 52, 56, 57, 69, 70, 75, 85, 96, 98, 104, 106, 109, 117, 125, 158, 159, 160, 161, 177, 180, 182, 184, 186, 191, 193; critique of, 118; loyalty to, 78, 143; opposition to, 15, 53, 108, 131, 188; positive aspects of, 98–99; religion and, 37, 56; resistance to, 3, 10, 37, 38, 40, 55, 56, 59, 101, 104, 112, 114, 121, 122, 124, 140, 169, 181, 182, 186

226 

index

socialist ideology, 27, 67, 94, 129; pervasiveness of, 142; religion and, 37; technology and, 85 socialist past, 1, 50, 61, 113, 114, 183, 186, 188, 197n13; evoking, 152–53; interest in, 120; knowledge of, 170; memory of, 151–52, 158, 182; narrative of, 181; nostalgia of, 154; opposition to, 184; picture of, 162; present and, 44, 179; treatment of, 161; younger generation and, 177–79 socialist period, 17, 34, 37, 53, 54, 100, 125, 142, 144, 147, 151, 156, 160, 162, 164, 167; citizenship and, 75; depicting, 61, 109; experiences of, 118, 155, 169; failure of, 163; hegemonic narrative of, 182; history of, 104, 119; knowledge about, 158, 159; life during, 118, 125, 157; memory of, 14, 50, 65–66, 114, 120, 123, 125, 151, 155, 158, 176, 177; representations of, 115, 134, 149, 159 socialist project, 26–27, 182, 184 socialist realist style, 21, 32, 33, 34, 114 socialist state, 121, 152, 158, 184; collapse of, 41, 69–70, 81; language/symbols of, 108; nostalgia for, 204n1; opposition to, 138, 139, 188; repression by, 141, 145, 153 socialist towns, 101, 103–4, 127, 167; capitalist towns and, 200n16; model, 25–29, 31–32, 34, 100, 104, 193, 199n2 society, 19; memory and, 184 Solidarity, 3, 20, 47, 90, 93, 98, 104, 106, 114, 123, 136, 137; activists, 108, 115, 155; Battle for the Cross and, 122; branches of, 40; commemorative activities by, 139; creation of, 39, 135, 1 43, 1 4 4, 201n12; emergence of, 69; involvement in, 126, 170, 17 1; leadership of, 155; legacy of, 105; Lenin Steelworks and, 97; membership in, 40, 138, 139, 201n7; monuments to, 56, 74 ; ne t work s of, 15 4 ; Now a Huta and, 40, 109, 164, 166; strikes by, 125, 169 Solidarity altar, 166 Solidarity Avenue, 53 Solidarity Voters’ Action (Akcja Wyborcza Solidarność) (AWS), 7 Solidarność ’80: 91, 92 Soviet Bloc, 11, 25, 28, 41, 53, 60, 103 special economic zones, 47, 192 sports, 49, 82, 83, 131, 132 Square after Lenin (Plac po Leninie), 114

Square by the Post Office (Plac przy poczcie), 58 Stal (movie theater), 165 Stalin, Joseph, 26, 34 Stalinism, 31, 115, 160 Stasiewicz, Tomasz, 83–84 Statuepark, 51 steel production, 42, 66, 68, 90, 104 steelworkers, 68, 69, 76, 80, 126, 149, 150; accounts of, 88, 95; layoff of, 78; retired, 127; strike by, 56 steelworks, 23, 25, 35–36, 41, 46, 47, 50, 51, 61, 62, 63, 66, 78; administrative center of, 64–65, 65; apartments and, 81, 92, 95; building, 111, 112, 124; changing role of, 72–75; culture and, 132–33; decline of, 42; employment at, 34, 73, 79, 96–99; foreign investment in, 48; history of, 74, 75; influence of, 180–81; political upheavals and, 60; pollution by, 49, 69; privatization of, 71, 146; provisions from, 83–84; reorganization of, 70; technologica l improvements at, 85; trips to, 81–82 Steelworks’ Wind Orchestra, 74 Stenning, Alison, 187, 189 Stępień, Ms., 147–48, 149 street names, changing, 53, 199n11 strikes, 3, 8, 69, 125, 135, 137, 138, 144, 151, 159, 164, 169, 170, 171, 172; occupational, 109, 136, 155; security forces and, 203n9; student, 161; waves of, 39 Stylowa (restaurant), 2, 22 subjectivities, 17, 87–94, 180, 183 Suder, Paweł, 203n16 summer camps, 82, 83, 170–71, 172 Światowid, 115, 201n11 Świt (Dawn), 43 Szewczyk, Tomasz, 72, 128, 149, 153, 154; on cultural/leisure activities, 82–83 Szklane Domy (Glass Houses), 55–56 Szydłowska, Małgorzata, 54 Szydłowski, Bartosz, 54 Szymborska, Wisława, 27 Tadeusz Sendzimir Steelworks, 70 Tajna Komisja Robotnicza Hutników NSZZ Solidarność, 106 Tater, 105, 203n15 Teatr Ludowy (People’s Theater), 102 technology, 41, 75, 86, 97; disciplinary, 185; information, 47, 103, 177; socialist-era, 85

index  

Tesco, 42 Thatcher, Margaret, 199n9 thaw of 1956: 34, 37, 160, 161 Tomex, 42 tourism, 47, 50, 96, 103; communist, 1–2, 51–52 town of youth (Miasto młodości), 183 Trabants, 2, 4, 196n5 trade unions, 39, 76, 82, 86, 94, 98, 144; outsourcing and, 92; regional structure of, 155; state-controlled, 128; strikes by, 204n3; work arrangements and, 97 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 11 Twaróg, Maciej, 58 Tygodnik Powszechny, 108, 138, 201n8 unemployment, 42, 79, 95, 97, 98, 130, 153, 170, 189, 192, 194; benefits, 77; combatting, 190; reform and, 76, 78; social problems and, 76; socialist period, 71 UNESCO, world heritage sites and, 50 United Workers’ Party, 201n6 unskilled workers, 90, 98 urban decline, 192, 194 urban environment, 41, 60 urban planning, 25, 32, 41, 45, 49, 50, 60, 103, 189; Soviet, 27–28 urbanization, 25, 27, 110 Urocze neighborhood, 171 values, 87–94; shift in, 45, 75–76 Vodopivec, Peter, 202n7 volunteer labor brigades, 31, 125, 159

227

Wajda, Andrzej, 115, 118, 119 Walczak, Mr., 47–48 Wałęsa, Lech, 160 Wanda’s mound, 113 Ważyk, Adam, 34, 35 Wiedza o Społeczeństwie (WOS), 160 Wierchoła, Grzegorz, 88 Williams, Raymond, 197n14, 204n8 Winter, Jay, 13 Włosik, Bogdan, 55, 164, 201n5 “Wojna polsko-jaruzelska” (Poland-Jaruzelski war) exhibit, 116, 117 Wojtyła, Cardinal Karol, 38. See also John Paul II, Pope work, 87–94, 129; arrangements, 81, 88, 96, 97; community and, 96, 97; informal, 95; memory of, 75–87, 96–99 work leaders, 58, 100 Workers’ Party, 149, 202n1, 202n10, 202n12 World Bank, 5, 196n7 World War II, 160, 171, 177; memories of, 168; Polish-Soviet relations and, 197n12 Woźniak, Mr., 144 Zachwatowicz-Wajda, Krystyna, 115 Zdanie, 197n16 Zielarski, Józef, 35, 36 Ziemiański, Grzegorz, 203n16 Zinovyev, Aleksandr, 199n12 ZOMO, clashes with, 37, 135, 136, 156, 162, 168, 171, 201n12 Zubrzycki, Jan, 73, 139, 140