Rooms for Manoeuvre: Another Look at Negotiating Processes in the Socialist Bloc [1 ed.] 9783737013369, 9783847113362

Citation preview

Zeitgeschichte im Kontext

Band 15

Herausgegeben von Oliver Rathkolb

Die Bände dieser Reihe sind peer-reviewed.

Jerzy Kochanowski / Claudia Kraft (eds.)

Rooms for Manoeuvre Another Look at Negotiating Processes in the Socialist Bloc

V&R unipress Vienna University Press

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über https://dnb.de abrufbar. Veröffentlichungen der Vienna University Press erscheinen bei V&R unipress. The publication was co-funded by the National Science Centre (NCN), Poland, as part of the project “Rooms for Manoeuvre in State Socialism: Between Adaptation and Experiment” (project no. UMO-2014/15/G/HS3/04344). Gedruckt mit freundlicher Unterstützung des Dekanats der Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Universität Wien. © 2021 V&R unipress, Theaterstraße 13, D-37073 Göttingen, ein Imprint der Brill-Gruppe (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Niederlande; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Deutschland; Brill Österreich GmbH, Wien, Österreich) Koninklijke Brill NV umfasst die Imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, Verlag Antike und V&R unipress. Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Das Werk und seine Teile sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung in anderen als den gesetzlich zugelassenen Fällen bedarf der vorherigen schriftlichen Einwilligung des Verlages. Umschlagabbildung: Die Fotografie auf dem Cover zeigt das Dorf Golzow im Oderbruch (DDR) im Jahr 1978. Es stammt von dem Berliner Fotografen Erhard Stiefel. Er nahm das Bild für die filmische Langzeitproduktion von Barbara und Winfried Junge, „Die Kinder von Golzow“, auf. (Archiv Filmmuseum Golzow / ZLB/L 1643-1652/80). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISSN 2198-5413 ISBN 978-3-7370-1336-9

Contents

Preface

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Jerzy Kochanowski / Claudia Kraft Introduction: “Rooms for Manoeuvre” – a New Paradigm for the Research of State Socialist Societies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part I: Socialist Space-Time Maria Hetzer Negotiating Economic Development and Everyday Needs in Rural GDR and Beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Martin Jemelka The Unified Cooperative Farm – Agrocombine Slusˇovice: Genesis, Tradition, Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Juraj Buzalka Room to Manoeuvre under State Socialism and the Memory of Livelihood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part II: Peripheries Dusˇan Segesˇ A Failed “Marriage”: The Attitude of the Peasants and the Government Toward the First Stage of Collectivisation in the Presˇov Region (1949– 1953) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jerzy Kochanowski A ‘Free City’? The Zakopane of Władysław Gomułka, 1956–1970

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. . . . . 119

6 Błaz˙ej Brzostek “Spaces for Freedom” of the Romanian Littoral Zone 1960–1980

Contents

. . . . . 141

Markus Krzoska The Devastation of Villages in the German-Polish Lignite Mining Region of Zittau-Bogatynia between 1980 and 2000. Opportunity or Threat for Local Residents? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

Part III: Privacy in State Socialism Jakub Gałe˛ziowski Single Mothers and Their Babies in Poland in 1945–1949. The Social Care System vs. Female Freedom and Subjectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Barbara Klich-Kluczewska Far from a Children’s Home. Adoption and the Question of Individual Agency in the People’s Republic of Poland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Maria Buko Repressed Personality – Privacy as a Room for Manoeuvre of Sybiraks in the Polish People’s Republic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231

Part IV: Rooms for Experts Matthias Barelkowski Communication with(out) Borders? Amateur Radio in the People’s Republic of Poland – From Personal Hobby to Social Imperative and State Surveillance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Theodore R. Weeks Esperanto in People’s Poland: Internationalism, Public Space, Propaganda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303

Preface

This anthology, edited by Claudia Kraft and Jerzy Kochanowski, is a valuable addition to the series “Zeitgeschichte im Kontext” (“Contemporary History in Context”). On the basis of international case studies presenting an experiential history of state socialism, the propaganda image of the Cold War is deconstructed with regard to the rooms for manoeuvre available to social actors. While in the “West” a monolithic portrayal of a rigid, thoroughly organized system was communicated up to 1989, this volume analyses many examples of societal rooms for manoeuvre in Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR. On the one hand, we have the people’s adaptations to their respective national communist societies and the rules of the regimes, while on the other hand, we can observe social practices, for instance in Polish mountain regions or Czech-PolishGerman border regions, that even led to the introduction of market-oriented state enterprises. Of course, it would be illusory to assume that these were spaces free of hegemony, but at the same time new internal social dynamics are revealed that had hitherto remained concealed. It is remarkable that such rooms for manoeuvre had an impact not only in individual cities or border regions but also in spheres ranging from social and family policy to amateur radio or agricultural cooperatives. This volume also represents an important contribution to an open and innovative history of Europe, the long-term impact of which extends far beyond 1989/1991. Vienna, May 2021

Oliver Rathkolb

Jerzy Kochanowski / Claudia Kraft

Introduction: “Rooms for Manoeuvre” – a New Paradigm for the Research of State Socialist Societies*

The scholarly examination of the state socialist societies in Central and Eastern Europe can now look back on a history of almost thirty years. And, already, it again presents itself as an object of historicization. In the countries of the former “Eastern Bloc” as well as in Western European and North American historiography, the examination of this political and social constellation is no longer pursued merely as a history of “coming to terms with the past.” Rather, it has developed into a separate field of contemporary historiography that encompasses a variety of topics and methodological approaches. Nonetheless, the process of historicization also repeatedly sparks debates about the admissibility or inadmissibility of specific research questions and approaches as well as about the (historical) political instrumentalization of that epoch. Historical scholarship strives to find ways to avoid a blatant juxtaposition between “system” and “everyday life” or “system” and “society.” Still, time and again, it must be pointed out that the study of history and the social or political use of history cannot be separated, but often overlap.1 At the same time, debates taking place within the respective national context have led to a situation in which innovative and selfreflective research approaches have had a hard time coming to terms with the use of history for the purpose of constructing identity. In this respect, Poland is a particularly interesting case. After the political upheaval of 1989, although the character of the socialist state was discussed in public, the debate was still mainly carried out by academics.2 This high-level intellectual exchange of views in daily * This volume is the result of the German-Polish research project “Rooms for Manoeuvre in State Socialism: Between Adaptation and Experiment”, which was funded by the Polish National Science Centre (NCN, project no. 2014/15/G/HS3/04344) and the German Research Foundation (DFG, project no. ROOMS, KR 3510/2-1) at the Universities of Warsaw and Siegen as part of the “Beethoven” funding initiative. 1 As, for example, in the case of the expert commission’s deliberations on the creation of a historical network for coming to terms with the SED dictatorship, which were the starting point for a multi-faceted debate, documented in Sabrow 2007. 2 The most important positions were collected in Fik 1996.

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and weekly newspapers contributed significantly to awakening an interest in a well-founded historical study of the People’s Republic of Poland beyond a onedimensional depiction of the authoritarian state vs. oppressed society.3 Be that as it may, the debate on the character of the People’s Republic of Poland became highly polarized. It gave rise to axiomatic positions that insist on the need to deal with the recent past, above all, with the moral condemnation of an objectionable “system” in order to provide society with a contemporary moral compass.4 One way to deconstruct such identity-forming narratives is to use a comparative perspective that does not ignore country specifics, but considers historical constellations that were also shaped by the transnational elements of specific social and political configurations. The point of departure of the German-Polish research project “Rooms for Manoeuvre in State Socialism,” which apart from Poland also looked at the GDR, Romania and Czechoslovakia, was therefore the question of how the dissimilar paths through socialism, which not least depended on the respective prehistories, could be brought into a common research perspective. In this context, it was critical to avoid levelling the differences, but rather to look for spatial and temporal parameters by which the differences could be better understood. We anticipated that this comparative perspective would provide us with a more open view on research questions that have already been frequently raised.5 One specific challenge of international research projects lies particularly in the need for constant translation. This not only involves linguistic translation, but also the transfer and adaptation of concepts and, finally, the very different weighting of topics and research questions in the respective social contexts, which also needs to be communicated. An aspect of translation was also dealt with at the beginning of the research project, whose results are now available in this volume. The idea of “open spaces” or “wolne przestrzenie,” which the Polish author and co-editor of this volume, Jerzy Kochanowski, had brought into the debate, was intended to bring into focus social, political, but also geographical spaces which were decidedly not understood as spaces for oppositional action, as apolitical “niches” or – when it came to spaces of private economic initiatives – as the “Trojan horse” of capitalism in the socialist planned economy. Rather, the 3 Particularly impressive is the documentation in almost 60 volumes of the series “W krainie PRL” (In the Land of the People’s Republic of Poland), which was issued by the Warsaw publishing house Trio from 2000–2011. 4 See Stobiecki in 2002 and Peters in 2016, especially for the period since the right-wing conservative Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwos´c´, PiS) took office in 2015. 5 The merit of having already asked these questions, also in a comparative and transfer-historical perspective, goes to the project “Hidden Paths within Socialism,” which dealt with informal contacts in the state socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, Borodziej/ Kochanowski/v. Puttkamer 2010a and more comprehensively Borodziej / Kochanowski / Puttkamer v. 2010b.

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aim was to identify those geographical, social and institutional spaces in which individuals and groups combined the logics of action of the social system with their own interests, goals and values and thereby often contributed to the stabilization of state socialist rule. Emphasis was placed on adopting both diachronic and synchronic perspectives. The former focused both on the respective pre-socialist legacy and the rapid change in times of political and social upheaval. The presence of historically different sets of experiences as well as the expectations for the future brought about by the socialist course of modernization could be a resource for historical actors to (re)claim their agency. Geographically peripheral regions could develop into experimental fields for new social or economic constellations, within which “peripherality” became an advantage over the power residing at the center. The concept of “Rooms for Manoeuvre” was initially only a translational approach to “open spaces”, which were neither considered to be spheres of total autonomy nor spaces that existed beyond human agency. Ultimately, it proved to be a flexible and open-ended conceptual instrument by means of which very different subprojects could enter into fruitful communication. Against this backdrop, it should be noted, for example, that Alf Lüdtke’s concept of “Eigensinn” (stubbornness) with its perspective on everyday history provided important methodological impulses for many project members. In an English text, which similarly deals with the agency of historical actors in modern mass dictatorships, the author located ambivalences and ambiguities in the behavior of historical actors likewise semantically in a “room for manouvering.”6 Rooms for manoeuvre has proven to be a productive research concept in two respects. First of all, “rooms” can be understood as social or geographical spaces. Spaces are always experienced and appropriated by the actors. At the same time, physical spaces, but also spaces of representation, have an impact on historical action.7 In all projects, the relationship between the actors, who are restricted but also empowered by specific spatial constellations and simultaneously shape their social or physical environment through action, was a major factor. We underscore this because historical experiences are accumulated in spaces (there are phenomena of preserving practices and resiliencies), so that we find different layers of time in space, which are experienced by the historical actors as realms of experience and horizons of expectation.8 We consider this to be particularly important at a time when state socialism is being re-historicized. This is especially true in view of the new experiences that have been accumulated since 1989,

6 Lüdtke 2016, p. 13, p. 23, p. 29. 7 Hirschhausen v. / Grandits / Kraft / Müller / Serrier 2019. 8 Koselleck 2004.

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and given that we were convinced from the very start that we also had to include the pre-socialist period in our analysis. Second, the metaphor of “manouvering” refers to actor-centered approaches. Here, we refer to Alf Lüdtke’s reflections on “domination as social practice.”9 He thus describes a field of interaction between those in power and those subject to it, which – depending on the situation – is characterized by mutual evasion and exploitation of the other’s weaknesses as well as cooperation. In short, each party is looking after their own interests. The various concepts at play here include: “adaptation,” “assimilation,” “mimicry” and “stubbornness.” Lüdtke’s approach, which he already developed in the 1980s, remains innovative within research on modern forms of authoritarian regimes. It is especially useful for describing constellations in which people are not autonomous in their actions, but nevertheless enabled to transform dominant patterns of behavior into something new through adaptation – something that seems to elude total control by political institutions and social norms.10 In addition to Lüdtke’s “Eigensinn” (stubbornness), Michel de Certeau’s “practices of everyday life” also proved instrumental for the analysis. The author distinguishes between the “strategies” of the powerful, who are able to occupy places and dictate the conditions for action, and those of the less powerful actors. The latter develop tactics that may not allow them to escape the framework conditions, but they can still use the established order for their own purposes.11 De Certeau uses spatial categories to highlight the specific capacity of the actors to act. He explicitly distinguishes between spaces and places. Places are effectively created by the powerful, who exist independently of them. For their part, the less powerful cannot escape this order, yet they still have agency. It is through their actions that they turn places into spaces. De Certeau describes the latter as being filled with everyday practices which the actors manage to adapt to their own interests within the given social order.12 In this way, they essentially escape this order without leaving it13 and create a space for themselves to act – in a word, room for manoeuvre. 9 Lüdtke 1991. 10 The research concept of “Eigensinn” is difficult to translate into other languages and, in Lüdtke’s English essays, for example, it often remains in the original German: Alf Lüdtke, “Cash, Coffee-Breaks, Horseplay: Eigensinn and Politics among Factory Workers in Germany circa 1900,” in: Michael Hanagan/Charles Stephenson (eds.), Confrontation. Class Consciousness, and the Labor Process. Studies in Proletarian Class Formation, New York 1986, pp. 65–95. For the history of the term, see also “Eigensinn” in Lindenberger 2015. For the Polish translation of the concept in an anthology with texts by Alf Lüdtke and Thomas Lindenberger, the term “samo-wola” (arbitrariness) was chosen, see Lindenberger / Lüdtke 2018. 11 de Certeau 1988, p. XIX. 12 Ibid., pp. 117–122. It is worth pointing out here that East Central European scholars have also been thinking – albeit from a more social science perspective – about how social action can be

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Heuristically, what exactly is the added value of the concept of rooms for manoeuvre? As historians working on Central and Eastern Europe, we are often confronted with the fact that our research is framed and put into a certain perspective by other, more systematically oriented disciplines. In the study of state socialism, sociology occupies an important position, for example when it postulates that socialist societies were unstable precisely because of their rigid institutional order. The primacy of the political over all other forms of societal challenges meant that these societies were not able to react flexibly to change and thus failed to attain a key accomplishment of modern societies, namely ensuring stability through flexibility.14 For our research perspective, it has proved immensely useful to include not only this sociological ex-post perspective, but also sociological self-descriptions in the countries from the late phase of state socialism under analysis. The Polish sociologist Andrzej Rychard, for example, provided such a self-description in 1987. He explained how it was precisely through the state’s omnipresent interference in society that overlaps emerged between the interests of “society” and those of political leadership. Even if they were not on an equal footing, cooperative relationships nonetheless arose that contributed to the stability of the system. The society, which pursued pragmatic interests, adopted an attitude of active adaptation (“aktywne dostosowanie”). In the process, it not only changed itself, but also the system, stabilizing and making it more effective, for instance through informal economic activity.15 Indeed, from his intimate knowledge of his own experience with state socialism, Wolfgang Engler developed the concept of the “bargaining society” with regard to the GDR after it had collapsed.16 The authors in this volume pursue a precise historicization and trace how the historical actors created rooms for manoeuvre in which, under the conditions of the given political and social order, their own interests and goals were aligned with those of the “system.” The developing coexistence had very different impacts on the “system.” If we could tell the history of state socialism as a history of recurrent crises and subsequent “normalizations” without repeating a teleology of failure, then this would allow us to create a multidimensional perspective through which we could focus on the treatment of the unintended consequences of actions.

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described in a political system that strongly controls social spheres of action. Concepts were developed such as the “second society” for Hungary, Hankiss 1988 and “społeczen´stwo drugiego obiegu” (society of the second circuit) for Poland, Marody 1999. de Certeau 1988, p. 13. Lepsius 1994, on sociological interpretations of (the end of) state socialism, see also Ettrich 2005. Rychard 1987. Engler 1997.

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It therefore seems reasonable to consider rooms for manoeuvre as a research perspective (in the sense of a “creative metaphor”17) rather than as fixed geographical or social spaces. In this way, we avoid the danger of seeing special zones, which are less affected by the disciplinary power of the state, as the “flip side” of normal state socialism. If we were to assume such a “flip side,” our research might either lead to the banalization of state socialism as a social order or to the unquestioned confirmation of its claim to the comprehensive exercise of power beyond these allegedly “open spaces.” We obtain a more precise picture of state socialism if we are prepared to think of spaces as constantly being produced according to the situation. Taking recourse to Lüdtke’s everyday history is particularly useful here.18 Its guiding principle is not to examine the supposedly apolitical everyday life in modern interventionist states, which extend their claim to power to the very last recesses of society. Rather, everyday history asks how the actors deal with these omnipresent impositions and how they can appropriate them. Of course, it would be naïve to assume that all historical actors had the same resources at their disposal that made them manoeuvrable. It is therefore important to take into account the institutional and political context. However, our examples have shown that situational appropriations can change the scope of action and that at the same time certain spatial constellations influence agency. This, in turn, has prompted us to reconsider the respective capacity to act. Michel de Certeau stressed the often unconscious nature of the tactics underlying everyday practices, as opposed to the carefully planned strategies designed by many kinds of social institutions to control behavior and regulate relationships. Nevertheless, in view of our case studies, it seems appropriate to consider the continuum of strategies and tactics rather than their mere juxtaposition. As research in several of our subprojects has shown, less powerful historical actors were also able to act strategically, while powerful institutions and their representatives were forced to resort to improvised tactics.

Contributions of the volume Socialist Space-Time What was state socialism? Is it a self-contained epoch? Or is it part of a larger historical continuum that cannot be understood without including pre-socialist legacies in the analysis and examining how the historical actors combined the

17 Hirschhausen v. / Grandits / Kraft / Müller / Serrier 2019, p. 368. 18 Lüdtke 1995.

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radically new with the traditional forms of life and economy?19 There was a mixture of new political and economic rationalities, on the one hand, and existing ways of life and even resistant materialities (be it natural areas or infrastructures), on the other. It is therefore difficult to speak of “the” state socialism that eventually asserted itself and then continued in its “real socialist” variant until the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989. Even the often apologetically used term “real existing socialism” indicates that this system was far removed from the original social utopia and nevertheless relevant to lived experiences It was precisely the mixture of pre-socialist orders and norms and newly created institutions and value systems that often contributed to the emergence of a specific socialist “space-time,” which was not a rigid system but a situation that had to be stabilized through constant negotiation processes.20 This observation affirms that state socialism is not to be regarded as a rigid monolithic “system.” Rather, in its forty years of existence, it was characterized by dynamic social change and phases of accelerated or delayed modernization, which varied greatly from sector to sector. What is more, generational changes led to the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous.21 The authors of the articles collected here show that state socialism was not a fixed system. Instead, ideas and debates were formed about it through the manner in which actors created spaces via their actions and expressed ideas about a socialism that had failed or was still unrealized. This might be summed up in the words of Doreen Massey, a leading voice from critical geography: “It is not that the interrelations between objects occur in space and time; it is these relationships themselves which create/define space and time.”22 It is precisely in those places that were meant to embody the new order in exemplary fashion – such as agricultural production cooperatives – that the fascinating landscape of these negotiation processes unfolds. Maria Hetzer’s contribution thus shows how very different traditions, lifestyles and future expectations converged at LPG Golzow in the German Democratic Republic. While war-induced migration and a vast range of wartime destruction hampered socio-economic transformation, they also created a space for socialist planning – similar as the former large-scale agricultural economy of Ostelbien. Although the socialist planning had to struggle with numerous difficulties, the author shows that these in fact provided opportunities for the empowerment of local actors. State regulations permanently confronted the LPG 19 For Poland, however, Andrzej Leder has recently pointed to the radical transformation brought about by war, occupation, and system change from a socio-psychological perspective, Leder 2016 (the German translation of the Polish original from 2014 appeared in 2019, Leder 2019). 20 See also Dorsch 2013. 21 S´wida-Ziemba 2010. 22 Massey 1992, p. 79.

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with the task of dealing creatively with existing resources. Therefore, the muchvaunted “Plan” was both a facilitator and a hindrance to independent action. Specifically, in situations in which state intervention was particularly direct – such as when the LPG was to be presented to foreign visitors as a model of socialist agriculture – opportunities arose for making new demands on the state and thus improving one’s own negotiating position. The negotiation processes did not follow any clear rules; instead the rules were constantly adapted to the situational challenges. Modernity took hold and gender policy was managed flexibly, which resulted in agency for women. At the same time, however, the events following 1989 show that old patterns of action reappeared in the radically changed economic situation, while, at a time of increased mobility needs, it was women who were among the losers in this new era. It can be observed, then, that the space-time of socialist rurality had created a constellation in which tradition and progress coexisted. It was certainly a constellation in its own right and not merely the antithesis of urban modernity. Martin Jemelka presents a similar case of socialist space-time, in which presocialist and socialist practices were combined at the Unified Cooperative Farm – Agrocombine Slusˇovice in Czechoslovakia. He elaborates on how the geographical proximity of the cooperative to Zlín and the form of rational industrial modernity established there by the Bat’a works as early as the interwar period played an important role in the development of this economically successful cooperative. It is striking that the “Bat’a principles” are difficult to describe purely in economic or political terms. Bat’a’s “authoritative management of modern society” demonstrates the flexibility of organizational methods of industrial modernity with regard to different social contexts. The rationalization promoted in Slusˇovice since the 1970s and the introduction of new marketoriented technologies and products were immune to ideological criticism due to the considerable economic success. This created space for a separate value system. Here, new products (fewer and fewer agricultural ones), new modes of production (licensed production of western consumer goods) were coupled with socio-political reforms and attractive opportunities for communitization (sports, ˇ uba was leisure culture). As a result, long-time director of the JZD Frantisˇek C granted immense organizational power. He was neither a mere Bat’a follower nor ˇ uba was rather a repa mastermind of the Perestroika reforms of the 1980s. C resentative of a socialist industrial modernism that skillfully exploited the spaces of opportunity offered by economic and socio-political patterns in an ideologically altered context. Juraj Buzalka conceives a completely different state socialist space-time with the “post peasant house,” which is considered retrospectively as a “room to manoeuvre.” As a cultural anthropologist, the author has investigated the significance of agricultural properties for the economic practices of the rural

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population in Poland and Slovakia. He observes that while the economic system of state socialism is not remembered positively, there is a positive recollection surrounding the peasant house. The house is understood to have been the bedrock of autarky and trust in oneself and one’s family and friends. It was thus a foundation for agrarian practices under state socialism, which in hindsight cannot be remembered as capitalist or socialist practices. Just as one cannot talk about a state socialist practice of rural economy, the current peasant self-image cannot simply be analytically grasped as “post-socialist.” Rather, Buzalka identifies a “post-peasant economy,” which developed under state socialism, as a specific form of economic modernity. Socialist modernization in particular has thus brought about a strong focus on small-scale private property, which, however, cannot be grasped with the classical notions of socialist or capitalist ideas of ownership. The author concludes that research should avoid vague descriptions such as “postsocialism.” Instead, the idea of the “economic organization of the house” should be stressed more in the analysis of economic activity in rural areas, before and after the system change.

Peripheries At the outset of our research project, we hypothesized that geographical criteria, such as distance from the center, proximity to the border or natural features (e. g. mountain or coastal regions) would foster the formation of rooms for manoeuvre that are particularly difficult to control. On the one hand, these spaces could play a significant social and economic role in the socialist welfare state; on the other hand, they also came into conflict with the ideological and economic premises of the state. It quickly became evident, however, that “periphery” was not an unambiguous term.23 Furthermore, besides the category of space, the question of the pre-socialist legacy – and thus a diachronic perspective – was once again relevant. At the same time, however, the historical actors did not follow the paths apparently prescribed by traditional social relations and institutions. On the contrary, they used historical knowledge according to the situation, although they could also ignore it for the sake of present objectives.24 Both in terms of its geographical location and its economic structure, the eastern Slovakian Presˇov region can be regarded as a periphery in the Stalinist modernization project. This project was massively promoted in Czechoslovakia 23 Particularly illuminating in this respect was the comment by Thomas Lindenberger during the project’s final conference at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw (22/23 November 2018), in which he pointed out the range of “marginality,” “remoteness” and even “eccentricality” (in the case of Zakopane) of the peripheries under consideration. 24 Hirschhausen v. / Grandits / Kraft / Müller / Serrier 2019 pp. 386f.

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from the end of the 1940s. Dusˇan Segesˇ describes the way in which the peasants of this region fought against the forced collectivization of agriculture during the Stalinist era. The region had already experienced a dynamic socio-economic change since the 19th century. The pauperization of the peasants working in subsistence farming triggered large emigration movements, as a result of which traditional social relations and thus also the gender relations changed greatly. Simultaneously, the importance of kinship and village relations created a setting in which the preservation of “domestic peace” was considered desirable by all local actors – be they farmers or representatives of the local administrative and party apparatus. Thus, a multitude of delaying tactics were observed, with which the farmers (quite in the sense of de Certeau) escaped the new agricultural order without actually leaving it. At the height of Stalinist collectivization, a manoeuvring space was created on the ground as the peasants learned to undermine state demands with ever new tactics. In addition, the process of collectivization planned by the state also presented itself as a process of communication between local party and administrative officials and farmers. In this context, all participants reinterpreted state guidelines for their own purposes. The introduction of centrally planned socialist modernity also took place in the Presˇov region. However, the actions of the local actors cannot be described one-dimensionally as a form of resistance. On the contrary, they anticipated state reactions, withdrew, or only pretended to collectivize. In this respect, local networks of contacts played a more important role than blatant political positionings. Jerzy Kochanowski describes a completely different periphery with the tourist center of Zakopane in the Polish Tatra Mountains. The diachronic perspective is relevant here as well. Zakopane was already able to look back on a long and quite illustrious tradition of tourism when the new state socialist rulers decided to use it for the purposes of state-organized recreation. In the process, these administrators either did not want to or could not deprive the location of its special aura. In fact, Zakopane was and remained a center of mass tourism, but in a way that created a microcosm in which notions of socialist property and socialistorganized holiday-making could never supplant local interests and resources. Interestingly, the local economic actors – mainly due to land and property ownership – had such unfettered power that Zakopane for them was much more than a “manoeuvring space”. It is therefore not actually possible to speak of negotiation processes between the successful and self-confident entrepreneurs under socialism and the local administrative and party institutions. The latter were dealt with in an instrumental way and endeavoured to benefit from the established order themselves within the scope of their possibilities. In the boom phase of tourism since the thaw in 1956, government agencies – both locally and in Warsaw – had come to terms with the successful entrepreneurs. From the 1970s onward, a new generation of socialist functionaries set out to put an end to

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the historical and socio-economic exceptionalism of Zakopane and turn the place into a “socialist city.” It was all in vain, however, as private enterprise was already flourishing again in the crisis-ridden 1980s. This failure, clearly shows that throughout the entire period of state socialist rule, a significant proportion of the relevant actors in state institutions and in the party, as well as the factory managers, were concerned with maintaining a state of “social peace.” As a consequence, the private (tourist) infrastructure was not only tolerated but even financed by these bodies. In his contribution on the Romanian Black Sea coast, Błaz˙ej Brzostek shows how differently the appropriation of traditional tourist destinations could take shape in the state socialist camp. The Romanian state leadership recognized their economic value early on and was able to build on a modest tourist infrastructure. By the 19th century, the idyllic sea beach at the European periphery had already attracted more than just local tourists. The dynamic development of a tourist infrastructure that also targeted Western tourists began in the late 1950s. During this period, the Stalinist idea of recreation as a complement to proletarian work receded into the background and Western tourists were seen as a welcome source of income. This was intended from the 1960s onward to promote the desired independence from the USSR. By promoting the tourism industry aimed at foreign tourists, the Romanian party leadership realized that its control and disciplinary apparatus would be challenged in various ways. The preferential treatment of Western tourists, which included the availability of a range of consumer goods in exchange for hard currency, turned a spotlight on the economic disparities on the ground in the systemic conflict. Here, as well as more generally regarding social contacts between foreign and domestic tourists, complete separation was impossible. Yet the ramped up modern mass tourism affected other areas as well. In the hinterland, enclaves of Romanian independent tourism emerged, which accommodated a need for isolation from state-organized leisure. For the party leadership, the Black Sea coast was a space of very different self-representations. It enabled both a show of external independence from the Soviet Union and an opportunity for internal monitoring via the Securitate’s increased presence in the strongholds of tourism. The rooms for manoeuvre created for enterprising youth, nudists, or nonconformists were never actually free from state control. Still, they opened up new spaces for taking action – no less in the immediate vicinity or even in the middle of a state prestige project. In his contribution, Markus Krzoska describes historical actors in a twofold peripheral location (on the outskirts of large coal waste dumps as well as in the German-Polish border region on the Lusatian Neisse), which were simultaneously at the center of a fundamental dilemma of late socialist economies. Specifically, there was a constant tension between energy production from lignite mining, on the one hand, and serious environmental pollution, on the other.

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Krzoska outlines the rooms for manoeuvre of the local population as well as of the political and economic elites, which were at least as much constrained by deficient economic, geological-topographical and infrastructural conditions as by political and planned-economy directives. In doing so, he succeeds in breaking down one-dimensional narratives of opposition, oppression, and resistance. He paints a complex picture of negotiation processes between local, regional and central authorities, on the one hand, and economic, future-oriented and traditional, homeland-related interests, on the other. The opening up of rooms for manoeuvre – as in the Polish case, where local actors succeeded in attracting supraregional attention to the economic and, above all, ecological problems of their home region – did not necessarily mean that these actors could exploit them in the long term. This is clearly demonstrated by the situation in the Polish lignite mining region after 1989. At the same time, ambivalences emerge in the ability to measure the “success” of the manoeuvring or negotiation processes. Could moving to more modern housing compensate for the loss of ancestral living space when an entire village was relocated, as with Deutsch-Ossig in Eastern Germany? And what was lost when an old church building in Olbersdorf, also in Eastern Germany, was demolished and then replaced by a multi-functional community center? The author emphasizes that such questions resist definitive answers, since manoeuvring also meant a continuous realignment of one’s own expectations and objectives. This realignment, moreover, affected not only the ordinary inhabitants of the lignite areas, but also the functionaries in state, party and economic institutions, who had to navigate a complex web of interests.

Privacy in State Socialism When speaking of privacy under state socialism, it is precisely in retrospect that we often imagine a dichotomous separation between an over-politicized partystate public sphere and a private sphere of refuge. But the same holds true for state socialism as for other modern political systems: Public and private spheres are not fixed spaces, but are produced and given meaning by different actors. They are also not complementary spaces, but are interwoven and constitute each other – depending on the meanings attributed to them.25 Nor can the “private” be understood in a generalized way as a space of refuge that guarantees trusting and nonviolent social relations. In this context, it is therefore interesting to examine the question of how rooms for manoeuvre existed in spheres that were designated as private, what actors were active, and how interests there were negotiated.

25 Gal 2003; Kraft 2008, pp. 6–11.

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Jakub Gałe˛ziowski focuses on Polish Mother and Child Homes in the first post-war years. He reminds us that the establishment of state socialism in Poland went hand in hand with overcoming the terrible consequences of the war. Besides the many other problems of rebuilding, the new authorities were also concerned with the phenomenon of single mothers. This included women who had been raped, female forced laborers who returned from the German Reich with a child, but also “abandoned” women or young girls who urgently needed support in the broader post-war chaos. As Polish statehood was initially weak in the new Polish northern and western regions, the challenge of dealing with this social problem was daunting. The author uses the example of a Mother and Child Home in Słupsk (Stolp), which was considered exemplary at the time, to illustrate the complex mixture of actors involved. State authorities reacted quickly with regard to the legal equality of legitimate and illegitimate children. Much more problematic was the social security of mothers and children. The original practice of laying claim to the costs of their accommodation from their families proved to be unsuitable, since for many single mothers the homes were valued because of the anonymity they offered. Social hypocrisy in a conservative Catholic population contributed to the stigmatization of single mothers (the majority of whom, since 1947, consisted of women “abandoned” by their lovers). The social authorities consequently also became active in this area in material terms – although not until the end of the 1940s. In the “long” post-war period (war destruction and manifold migration movements up to the end of the 1940s justify such a designation), the Mother and Child Home in Słupsk represented a place where a social problem, which was often not addressed and alleviated in private due to a social double standard, was treated by activating social networks. With regard to the home in Słupsk, it is worth to reflect also about the peripheral location in the new Polish western territories and a certain anonymity, resulting from the fact that social relationships in this region still had to be formed. Barbara Klich-Kluczewska focuses in her contribution on adoptions in the People’s Republic of Poland. Adoptions are well-suited for problematizing the concept of privacy. They not only concerned very personal life decisions, but they also brought the actors into contact with state welfare institutions. The author elaborates on how far social practices – especially in rural areas – were able to deviate from the guidelines and ideas of state welfare management. The latter sought to formalize the treatment of orphans or “social orphans” and to bring it exclusively under state control, which was mainly exerted in state children’s homes. Much less clear was the state’s influence over family group homes, which had become more and more widespread since the late 1950s. Here, married couples cared for several children, with concepts of family care and state funding and supervision becoming intertwined. However, the liminality of social prac-

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tices was particularly significant in the case of the so-called “dochowan´cy” (children who were “adopted” in order to work for farming families and were offered the prospect of an inheritance). Adoptions of “dochowan´cy” took place less with regard to the welfare of the child than economic considerations. The author examines the extent to which social practices in rural areas were removed from an urban modernity, in which state authorities, lawyers and educational experts addressed the well-being of children. The emotionality of familial relations receded into the background in favor of economic and utilitarian concerns. In the 1960s, this phenomenon was still not uncommon among individual farmers. It shows the enormous gap that existed between an envisaged socialist (agrarian) modernity and social practices that had their origins in pre-modern rural societies. Maria Buko dedicates her contribution to the Poles deported to Siberia (Sybiraks) who were able to return to Poland after the Second World War (some not until the 1950s). The People’s Republic of Poland made it impossible for this group to make the experience of deportation and the gulags part of an official war time memory. Unlike National Socialist crimes, Soviet atrocities were not allowed to become part of the official collective memory. The author evaluates biographical interviews conducted with the Sybiraks in the late phase of the People’s Republic of Poland in the 1980s and in the 1990s. She is able to demonstrate that the former deportees felt discriminated against not only by the socialist system, but also by the majority society, which perpetuated this culture of remembrance. Memories of the gulag were thus relegated to the family sphere. Nevertheless, beyond this space, a community of remembrance emerged among those who had suffered Soviet repression. It was, consequently, not so much the private sphere of the family that became a locus of memory, but rather the community of a shared experience that was doubly connected – through the personal memories of the gulag and through the experience of official suppression of memory in the People’s Republic. The author observes that in this community of remembrance imposed forgetting played a dominant role. Normally, there was more discussion about the injustice experienced in the People’s Republic than about the deportation experience. Life under socialism was also more or less viewed as a continuation of the experience of injustice.

(Negotiated) Transnational Rooms In her contribution on transnationalism during the Cold War, Penny von Eschen reminds us that this phenomenon needs to be considered from a particular perspective. During this time, namely, transnationalism was a “highly specific political and ideological formation.” At the same time, however, a description of

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transnationalism should not overlook “networks that predate the cold war.”26 The last section of the volume is devoted to precisely those constellations in which negotiation processes are examined in the field of tension between bloc membership, national sovereignty, and cross-border practices. The focus is on the importance of knowledge, but also of cultural capital in general. The actors had already acquired this before the caesuras of the Second World War and systemic change and it was now highly relevant for the construction of the new system. In this respect, one might consider a much wider range of institutions that had cultural capital because of their societal activities. The state party was either indifferent to them because of their seemingly apolitical stance (such as dog breeders’ associations) or their expertise and commitment was urgently needed (for example, charities).27 In his contribution on Polish radio amateurs, Matthias Barelkowski shows how actors who had specific technical knowledge that was “relevant to security” for the People’s Republic of Poland created rooms for manoeuvre in complex negotiation processes. Following the Second World War, a wide range of political actors came together again in the relaunched pre-war association. Its apolitical character and proclaimed internationality were initially removed from the association’s charter, which still dated from the interwar period. With the thaw, however, the radio amateurs managed to re-establish their “apolitical” independence to a certain extent, successfully freeing their association from being incorporated into a paramilitary group. The author shows an extensive overlapping of interests between the radio amateurs and the party. The latter relied on the specific technical knowledge of amateur radio operators (hams) and stressed the importance of Poland’s visible presence in international associations (such as the International Amateur Radio Union, IARU). This, in turn, was entirely in the interest of the hams, who were more than willing to compensate for their highprofile participation in prominent meetings with regular intelligence work. A certain room for manoeuvre for the hams resulted from the simple fact that the party leadership wanted to remain informed about international developments in this field, which was also technologically important. It therefore depended on both linguistic and technical translation of the international expert debates. We encounter a story here of concessions, dependencies, mistrust, but also overlapping interests. Inadequate means of control meant that the hams were particularly closely watched in times of political unrest. However, they did not necessarily possess the oppositional capacity that was attributed to them on the basis of their technical knowledge.

26 van Eschen 2013, pp. 452f. 27 Ruzikowski 2017.

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Theodore R. Weeks describes one group with undisputed cultural capital in his contribution on Polish Esperantists. Similar to the radio amateurs, they made use of a per se cross-border, transnational medium, in this case an artificial language invented on Polish soil by Ludwik Zamenhof in 1887. Esperanto was intended to enable borderless communication. As elsewhere, the relationship between a group of experts and the state party displays an interesting ambiguity. Esperanto, as Weeks emphasizes right at the beginning of his article, was “perfectly suited to socialism.” But internationality – especially during the time of Stalinist isolation – did not have a good reputation in Poland or, for that matter, in the entire Eastern Bloc. Esperanto, moreover, aroused suspicion on several counts, as it created a “semi-autonomous space” for a group with specific knowledge, both within the country itself and across borders. As a consequence, the magazine “Pola Esperantisto” could not be published in the years 1949–1957. Even afterwards, the party’s relationship with the Esperantists, who were reproached for their pre-war bourgeois history despite their commitment to the new order, was characterized by indifference and mistrust. Despite this, the Esperantists still had room to manoeuvre. As early as 1959, the World Congress of Esperantists could be held in Warsaw; in 1987, this event was repeated for the centenary of the invention of the language in its country of origin. There was a strong desire for the Esperantists to convey a positive image of the country to the congress participants, and abroad more generally. Illustrated books, for example, were also published in Esperanto and presented both the modernity of the country and its heroic resistance during the Second World War. This overlapping of interests between the state party and the Esperantists regarding international understanding and the preservation of world peace remained more in the ideological realm. Even so, Esperanto enabled its speakers to cross real and virtual borders and connect with the world. The range of rooms for manoeuvre discussed here is without question partial and fragmentary. We hope, however, that their example will highlight new avenues for research. The question was also raised whether this perspective is only meaningful for the analysis of authoritarian states or whether it is not generally inevitable in modern societies with pronounced state and institutional regulation. Rooms for manoeuvre may also be expected more broadly as creative ways of responding to the impositions of institutional order and social norms. Since topics such as dealing with social stigmatization due to illegitimate children, adoptions, agricultural reforms or the development of tourism were also on the agenda in capitalist countries, case studies would be desirable here as well. In any event, a comparative analysis is likely to provide new insights into the differences, but also the similarities in the arrangement of the various rooms for manoeuvre. Furthermore, the question arises as to what role the rooms for manoeuvre not only played (or still play) in enduring or stabilizing social orders, but also how

Introduction: “Rooms for Manoeuvre”

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they changed during a transformation process or contributed to shaping it.28 In this regard, one might consider the previous example of private economic initiative under socialism, commonly regarded as the “Trojan horse” of free market capitalism in socialist states. Nonetheless, a closer look is needed here, as the Polish sociologist Edmund Mokrzycki explained at the beginning of the 1990s: “Contrary to popular opinion that saw private enterprise as a capitalist Trojan horse in a socialist stronghold, the sector was as integral a part of the socialist economy as the Vladimir Lenin Steelworks [in Krakow] or the State Agricultural Farms (PGRs). The very first weeks of the transformation revealed the total dependency of the sector on the central distribution of goods and above all its symbiotic relationship with state industry and trade. For the sector, market mechanisms – to the extent that they had indeed been effectively implemented by the reforms – turned out to be lethal rather than beneficial.”29 At the same time, more recent transformation research has shown that the free-market competencies developed by citizens as early as the 1970s to cope with the scarcity of the state socialist economy were an important resource later in the 1990s. Not only was it a critical means of coping the transformation of this decade, but it also contributed to the development of a “transformation from below.”30 The rooms for manoeuvre of state socialism are in any case present in historical memory. Zakopane, for example, is still a recurrent theme in caricatures to this day.31 Unfortunately, recent developments (2021) in some countries of Eastern Central Europe indicate that rooms for manoeuvre will no doubt once again become more important in the future. Translated by Christopher Reid

Literature Certeau, Michel de: The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley 1988. Borodziej, Włodzimierz / Kochanowski, Jerzy / Puttkamer, Joachim v. (eds.): Hidden Paths Within Socialism, special issue of Journal of Modern European History 8/2 (2010). Borodziej, Włodzimierz / Kochanowski, Jerzy / Puttkamer, Joachim v. (eds.): “Schleichwege”: Inoffizielle Begegnungen sozialistischer Staatsbürger zwischen 1956 und 1989, Köln 2010.

28 29 30 31

Marody 1999; Rychard 1998. Mokrzycki 1994, p. 46. Ther 2016, pp. 167ff. Kochanowski 2019, pp. 249ff.

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Dorsch, Sebastian: Space/time practices and the production of space and time: an introduction, in: Historical Social Research 38/3 (2013), pp. 7–21. Engler, Wolfgang: “Aushandlungsgesellschaft” DDR, in: Beck, Ulrich / Sopp, Peter (eds.): Individualisierung und Integration – Neue Konfliktlinien und neuer Integrationsmodus? Wiesbaden 1997, pp. 37–46. Eschen, Penny van: Locating the Transnational in the Cold War, in: Immerman, Richard / Goedde, Petra (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War, Oxford 2013, pp. 451–468. Ettrich, Frank: Die andere Moderne. Soziologische Nachrufe auf den Staatssozialismus, Berlin 2005. Fik, Marta (ed.): Spór o PRL, Kraków 1996. Gal, Susan: A Semiotics of the Public-Private Dichotomy, in: Scott, Joan Wallach / Keates, Debra (eds.): Going Public. Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of the Private Sphere, Urbana et al. 2004, pp. 261–277. Hankiss, Elemer: The “Second Society”: Is there an alternative social model emerging in contemporary Hungary? In: Social Research, 55/1–2 (1988), pp. 13–42. Hirschhausen, Béatrice v. / Grandits, Hannes / Kraft, Claudia / Müller, Dietmar / Serrier, Thomas: Phantom Borders in Eastern Europe: a new concept for regional research, in: Slavic Review 78/2 (summer 2019), pp. 368–389. Kochanowski, Jerzy: “Wolne miasto” Zakopane 1956–1970, Kraków 2019. Koselleck, Reinhart: “Space of Experience”, and “Horizon of Expectation”: Two Historical Categories, in: Koselleck, Reinhart (ed.): Futures Past: on the Semantics of Historical Time, New York 2004, pp. 255–275. Kraft, Claudia: Geschlecht als Kategorie zur Erforschung der Geschichte des Staatssozialismus. Eine Einführung, in: Kraft, Claudia (ed.): Geschlechterbeziehungen in Ostmitteleuropa nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Soziale Praxis und Konstruktionen von Geschlechterbildern, München 2008, pp. 1–21. Leder, Andrzej: The Sleepwalker’s Revolution, in: Revue d’Études Comparatives Est-Ouest 47/4 (2016) pp. 29–55. Leder, Andrzej: Polen im Wachtraum. Die Revolution 1939–1956 und ihre Folgen, Osnabrück 2019. Lepsius, Rainer M.: Die Institutionenordnung als Rahmenbedingung der Sozialgeschichte der DDR, in: Kaelble, Hartmut / Kocka, Jürgen / Zwahr, Hartmut (eds.): Sozialgeschichte der DDR, Stuttgart 1994, pp. 17–30. Lindenberger, Thomas: Eigen-Sinn, Domination and No Resistance, in: DocupediaZeitgeschichte, 03. 08. 2015, available at: http://docupedia.de/zg/lindenberger_eigensin n_v1_en_2015, (31. 03. 2020) DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok.2.646.v1. Lindenberger, Thomas / Lüdtke, Alf: Eigen-Sinn: Z˙ycie codzienne, podmiotowos´c´ i sprawowanie władzy w XX wieku, Poznan´ 2018. Lüdtke, Alf: Einleitung: Herrschaft als soziale Praxis, in: idem (ed.): Herrschaft als soziale Praxis. Historische und sozial-anthropologische Studien, Göttingen 1991, pp. 9–63. Lüdtke, Alf (ed.): The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, Princeton 1995. Lüdtke, Alf: Ordinary People, Self-Energising and Room for Manoeuvering: Examples from 20th Century Europe, in: Lüdtke, Alf (ed.): Everyday Life in Mass Dictatorship. Collusion and Evasion, Houndsmill, Basingstoke, New York 2016, pp. 13–34.

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Marody, Mirosława: Od społeczen´stwa drugiego obiegu do społeczen´stwa obywatelskiego, in: Studia Socjologiczne 155/4 (1999), pp. 35–53. Massey, Doreen: Politics and Space/Time, in: New Left Review 196 (Nov./Dec. 1992), pp. 65–84. Mokrzycki, Edmund: Nowa klasa ´srednia, in: Studia Socjologiczne 132/1 (1994), pp. 37– 52. Peters, Florian: Patriotische Geschichtsschreibung im Staatsauftrag. Polens neue Rechtsregierung bricht mit der historischen Legitimation des Neuanfangs von 1989, in: Zeitgeschichte-online, Mai 2016, available at: https://zeitgeschichte-online.de/themen /patriotische-geschichtsschreibung-im-staatsauftrag (9. 04. 2020). Przegla˛d Historyczny 109/4 (2018) (= Wolne przestrzenie / Room for Manoeuvre), eds. Kochanowski, Jerzy / Kraft, Claudia. Ruzikowski, Tadeusz (ed:): Nie tylko partia? Organizacje społeczne w Polsce Ludowej 1944–1989 – geneza, funkcjonowanie, znaczenie, Warszawa 2017. Rychard, Andrzej: Konflikt i przystosowanie: dwie koncepcje ładu społecznego w Polsce, in: Adamski, Władysław (ed.): Fenomen “Solidarnos´ci” i zmiana ustroju. Polacy 1980– 2011. Warszawa 2014, pp. 63–78 (first in Marody Mirosława / Sułek, Andrzej (eds.): Rzeczywistos´c´ polska i sposoby radzenia sobie z nia˛, Warszawa 1987, pp. 89–108). Rychard, Andrzej: Aktorzy społeczni i instytucje: strategy adaptacji, in: Adamski, Władysław (ed.): Polacy ’95. Aktorzy i klienci transformacji, Warszawa 1998, pp. 184– 218. Sabrow, Martin (ed.): Wohin treibt die DDR-Erinnerung? Dokumentation einer Debatte, Göttingen 2007. Stobiecki, Rafał: Spór o PRL, Metodologiczne oblicze debaty, in: Kultura i Historia 2 (2002), pp. 52–60. S´wida-Ziemba, Hanna: Młodziez˙ PRL. Portrety pokolen´ w konteks´cie historii, Kraków 2010. Ther, Philip: Europe Since 1989: A History, Princeton 2016.

Part I: Socialist Space-Time

Maria Hetzer

Negotiating Economic Development and Everyday Needs in Rural GDR and Beyond*

Introduction: Concepts and context This text presents the case of an agricultural production co-operative in order to operationalise the room for manoeuvre concept for use in rural studies on state socialist societies. The discussion is based on contemporary ethnographic fieldwork carried out in a former socialist village that was famous for both a successful agricultural co-operative and the longest film documentation on everyday life in the GDR, the Kinder von Golzow (1961–2007). Over the course of three years, I employed a mixed method research approach of narrative interviews, participant observation, media analysis and archival work to explore the fringes of spaces for empowerment and self-reliant action for rural actors in everyday life within the frame of state socialism. If we aim at a more complex, that is, integrative and praxeological approach to socialist modernity, we need to consider the ambivalences that governed the everyday experiences of historical actors. With this contribution, I hope to assist endeavours to describe socialist life and actors outside the parameters of opposition and repression that have reigned the historiographical project on state socialism for so long.

A society of negotiations Agricultural production co-operatives, or LPG,1 as they were known, became the main driver of socialist village development since 1945 in the German Democratic Republic. These multifaceted and changing constructs amounted to much more than companies that solely organised agricultural work based on the manual labour of their members. An apex of communitisation, they provided and * This paper has been written as part of the DFG-funded project “Rooms for Manoeuvre in State Socialism: Between Adaptation and Experiment” (ROOMS, KR 3510/2-1). 1 In German: Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft.

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maintained vital social and cultural services for the rural areas. As such, the LPG conditioned a multitude of everyday practices, thus creating a sphere specific to socialist rural modernity.2 In applying the concept of Rooms for Manoeuvre as a working term to grasp the parameters of rural life in the GDR after 1945, it is necessary to focus on this co-operative dominated culture as the space within which negotiations took effect. Therefore, it is not helpful to measure and describe such a possible room for manoeuvre in economic and political terms only. Rather, we have to regard the socio-cultural effects and daily experiences of the rural actors, too. In order to do so, we need to embed the evolving rural cosmos into wider considerations of the GDR as a “society of negotiations”. According to sociologist Wolfgang Engler, the specific relationship of the GDR citizen to the state resembled a dynamic performance of alliances and dissociations grounded in dominant coordinates of East German culture and politics.3 The performances were deliberately designed to serve the needs of citizens in applying for housing, enrolment in sought-after vocational training programs, vacation placement in a company’s holiday home, and much more. Engler’s concept emphasises the various ways in which citizens drew on narrative options explicitly and implicitly offered by the state in order to negotiate and fulfil their own interests. It also stresses that citizens exceeded these options, thereby shaping as well as advancing state politics and policy-making.4 In these performances of citizenship, we see how the specific relationship between the state and its citizens was enacted. An analysis, like Engler’s, of everyday life in the GDR within the realm of a society of negotiations explicitly draws on the theory of structuration. In the development of his social theory, Anthony Giddens emphasises the reflexivity of social structure and action. He explains that actions do not solely reproduce social structures, but nevertheless can change them.5 In the agricultural sphere, 2 Bettina van Hoven-Iganski has referred to this amalgam of everyday practices and ways of doing related to agricultural co-operatives as creating a specific rural socialist world, an agriculture that dominates village life: van Hoven-Iganski 2008. 3 German: Aushandlungsgesellschaft, see Engler 1997. 4 Engler 1997, p. 39: ‘Der Staat [DDR] tat weniger [als in westeuropäischen Gesellschaften], insofern die von ihm inspirierte Lebensordnung das große Ganze, aber keineswegs die Einzelheiten des Daseins regierte. Im Alltag, der auch ein Alltag der Behörden und Fabriken war, herrschte alles, nur eines nicht: Eindeutigkeit und Verläßlichkeit. Permanenter Mangel, Rechtslücken und ideologische Kampagnen unterhöhlten die ’große Ordnung’ in materieller, sozialer und geistiger Hinsicht und wiesen die Akteure auf sich selber hin. Der staatssozialistische Disziplinarraum bestand aus lauter wilden Räumen, in denen Arbeiter und Direktoren, Bittsteller und Amtspersonen, Mitglieder und Funktionäre Ordnungen von beschränkter Dauer und Gültigkeit mit- und gegeneinander aushandelten und auskämpften.’ [my emphasis] 5 Giddens 1984, pp. 41ff. For example: ‘The fixity of institutional forms does not exist in spite of, or outside, the encounters of day-to-day life but is implicated in those very encounters [author’s emphasis]. The evanescence of encounters expresses the temporality of the durée [author’s

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we find co-operative managers who regularly employed specific tactics to deal with the consequences of misplanning, shortages and natural catastrophes, often in direct breach of the rules of contemporary state policies and regional decisionmaking. These ranged from instances where all of the members of the agricultural co-operative were involved in stagings of dutiful citizenship or violating the law to more delicate instances where managers of the co-operative were as uninformed of exact proceedings as the regional authorities.6 In using these tactics, and by taking part in state-supported knowledge networks, the managers also coauthored, amended and advanced agricultural policies, civic rules and economic planning. These actions, in turn, were decisive in shaping rural environments within which co-operative workers and village inhabitants had to negotiate their everyday needs and relationship to the state. Consequently, these instances of negotiated action opened up somewhat provisionally and precariously, that is unreliably in regard to the outcomes they effected. Framed by more durable socio-political practices, the products of rural decision-making thus became a hybrid mix of planned and regulated consequences as well as anticipated failure and coincidence. The process of negotiation was marked by a simultaneity of seemingly contradictory moves within a single framework of activity. The scope for action resulting from this setup conditioned a specific understanding of space-time for the various local actors in describing their experiences living and working in the new model socialist village. As such, socialist actors resembled a hybrid version of “bricoleur-engineers”7: They devised a grand plan within the modernist mindset of progress to work with whatever was available to them in situ. Hence, actors were continually forced to partially invent the path to where they wanted to go. In order to qualify these rather conceptional considerations, I will elaborate on a range of negotiations

emphasis] of daily life and the contingent character of all structuration’, see Giddens 1984, p. 69. 6 To give but two examples: In a time of severe shortage in harvesting equipment, the LPG hid tractors and reapers delegated to them by the regional authorities behind bushes. This was done in order to postpone harvesting for as long as possible, since the agricultural management deemed it too early to already start harvesting. However, they were found out and the case was intensely discussed in the local newspaper; the president of the co-operative was heavily criticised, see: Neuer Tag 16. April 1963 p. 13. On the other hand, the president of the cooperative led a yearly tour of the co-operative fields for coop managers in order to determine which crops would be cultivated on which field in the coming season. The public performance of wise rural leadership was endured by the head of field cultivation who dutifully drew up a cultivation plan on the field site according to the instructions given. However, in an interview with the author of this text, he stated further that he was always busy correcting the plan upon return to his office in order to fit actual proceedings and cultivation measures [personal interview, 3 May, 2017]. 7 Lévi-Strauss 1966.

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and their contexts that lend themselves to being understood as rooms for manoeuvre across the different phases of rural development in the GDR.

Golzow: The case study My findings are based on field work carried out in the rural Oderbruch region of Eastern Germany. Located about ten kilometres from the border to the Republic of Poland, the village of Golzow provides rich data to illustrate the socialist model for successful agriculture and village development and its exceptional everyday implementation of it. With its highly successful agricultural co-operative on very fertile soil, it boasted outstanding preconditions for showcasing the best practices in everyday socialist life. As a rural model, it also met the standards that other similarly well-equipped co-operatives had adopted. However, the cooperative’s economic success against the pitfalls of socialist agricultural planning policies and realities was clearly ensured by the cunning manner in which the LPG directing committee and its staff were able to appropriate and expand the options that were available. In coping with shortages, poor planning and floods, the villagers through their everyday practices created specific room for manoeuvre that was aimed at satisfying the demands of the rural community within the socialist state and economy. Their practices were rooted in the ambivalent experiences of the rural actors that alternated between the ‘fast-forward’ approach of the socialist modern time and the perceived belatedness of everyday life. The room for manoeuvre, which transgresses the limits of the planned economy, is rooted in both everyday practice as well as the exceptional status of a model village economy. As with most environments directly affected by the Second World War, socialist rural space-time in the post-war melange of demographic, socio-political and developmental parameters was complex. In this regard, it is important to conceptualise the socialist ‘village’ as a transitional space. It seems unproductive to overly concentrate on the enduring traditions concerning patriarchal modes of governance and, as some have done, overlook the practices of everyday life (though this is necessarily part of the equation). Rather, it seems more useful to develop a notion of the rural space as marked by transit that is created by the migration of people and circulation of rural knowledge and land property.8 It is through this perspective that we can grasp rural spaces as being part and parcel of socialist modernity with a thriving agricultural co-operative at its centre. It also helps to transcend the common juxtaposition of urban and rural spaces as hubs of modernity versus tradition. 8 Hetzer / Scholze-Irrlitz / Meyer-Renschhausen / Müller / Stoye 2015.

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In 1960, Golzow was chosen the site for a documentary film on children attending a new model school. The ‘Children of Golzow’ (Kinder von Golzow) by Barbara und Winfried Junge addressed East German identity formation and everyday life and has since become the most influential piece of work on this subject. The film extends from 1961 to 2007 and thus spans the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall and life after German reunification. The film team regularly returned to Golzow in order to document life and work in the countryside of the GDR.9 Watching these films in retrospect, we can discern what aspects of rural life the documentation was able to show and also what fell victim to censorship.10 For my study, the films and the staging of their background at the film museum of ‘The Children of Golzow’ provided valuable information for identifying archival and interview material. It is worth noting that the former school master of Golzow claimed the village was the perfect site for such a film project because of the characteristic state of underdevelopment of the rural region at the time.11 The socialist experiment had to prove itself with an infrastructure that did not support its success. The backwardness of the area was mainly a consequence of the Second World War. In fact, the Oderbruch region traditionally had important agricultural standing in providing the German capital with vegetables, crops and dairy products. At the end of the war, ninety per cent of rural infrastructure was destroyed and the fields were completely mined. The region became an endurance test for GDR modernisation: Initially, as elsewhere in socialist countries, a land reform was executed in 1945. It was primarily aimed at giving land to incoming refugees and the rural poor. Due to the level of devastation and mines in the fields, however, it took many years before most of the land could actually be reclaimed for cultivation. The tremendous level of destruction caused many former inhabitants to not return to the village, which made room for new rural actors. At the end of the war, approximately eight million refugees crossed the wider region of Brandenburgia. Unsurprisingly, the refugees who used to live on the Polish side of the newly established border tended to stay in the region in hope of an eventual return home. They formed a new rural working class that gradually coalesced in the process of collectivisation, that is during development of collective farming in agricultural production co-operatives.12 The challenging post-war situation supported collectivisation. Specifically, the recipients of land who were new to owning a farm such as former land labourers, 9 see Junge / Junge 2014; Junge / Junge 2017. 10 For a recent discussion on the mediatisation of everyday life in the GDR related to the Kinder von Golzow, see Häußer 2018. 11 Rudolf Ramm: ‘Why Golzow?’, a text included in the permanent exhibition of the film museum in Golzow. 12 Schöne 2005; Last 2009.

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widows with children, refugees, the old, disabled and sick, were overburdened with delivering the required amount of farm products to the state. If they did not decide altogether to leave the countryside, they turned to each other for help – sharing what little resources they had. In the first established co-operatives, the migrants took up the labour to farm the devastated, but fertile land together with small landholders and former workers on the rural estate. In interviews, cooperative managers and a village representative repeatedly mentioned that these incomers contributed to a melange of the rural population that was “easily governed and willing to succeed within the emerging new state”.13 Biographical interviews with former LPG workers and refugees further substantiate this view and indicate that a remarkable amount of individual labour and effort was put into “devastated companies”,14 education programmes, and political participation. The ongoing circulation of farmland and plots continued until the full force of collectivisation put an end to it in 1960 and caused a subsequent outmigration of rural inhabitants. By then, many people had already left the area in the 1950s due to bad farming conditions and because the politics of forced collectivisation compelled more successful farmers to join the early co-operatives. The abandoned plots were either taken over by individual families or the newly established co-operative. Despite the severe conditions, Golzow established a very successful, that is highly productive, model socialist co-operative and village community. Its development started out in accordance with the usual LPG paradigm: The early cooperative members were the long-time resident poor and landless, expelled people from the former Eastern German territories, as well as widows with children and old people who were not able to self-manage the land accorded to them during the socialist land reform. After an initial reluctance of established farmers, membership numbers eventually thrived, mostly after the managing director post of the co-operative was assumed by a young farmer from a wellestablished and connected local peasant family. The infamous credo of director Arthur Klitzke, who won over many of the resistant local farmers, nicely sums up his approach to co-operative politics and village development: “We’ll make this happen! But our way.”15 Within the course of ten years, Golzow came to exhibit all the traits of a model socialist co-operative and came to be described as a GDR hub of rural modernity by both its inhabitants and observers. In many instances, the village and its co-operative were used to showcase successful GDR socialist agriculture and rural life for an international audience. So far, the success of the 13 Group interview with members of the LPG directing committee and a local representative (12 May 2017). 14 Plots and farmsteads abandoned by their owners, often in connection with leaving the GDR for good. 15 Personal interviews with members of LPG directing committee (12 May and 9 August 2017).

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Golzow “socialist project” has been repeatedly explained by political and agricultural specialists in terms of its actors’ capacities to game the system, that is: to act in spite of the unreasonable demands of socialist economic planning and repressive policies. Little has been said about how opportunities actually arose for empowerment, innovation, pro-active initiatives and self-determined behaviour that advanced economic success.16 However, the framework and mindset within which the concerned actors operated is indeed best described by the dynamics between a state supportive of self-determined economic activity for the advancement of food production and co-operative development, on the one hand, and state sanctions against the independent actions of supposedly unruly or transgressive agricultural players, on the other.17

Room for Manoeuvre: Showcasing successful socialist agriculture The village of Golzow had high representational status as a showcase of successful socialist agricultural policy. Situated in the proximity of Berlin and thus accessible to visitors coming from the state capital, the president of the cooperative and village mayor showed international guests and state functionaries around the village throughout the year. The busy schedule of the village included visits from state representatives such as Yasser Arafat, Kim Il Sung, Indira Ghandi, the Tanzanian Prime Minister and the Minister of Agriculture, the Ethiopian Minister of Commerce and Tourism, and many others.18 On the national side, there were regular visits from high-level GDR political representatives such as Walter Ulbricht, Erich Honecker, Willi Stoph and representatives of their ministries. These representational visits were careful stagings: well prepared and just as skilfully documented. The most important part of these visits was the protocol. As the basis of negotiations surrounding the visit, it prescribed in minute detail what would happen during the visit, who would be allowed to participate and where the guests would be taken. The question as to what exactly constituted valuable and appropriate matter for negotiations was a careful balance between the expectations of higher agroeconomic functionaries, political officers of the Ministry of the Interior and the local LPG management. To a certain degree, it was possible for the LPG to plan with the additional benefits that would result from these negotiations. The protocol guided all interactions with and between LPG 16 For a rare example see Seiring 2017, p. 13. 17 In German: ‘selbstständig statt eigenmächtig’ (working independently vs. overstepping one’s boundaries). 18 Neues Deutschland 1977a; Neues Deutschland 1978; Neues Deutschland 1985; Schollbach 1984, p.30; also well documented in KvG 1984 and used as part of the analysis here.

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personnel, villagers and local (often regional) representatives. A time-consuming process, the negotiations involved many actors and the protocol itself underwent many revisions and numerous checks prior to the final event.19 Local preparations were equally laborious, and time and resources were invested in putting the finishing touches on the village and the LPG. As part of these stagings, and on the basis of the protocol, streets were blocked off and villagers deemed unruly or inappropriate for the official visit were removed temporarily to prevent unwanted interactions. The space for the village encounter and the inventory were carefully arranged. In local lore, villagers often recount the delicate tactical measures that were undertaken surrounding these official visits to the “model village of state socialism”. In return, the village and agricultural players could expect many privileges in the allocation of scarce resources such as building materials, agricultural equipment and manpower in the preparation for the stagings. These privileges were vital in finally completing communal development projects that had stalled because of a lack of resources, for example housing projects, the construction of village and farming roads, and school equipment. The negotiations surrounding the exact tour of the official guests and the extraordinary measures for accomplishing the optimal staging, however, were not actually showcased to the visitors. Instead, corresponding with the recurring theme “daily life in the socialist village”, visitors were led along fields with busy workers, into greenhouses with trainees handling seedlings and into corporate workers’ homes with all the modern amenities. Occasionally, a guest would ask to see something off-topic so that management would have to scramble on all sides to keep the tour on track. The effort to obtain resources for rural and urban development in this manner came to constitute a regular practice throughout the GDR.20 To give but one example: Prior to a planned visit by Indira Ghandi in 1976, the construction of an apartment complex for farm workers and their families was accomplished hastily through a local after-work brigade, while parts of the apartment building were specifically decorated for the occasion. This was done because Ghandi was scheduled by the directing committee of the LPG to conclude her village tour by meeting a young family in their new co-operative home.21 Such timely construction was possible because of the rapid provision of resources for these occasions by both the co-operative and a specific office of the Ministry of the Interior.22 Similarly, the construction of an agricultural road that was to give

19 20 21 22

Personal interview with the former mayor of Golzow, Heinz Riedel (24 May 2017). For a more general description and discussion see Schier 2001. Episodes surrounding the staging of state visits to the village can be found in Suthau 2008. Protocol of LPG visit, 1977, private archive Heinz Riedel (copy with author).

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access to the southern fields of the co-operative was only accomplished due to the extra manpower and building resources allocated by the Ministry.23 By contrast, villagers also used these situational opportunities to deliberately perform measured, but nonetheless serious shortfalls in agricultural planning and policy. During visits by high officials, they convinced state representatives to consent to privileges. As part of the guided tour, the co-operative would stage walks along their extensive fields in order to showcase its agriculture. At this moment, the co-operative would enact its scarcity. For example, when Willi Stoph visited Golzow during harvest season in 1988 with a group of Ethiopian statesmen, the delegation was shown carefully prepared female workers cutting huge amounts of cabbage with knives made of cheap sheet metal only.24 During the walk, the members of the LPG directing committee would comment on the speed at which the work was carried out and marvel at the potential economic profit if the knives were replaced by West German knives made of Solingen steel. However, the GDR was always short on foreign currency, making equipment such as these knives a much sought-after tool. In the end, one hundred Solingen knives were supplied to the Golzow co-operative and reported as missing elsewhere.25 In this context, a room for manoeuvre should be understood as a space that opened up temporarily under exceptional circumstances. The model status and economic success of the LPG and state of village development were prerequisites for the high level visits of statesmen and foreign functionaries. Likewise, the visits offered scope for economic and material negotiations. Their outcome would, in turn, strengthen the model status by securing privileges that were essential to beating out other co-operatives in fulfilling the plan. As such, these performative displays of scarcity were essential to maintaining the economic success of the LPG and the model status of the village. This particular room for manoeuvre relied on the effective negotiation of a multitude of rural actors and a functioning village community that would perform the LPG’s demands, for example for better work conditions, in a situation deemed more or less precarious.

Room for Manoeuvre: Gender policies and economic considerations Rural women came up with new strategies of negotiating the establishment of a socialist modernity. This meant facing the rupture of social, economic and political parameters that were part and parcel of a socialist land reform and col23 Interview with the former village mayor (24 May 2017). 24 Report in Newspaper of SED party, Neues Deutschland 1977b, p. 2; Personal interviews conducted with several workers from the Golzow co-operative. 25 Suthau 2008 and personal interviews.

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lectivisation. It is in this gender-specific reorientation that the LPG, in embracing GDR gender policies, created a space for negotiating the question of economic status. My research suggests that instead of fighting the new state regulations for changing gender relations, the LPG leadership sought to utilise these regulations to provide an opportunity for (economic) manoeuvering. While the view on the villages persists to this day that they were bastions of conservative, traditionalised thinking, I discovered that the LPG invested early in improving women’s work conditions and providing social services as part of the village’s overall development. Collectivisation with agriculture at its centre was vital in the process of creating a new rural culture. When it came to the negotiation of individual and gender specific expectations, the LPG proved essential in terms of its economic, social and emotional infrastructure. The sound economic basis of the LPG in Golzow, with its financial bonuses and awards, satisfied these needs so effectively that the inhabitants regarded their village and LPG as progressive, even avantgarde.26 This perception motivated LPG members to work even harder, especially as every aspect of the village depended one way or another on successful co-op development. And, indeed, as Chris Hann has pointed out, life in the socialist village, in socialist space-time, was measured in terms of progress.27 The industrialised economic agglomerate, which the agrarian co-operative came to resemble by the 1980s, was able to negotiate gender politics and economic considerations within the LPG with greater impact than smaller co-ops elsewhere. Given that there were almost 600 workers (of which 220 were women) and 7300 hectares of land in nine villages, greenhouses, a pellet plant and many agro-technical facilities, being gender sensible had real economic consequences. Prior to 1945 and collectivisation, one economic consideration was providing social services to women in traditional jobs. Landlords, for instance, paid for nurses and child care. In the early years after 1945, with a pervasive absence of male manpower, female work was deemed even more important to the overall rural economic equation. In the course of collectivisation since the early 1950s, moving women to work in the co-operative thus became a major driver for the construction and institution of many rural services for women – in all villages of the GDR and beyond. The economic success of the LPG facilitated areas of rural development from which women directly benefitted. Most important here were housing schemes involving the accelerated and in part illegal construction and reconstruction of houses and apartments for LPG workers. First and foremost, construction 26 History workshop ‘Agriculture and the village since 1945’, jointly organised by author and the senior citizen association of Golzow (Seniorenverein Golzow) at the local community centre on 15 October 2017. 27 Hann 2015.

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projects were realised for members of the LPG using all sorts of conventional and unconventional allocations of resources. Married women came to expect the LPG’s support in moving out of their parents’ home or moving to the village for work. Throughout the existence of the GDR, the assignment of an appropriate apartment became a main motivator for qualified women to work in the LPG. It was also one of the main indicators for an improvement of their overall living circumstances. Where this demand could not be met, the LPG risked losing (potentially) qualified personnel – contributing to the overall urban brain drain and rural exodus. In addition, the provision of services and public village functions were vital in a decision of women to come to or stay in the LPG. Considerations included the availability of a place in kindergarten or school, physician and dental offices, a receiving office for washing and repairs, a grocery store, a community centre, sports facilities, and so on. In their threefold roles as mothers, workers and household managers, rural women in particular profited from such an improvement of the overall situation, especially in the aftermath of the Second World War. From the 1970s onwards, as the consequences of war receded into the background, women were more attracted to the overall appearance of the village as ‘resembling a town’, with its thriving cultural centre and ambitious programme of cultural and sports events, and the steady provision with high-quality goods and groceries.28 State regulations and financing, primarily concerning the amount of child care and female work qualifications, supported LPG efforts and became an additional factor for many women. Moreover, gendered work policies were implemented and incorporated comparatively early on into the written work rules of the co-op – namely, from the early 1960s, when many other LPG still operated without work contracts and written work regulations. These work regulations were the basis of the monthly gatherings of women workers, who voiced their everyday concerns and demands to the LPG commission. These included regulations such as wage compensation, full social benefits and fewer working hours for women caring for children, a (paid) monthly day for household chores and, most importantly, structured plans for the further qualification of women (which essentially meant better jobs and higher pay). Consequently, the LPG Golzow was able to choose from a pool of job applicants, whereas most agrarian co-operatives of the GDR had to fight the urban brain drain. This, in turn, had a significant impact on the LPG’s overall economic performance. At first glance, this localised gender policy is impressive. Still, there is another side to localised gender policy making. Due to the success and influence of the LPG, it was also able to challenge state gender regulations where they were deemed inappropriate. The co-operative could directly or indirectly confront 28 History workshop ‘Agriculture and the village since 1945’, see Footnote 26.

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and shape political and economic decision-making processes on the basis of their local knowledge and negotiating power. As a member of the LPG directing committee put it: “We could afford to say no.”29 For example, qualification measures for women were put aside where they hindered economic processes within the co-operative. During intense working phases, participation in classes was denied and the assignment of women to further qualification was delayed to a time when they were not considered essential for the fulfilment of important tasks.30 Regional authorities controlled and sanctioned these procedures. Nevertheless, because of its economic importance for the provision of desperately needed foodstuffs for the capital Berlin, the LPG leadership was able to avoid harsh political or financial consequences of their illegal, albeit effective, actions. In essence, the LPG played regional women politics against state economic interests. The co-operative even forced the rescheduling of the dates for further qualification of a whole region of women to adequately position their female workers in ongoing production processes.31 The women in Golzow, however, were a culturally and socially heterogeneous group. Depending on their attitudes and social backgrounds, they were prone to react differently to the options the LPG offered to women. Accordingly, it is possible to identify different types of rural women who were directly affected by agricultural politics and how they confronted the changes. For the sake of brevity, I only want to mention two that fit more neatly into our understanding of traditional peasant women and the ‘modern’ woman, who the socialist state hoped to cultivate.32 On the one hand, there were successful female farm managers who were often reluctant about or even outright opposed to collectivisation. They initially became housewives, later taking up part time work in the cooperative for social benefits and an independent income. Here, they were careful to reserve time for subsistence and individual agriculture on their private fields and in their allotments. On the other hand, particularly from the beginning of the 1970s, there was an influx of highly qualified young females from other parts of the country. This was at least partly brought about by changing gender policies, but also new job profiles created in an industrialised agriculture. These women took up positions in local services and secondary management in the co-operative. They also 29 Interview with a former head of cultivation, LPG Golzow, (3 May, 2017). 30 Kreisarchiv Seelow (in the following: KAS), File ‘Golzow 1’, Protocol of the Village Council Meeting (Rat der Gemeinde) Golzow, 26 February 1963; Personal interview with a former educational manager of the Golzow co-operative (27 July 2017). 31 Personal interview with a former educational manager of the Golzow co-operative (27 July 2017). 32 For a discussion of more types of rural women and rural emancipation in everyday life, see Hetzer 2018 (in Polish), and Hetzer 2019 (in German).

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changed the face of Golzow in an unforeseen manner. Well educated and articulate, they addressed their needs openly and directly. Often, they were characterised by older local women as pushy and arrogant. They also tended to keep to themselves.33 They applied for work in the co-operative mainly because of its good economic standing.34 With the influx of these qualified women from other regions, there was a gradual levelling out of historical local status differences, e. g. in the make-up of the directing committees of LPG and village council, where many women were engaged in communal decision-making. By exploiting conventional traits of traditional female role patterns as well as those of the ‘new’ socialist woman in co-operative politics, the LPG was able to sustain its sound economic basis. The strategic management of social difference and gender-specific expectations towards a good life (in the village) constitutes part of the room for manoeuvre the LPG was able to carve out, most notably since the middle of the 1960s. Thus, while many women were trained to perform male work (e. g. as tractor driver), they continued to opt for work that was traditionally lower paid. In return, they could expect family-friendly working hours and continuity (e. g. in contrast to tractor drivers).35 In this respect, we might want to conclude that because women opted for work that fit into a traditional, conservative role in rural families, the LPG did not have to pay the women higher wages and was able to enhance its economic performance. Yet, as we can see for Golzow, there were specific instruments of GDR gender policy that were used early on to strengthen the economic standing of the co-operative. The directing committee quickly realised the innovative potential and, hence, economic benefit of employing highly educated young women in high skilled jobs within the company, for example as officer of pest management. Therefore, it might be more accurate to state that the co-operative employed a flexible, non-ideological approach to the realisation of gender policy and rules within an economically rational frame. In turn, regional authorities and women themselves also took a flexible approach in voicing their interests: On the one hand, they demanded regard for gender issues from the LPG management, while succumbing to economic policy considerations on the other.

33 Personal interview with a female co-operative worker (9 August 2018). 34 Personal interview with a former educational manager (27 July 2017) and with a former pest control manager (1 August 2017) and a former supervisor in greenhouse production (30 June 2017) of the Golzow co-operative. 35 Personal interviews with local LPG women (30 June 2017); for a contemporary academic evaluation of the general situation in GDR agriculture, see Röder 1975.

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Room for Manoeuvre after 1989: Venturing into Tekucha, Ukraine Another area of concern within this particular research project was the transition from the socialist to the capitalist economy. Specifically, can we conceptualise similar rooms for manoeuvre across historical caesuras like the one in 1989? Traditionally, the transformation of the GDR into the East German regions of the new Berlin Republic has been seen as a time of unruly behaviour, everyday practices and spaces for action. Unconventional solutions and everyday living experiments became the norm before the final institution of German federal law.36 Here, emphasis is laid on the disruption of routine practices caused by the end of institutions, big companies and employers. This consequently allowed for a new approach to deal with the post-1989 realities. Most important for East German agriculture was the fact that there was no longer a market for selling agricultural products. The crisis was profound. In the course of German unification, the agrarian production co-operative in Golzow turned into a limited liability company. Rarely has this kind of struggle for existence of an economic endeavour been evaluated under the premise of how it created room for manoeuvre within the context of fundamental change. On close inspection, room for manoeuvre can be identified here that confronted the strategies of federal institutions in dealing with East German agriculture in order to accommodate the specific needs of the co-operative. For example, the Agricultural Amendment Act of 1990 (AAA)37 was adapted to German federal law and EU regulations in 1991, providing the framework for the LPGs to be transformed into a legal entity. It pronounced as a leading principle the ideal of the sustainable smallholder. In fact, family-based agriculture marked all the provisions and rulings of the AAA. For the huge companies the LPGs now formed in the new market-centred economy, this proved highly unfavourable. A lot of managerial creativity and lobbying (as these political negotiations were now called) went into transforming such hindrances into a viable economic path. Since the former LPGs were new players in the westernized global market, the companies came to rely heavily on the resources and connections established prior to 1990. I would like to present just two examples in order to account for the continuity of specific practices that offered room for manoeuvre for the LPG. The first example concerns the legacy of economic performance in socialism for company politics and resources post 1989. Many LPGs in the GDR were impeded by the AAA law from mastering the transition to Western-style capitalism, because they were forced to pay back the initial financial or material contributions to the co-

36 Links / Nitsche / Taffelt 2004. 37 In German: Landwirtschaftsanpassungsgesetz (LwAnpG).

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operative38 by their members (§44 AAA). There were countless legal disputes between co-op members wanting to leave and managing boards over the precise value of the contributions and the calculation of the opening balance that determined the company‘s ability to meet its financial obligations. As a consequence, the newly established companies were hobbled from the start.39 In Golzow, however, initial contributions had already been paid out over the years; according to staff members, this was completed in the 1980s following GDR tariffs. As the head economist of the co-operative commented: “In Golzow, the company was lucky. All the shares were already paid back by the 1980s. This should not be considered a charitable act. It was pure self-interest of the management.”40 In line with this judgement, the former mayor of Golzow complained: “Arthur [Klitzke] always said: I have to develop the co-operative first, before I can support the village.”41 Minimising the influence of external factors on the company’s economic performance and showing off the strength of the cooperative to its stakeholders, thus constituted different parts of the economic agenda. These efforts, which were grounded in the economic strength of the cooperative prior to 1989, were critical to the strength of the new agricultural company’s opening balance post-1989. As a result, the company had tremendous head start compared to others.42 Second, the newly formed company also profited from significant knowledge transfer as well as farmland, equipment and – yet again – the migration of workers. In accordance with EU regulations, the AAA ruled that co-operatives would need to stop farming a tenth of the land that had been cultivated before 1989. This agricultural policy proved to be a grave issue for product-oriented LPGs. The creation of fallow fields also resulted in the redundancy of other resources. Most importantly, workers became superfluous, but also farming equipment such as tractors and harvesters. It should be borne in mind that most workers were part of the co-operative and thus had to agree to the further existence of the LPG reconstituted as a Western-style company. They were less inclined to do so if it was clear that they would be made redundant after the transformation. The existence of the whole company was therefore immediately put at risk. In this situation, the Golzow enterprise forged its ties with a Ukrainian village and former kolkhoz, Tekucha, based on relations established in the socialist era. The cooperation was now intensified on new terms as a joint venture: The East Germans leased 4,000 hectares of farming land from the Ukrainian co38 39 40 41 42

In German: Inventarbeitrag. Bayer 2003, p. 36. Personal interview with a former head of cultivation of the LPG Golzow (3 May 2017). Personal interview with former mayor of Golzow (24 May 2017, Golzow). Personal interview with the former head accountant of the LPG and co-author of the opening balance sheet (5 May 2017).

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operative – four times more than the amount of land prescribed by EU legislation. This arrangement provided for an equal share of the venture for both companies and a viable amount of the most fertile farming land where industrial agriculture could thrive. Equally important, the East German company shipped technical equipment to assist in cultivating the fields along with experts for maintaining the machines for different periods of time every year. Eventually, Western land machines were also bought and sent to Tekucha. In this way, the East German company invested directly into the joint venture as a second pillar of production. Owing to similar climate and soil conditions, amongst other factors, the migration of people and equipment proved particularly successful. There were thus many opportunities for translating the knowledge of farming techniques and issues between the two regions.43 These exchanges were scientifically co-evaluated by a German rural research institute under the guidance of the new co-operative turned company director, Manfred Großkopf.44 In terms of economic progress, this move was particularly useful for the effective application of equipment that otherwise would have deteriorated or been sold at a considerable loss to companies in the global East and South. Yet, to find a solution to the precarious employment situation for LPG workers, such as the mechanics, was more complicated by comparison. In general, technical skills that were invaluable for LPG workers in GDR times became less important in light of new Western techniques. By contrast, workers who were willing to go to the Ukraine for an extended period of time (e. g. six weeks during summer) had an advantage in negotiating their further employment in the agricultural company. While many aspects of the earlier thriving LPG organisation had relied heavily on workers being settled – i. e. married with children and farming household plots in the village and interested in the company’s communal politics – this expectation changed after 1989. For the evolving new company, workers with weaker ties to the local village and a willingness to migrate became valuable assets. Many of the tensions arising locally thus stem from the estrangement of the village community to the company. A common refrain during fieldwork was that “one does not know anybody in the company anymore.”45 After many years, or even nearly a lifetime, of working for the LPG, this is part of a common, wider narrative of shattered work biographies typical of

43 Personal interview with a former foreman of the co-operative turned company in Tekucha (27 November 2017); personal interview with former director of LW Golzow on 30 August, 2016. The last part of the KvG film ‘… dann leben sie noch heute – Das Ende der unendlichen Geschichte: Bernhard und Eckhard’ (2007) documents Bernhard’s and other former LPG members’ work life in Tekucha see Junge / Junge 2017. 44 Zaske / Großkopf 1996. 45 History workshop ‘Agriculture and the village since 1945’, see Footnote 26.

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the post-socialist world.46 More generally, the joint venture was decisive in balancing out the negative effects of an accelerated globalised economy, on the one hand, and unified German and EU agricultural policy making, on the other. In terms of the overall experience of co-operative workers, however, it was a less successful move. The migratory aspect of the business relations meant that only flexible workers were offered a more sustainable existence. At the same time, the new management, oriented toward economic neoliberalism and not bound by state regulations concerning gender equality, excluded women. In the GDR, female workers had been a significant part of the co-operative workforce, being employed for instance in labour intensive plant cultivation. The wave of largescale unemployment that rolled over Eastern Germany in the course of German reunification hit female workers first and severest.47

Conclusion It seems obvious to state that actors, individuals and collectives, have choices in the context of a set of rules and regulations. Actors will typically behave with a view to their own interests and, accordingly, employ specific tactics. Nonetheless, within historiographic research on state socialism, there still seems to be an uncanny tendency in Western and Eastern scholarship to do away with agency all together in the light of totalitarianism theory. Alternatively, they relegate independent action and personal agency to certain niches or anomalous unregulated spaces.48 By contrast, as I have tried to demonstrate here, it is possible to discern everyday rural work and the lives of individual and collective actors in the context of a shifting ground. At once, they act on the basis of a set of rules while making the rules on the fly. My research clearly indicates a web of circumstantial opportunities and changing rules, a situational opening up of political and economic horizons for taking action as well as enduring and spacetime-specific options grounded in everyday life as the basis for economic performance and rural agency. Furthermore, the diverse knowledge of the actors contributed to creating instances for action, infusing them with a specific negotiational power vis-à-vis the impositions of planning policies and political realities. Some spaces may have been mainly one-off possibilities and as such 46 Willisch 2008. 47 By the end of the GDR, the considerable amount of ten percent of all workers were employed in agriculture, see Statistisches Jahrbuch 1990, p. 125; Within three years, former LPG cooperatives reduced their workforce by 90 per cent, see Martens 2010, p. 2; 75 per cent of all agrarian workers lost their jobs within a decade, see Karlsch / Schäfer 2006, p. 282. 48 See Meuschel 2000 for a typical discussion of totalitarianism theory and Betts 2010 for a treatise on everyday life in the GDR as lived out in a niche.

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were hard to plan and assess. By contrast, other spaces were recurring features of a planned economy, and were thus exploited by the state to counteract the pitfalls of central planning and to showcase negotiational power (e. g. listening to the workers on state visits). The latter spaces were more viable and could be relied on by the LPG. Still, they, too, remained uncertain opportunities for taking action within an ever- changing political climate. Language edited by Christopher Reid

Archives and Sources Archiv Filmmuseum Golzow (Archive of the Film museum in Golzow). Kreisarchiv Seelow (Regional Archive Seelow). Kinder von Golzow, film documentation. Neues Deutschland, Newspaper of the SED Party, 16 July 1977; 18 July 1977; 7 June 1978; 18 April 1985. Neuer Tag. Socialist Newspaper of the Oderbruch region.

Literature Bayer, Walter: Rechtsprobleme der Restrukturierung landwirtschaftlicher Unternehmen in den neuen Bundesländern nach 1989: Abschlussbericht des DFG-Forschungsprojekts, Berlin 2003. Betts, Paul: Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic, Oxford 2010. Engler, Wolfgang: ‘Aushandlungsgesellschaft’ DDR. In: Beck, Ulrich / Sopp, Peter (Eds.): Individualisierung und Integration – Neue Konfliktlinien und neuer Integrationsmodus? Wiesbaden 1997, pp. 37–46. Giddens, Anthony: Die Konstitution der Gesellschaft: Grundzüge einer Theorie der Strukturierung, Frankfurt am Main 1988. Hann, Chris: Backwardness Revisited: Time, Space and Civilization in Rural Eastern Europe, in: Comparative Studies in Society and History 57 (2015), pp. 881–911. Häußer, Ulrike: Golzow Forever. Eine Untersuchung der Langzeitdokumentation ‘Die Kinder von Golzow’, Berlin 2018. Hetzer, Maria: Wypracowac´ równouprawnienie! Wies´ Golzow w NRD jako model. Przegla˛d Historyczny, CIX, 4 (2018), pp. 757–571. Hetzer, Maria: Gleichberechtigung im Alltag aushandeln: Erwartungen und Erfahrungen von Frauen im ländlichen Raum. In: Braun, Karl / Dieterich, Claus-Marco / Moser, Johannes / Schönholz, Christian (Eds.): Wirtschaften. Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven. dgv Tagungsband; Marburg 2019, pp. 582–589. Hetzer, Maria / Scholze-Irrlitz, Leonore / Meyer-Renschhausen, Elisabeth / Müller, Victoria / Stoye Laura: Transitzone Dorf. Ein Ort zwischen Bodenreform und Kollektivierung, Berlin 2015.

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Hoven-Iganski van, Bettina: Made in the GDR. The Changing Geographies of Women in the Post-Socialist Rural Society in Mecklenburg-Westpommerania, Utrecht–Groningen 2000. Junge, Barbara / Junge, Winfried: Lebensläufe – Die Kinder von Golzow. Marburg 2014. Junge, Barbara / Junge, Winfried: Die Kinder von Golzow. Die Golzow Gesamtausgabe (DVD). Absolut Medien, Berlin 2017. Last, George: After the ‘Socialist Spring’. Collectivisation and Economic Transformation in the GDR (= Monographs in German History; Vol. 26), New York, Oxford 2009. Lévi-Strauss, Claude: The Savage Mind [La Pensée sauvage, 1962], Chicago 1966. Links, Christoph / Nitsche, Siegried / Taffelt, Antje: Das wunderbare Jahr der Anarchie. Von der Kraft des zivilen Ungehorsams 1989/90, Berlin 2004. Karlsch, Rainer / Schäfer, Michael: Wirtschaftsgeschichte Sachsens im Industriezeitalter, Leipzig 2006. Martens, Bernd: Landwirtschaft in Ostdeutschland: der späte Erfolg der DDR, Berlin 2010 [online, accessed on March 15. 3. 2020]. Meuschel, Sigrid: The Other German Dictatorship: Totalitarianism and Modernization in the German Democratic Republic, in: Thesis Eleven 63 (2000), pp. 53–62. Röder, Barbara: Zur Qualifizierungsbereitschaft der Frauen in der sozialistischen Landwirtschaft der DDR im Zusammenhang mit ihrer beruflichen Qualifikation und gesellschaftlichen Stellung. Hochschulschrift: Leipzig 1975, Univ., Diss. A. 151 Bl. Schier, Barbara: Alltagsleben im ‘Sozialistischen Dorf ’. Merxleben und seine LPG im Spannungsfeld der SED-Agrarpolitik (1945–1990), Münster 2001. Schöne, Jens: Frühling auf dem Lande? Die Kollektivierung der DDR-Landwirtschaft, Berlin 2005. Schollbach, Walter: Die Entwicklung der LPG Pflanzenproduktion Golzow. In: Rat des Kreises Seelow, Abt. Kultur (Eds.): Heimatkalender Kreis Seelow 1986, Fürstenwalde 1986, pp. 28–33. Seiring, Wilfried: Ausnahme LPG? Märkisch Oder Zeitung, 5 June, 2017, p. 13. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 1989. Herausgegeben von der Staatlichen Zentralverwaltung für Statistik. 34. Jahrgang, Berlin 1990. Suthau, Wolfgang: Episoden von den Staats- und Regierungsbesuchen in der LPG ‘Einheit’ Golzow. In: Vetter, Klaus / Ochs, Helga / Ochs, Eckhard / Uebelhack, Simone / Kunze, Anneliese (Eds.): Gemeinde 700 Jahre Golzow 1308–2008, Golzow 2008, p. 69. Willisch, Andreas (2008): Die Zukunft des Dorfes: Produktionszonen und periphere Menschen. In: Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert / Giesecke, Dana / Dumke, Thomas (Eds.): Die Natur der Gesellschaft: Verhandlungen des 33. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Kassel 2006, Frankfurt am Main 2008, pp. 577–591. Zaske, Jürgen / Großkopf, Manfred: Large-scale farming and environment – Sketches from Brandenburg and the Ukraine: Are there different requirements related to technology and machinery? ZALF Publications 51/6 (1996), pp. 308–310.

Martin Jemelka

The Unified Cooperative Farm – Agrocombine Slusˇovice: Genesis, Tradition, Interpretation*

Introduction It would be impossible to find a more well-known unified cooperative farm in Czechoslovakia than JZD Agrocombine Slusˇovice before 1989.1 The earliest unified cooperative farms in Czechoslovakia were established in 1949. Forty years later, many of them found themselves on the verge of economic collapse, with unprofitable production, obsolete technologies and hit by the changes in the national as well as global economy.2 Without massive financial support from the state and the centrally planned agricultural economy, they would have found it hard to survive. But this was not the case of JZD Agrocombine Slusˇovice with its ubiquitous presence in the media in the 1980s, which became a veritable laboratory of Czechoslovak perestroika reforms and economics. The long transition from agricultural production to synergic industrial production, consumer economy and services was finally completed there in the 1980s. Their production base continued to be primary agricultural production, now bearing the hallmark of environmentally-friendly business, but its organisational principles, proWestern marketing strategies and technologies far outreached the boundaries of the centrally planned state socialist economy in the late-normalisation Czechoslovakia.3 The Slusˇovice cooperative farm, along with its management methods, production programmes and entrepreneurial strategies, was an omnipresent phe* This paper has been written as part of the Polish National Science Centre-founded project no. 2014/15/G/HS3/04344 “Room for Manoeuvre in State Socialism: Between Adaptation and Experiment”. 1 In the latter half of the 1980s the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia entitled Rudé právo [The Red Truth] published some twelve extensive articles describing the activities in the JZD Agrocombine Slusˇovice. Many of these articles were discussions or polemics. 2 Pru˚cha 2009, pp. 423–440, 920–929. 3 Jemelka 2018, pp. 736–740.

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nomenon in the media in the 1980s. It was commented upon by the top officials of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, by the thriving technocracy, from whose ranks the highest politicians of the Czech Republic were recruited after the November 1989 events, including the presidents Václav Klaus (in office 2003– 2013) and Milosˇ Zeman (since 2013), as well as by ordinary citizens and consumers. The managements of competitive cooperative farms varied in their standpoints over the so-called “Slusˇovice miracle” between blindly following Slusˇovice’s examples and rejecting them as corrupting methods of politically decadent perestroika which had misappropriated the ideals and objectives of the first cooperative farms as the communist units of the shared economy. Suspicions dominated the unofficial media discourse that Slusˇovice’s management were using the darkest entrepreneurial methods, for which Slusˇovice was a welcome scapegoat for denouncing the society-wide discord of the period, with corruption and clientelism first and foremost.4 Hundreds of hours of film were shot about Slusˇovice,5 which is how the agrocombine entered the history of Czechoslovak literature,6 filmography7 and modern folk music.8 It was virtually impossible not to have an opinion of the “Slusˇovice miracle”, especially when it touched upon the Achilles’ heel of the centrally planned economy of all Sovietbloc countries – the consumer economy. But JZD Agrocombine Slusˇovice did not disappear from the media scene even after the change in the political regime after 1989. In the new political setting and with a reshuffled crew, the topic of Slusˇovice became an opportunity to reckon with the old regime and its economic shortcomings, as well as to criticize the methods of Czechoslovakia’s emerging post-November elites. The post-November9 elites naturally included people with Slusˇovice experience, too; in fact, they were the part of the establishment that did not hesitate to present the “Slusˇovice miracle” as the predecessor of the post-November market economy, 4 5 6 7 8 9

Jemelka 2018, p. 740. Sedlácˇek 1999. Vácha 1987. Slinták 2012, pp. 42–54. Mládek 1977; Palecˇek / Janík 1984. The events of 17 November 1989, when a peaceful student demonstration to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the closure of Czech universities in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was violently suppressed, launched a series of first student and later mass demonstrations against the ruling regime that led to its collapse. On 10 December 1989 the so-called Government of National Understanding was appointed, and on 29 December 1989 Václav Havel was elected the President of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. On 8–9 June 1990 the first democratic elections were held. The economic reforms and the shift towards a market economy were an important part of the post-November changes that affected the whole of society. The leading representatives of perestroika Czechoslovakia and people connected with the JZD Agrocombinát Slusˇovice played a key role in the economic transformation process (see Kopecˇek 2019; Sommer / Spurný / Mrnˇka 2019).

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and the Slusˇovice cooperative as an island of perestroika-based democratisation before the democratic transition. This opinion became well established in the public discourse in the decades around the year 2000. At that time, however, the Slusˇovice cooperative no longer existed. It began to disintegrate quickly in the first months of 1990, its property melted away in the invisible network of subsidiaries and successor companies, and the enterprise’s archives were destroyed after they were moved to Bratislava, Slovakia.10 Stories about the Slusˇovice miracle still appear every now and then in the Czech media. They no longer take the form of the generational conflict between the perestroika generation and the older generation which, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, founded the first cooperative farms.11 However, they have become a conflict over the continuity of the pre-November and post-November society and its political, economic and technocratic elites. In 2014, the designer of the “Slusˇovice miracle” and the long-standing chairman of JZD Agrokombinát ˇ uba, even began to enjoy the limelight again when he was Slusˇovice, Frantisˇek C elected a senator of the Czech Parliament and also accepted the post of agricultural expert to president Milosˇ Zeman, who first appeared in the media and expert discussions in the 1980s, more than once in discussions over the Slusˇovice phenomenon.12 The following analysis will elaborate on the origins of this phenomenon, and what course was taken by the transformation of the Slusˇovice cooperative into Czechoslovakia’s most prosperous agricultural and industrial enterprise with turnovers of more than one billion crowns. It will consider the role played by the regional industrial tradition and experience with the organisational principles of the Bat’a system13, constituted in the period between the 10 Three collections are lodged with the Moravian Archives – the District Branch in Zlín, which were produced by the JZD Agrokombinát Slusˇovice, all of them still uncatalogued and inaccessible: Agrodruzˇstvo Slusˇovice (1991–1999) and Moragro, a. s., Slusˇovice (1991–1997), the former with 0.79 linear metres of materials, the latter as little as 0.06 l.m. of material. The key relevant source of information on the cooperative’s history should therefore be the collection entitled JZD Agrokombinát Slusˇovice with its 3.44 l.m. of materials. However, a substantial portion of this collection comprises period promotion materials and the enterprise’s press, certainly none of which allows a precise reconstruction of the development of the cooperative. 11 Sˇtrougal 2009, pp. 91–93. ˇ uba 2018. 12 Senátor C 13 Jemelka / Sˇevecˇek 2016, p. 17; Steinführer pp. 46–47: The notion of the Bat’a system was used in period discussions while lacking an accurate definition, in the broader sense for the system of doing business which was understood as comprehensive, and in the narrow sense for the ˇ ipera, manner in which the Bat’a company was managed (its managerial system). Dominik C the leading manager of Bat’a and in 1932–1944(1945) the mayor of Zlín, saw the mechanisation, rationalisation, standardisation, specialisation and decentralisation of mass production under the conditions of the company’s vertical concentration to be the pillars of the ˇ ipera, an important part was played by material Bat’a entrepreneurial system. According to C and financial performance incentives, the company’s financial and marketing strategies,

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wars in nearby Zlín, in the birth of the Slusˇovice miracle. Finally, this paper seeks to determine whether such a comprehensive and multifaceted phenomenon like Slusˇovice can ever be grasped with ideologically unbiased interpretational tools? The following text is dedicated to these questions.

The Genesis of the Slusˇovice Miracle The earliest JZDs (a well-known abbreviation for Jednotné zemeˇdeˇlské druzˇstvo – United Cooperative Farm) began to be established in Czechoslovakia in 1949, at first mostly in the Czech and Moravian border regions that had been vacated after the withdrawal of the previous German population. The ‘mainland’ farmers’ strong resistance to the collectivisation of rural areas temporarily halted the mass establishment of JZDs, which was replaced with two or three exemplary cooperatives set up in every district. But even this stage did not last long. At the ˇ (Central Committee of the beginning of 1950, at the decision of the ÚV KSC Communist Party of Czechoslovakia), it was superseded by a new and violent wave of collectivisation which led to the establishment of cooperatives with crop and animal production. The hostile campaign, accompanied by the forced buyout of livestock and machinery, the reorganisation of land plots into large units and the creation of large cooperative tracts, incited resistance both among farmers and landowners as well as among small farmers – even members of the Communist Party for whom the establishment of cooperatives was nothing more than an implementation of the Soviet kolkhoz system and the final elimination of traditional private farming. By the end of January 1951 there were 7110 cooperatives in Czechoslovakia, and one year later there were 8636 cooperatives in one half of the boroughs in Bohemia and Moravia. Their existence was often merely a formality as they faced serious existential problems.14 At the height of the forced collectivisation in 1952, “JZD Slusˇovice” was established in Slusˇovice, located in eastern Moravia some 10 km from Gottwaldov (now Zlín again), which was a regional centre with a long industrial tradition in shoe manufacture, heavy machinery and development industry. The unsuitable geomorphological situation, low soil quality and the fact that much of the workforce had left for nearby Gottwaldov, which offered enough better-paid jobs in industry, doomed the Slusˇovice cooperative to an early demise. In 1963, ˇ uba (b. 23/01/1936), then 27, was appointed the cooperative’s sixth Frantisˇek C chairman in eleven years. A graduate of Prague’s Agricultural University, after autocratic-patriarchal managerial style and the nurturing of the company’s own young workers. 14 Pru˚cha 2009, pp. 423–440.

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his two-year compulsory military service in 1961–1963 he worked briefly as the district agronomist and the deputy head of the Agricultural Department of the District Council of Gottwaldov before he became the chairman of the cooperative in Slusˇovice, now in decline.15 ˇ uba becoming the leader of the stagnating cooperative was a turning point in C its history. The milestone was Christmas 1963, when most of the staff left the enterprise after the first shows of authority by the young chairman. Facing their ˇ uba became determined not only to motivate the future staff but also departure, C to force them to work, to ensure that come what may, the cooperative would be profitable irrespective of its mainly agricultural production portfolio. The rationalisation and specialisation of farming production reached its production peak before 1970. In the early 1970s, if cooperative production were to continue growing, the final decision had to be taken to expand the JZD’s portfolio to include so-called ancillary production, taking account of the seasonal nature of farming work. The cooperative’s production of work gloves, rubber animal dummies, lumber, wooden pallets, tiles and dunging yard grids was soon accompanied by the production of mineral feed admixtures and supplements. The sharp surge in agricultural and other production at the end of the 1970s was the result of the systematic introduction of state-of-the-art technologies and scientific advancements in production. The ancillary production itself at first focused on the goods and materials necessary for primary agricultural production, which were scarce. However, it was soon accompanied by the production of goods in short supply on the Czechoslovak consumer market.16 ˇ uba’s leadership (1963–1983), JZD SlusˇoOver the first twenty years under C vice went from being an almost bankrupt cooperative farm to a production-type enterprise with a complex agricultural production programme, i. e. crop and animal production, as well as non-agricultural production that efficiently utilised the company’s human resources and materials and the synergies between agricultural and non-agricultural production, including the energy and raw material potential of waste management. The transformation began in the early 1970s, despite the objections raised by the state authorities and the applicable legislation, which banned agricultural enterprises from engaging in anything other than agricultural production on principle.17 Such production could only be promoted in the face of opposition from the state authorities at the regional and national level by constantly arguing the unsuitable geomorphology of Slusˇovice’s poor soil, searching out legislative loopholes and overcoming the growing anˇ uba, CSc., in 1963–1990 the chairman of JZD (JZD 15 On the personality of doc. Ing. Frantisˇek C ˇ uba / Divila 1989, pp. 12–13, AK) Slusˇovice, briefly and objectively, see Tomesˇ 1999, p. 218; C 220. 16 Jemelka 2018, p. 736–740. 17 Ibid., p. 737–738.

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tagonism of party and state officials at the regional and national level, often through corruption and personal links to the highest-ranking party politicians with experience working in the Zlín (Gottwaldov) region. Unlike the conservative Slovak-born president Gustáv Husák (1913–1991, in the office in 1975–1989), these politicians included Milousˇ Jakesˇ (b. 12/08/1922), in 1937–1947 an assembly worker at the Bat’a concern in Zlín, in 1950–1952 the chairman of the Municipal Council in Gottwaldov and in 1987–1989 General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.18 The only thing that could legitimise the unsystematic nature of Slusˇovice’s production programme and its unrivalled economic effectiveness was the ideologically neutral numeric rationale of its unprecedented and continuously improving economic indicators. The large-scale investments into the company’s social policy, which also included the families of former staff, could hardly be criticised.19 What played an important part in the legitimization of Slusˇovice’s business methods, more than their success in capitalist countries, were the strengthening relationships with the Soviet Union during the perestroika era. The contribution that the JZD Slusˇovice Agrocombine made to the genetic breeding of cattle was even praised in the debate at the 27th convention of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.20 At the beginning of the 1950s, the grain crop yields in Slusˇovice and the surrounding area were 1.8 tons per hectare and the average cow milk yield was some 1700 litres per year. In 1987, when the JZD Slusˇovice Agrocombine was fully converted into an industrial and agricultural enterprise specialising primarily in non-agricultural production, the average grain crop yields were 6.72 tons. The Czechoslovak average at the time was 4.86 tons, and in cooperatives in potato growing areas such as those around Slusˇovice the figure was a mere 4.41 tons. The average milk yield rose to 6004 litres while the state average was 3787 litres per year. With these crop yields, the JZD Slusˇovice Agrocombine was now approaching the levels of Western market economies, namely in the United Kingdom (6.08 tons) and Holland (6.92 tons). The amount of farming land also grew in proportion with this: in 1952 the Slusˇovice cooperative used 106 hectares of land, while the figure rose to almost 6000 hectares in 1965–1976 after the integration of 15 agricultural enterprises in 16 surrounding villages. From the initial staff of 23, the enterprise grew to employ approximately 1500 people in 1976.21 The Slusˇovice cooperative therefore became, as early as in the mid-1970s,

18 19 20 21

Sˇtrougal 2009, pp. 91–93. Trnka 1998, pp. 19–30. XXVII. sjezd KSSS 1987, p. 460. ˇ uba / Divila, 1989, pp. 7–18, 208. C

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one of the most important regional employers and the largest cooperatives in the whole state. The continuous growth of productivity, employment and individual performance should primarily be attributed to the enterprise’s non-agricultural production. It made up 94.4 % of its programme in 1986. If ancillary production began with farming tools and simple wood and metal products, by the 1980s it had peaked with a consistent focus on the production of biotechnologies and microelectronics. Most Czechoslovak JZDs were equipped with Slusˇovice’s TNS computers before the end of the 1980s.22 And if there were Czechoslovak enterprises where the environmental impacts and consequences of mass agricultural production were discussed in the 1980s, they certainly did include Slusˇovice. Its progressive strategy of combining primary agricultural production with ancillary non-agricultural production even contributed to the adoption of the new act on agricultural cooperatives, which deregulated the proportion between agricultural and ancillary non-agricultural production in administrative terms.23 Despite all the rationalisation measures and technological interventions, primary agricultural production was systematically declining in the 1980s to make way for ancillary production which had apparent innovation potential. At the same time, JZD AK Slusˇovice became involved in another field of business in the 1980s which made the flourishing cooperative enterprise the Mecca of Czechoslovak consumer society in the latter half of the 1980s.24 This involved investments into the tertiary economic segment, at first in Slusˇovice and the surrounding region and later throughout the entire country. In searching for new economic strategies, the management of JZD AK Slusˇovice easily found its golden mine – the field of services and consumer goods, long overshadowed in the centrally planned economy. The inspiration drawn from Western marketing strategies blurred the difference between capitalist Western countries and the Soviet bloc countries in Slusˇovice’s tertiary sphere. This was most markedly evident in investments into the licensed production of Western consumer goods, such as Pepsi drinks.25 JZD Slusˇovice also began investing in gastronomy in the mid-1980s, involving both the establishment of a country-wide network of roadhouses and taking

22 On the creation and production of the first Czechoslovak computer of the TNS brand (an abbreviation for Ten násˇ systém, i. e. This System of Ours) in detail, see e. g. Procházková 2009. ˇ uba / Divila, 1989, pp. 7–8. 23 C 24 The term ‘Mecca’ was in use for Slusˇovice even in the period media, see e. g. Nasˇe cesta, Slusˇovice [Our Journey, Slusˇovice], JZD AK Slusˇovice 1989/11, 1989, p. 30. 25 Nasˇe cesta, Slusˇovice [Our Way, Slusˇovice], JZD AK Slusˇovice 1989/11, p. 30. The contract for the construction of a Pepsi licensed plant was signed in December 1988 and the production was launched just six months later in June 1989.

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control of the ice-cream stalls on the iconic Wenceslas Square in Prague.26 Mass catering, which was unified in terms of production, was exactly the industry where the tradition of agricultural and industrial production could go hand in hand with a strong enterprise involvement in services. Whatever the case, in the 1980s the sphere of the enterprise’s social policy crossed village and regional boundaries when Slusˇovice’s sports grounds and shops opened up for the public also on Sundays. This blurred the boundaries between the cooperative’s staff and visitors to Slusˇovice who came to this miraculous haven of Czechoslovak consumerism on Sundays to enjoy horseracing (1981), a stay in the enterprise’s luxurious hotel in Vsˇemina, near Slusˇovice dam (1986) or fine dining in a restaurant located in a disused aeroplane (1982). There was none of the strict foreign currency policy of the normalised Czechoslovakia and no prudish bourgeois morals which condemned the prostitution covertly tolerated in Slusˇovice. Erotic was strongly featured in the promotional graphic design of Slusˇovice’s consumer goods27 and in untamed Slusˇovice’s discos at the end of the 1980s, visited by teenagers even from afar.28

Zlín and Slusˇovice, Bat’a and Cˇuba: (Dis)continued History “The song ends, what else to add – a paradise on earth, it certainly is in Slusˇovice – I swear that old [Bat’a] grins from his grave” – this was one part of the lyrics of the popular folk song, entitled Slusˇovice Romance, by the popular modern folk duo Miroslav Palecˇek (born 1945) and Michael Janík (born 1945) in 1984.29 The multi-faceted alliance between JZD Agrocombine Slusˇovice and the Bat’a shoemaking concern in Zlín, the world’s greatest shoe exporter from 1928 to 1938, with the exception of 1930,30 ceased to be a taboo topic in the mid-1980s when this song spread swiftly through the modern folk subculture. And hand in hand with it came the opportunity to apply some aspects of Batism and its predecessor examples Fordism and Taylorism in the economic reality of the socialist economy. It was the management of JZD Slusˇovice which did so much in the 1960s

26 Jemelka 2018, p. 739; JZD Slusˇovice 2008. 27 Pospeˇch 2018. 28 On the phenomenon of Slusˇovice’s discos in detail, see Fialka 2017, pp. 220–222: The author notes both the Austrian examples to Slusˇovice’s ‘Derby Centrum’, also called Sud [the Barrel] (1982–1983), designed by the architect Sˇebestián Zelina, where the discos were held, as well as the growing attention from the state administration and repressive forces to the “obscene excesses” of a growing number of teenager visitors of the discos who demolished also the equipment of the Derby Centrum. 29 Palecˇek / Janík 1984. 30 Jemelka / Sˇevecˇek 2016, p. 471.

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and 1970s to revive some of Bat’a’s business and management principles, to eventually speak about them almost openly in the 1980s.31 “Bat’a was a private capitalist entrepreneur. […] But we would be foolish, stupid and inveterate idiots if we wanted to claim that everything about Bat’a was wrong […]. No, comrades and friends, the way to organise modern production is something we can and will have to learn a lot about from Bat’a.”32

This was said in 1946 by President Antonín Zápotocký (1884–1957), member of the Presidium of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and the President of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1953–1957. Five years later, however, Bat’a’s entrepreneurial methods had already been the subject of scandal and criminalised and Bat’a’s name was taboo. Zlín was renamed to Gottwaldov in 1949 after Novotný’s presidential predecessor (1948–1953), Klement Gottwald. Many of Bat’a’s supporters, including the former management, were persecuted and even put on trial.33 Bat’a’s production and management methods were applied in the successor company to the Bat’a concern, Svit national enterprise, long into the 1960s.34 An ingrained awareness of the principles of the Bat’a business and management system was widespread at least in this region, where Zlín was only 10 kilometres from Slusˇovice and where the people of Slusˇovice, then a rural village, also went to work in Bat’a’s concern in Zlín between the wars. And it was the Slusˇovice ˇ uba, which began agricultural cooperative, under the management of Frantisˇek C experimenting with some of Bat’a’s basic principles of industrial production in the 1960s,35 which were publicly discussed by the Slusˇovice agro-combine’s representatives in a book on the history and organisation of the Slusˇovice cooperative shortly before November 1989.36 Bat’a, to the disproval of the older generation of the communist establishment, was seen almost as the predecessor of Slusˇovice and, along with it, perestroika. The survival of elements of Bat’a’s system in the centrally planned economy of state socialist Czechoslovakia was facilitated by the similarity of the state socialism variation on the authoritative management of modern society to Slusˇoˇ uba / Divila 1989, p. 19, 65; Jemelka / Sˇevecˇek 2016, p. 26. C Jemelka / Sˇevecˇek 2016, p. 102. Pokluda 2012, pp. 88–91: Persecution and trials were fateful for many leading managers of the Bat’a concern, especially Frantisˇek Malota (1900–1984) and Hugo Vavrecˇka (1880–1952), the grandfather of Václav Havel, the President of the Czechoslovak and later Czech Republic. Vavrecˇka was one of the concern’s directors in 1932–1945. 34 Jemelka / Sˇevecˇek 2016, p. 105. 35 Similar professional resources include, for instance, a book by Frantisˇek Machát dating back to the late 1960s which focused on the topic of scientific management in capitalist industry and which dedicated a whole chapter to Bat’a’s management methods. Machát 1967, pp. 183– 215. ˇ uba / Divila 1989, pp. 91–115. 36 C 31 32 33

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vice’s strict hierarchical and authoritative Bat’a-like alternative to the modern system.37 Even though the state, the Communist Party and their affiliated organisations intervened with increasing frequency in the post-war Bat’a’s system, especially in human resources and social policy – quite remarkably particularly as regards the abandonment of the interwar Ford-Bat’a family model of a manworker and woman-housekeeper to support the high employment rate of women in light industry (approximately 58 % in around 1985)38 –, even the socialist practice found a place for Bat’a’s interwar methods, which had a strong influence on employees. Bat’a’s principles also managed to survive longer in the post-war economy of Zlín (Gottwaldov) region thanks to the fact that Bat’a’s business, technocratic and seemingly apolitical, focused primarily on economic and production objectives that came before everything else. Bat’a’s strategies in technologies, production processes, organisation and management, planning and development, healthcare and education were thus also given the opportunity to easily permeate and influence Slusˇovice’s milieu of a pro-market socialist enterprise.39 JZD Slusˇovice declared its support of Bat’a’s principles shortly after the apˇ uba as the chairman of the cooperative in 1963. As his pointment of Frantisˇek C position strengthened in the cooperative’s management and in regional politics and economic structures, in JZD Slusˇovice Bat’a became ever more a source of inspiration and example, whether overtly or otherwise. At least three major principles of Slusˇovice’s staffing policy stemmed from Bat’a’s methods – the absolute ban on alcohol, no wage for a day if late arriving at work, and the ban on reemploying anyone who had once been fired.40 The restrictive measures influencing the establishment of work teams proved to be efficient both in Bat’a’s Zlín ˇ uba’s Slusˇovice. There was a similar approach in the combination of the and in C strictly hierarchical structure of the enterprise with egalitarianism at work – Slusˇovice’s employees were collaborators managed by a charismatic leader who promoted the apolitical character of the cooperative’s business. This was the only way that the cooperative could be a forum where staunch Communist Party members could meet active Catholic Christians and, in the 1980s, even dissidents, who eventually formed an opposition group within the company, whose public criticism of circumstances in the cooperative contributed to the public postNovember critique of Slusˇovice’s entrepreneurial methods and their deconstruction (Stanislav Devátý).41 All the workers were united by the comprehensive incentive system which included financial rewards, most importantly a share in 37 38 39 40 41

Jemelka / Sˇevecˇek 2016, p. 26. Statistická rocˇenka 90, p. 84. Jemelka / Sˇevecˇek 2016, p. 26. ˇ uba / Divila 1989, pp. 91–115. C Devátý 2014, 2015.

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profit, social benefits in the form of the company’s large network of healthcare and leisure time facilities, and publicity for deserving employees and teams. They also modelled themselves directly on Bat’a, as did the company’s internal competition and emphasis on transparent forms of control. Transparent controls in the company were applied not only internally, but also externally. As an example, the scales available to every customer in the company’s fruit and vegetable shop in the centre of Gottwaldov made it possible to check the weights of the goods on sale. Even the shop itself was built at a “Bat’a tempo” within just one year. Bat’a examples were also present in the Slusˇovice cooperative business’s human resources and social policy, media strategies, and also in the actual rudiments of cooperative business. This was primarily manifested in the staff ’s responsibility for entrusted property and their share in profit or loss at each workplace, which they kept in “socialist safekeeping”. A three-component wage (a percentage bonus based on performance, the financial results of the unit and the difference between the budget and actual costs) was by no means ordinary in Czechoslovakia before November 1989, and neither were wage payments to special “agro” accounts with a 3 % interest rate, the offer of cashless loans of up to three months’ wages and the option of cashless payments at company shops. The quality and scope of the services rendered, which included, for instance, a company travel agency, crafts, household service, education and language courses, were an important incentive and performance factor and a means of establishing a high degree of loyalty to the enterprise amongst the socially homogeneous agrarian-industrial community. This was intentionally helped by the fact that a major part of Slusˇovice’s social programme focused on former employees and employees’ families.42 Social cohesion, also following the direct example of Bat’a’s Zlín, was further emphasised by the widespread sports involvement of the employees,43 especially in the popular sports of the time, such as football, horse racing and motorsports, in which the employees of JZD AK Slusˇovice excelled. The sports activities combined physically beneficial forms of leisure pursuits with consumerism while building up the spirit of collective competition.44 42 Jemelka 2018, pp. 738, 740–741, 743. 43 Jemelka / Sˇevecˇek 2016, p. 68. ˇ uba / Divila 1989, p. 81: Horseracing and thoroughbred horse breeding were developed in 44 C JZD AK Slusˇovice from 1975. Horse breeding was the model for cattle breeding, where horse breeding methods were applied. At the end of the 1980 Slusˇovice’s stables housed 300 horses and the Slusˇovice stud farm, together with that of nearby Napajedla, was the best in the country. The motor racing club was established in 1978 under the Svazarm nationwide leisure organisation. Slusˇovice’s car racers and horse racers were top performers in the 1980s at the Czechoslovak and European level. The cooperative’s football club enjoyed an equally rapid rise, making it from a district contest to the 1st Czechoslovak League in 1976–1986. All of these activities were a sophisticated blend of the various spheres of the enterprise’s activities, from

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Bat’a’s management and entrepreneurial models were also successfully established in the environment of the Slusˇovice cooperative despite the dominating socialist modernity. Their establishment was legitimised through unprecedented economic growth, all the more so when the company implemented among its employees its apolitical ideology of meaningful and profitable (socialist) work, and eventually focused on consumer leisure pursuits. This was another area in which JZD Slusˇovice, during the peak and late period of normalisation in the Czechoslovak Republic, became a bastion of modernity in consumer goods, especially those produced in the West and distributed in its company shops.45

Autonomy, Autarky and Authority: An Attempt to Interpret the Slusˇovice Miracle The multiplicity and complexity of the history of the Slusˇovice cooperative make biased interpretations virtually impossible and also make it difficult to put forward suitable interpretational perspectives. It is also apparent in today’s discussions on the causes of the cooperative’s rapid rise and even more rapid fall, where its economic strategies and methods are occasionally lauded46 and in other cases demonised.47 The present author has therefore selected three different perspectives for interpreting the development of JZD Slusˇovice cooperative from its establishment in 1952 until the dismantling of the JZD Agrokombinát Slusˇovice in the early 1990s as a result of the transformation from the centrally planned economy of state socialist Czechoslovakia into an early liberal market economy. The period interpretations of the so-called Slusˇovice miracle,48 appearing in the normalisation-era mass media in the 1980s, repeatedly articulated and widely discussed issues related to the specific and unique position of the Slusˇovice Agrocombine, the basic principles of Slusˇovice’s entrepreneurial production system and the management structure in staffing matters. These were basically topics relating to 1) the autonomy of the Slusˇovice cooperative within the Czechoslovak centrally planned economy, 2) the autarky of Slusˇovice’s entrepreneurial production system, which was largely independent of other entities in the state-planned economy, and 3) the authoritative managerial style, including the role and influence of the charismatic authority of the chairman

45 46 47 48

primary agricultural production through an interest in modern (bio)technologies to the tertiary sphere and mass support for consumer leisure pursuits. Jemelka 2018, p. 747. Trnka 1998. Havel 1990. Jemelka 2018, pp. 744–748.

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ˇ uba, the creator and living symbol of the so-called Slusˇovice MiraFrantisˇek C 49 cle. The autonomy of JZD Slusˇovice within the network of Czechoslovak cooperative farms and also in the framework of the whole agricultural sector of the Czechoslovak economy was a result of a specific development trajectory which went from what was a geographically isolated and socially determined agricultural cooperative in an outlying submontane region of the Czech lands, which was less than profitable in the 1950s and 1960s, to becoming a prosperous and exemplary agrocombine in the 1980s. The reasons behind the autonomy of JZD Slusˇovice lie not only in the geographic remoteness of this region with its poor soil, but also in the local tradition of light industrial production connected with the nearby shoemaking and machinery centre, Zlín (Gottwaldov).50 An important role in constituting the autonomous JZD was also played by the conflicts and power struggles between the central and regional party elites and structures, which were well aware of the local industrial potential and specific social assumptions of the region, whose rural inhabitants were mostly traditional and religiously-minded. The definitions of autonomy in the social sciences usually accentuate, on the one hand, both the ability of autonomous entities to formulate, modify and advocate their own value system, and on the other, the liberal and democratic context of autonomy.51 Slusˇovice was no different. At the end of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s its autonomy at the local level allowed it to successfully promote the company’s own value system.52 The perestroika democratisation and liberalism played a smaller role in this than the observers of the time assumed, being contrary to the strongly authoritative character of Slusˇovice’s entrepreneurial production model.53 While its democratisation potential and liberalising trends were rather overestimated by Slusˇovice’s observers and commentators during the perestroika period, the strongly autarkic character of Slusˇovice’s entrepreneurial production model could hardly be overlooked by basically anyone who took a closer look at Slusˇovice’s cooperative reality. Clearly autarkic trends began to surface in Slusˇovice’s cooperative as early as in the 1960s after the appointment of the young ˇ uba and were apparently related to the efforts to make the cooperative chairman C profitable as a business unit. The development of the cooperative in the 1970s and the final decision to focus on the ancillary production of consumer goods not ˇ uba / Divila 1989, pp. 91–115; Vácha 1988, pp. 31–103. C ˇ uba / Divila 1989, pp. 7–20, 106–115, 117–124. C Nohlen 1989, pp. 652–655. ˇ uba / Divila 1989, pp. 202–204: The authors only reprinted the basic structure and chapter C headings from the Vnitropodniková pravidla JZD AK Slusˇovice [Internal Rules of JZD AK Slusˇovice] as applicable in 1988. ˇ uba / Divila 1989, pp. 93–101. 53 C

49 50 51 52

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otherwise available on the market, instead of staying with the primary agricultural production line, forced the cooperative to concentrate its production vertically, which gradually eliminated external suppliers.54 The vertical concentration of production only strengthened the autarkic character of the Slusˇovice cooperative. The natural consequence of this was the expansion of the cooperative’s human resources and raw materials base within the region to the detriment of the less successful cooperatives that had not been integrated into JZD Slusˇovice. Slusˇovice’s economic reality, however, was naturally not the only sphere affected by its autarky. It was also accompanied by a considerable degree of social control at work and elsewhere and trends that saw the rigid strengthening of ˇ uba and his management. authority, both that of the cooperative’s chairman C The autonomous self-presentation of Slusˇovice’s cooperative in the Czechoslovak market and the autarkic character of its production programme and entrepreneurial methods naturally met with deepening suspicion on the part of the competition and part of the Czechoslovak public regarding Slusˇovice’s economic reality. Corruption, clientelism and illegal entrepreneurial methods55 were the flip side of the Slusˇovice miracle and a frequent topic in the public debate about Slusˇovice virtually throughout the whole of the 1980s.56 The autonomous position of Slusˇovice’s cooperative among Czechoslovak JZDs in the 1980s and the strongly autarkic character of the local entrepreneurial production system were supported by authoritative forms of management which, as early as in the 1960s, were the basis for the radical decision to make the fading Slusˇovice cooperative a prosperous and eventually also exemplary enterprise in the state socialist economy. The authoritarian environment of the cooperative was directly linked to the personal ambition of its charismatic chairman, which was legitimised by his achievements in the economic, social and staffing policies. The chairman’s authority was also strengthened through collective debates with the cooperative members that became part of the cooperative’s HR management in the 1970s.57 While they appeared to promote a free forum, in which members could express their opinions on the functioning of the cooperative, in fact, rather than serving as a corrective to the chairman’s authoritative decisions, they were a platform to strengthen the influence and authority of the founding generation of ˇ uba,58 who turned 50 in the cooperative, led by the young charismatic chairman C 1986, in the heyday of the Slusˇovice era.

54 55 56 57 58

Ibid., pp. 14, 16, 29–36, 98–99. Havel 1990. Jemelka 2018, pp. 744–748. Vácha 1988, pp. 30f. ˇ uba / Divila 1989, pp. 19, 93–101. C

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The authoritative environment in Slusˇovice, however, had its opponents and critics, although more at the central rather than the regional level. Its authoritative managerial style was criticised as unacceptable as early as in the 1960s, as it contradicted the original ideals of the egalitarian management of equal administrators of their cooperative share. Especially in the latter half of the 1960s, during the search for the so-called “socialism with a human face”, the authoritative environment in Slusˇovice was much closer to the Stalinist era of the early 1950s, which was when the Slusˇovice cooperative was established. However, stronger opposition came from those who recognised the legitimising force of Slusˇovice’s success at the local level, in such sharp contrast to the de-legitimised authority of the state after August 1968 in the early normalisation period. Slusˇovice’s authoritarianism was legitimate for cooperative members and locals, as it was legitimised by the profits in the cooperative’s accounting records and specific investments aimed at expanding production and social services at the company and municipal level. In fact, the authority of the state faced resistance in Slusˇovice when it tried to channel Slusˇovice’s methods into the framework of the legal and party-disciplinary framework. Some role in this struggle was obviously also played by the tensions between the local and central party elites, who were reaching out for repression at the central level while being legitimised through an interest in the improvement of standards of living at the local level.59 Slusˇovice’s management tried to prevent competence and power conflicts by formalising the cooperative’s authoritarianism. To this end, it transferred the rigid authority to a depersonalised system which, given the demands on work efficiency and employee loyalty, undermined the potential for success.60 The unusual autonomy, strong autarky and considerable authoritarianism were the three topics on which the normalisation media continued to focus in connection with the JZD Slusˇovice Agrocombine, which was ubiquitous in the media. Staunch supporters of perestroika were attracted by the considerable autarky of Slusˇovice’s economic model; however, they were put off by the authoritarianism within the enterprise and strict managerial hierarchy, things that were in strong contrast to the democratising and liberalising ambitions of the perestroika era. The supporters of the normalisation regime, on the other hand, criticised its autarky in doing business, questioned its autonomous inclinations and fully rejected Slusˇovice’s authoritarianism, which rivalled the power monopoly of the national and regional power structures. Nowadays the Slusˇovice miracle is often interpreted as an autonomous veritable laboratory of the postNovember market economy of the 1990s in which authoritarianism was a necessary objective in order to achieve the economic miracle in the state socialist and 59 Ibid., pp. 19, 93–101. 60 Ibid., 1989, pp. 106–115.

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centrally planned economy. Modern-day supporters of the Slusˇovice miracle see that autonomy only as a means of breaking free from the bondage of the nationwide power structures of socialist Czechoslovakia.61

Conclusion Today, the East Moravian town of Slusˇovice, in the Zlín Region, has a population of some 3000 people. The main square of the countryside town is dominated by a Baroque church, a reminder that Slusˇovice is in one of the most religious regions of the Czech Republic, and a shabby grocery shop with the fading inscription “Supermarket”, whose graphic design bears witness to Slusˇovice’s faded glory from the 1980s. The municipality owes its belated promotion to town status in 1996 to the now defunct JZD Agrocombine Slusˇovice. Considering the size of its population, Slusˇovice has solid civic amenities and is probably the only Czech municipality of its size which is serviced by its own airport and a four-lane highway with the same parameters as a motorway. The longest street in the town is called Dostihová [Horseracing St.] and the main square is called Svobody [Freedom Sq.].62 The notion of freedom holds a steady place in the media picture and collective memory of Slusˇovice’s inhabitants. JZD Agrocombine Slusˇovice is often presented as an island of freedom in pre-November Czechoslovakia, and yet there was no place for the liberal concept of freedom in the authoritarian management system of the Slusˇovice cooperative. The current understanding of freedom stems from the 1980s, the perestroika period and Slusˇovice’s heyday, and must be interpreted within these intentions. To a considerable extent, Slusˇovice was an autonomous and autarkic entrepreneurial unit whose authoritarian management style challenged the authority of the disintegrating Czechoslovak state at the dawn of perestroika. It is only within this political climate that Slusˇovice can be seen as an island of freedom.63 Slusˇovice today is no open-air museum. It lives its life of a small, neat countryside town of three thousand inhabitants which benefits from its proximity to the regional capital Zlín, the nearby Czech-Slovak border and recreational destinations in the adjacent Beskydy mountains near Vsetín. Tourists mostly pass by Slusˇovice and rather than going to the discos in the legendary giant barrel and accommodation in the once luxurious Vsˇemina hotel, they follow the skiing tracks of the Beskydy Mountains. Slovak customers, on the other hand, go 61 62 63

Jemelka 2018, p. 743. Slusˇovice 2019. ˇ uba / Divila 1989, pp. 7–20. C

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shopping in Zlín and the neighbouring Vizovice, which is famous for its legendary ‘slivovice’, Rudolf Jelínek’s plum brandy.64 Anthropologists, sociologists and ethnologists have not reached Slusˇovice as yet, and historians rely upon the torso of the enterprise’s archives, the newspaper which served as the shop window of the Slusˇovice miracle, and documents produced by the central authorities, which demonised the Slusˇovice cooperative all the more in the late 1980s. Czech and Slovak oral historians no longer carry out ˇ uba and the generation of his field work in Slusˇovice. As long as Frantisˇek C closest collaborators remain alive as the guarantors of the most widespread Slusˇovice narrative, the multifaceted history of Slusˇovice will be difficult to grasp, especially based on witness recollections. The Slusˇovice miracle continues to attract interest, and its interpretations remain provocative, whether in the TV documentary by the Zlín-born director ˇ uba and the Slusˇovice miracle (1999)65 or the Robert Sedlácˇek on Frantisˇek C publication on the promotion photographer Jan Regal, who created the visually appealing part of the Slusˇovice phenomenon and its consumer attraction.66 Sedlácˇek’s documentary, made ten years after the November 1989 events, took ˇ uba and condemned Václav Havel67 and the postthe standpoint of Frantisˇek C 68 November establishment, while the catalogue of Slusˇovice’s posters and promotional photographs admires the colourfulness and lushness of perestroika consumerism. Slusˇovice, however, remains the cornerstone on which the interpretation of the history of the last third of the 20th century breaks up, using the example of what was originally an insignificant agricultural cooperative where, to mutual satisfaction, the capitalist West amidst the economic recession met the countries of the collapsing Soviet East before 1989.69 It is undeniable that the rise and fall of JZD Agrocombine Slusˇovice was only possible within the boundaries of the centrally planned economy. Especially instrumental were its two stagnant segments – (industrial) agriculture and the consumer economy70 – on which Slusˇovice’s production had been focused systematically from the 1970s. We cannot doubt that the Slusˇovice phenomenon was to a considerable extent an ambitious project of a charismatic authority which stemmed from an intimate knowledge of the region and relied on the region’s staffing and production tradition and capacities. Another key role in the history of the JZD Agrocombine Slusˇovice was played by the competition in the regional 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Jemelka 2018, p. 747. Sedlácˇek 1999. Pospeˇch 2018. Havel 1990. Sedlácˇek 1999. Jemelka 2018, pp. 748–750; Zˇídek 2006, pp. 81–104, 113–118. Hobsbawm 2010, pp. 383–411.

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and national structures of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia which, to a considerable degree, took on the character of a generational conflict between the founders of the unified cooperative farms in the Stalinist 1950s and their proreform characters of the 1968 Prague Spring. However, the Slusˇovice phenomenon can serve as an illustration of how shallow the transition was between the normalisation era of the 1980s and the post-socialist period of the 1990s, besides the traditional socialist story of technological progress. On the other hand, the personal continuity of a major part of the post-November elites and the staunch defence of Slusˇovice by the present Czech public are convincing testimony of this.71 Translated by Hynek Zlatník and Steve Coleman

Literature ˇ echlovská, Magdalena: Slusˇovice meˇly blízko k Neználkovi. Kniha prˇiblizˇuje ekonoC mický zázrak normalizace, 2019, available at: https://magazin.aktualne.cz/kultura/um eni/slusovice-mely-blizko-k-neznalkovi-kniha-priblizuje-ekonomic/r~a342e4f223251 1e9a0090cc47ab5f122/ [28. 01. 2019]. ˇ uba, Frantisˇek / Divila, Emil: Cesty k prosperiteˇ: JZD Agrokombinát Slusˇovice, Praha C 1989. Devátý, Stanislav: Nechci se bát budoucnosti, available at: https://www.pametnaroda.cz/c s/devaty-stanislav-1952 [31. 05. 2019]. Fialka, Jirˇí: The role of popular culture in rural-to-urban transformation contributing to the “Slusˇovice miracle”, Urban People / Lidé meˇsta 19 (2017), pp. 211–230. ˇ SFR Václava Havla k výrocˇí okupace C ˇ eskoslovenska Havel, Václav: Projev prezidenta C vojsky peˇti zemí Varsˇavského paktu, Praha, Václavské námeˇstí, 21. srpna 1990, available at: http://vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=projevy&val=300_projevy.html&typ=HT ML [31. 05. 2019]. Hobsbawm, Eric: Veˇk extrému˚: krátké 20. století. Prˇeklad Jana Pecˇirková a Petr Sˇteˇpánek, Praha 2010. Jemelka, Martin / Sˇevecˇek, Ondrˇej: Tovární meˇsta Bat’ova koncernu: evropská kapitola globální expanze, Praha 2016. Jemelka, Martin: “The Miracle of Slusˇovice”. The Municipality and the United Cooperative Farm – Slusˇovice Agrocombine as the Pilgrimage Site of the Czechoslovak Consumerism at the Dawn of the Socialist State Era, in: Przegla˛d Historyczny 109 (2018), pp. 739–756. JZD Slusˇovice, 2008, available at: https://www.ceskatelevize.cz/porady/10176269182-retro /208411000360618/ [31. 05. 2019].

71 Pullmann 2011, pp. 185–228.

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Kopecˇek, Michal (ed.): Architekti dlouhé zmeˇny: expertní korˇeny postsocialismu (1980– 1995), Praha 2019. Machát, Frantisˇek: Deˇjiny veˇdeckého rˇízení v kapitalistickém pru˚myslu: vybrané kapitoly, Praha 1967. Mládek, Ivan: Jozˇin z bazˇin, 1977, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3t G1X5ewAg [24. 03. 2020]. NohLen, Dieter (ed.): Pipers Wörterbuch zur Politik, München 1989. Palecˇek, Miroslav / Janík, Michael: Slusˇovice, 1984, available at: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=55bIMBuembE [6. 02. 2019]. Pokluda, Zdeneˇk: Bat’ovi muzˇi, Zlín 2012. Pospeˇch, Tomásˇ: Zemeˇdeˇlské práce – Slusˇovice, Sine loco 2018. ˇ eskoslovensko 1989, díl trˇináctý: Procházková, Bára: Zrod Kapitalismu Czech Made. C Sedm let slusˇovického pocˇítacˇového undergroundu , in: Respekt 40 (2009), available at: https://www.respekt.cz/tydenik/2009/40/zrod-kapitalismu-czech-made [6. 11. 2014]. ˇ eskoslovenska 1918–1992, 2. díl, ˚ cha, Václav (ed.): Hospodárˇské a sociální deˇjiny C Pru období 1945–1992, Brno 2009. ˇ eskoslovensku, Pullmann, Michal: Konec experimentu: prˇestavba a pád komunismu v C Praha 2011. ˇ uba: slusˇovický zázrak, 1999, available at: https://www.yo Sedlácˇek, Robert: Frantisˇek C utube.com/playlist?list=PLwYcMU_ovWM-VzXTz8_vCL4bpdQfDSGSf [27. 02. 2015]. ˇ uba mandát nevykonává, navíc uzˇ ani nekomunikuje, available at: https:// Senátor C www.novinky.cz/domaci/462175-senator-cuba-mandat-nevykonava-navic-uz-ani-nek omunikuje.html [01. 02. 2018]. Slinták, Petr: Haurˇi a perestrojka: slusˇovické JZD jako inspirace prˇestavbového filmu, in: Pameˇt’ a deˇjiny 6/1 (2012), pp. 42–54. Slusˇovice, available at: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slu%C5%A1ovice [03. 02. 2019]. ˇ ídit socialismus jako firmu. ˇ ka, Jaromir: R Sommer, Víteˇzslav / Spurný, Mateˇj / Mrn ˇ Technokratické vládnutí v Ceskoslovensku 1956–1989, Praha 2019. Steinführer, Annett: Stadt und Utopie. Das Experiment Zlín 1920–1938, in: Bohemia 1 (2002), pp. 33–73. Sˇtrougal, Lubomír: Pameˇti a úvahy, Praha 2009. ˇ eský biografický slovník XX. století, I. díl: A–J, Praha – Litomysˇl 1999. Tomesˇ, Josef (ed.): C ˇ uba , Praha 1998. Trnka, Frantisˇek: Zlínsˇtí podnikatelé Tomásˇ Bat’a a Frantisˇek C Vácha, Stanislav: Haurˇi, Praha 1987. Vácha, Stanislav: Jak se rˇídí Slusˇovice, Praha 1988. XXVII. sjezd Komunistické strany Soveˇtského svazu, Praha 1987. Zˇídek, Libor: Transformace cˇeské ekonomiky 1989–2004, Praha 2006.

Juraj Buzalka

Room to Manoeuvre under State Socialism and the Memory of Livelihood*

This paper discusses the social-anthropological perspective on livelihood practices and ideas remembered as room to manoeuvre from the period of state socialism.1 The aim is to show how popular memories of the economy related to livelihood strategies under state socialism do not fit the ideologies that are thought to drive and explain the economy. The economy is neither referred to as the market nor conceived in terms of state socialist redistribution both mechanisms consisting of production, consumption, and circulation of goods and services. Instead, it is understood in the context of the ideas, institutions, and relations that surrounded the house, the cultural-economic unit practiced by the population and implicitly functioning room to manoeuvre under state socialism, which I define as “post-peasant house”. This post-peasant house belongs to those social spaces “in which individuals and groups combined the logics of action of the social system with their own interests, goals and values and thereby contributed to the stabilization of state socialist rule”.2. In terms of the cultural-economic logic, the post-peasant house * This paper has been written as part of the Polish National Science Centre-founded project no. 2014/15/G/HS3/04344 “Room for Manoeuvre in State Socialism: Between Adaptation and Experiment”. The material has also been gathered thanks to ANEXINT, Antropológia vylúcˇenia a integrácie: Slovensko v kontexte európskych transformácií (The Anthropology of Exclusion and Integration: Slovakia in the Context of European Transformations); Slovak Research and Development Agency, APVV-14-0431. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Claudia Kraft for her valuable comments on the earlier version of this paper and to Jerzy Kochanowski for his advices on research in Zakopane and on the economic history of state socialist Poland. I would also like to thank to my field assistants Wojciech Kalinowski and Ewa Krzan without whom the data gathering for this study would not have been as efficient as possible. 1 The selection of material gathered for this article has been chosen on the basis of a long-term ethnographic fieldwork I have been carrying out since 2003–4 in South-East Poland and since 2010 in Eastern Slovakia. The interviews that have been analysed in this paper built upon the detailed knowledge of the social and economic context and history of particular localities and of people who were my kind long-term informants. 2 See Kraft / Kochanowski in this volume.

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represents the popular material and symbolic economy as the unconscious tactics underlying everyday practices, as defined by Michel de Certeau3, as well as the conscious avoidance or ignorance of official rules and values out of material necessity or for individual profit and for the benefits of one’s house. The paper further contends that this state socialist livelihood memory is the subject of present-day appropriation. In other words, elements of state socialist livelihood are re-imagined in popular memories and by present-day political symbolism in such a way that, today, thirty years after the transformation of economy and politics, they continue to validate the concept of postsocialism in political analysis. In what follows, I present several case studies of people of various ages who personally experienced state socialism. These examples from Slovakia and Poland shall demonstrate why it is important to analyse livelihood memories beyond the dominant political and economic ideologies. After demonstrating the importance of the house as the unit of actually existing popular economy complementary to and often different from the definitions of the analysts and ideologies in theorizing the state socialist transformation, I argue for the continuing relevance of the concept of postsocialism in contemporary analyses.

Economy and memory Susanna Narotzky defines the provisioning of the economy as a complex process where the relations of production, distribution, appropriation, and consumption are all taken into account and where history defines particular available paths for obtaining goods and services. For Narotzky, provisioning integrates various aspects of peoples’ lives that might otherwise be seen as separate; shows the institutional underpinning of flows of goods and services (state, market, family, etc.); and, finally, helps to explain the historical process in shaping economic life with its material, political and cultural components.4 The analysis offered here of the popular memory of livelihood is inspired by Stephen Gudeman’s perspective on cultural economy, located at the interplay of community5 and the market and on ‘house economy’6. I argue that this memory in post-socialist Europe is often symbolically related to a house, preferably one located in the country. At the very least, the understood economy is stripped of the direct socialist/capitalist ideological content in the popular commemoration. 3 4 5 6

de Certeau 1988. Narotzky 2005. Gudeman 2016. Gudeman / Rivera 1990.

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It will be necessary to first explain the ‘house’ character of economic memory with regard to the state socialist transformation of an overwhelmingly rural society at the start of the transformation. In an earlier paper on the memories of self-employed individuals from late state socialism in Zakopane7, I demonstrated that the type of economy in this tourist setting was built on agrarian patterns. Its dominant characteristics, stressing “socialist pathology” or a shadow “free market” dimension of state socialism, failed to grasp this common popular economic model. Following Juraj Podoba, who researched housing culture in Slovakia8, I argued that the agrarian source of livelihood (i. e. land) was conflated with and replaced by the house as the central material and symbolic value. I call this popular cultural-economic unit “post-peasant house”. The economy of the house changed during the socialist era and remained a source of stability long after. Being the most popular form of investment, a symbol of prestige, and an asset to be accumulated and marketed during the socialist era, the post-peasant house represents an enduring cultural-economic institution that transcends dominant economic ideologies. Although the centrality of the house is common for Europeans in general – as a form and an effect of material economy, an idea and representation of kinship and community, and particularly power distribution and prestige – the key element of the house in postsocialism is its post-peasant quality. Within a community, a house has always fulfilled many social and economic functions – from ancient empires, feudalism and colonial contexts to socialism and capitalism.9 The house economy persists even today under globalisation, while it flourished in the former socialist areas of Eastern Europe. Sometimes the house produces and distributes goods, but as Gudeman notes, it is always a consumption unit. “It holds the means for living from food, to tools, to assets. These holdings are not capital but the base the house keeps for its use and persistence. The base may have a broader meaning than a collection of assets, however. It may include intangible items or emblems that comprise an impartible legacy … The base is a badge and assurance of identity in the world.”10

Frances Pine discussed the role of the house in rural parts of socialist and postsocialist Poland. In her accounts, social groupings and hierarchies are established in terms of houses rather than on other principles such as lineage organizations or overt political factions.11 In the southern part of the country, many people 7 8 9 10 11

Buzalka 2018. Podoba 2014. Gudeman 2016, pp. 14–15. Ibid., p. 16. Pine 1996.

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maintained their house organization in the late twentieth century despite being increasingly integrated into a highly centralized, industrialized nation state. According to Pine, the house is important not only in intra-village organization but also in relation or opposition to the state and Catholic Church, another solidifying source of identity above the local level. Houses also maintain difference, as they divide kin and place social groups in opposition to each other.12 During the socialist era, the ideology of the house was reinforced via ritual, reciprocity between houses, gender and the generational division of labour. The house, moreover, provided an alternative model to the state, and an alternative economy “which can diminish or increase in response to external change”.13 For the first time ever, the majority of former peasants began living in modern walled dwellings under socialism. While achieving huge structural changes in terms of industrialization and urbanization, the socialist economy itself nurtured practices reminiscent of an agrarian era. Kinship, social exchanges, and value circulation under a scarcity economy further produced relations reminiscent of the village community. In reference to rural Podhale in southern Poland, Nicolette Makovicky uses the term kombinowanie, which is relevant for our purposes. It captures the perspective I seek to articulate here, namely the memory of livelihoods surrounding the post-peasant house. Makovicky sees kombinowanie as “a vernacular practice of ‘making do’ which took place in the cracks between large-scale economies and state projects regardless of their ideological flavour”. Her informants consider the term kombinowanie “as rooted in the creativity, resourcefulness, and thrift of their ancestors”.14 My view stresses that the fundamental transformation of a predominantly rural population into subjects of state socialist industrial society was essential for the creation of what I call the postpeasant house economy under state socialism. In the present paper, I wish to extend this analytical perspective to what might be called economy commemoration. Presenting biographies and memories of the livelihood of several informants, I consider the house economy as room for manoeuvre under state socialism. This economy is the analytical category of what might be seen as the implicit state socialist ‘folk model’ of the economy. This model shaped an everyday livelihood in the era of state socialism. People enacted and understood it without however necessarily acknowledging its conceptual value.15

12 13 14 15

Ibid., p. 448. Ibid., p. 456. Makovicky 2018, p. 494. Since 2003 I have been carrying out fieldwork in the historial city of Przemys´l in southeast Poland. I have been visiting the city regularly ever since for shorter research visits. Since 2010

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Progress beyond ideology Since 2009, I have been visiting my informant Vlasta in Kosˇice, the second largest city in Slovakia (population 240,000). Vlasta was born in 1929 in the industrial city of Wiener Neustadt, some sixty kilometres south of the Austrian capital. Vlasta’s father worked in the steel mill. Due to the economic crisis in the 1930s, her family returned to their family home mining town called Zastávka u Brna, some forty kilometres west of Brno, on the main train line between Brno and Prague. Vlasta was apprenticed there as a seamstress. In October 2018, Vlasta and I visited the town of Zastávka u Brna. The family lived in the workers’ colony on the outskirts of town, inhabiting a one-room flat in the workers’ tenement with eleven other families. We managed to find the original house in the row of houses, although some had been refurbished. In the 1930s, Vlasta’s father found a job in a factory of arms in Brno. Vlasta was only ten years old when her father passed away. It was a time when Nazi Germany was an imminent threat to the Czechoslovak Republic. Vlasta’s mother and two teenage sibblings relied on the support of their nineteen years old brother, a lathe operator, and on the mother’s very modest pension. In August 2016, we also visited the city of Liberec (Reichenberg), in northern Bohemia. At the age of nineteen, Vlasta moved there after she had married her husband, a future People’s Army officer and the son of a policeman. Although they were not devout Catholics, the couple got married in the small church in the centre of Zastávka u Brna in the autumn, following the February 1948 communist takeover in Czechoslovakia. Vlasta came from a secular leftist working class family, but she followed the wishes of her mother-in-law, who expected a church wedding. The couple moved to Liberec just two years after the deportation of its majority German population as a result of post-war repatriations. Vlasta’s husband became an aircraft mechanic at the military school. In Liberec, Vlasta and I looked for the flat the newlyweds had obtained from the army in the former German part of the city. Vlasta vividly recalled her daily walk to get milk at the corner grocery store and her small flower garden in front of their building. The family moved to the city of Poprad in Slovakia in 1954, and one year later they moved to the neighbouring town of Liptovský Mikulásˇ, when her husband was transferred. With two daughters – one born in Zastávka u Brna in 1949, the other in Liptovský Mikulásˇ in 1951 – they then moved to Kosˇice, the major city in eastern Slovakia in 1956. Her husband had been invited to be an instructor there at the newly established air force academy: my major fieldsite has been the city of Kosˇice in eastern Slovakia. In 2016 and 2017 I also collected biographical interviews in Zakopane in southern Poland.

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“We got a new flat, we bought new furniture, and the children went to school. We had to accommodate to the Slovak language. I still don’t speak correct Slovak. In the store I asked for what I wanted but they replied “we don’t have it” even if it was clearly on the shelf. This is how they treated us. In material means, my husband had a good salary. We used to have beef for Sunday, we purchased a new Wartburg [an automobile made in East Germany, JB] and travelled to Zastávka for summer holidays.”

Like most urban Czechoslovaks of the communist period, the family spent almost every weekend at their cottage on the shores of a lake near Kosˇice. Vlasta’s husband, a passionate fisherman, built the cottage by himself. The couple became skilled gardeners, especially after Vlasta’s husband retired in 1985. Vlasta continued to take care of the cottage and garden alone after her husband passed away in 1992. By 2018, it was slightly overgrown, but it seemed to more or less preserve its original shape. Vlasta has always been a very careful gardener. Her garden, moreover, is tightly connected to her livelihood. For instance, her adherence to thriftiness, even with a relatively good pension of an army officer widow, can be observed in Vlasta’s use of every drop of ingredients while cooking, her use and re-use of as much of her own produce as possible, and even on her saving of the flushing water in her flat and in the garden. Vlasta and her husband joined the communist party of Czechoslovakia at the very beginning of their life together. They remained faithful to the party’s teachings even after the Warsaw Pact armed forces intervened in Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Although she was active in the senior club of former communist women and officers’ wives and also paid fees to the orthodox communist party of Slovakia until very recently, Vlasta has never viewed her life in ideological terms. She does not complain about post-socialist capitalism, and while she did not support the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, she immediately applied for Slovak citizenship. She did not keep her Czech citizenship, even though she might have. Unlike their neighbours, who were allowed to earn money abroad as military school experts, Vlasta and her husband had limited career prospects due to their son-in-law’s family background, which was as a son of a petty entrepreneur suspicious for the power holders. Vlasta’s daughters even considered their parents’ economic behaviour under communism to be naïve, since they supposedly did not take advantage of their privileges as party members. The cynicism of their generation was exemplified in the joke: “He who doesn’t steal from the state, steals from his own family.”16 Vlasta’s children did very well both under state socialism and after the communist regime collapsed. Her older daughter became an elementary school teacher and married a building engineer in early 1970s. Under the post-socialist 16 Kto nekradne, okráda vlastnú rodinu.

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privatization, her husband purchased a prosperous building company. Vlasta’s younger daughter was a bookkeeper. Despite divorcing her husband, a successful psychologist, she managed to raise her only daughter to enjoy a comfortable middle-class life. All of Vlasta’s granddaughters – now mothers themselves – are university educated and take care of their grandmother, who turned ninety in 2019. Behind the house in Zastávka u Brna, which we visited in 2018, there was a warren where rabbits and hens were kept. As Vlasta recalled, the two outhouses in the small backyard area and the warren were shared by twelve tenant families. We looked for the remnants of the little school garden where Vlasta used to work with other pupils and the little garden plot where they planted vegetables for their own use. When we met in 2018, Vlasta was impressed by the progress in the town’s housing. As we walked past newly renovated houses, streets, and pavements – apparently made with EU subsidies – she recalled the poor condition of the area when she was little. The church where she was married was also going to be renovated soon, and the village centre appeared well preserved. Near the train station, she recalled the dancing parties in the workers’ pub and waiting for the daily commuting of brothers to and from Brno. Over dinner in the new hotel we were staying at, which featured a bowling alley and squash courts, she further divulged memories of shopping for matches and butter in the former street booth, often on credit. As Vlasta observed: ‘Now life is far better than back then. Regardless of the system, we’ve always been getting better’. The major turning point in her life for the better was connected with the new flat the family obtained in the centre of Kosˇice in 1960s. At first, Kosˇice’s centre was peculiar to her and her husband, as they both had a proletarian upbringing. During the era of state socialism, the predominantly Hungarian-speaking city grew three times in size, thanks in particular to the influx of former peasants who found jobs in the large steel factory built on the city’s southern outskirts. Vlasta’s story proves that there are wider representations of economy – remembered as room for manoeuvre – than the ones locked in the dominant economic ideology or in its refusal. In what follows, I offer a view of the social group enjoying a prestigious position under state socialism, the steel workers.

State socialist steel makers The industrial tradition in the largest steel plant in Slovakia, located in the second largest Slovak city of Kosˇice, started in the 1960s under state socialist planning. Under late state socialism, the population of Kosˇice tripled in size, with one-sixth of all of the town’s inhabitants depending on the steel factory. Migrants main-

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tained important social and cultural networks and traditions in their new city life. Most remained in touch with relatives in their villages of origin and adapted their native patterns of solidarity to the urban setting. A recently retired worker I talked to remembers the ongoing need for flexibility at work during state socialism: “Shifts were much more demanding in socialism – more flexible – ‘merry-go-round’ shifts, one week mornings, one week afternoons, one week nights, sometimes Saturday or Sunday. The work safety system was relaxed at that time. One wore a helmet if the boss entered the shop floor but then he could take it off … Today, safety surveillance is hard, sometimes it makes work more difficult, for example, if one wants to breathe freely and take off his gloves, but they introduced much more favourable shift changes due to the changed labour law.”

Under socialism, the ability to guarantee one’s family welfare and obtain basic help with housing and secure employment depended on the workers’ social skills and networks. “Once a young man began his work at the steel plant, he got a flat, an interest-free loan, did not need millions to buy his own flat, as he does today. He could enjoy his free time more than he can today … The quality of life is hard to evaluate, but with childcare, for example, we had to be creative. We shared the care of children [here referring to the period of the 1970s, JB] among ourselves.”

The need for workers’ everyday adaptability and maneuvering was also necessary in other domains, for instance when looking for holiday vouchers, purchasing a bicycle or buying meat for Sunday lunch. Another retired worker offers the following account from the socialist period: “We always had to learn something new. From the beginning we had to learn by doing, adjust to changing needs at new parts of the factory, new equipment was introduced almost constantly, we tried to use it for new jobs, experimented. I worked as an electrician and I was always moving around with demands to fix something new. There were certainly more boring jobs in the factory, but people doing them had to improvise as well. When the Americans came [in 2000, ref. JB], they taught me at the age of 55 how to use a hammer! But we were skilled already, educated, I used to work as a welder, electrician and what not, I was used to working in many professions and without any accidents.”

Contrary to the dominant post-socialist narratives about changes from a socialist to a capitalist work discipline, many workers find that the control of the work process today makes them less flexible than the working conditions under state socialism. This contrast arises most clearly with regard to managers. As Jozef, the retired worker, explained: “Today a young man doesn’t know how to move around in the factory, the managers push for rather unimportant requirements in order to make sure that the shop floor

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looks nice, tidy, and safety is kept according to the textbook. This decreases people’s creativity and the ability to adjust and to have new ideas. The manager/worker relationship is more hierarchical today, person-to-person relations have gotten much worse, everybody is afraid to lose his or her job; it’s hard to disagree with the boss. In former times, we used to know each other also privately, celebrated together and went on holiday.”

A similar account from another worker (Ferko, age 65) describes: “In socialism the managers were more relaxed and friendlier … the foreman came by, shook hands, asked what was new and so on. Today, the managers just come, check if safety measures are kept well and if they are not, they fine us right away.”

During socialism, the factory maintained a relationship with the cooperative farm in the village. Another, older informant relates: “Whatever was needed in the cooperative or in the village, we were ready to provide it via the factory. Building materials, a lorry, electricians, everything was possible to arrange without many formalities. On the other hand, when the factory bosses wanted to have some fun, they were taken to the cooperative cellar, we roasted a pig for them. Everything could be arranged there.”

The major part of the fieldwork in eastern Slovakia was carried out in Sˇaca, a suburb of Kosˇice, located near the steel plant. Rather than a fully developed urban district, the suburb resembles a village, with a central avenue built in the 1960s and 1970s, surrounded by housing blocks and village houses and back gardens. Although formally part of the second largest city in the country, the suburb shows many signs of village sociability. With its five thousand inhabitants, it represents a typical Slovakian settlement. From the memories of the steel workers in Kosˇice, we see that there had been more flexibility at work under socialism than under capitalism. The latter prefers high safety measures and efficiency, but at the same time it requires work flexibility and adaptability to changing conditions. The state socialist factory efficiently fostered practices and relations that were reminiscent of those in an agrarian setting: moneyless gift exchanges, family and friendship ties under a scarcity economy, and patron-client relations between people working in the state bureaucracy and those in local communities. This livelihood, which was typical of state socialism, can also be explored in the case of a Polish intellectual.

Red count’s socialist flat Józef was born in 1950 into a previous noble family in industrial Gliwice, to where the family had been sent from its former properties in the villages around Przemys´l. He grew up in a socialist neighbourhood. His father was a devout

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Roman Catholic, who worked as an accountant. It was not until the 1960s that they were allowed to come within one hundred kilometres of their former possessions, including the large manor house. This keeping away of former nobility from their family property was a common practice of the communist regime. Not only was this punishment for one’s familial origin as a class enemy, but it also prevented contacts with loyal employees and clients on the property premises. In the 1960s, the family returned to Przemys´l, where it lived in the old urban villa on the banks of the San River with Józef ’s aunts, who were language teachers. Unlike their other properties, the large house had not been nationalized. Józef went to secondary school in Przemys´l, but he was a pariah there and did not graduate. He often spent his time in the historical park or in the city centre. By the time he reached adulthood, it was the Gierek period. Józef enrolled at evening school and attended classes with older adults, including soldiers and state employees whom he assisted, as he was a good student in literature. He liked to go out with his older classmates, who were better off than him at the time. They went to restaurants and Józef built up his social network. Speaking several languages, he was able to travel abroad in the summer, earning enough to live well at home throughout the year. In order to avoid conscription into the army, Józef decided to study pedagogy. He graduated with a degree in Polish philology in the regional capital, Rzeszów. Afterwards, he accepted the position of culture coordinator in the county’s cultural centre. In order to increase his career opportunities, his director proposed that he join the Polish United Workers’ Party. He joined the party in the second half of 1970s for ‘opportunistic and pragmatic reasons.’ Known for being the ‘only one who did not drink vodka at work’ and successful at his job, he became the head of the culture section in the county office. Józef married a teacher of Russian, but the couple remained childless. In 1980s, Józef became vice director of the county cultural centre in Przemys´l. From 1985 to 1990, he was its director. He enjoyed his job, especially his contacts with the artists who travelled across the country and abroad. He also had access to products that were harder to find in stores and other privileges such as food coupons, a flat in a new housing block, frequent trips to the USSR, and summer holidays in Bulgaria. After the Polish communist party lost the elections in 1991, Józef was no longer needed in the county’s office. He describes how many people stopped saying hello to him by that time and walked on the opposite side of the street to avoid him. He was unemployed for an entire year and forced to live on his savings. He later found a job of a cemetery cleaner in Switzerland, a type of employment that was not unusual for university-educated East Central Europeans in the early post-socialist period. After Józef joined the new Party of the Democratic Left (Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej – SLD), which had evolved from the former

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communist party and was the government party from 1993–1997, he was offered the position of vice director of the public library, where he worked until his retirement in 2016. On a personal note, Józef is one of the most open-minded and cosmopolitan people I have met in Poland. A political liberal and economic socialist, he remained critical of the economic politics of the state socialist era as well as the conservative populism that has become prominent in Poland since 1989 and especially since 2015. Józef believes that people should be free, but this was not possible in peoples’ republics. This opinion, though, does not prevent him from keeping good memories of the state socialist period. With traveling, socializing with colleagues and having a job he liked, he was able to enjoy a good life. Especially for an intellectual like Józef, the free market does not bring adequate freedom or security. He first learned about the limits in the new system when he hired an investor at the stock exchange. Using money, he received for the villa in the city centre and other property that he obtained in restitutions and later sold, he funded joint trips with colleagues and friends all over Europe and co-edited the intellectual magazine they were publishing. Józef nevertheless donated most of his inherited property on to charity, including the family manor house. In his view, this was the best way to pay tribute to his father, a devout Catholic. Józef prefers contemporary capitalism to former state socialism. His pragmatism under the former system might have been severely criticized but his case proves that by becoming a privileged member of it, one could extend his/her room for manoeuvre and even help others. Józef always valued his three-room flat in the socialist block on the riverbank of San, where he continues to enjoy his intellectual hobbies, especially reading books. He disliked the opulent yet cold old villa of his youth, which lacked hot water and reliable central heating. Józef, like Vlasta, were both members of the communist party in their countries. While Vlasta comes from a poor working class background and Józef is of noble origin, they both remember their livelihood under state socialism as characterized by a strong sense of pragmatism; the main concern was to secure a life regardless of the dominant ideology. Today, Vlasta is a contented and retired grandmother who raised successful children. For his part, the intellectual Józef enjoys his books and art while keeping a critical eye on the prevalent politicaleconomic model without feeling too much nostalgia for the period of state socialism.

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Value of the house I have had close friendship with Gustek since 2003. He was born in 1955 as the second child of a laboratory assistant and a city clerk who were resettled from Lviv in the wake of post-war arrangements between Peoples’ Poland and the Soviet Union. The family survived on modest incomes and Gustek grew up poor. When his father passed away in 1965, they still did not have a garden for selfproduction. His mother, now a widow, took care of three children, who were aware of the fact that they were poorer than most of the other families. Gustek recalls the Gierek era of the 1970s as being much better than the Gomulka era of the 1960s. During this time, the family purchased furniture, a television, a washing machine and a refrigerator. There was enough money to live from. The employers even paid for the children’s summer camps. Gustek enrolled at Jagiellonian University in Kraków in 1975, where he studied sociology for several years, but never graduated. He married a fellow student in 1979 and the couple raised one daughter. His wife’s mother was a teacher and her father a construction worker. Gustek remembers that life was ‘not bad’ for students: work was always available and the family dormitory was cheap. In the early 1980s, which were the hardest times in Poland since the Second World War, the family moved in with Gustek’s retired mother in Przemys´l. Memories of scarcity and food stamps as well as home-made vodka predominate. ‘Today I still know how to make alcohol at home’, he says. Gustek, who worked as a clerk, and his wife, a clerk too, both had low salaries, so they were forced to rely on the Gustek’s mother for their accommodation. ‘The most important thing by that time was to join the communist party or go into private business,’ remembers Gustek. He opted for the latter in 1983 and rented a drug store. Being thirty years old, he thought it was the right time to start a business. It was hard, though: People were queuing for washing powder in their store and the state company, the exclusive provider at that time, allocated goods inefficiently and in limited quantities. The couple therefore looked to acquire goods through private companies, but these were few and charged higher prices. The business did not go well and the family fell into debt. In 1991, the store and its premises were passed over to the city. More important, however, the competition on the market intensified and prices grew precipitously. Gustek relied on the help of his brother to deliver goods, as he did not have a car. The situation became intolerable. Gustek’s wife travelled three times to Canada for several months in order to earn money for paying off some of their debt but continued to experience tremendous financial pressure. They divorced by the end of 1990s. Gustek’s wife remained in Canada and their daughter subsequently joined her. Gustek continues to this day to pay back his debts. ‘Capitalism requires people who are

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operative and know how to ‘make things work’ (kombinowac´) and I’m a typical employee’, says Gustek, who is working again as a clerk. Gustek realizes that in Poland the quality of life has changed for the better. People earn enough to live well if they work hard and the market economy offers enough goods to satisfy consumption. ‘I think this is how it should be. Nobody should get money without working, except if he’s disabled’, argues Gustek. Unlike Vlasta, Józef, and the steel workers, Gustek does not miss anything from the period of state socialism. ‘Everybody had a job at that time, but they all earned very little, emigrated for work to the West and returned to be able to live here.’ Some of those who returned had more wealth then and those were the rich ones. Nowadays, the wealth differences are considerable and some people who were rich by the old standards now live on the verge of poverty: “Once upon a time the house and car represented a big fortune. Today it is the majority norm … people compare their own wealth to the wealth of the richest ones and feel very poor … It was always like this that the poor struggled against the rich … I don’t appreciate socialism. I’m just explaining where dissatisfaction comes from. I don’t mind if someone has a lot of money … More wealth is also progress in a certain sense.”

Gustek’s story is typical of those failed entrepreneurs of the state socialist/ postsocialist transformation who struggled to find the balance between their livelihood strategies and personal ideas about how to achieve a good life. Gustek believes that economic certainty today means having a place to live without being afraid that your home will be taken away from you. Having money to live is important, but having a house is the most important.

Natural entrepreneur I recently argued against commonly held assumptions about state socialist Zakopane, for instance that it was an ‘exceptionally entrepreneurial’ place (and ‘free’ in the sense of market freedom) or an example of ‘socialist pathology’ (as a local economy inappropriately benefiting from a redistributive state). Jerzy Kochanowski refers to the contrast between these two views on state socialist Zakopane as a free city (wolne miasto) or ‘free to do anything’ (samo-wola).17 I suggested taking a closer look at peoples’ livelihoods and their ideas about the material world of late state socialism.18 One of my key informants in Zakopane was Bogdan, a ‘natural’ entrepreneur.

17 Kochanowski 2019. 18 Buzalka 2018b.

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Born in 1950, Bogdan recollects the time of Gierek from his position as a currency exchange officer on the Polish-Slovak border in Łysa Polana. He himself took part in the petty commodity trade across the border. After losing this job at around the time of martial law, supposedly for his strike activities, he became employed by the city council as a cultural affairs officer. As he recalls, the biggest concern at that time was how to get a bottle of vodka for socializing. As the political situation relaxed, Bogdan found work in a company that had obtained a concession to export wood (so-called firma polonijna) for four years. They made carrier pallets. Today, Bogdan observes, the owner of the company is one of the richest Poles. To obtain such the concession, the owner not only needed someone from abroad to invest in the company with a hard currency investment but connections with party representatives. Bogdan’s company signed the export contract in France, which included a clause about the payment of fines. This was done illegally to siphon money from the company. Bogdan learned a lesson about the market economy while being in the United States for three years. He returned in 1991 to open a furniture store. He was happy for the fall of the regime. His furniture business prospered for around ten years. For Bogdan, the transformation from communism to capitalism meant that suddenly something had value and was possible to sell. From his perspective, socialism differs from capitalism in that ‘in socialism it’s difficult to buy something, while in capitalism it is difficult to sell something.’ People did not understand this distinction well at the beginning and relationships changed quickly. From the start of the transformation, there was a loss of mutual trust. In state socialism, tourism represented a major source of livelihood for the local population. As Bogdan relates, for three or four days per year two buses of Yugoslavs used to arrive to Hotel Kasprowy, the most prestigious hotel built in Zakopane in the state socialist period. Everybody on the bus had two or three hundred US dollars to spend and “all of Zakopane virtually made its living out of these two busses”. As Bogdan remembers, a state-owned business was always in the red, so it was offered to a tenant who worked at the company and paid rent. What follows is the story of Bogdan’s father, which illustrates how this hybrid company worked: “My father was the director of a creamery. He expanded it, purchased a piece of land in the centre of Zakopane at the market price, and built a milk-shake bar there. The creamery was making a profit even if the prices were set up by the state. The bar was rented by the manager who was subordinate to my father. He made ice cream and pastries known all over Poland. He entered into a contract with a citrus importing company that suggested that he opens a bar in Warsaw. My father, the director of the company, was earning four and half thousand zloty. His agent proposed to my father to become his deputy for seventy thousand! My mother did not agree to move to Warsaw. After three years, the agent ended up in prison. His bosses in the state company earned

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seven or eight thousand zloty and he unofficially added ten thousand to their salaries every month. He was imprisoned for bribery and he defended himself by saying he loved his bosses who earned seven thousand while he was getting one hundred and twenty thousand, so he shared a little bit with them. He was released and ran an elegant pub in Warsaw, then moved to Vienna and opened a bar there.”

Bogdan has vivid memories of bureaucratic procedures – the state banditry, as he calls it – that complicated the business in state socialism. The residence permit, size limits for new buildings, so-called taxes to prevent the accumulation of wealth (podatek od wzbogacenia), etc. forced people to become innovative and to break the rules to improve their living standard. Bogdan tells the following story. “After completing my military duty, I worked in the tax office for two or three months. An old grandad, a pre-war clerk before retirement, was working there. We went to draw up the protocol about the podatek od wzbogacenia. The house was big, but they lived in the basement. In the basement and on the floor there was nothing. Five children and a smell so bad that we even said no, thank you for the tea they offered to us. The tax was one hundred forty thousand zloty for the unfinished building. They had been building it for several years, with the help of family. It was huge but the really liveable area was perhaps ten percent: two rooms in the cellar and children and the smell. We drew up the protocol that it might be worth the price after the building is finished but not now. We wrote that it should be amortized because the tax was not possible to assess. The owner sat by with half a litre of vodka and that was it!”

Bogdan remembers that, at one point, there were hundreds of illegal buildings in Zakopane. The difference between the fine paid for constructing an illegal building and the cost of the actual building was huge. Despite the fact that the house was deemed illegal, it could be connected to water and electricity after the fine was paid. This practice supposedly only increased when after a local resident became the county governor and another the minister of justice. ‘By then, the building mania began everywhere in Zakopane, with no plans or permits, in the creek valley as well as on the peak of Gubałówka.’ This was the period, remembers Bogdan, when as few as seven or eight illegal buildings were ordered to be torn down. The demolition was done by prisoners under police supervision, as none of the locals wanted to do it out of mutual loyalty. As the biography of Bogdan shows, the livelihood practices under state socialism neither worked as a ‘hidden market’ nor as ‘parasitism on the state property’.19 None of my informants from 2016 and 2017 viewed state socialism positively as an actual political-economic system. People nevertheless reflected nostalgically on their self-reliance and the support of family and friends during

19 see Kochanowski 2015.

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the state socialist years. For many, paradoxically, there was more room to manoeuvre then with regard to their livelihood than today. Tourism depended on the possession of property, a house and/or a plot of land. This local people’s economy is widely remembered as an unintended consequence of communist modernization, not as an integral part of it. While the state redistribution system, in theory, brought equality and material well-being to underdeveloped areas, it in fact nurtured informalities and a reliance on wellestablished community ties and institutions, which transcended dominant economic ideologies. And most of the locals were fully aware of the essential basis of this unintended room to manoeuvre. The specific economic knowledge and social virtues developed under late state socialism are still valued and remembered today. As I will show in the final empirical sections of this paper, the parameters of this economic memory are more agrarian than socialist-modernist in nature.

Peasant or ethnic memories I met Olga (born in 1970) for the first time fifteen years ago, when she was working for the local newspaper in Przemys´l. Olga helped me to find informants from among the local Ukrainian minority for my doctoral project on ethnic tension and cohabitation between Poles and Ukrainians in southeast Poland.20 Four years ago, she quit her journalist job and opened an artisanal bakery in the main square of Przemys´l, a city which is becoming more and more attractive for tourists. For a divorced woman in her late forties, this was a bold decision. I visited Olga in the house she long dreamed of building on an inherited plot of land. The house was completed when her daughter, whom she raised as single mother, was in the process of moving out and marrying a Ukrainian classmate. Olga’s memories of state socialism stem from the specific position of her family. She was part of a proscribed ethnic minority in communist Poland. On the basis of an agreement between the Soviet Union and Poland in 1944, and motivated by the continuing ethnic war, the two countries announced ‘repatriation’ plans for Poland’s Ukrainian minority and for Poles in Soviet Ukraine. When repatriations between Poland and the Soviet Union ended in 1946, around 150,000 Ukrainians remained in Poland. Because the cities had already been ‘cleaned’ – the Jews had vanished into the concentration camps and urban Ukrainians were the first targets for repatriation – the only remaining non-Polish inhabitants in post-war southeastern Poland were Greek Catholic peasants. At this time, in 1947, the Polish state devised a plan called Action Vistula (Akcja 20 Buzalka 2007.

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Wisła) to forcefully disperse Ukrainian villagers from southeastern Poland to the areas in the north and west. In the late 1950s, Ukrainians and Lemkos began to return to their native region, and by the 1980s, some ten thousand had established themselves in southeast Poland. During my fieldwork, I had several opportunities to join a group of young people, both men and women, on trips they took across the region. We explored their historical homeland, the area they imagined as having a Ukrainian past. It was peculiar to walk in forested land where there had once been a village and where the only remains hidden in the undergrowth were a cemetery or the foundations of an Eastern rite church known as tserkva. Among the images the search evoked for my friends were marching armies, inter-village war and state repression. I also took part in journeys across southeast Poland with several Ukrainians, including Olga. Both of her parents, who came from peasant families, moved to Przemys´l as soon as it was possible, where they had two sons and three daughters. Both of Olga’s brothers emigrated to Canada. Her older sister, a physical education teacher, built her house on their parent’s neighbouring land. Olga’s younger sister, for her part, stayed with her parents. Olga’s parents choose Przemys´l because it was known for attracting other Ukrainians, and they wanted to live among ‘our own’ people (swoji). Olga’s father originally came from Koman´cza, and her mother from a small village near Jarosław. “We didn’t talk much about these things [Action Vistula] at home because our parents used to work hard: house building, husbandry – cows, fowl, and sheep, a garden – plus Mum’s work in the city on Sundays. We were brought up to work, not talk. From time to time Dad used to take us to [visit] his family in Koman´cza and explained some things, but very little. He was unable to speak to children. He spoke to us like adults. I myself did not understand anything for a long time.”

Many Ukrainians in Poland became successful professionals during the socialist years and lived their private lives as the majority of Poles did – in resignation and sometimes in opposition to state ideologies and policies. They additionally pursued their livelihood and took advantage of as many opportunities as were available at the time. Nevertheless, there is something related to the origin of their collective memory that has an ethnic component at first sight, but, more importantly, it is tied to the villages. In the summer of 2004, I attended a barbeque hosted by Olga in her large garden. I rested with friends, Poles and Ukrainians alike, under the apple tree, next to an arbour built by Olga’s father and enjoyed sausages from a popular butcher. Two of these friends were Wojtek, forty-five at that time, and Ivan, thirty-nine, both university-educated in the humanities and working in that field. Part of Wojtek’s family, which was expelled from Ukraine after World War II for being Polish, moved to Przemys´l and took over a former Ukrainian farm. Ivan

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was born in the north of Poland to parents from the Bieszczady Mountains, from which they were expelled during Action Vistula for being Ukrainian. In the 1970s, they bought a house and a piece of land near Przemys´l and remained peasants. Wojtek said that many Poles believed that leaving the ‘wild and barbaric’ mountains was a blessing for the Ukrainians, since they relocated to the fertile fields left by the civilized Germans in the north and west of Poland. The Ukrainians who eventually came back to southeast Poland, he continued, returned as well-off, experienced people who had made money on originally German property that they acquired in a consequence of original owners’ deportation. Looking at Ivan, he said, ‘It was a civilizing move for you [Ukrainians], but you were so desperately nostalgic that you came back.’ Ivan, usually a silent man, expressed no objection to Wojtek’s interpretation of Ukrainian nostalgia for the homeland. But he finally made a radical statement: ‘This is Ukrainian land, and Ukrainians do not need to prove it. We were the first ones here!’ Wojtek’s provocative words showed a lack of empathy for or knowledge about the often difficult conditions the late-arriving Ukrainians experienced in the former German areas, which had already been occupied by Poles from across the country and from areas Poland had lost to the Soviet Union. But the important point of this discussion is that it reveals a kind of memory that pushed thousands of Ukrainians to return to southeast Poland, even if they paid a high price for doing so. As many older informants recalled, property such as houses and land as a source of parental livelihood was more expensive for returning Ukrainians than for Poles, and the anti-Ukrainian atmosphere was far more hostile in southeast Poland than in the north and west of the country, where virtually everyone was an immigrant after World War II. Some of my Ukrainian friends expressed their nostalgia for southeast Poland in terms of the landscape of southeast Poland. The fresh, dynamic and peaceful ‘Ukrainian’ mountains contrasted with the boring, hostile and alien ‘Polish’ fields to the north, where the big Polish cities were located. Behind this nostalgia lay not only the ethnic construction of the Ukrainian national minority in communist Poland but also memories of a peasant livelihood. This type of memory is nevertheless observable in discussions elsewhere in eastern and central Europe, where worldviews are expressed in narratives that nourish a kind of peasant nostalgia. A former electrical engineer, retired in Przemys´l after decades of working on the Baltic coast, articulates this nostalgia for the past. He often said what many of his fellow Ukrainians declared about their nation: ‘We are all peasants!’ One of my friends, referring to the local conservatism, said ironically that the ‘mentality of a peasant who became a lord’ (mentalnos´´c span´szczyz´nianego chłopa) prevailed in Przemys´l.

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The essential element of the peasant livelihood is a cultivated piece of land. The economy of the peasant is closely tied to the household. The household is ‘a small, self-contained domestic group, one that serves as the foundation of any larger group worth its salt’.21 The head of the household, his spouse and children, the dwelling itself, and its surroundings such as the garden and neighbourhood constitute the basis of the house as an analytical category and part of the popular imagination.

Post-socialist house economy As Juraj Podoba stresses, the country person in the second half of the twentieth century desired for something that he or she imagined had been the lifestyle of ‘better people’ from earlier, pre-socialist times.22 In this vein, a local businessman in Zakopane in his early fifties (in Spring 2017) refers to the property attachment of the locals: “Once I asked the lady who cleans my house what will happen to their fields. She said her grandson is building a house on the father’s land and after him the grand grandson will do; it never comes to end.”

The house in Zakopane, today an urban-looking mountain spa resort, served as a home, but was also increasingly a major source of livelihood, along with foreign remittances, furriery, and petty commodity trade. To meet the expectations of the incoming tourists, its symbolic appearance took on agrarian, Góral-type features, building upon the romantic image of the mountain shepherd and the agrarian self-producer. The elite always travelled to Zakopane, in part precisely for the ‘peasant tranquillity’ in the romantic mountains: it was the modern reaction to city life as well as a way of getting back to one’s supposed roots. More importantly, and with reference to a broader post-socialist context, the house was built on peasant land, which had central importance in the agrarian economy. Thus, the house under state socialism and afterwards served as the material basis of the post-peasant economy, even in the most cosmopolitan spa in Southern Poland. As Juraj Podoba has demonstrated, a spacious modern house in the Slovak countryside built during a vibrant state socialist conjuncture replaced the land, stable, and barn as the major symbols of prestige outside major cities.23 Peasant artefacts, the annual peasant cycle, coming from folklore and the consumption of

21 Fennell 2017. 22 Podoba 2014, pp. 57–58. 23 Podoba 2014.

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bucolic life were always essential elements of state socialism and they even experienced a revival in post-socialist everyday life.24 In eastern and central Europe – perhaps with the exception of old industrial areas such as Silesia or Bohemia and the capital cities – many people have maintained their house organization in the late twentieth century despite being increasingly integrated into a highly centralized, industrialized nation state.25 The house provided an alternative model to the state, and an alternative economy “which can diminish or increase in response to external change”26 The house economy – Stephen Gudeman remind us – is an institution that long preceded the development of the market and its corporate organization27 and this economy, in turn, helps to define local social organization. As Gudeman and Chris Hann stress, while most economists miss the importance of bottom-up institutions for the operation of the economy, the household remains the final safety net and the form of social organisation.28 The post-peasant house, whose emergence I locate in the period of state socialism, is related to wider attachments to the natural environment, political territory, and work around the house. Activities like hunting, firefighting, or patriotic events extend the meaning of the house to include the village community, and religious and national ‘imagined communities’ that are themselves considered as being connected to the house in the fundamental way. For most post-socialist Europeans, a house in the country surrounded by a garden is the most desirable, natural, and most secure form of dwelling. Even if this population today mostly resides in a more urban setting – such as in large city blocks built in mass scale by the state socialist regimes – most would prefer to live in a country house (albeit one equipped with gas, running water, TV and internet).

Conclusion State socialism has long been viewed through the prism of its agrarian heritage and rapid modernization under the guise of Marxism-Leninism. This paper looked at the livelihood practices and ideas, remembered as a kind of ‘room to manoeuvre’ from the period of state socialism, and at how popular memories of the economy related to state socialism do not fit the ideologies that are commonly understood as driving the economy.

24 25 26 27 28

see Feinberg 2018. See Pine 1996. Ibid. Gudeman 1990, p. 9. Gudeman / Hann 2015, p. 27.

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The post-peasant economy that originated under state socialism when the bulk of former peasants were incorporated into the industrial economy should not be seen as a direct remnant of the agrarian past but as a truly modern phenomenon, both with respect to the livelihood of the people in question and the related symbolism. This symbolic economy is not about the memory of the peasant; rather, it can be defined as a type of modern relations and representations of the economy based on a non-urban social structure and imagined rurality. By demonstrating the importance and ongoing relevance of the house economy – which was neither the product of the capitalist market nor state socialist pathology – I argue for the continuing relevance of the concept of postsocialism in contemporary analyses. In other words, if there is a livelihood memory of state socialism today, it is predominantly the post-peasant memory with the house and household as the central unit of commemoration. This post-peasant economic model had a clear material basis in the way industrialization was introduced into an overwhelmingly agrarian setting and in the transformation of land into a house as one of the cornerstones of cultural economy. Language edited by Christopher Reid

Literature Buzalka, Juraj: Nation and Religion: The Politics of Commemoration in South-East Poland, Münster 2007. Buzalka, Juraj: Post-Peasant Memories: Populist or Communist Nostalgia, in: East European Politics, Societies and Cultures 6 (2018), pp. 988–1006. Buzalka, Juraj: Post-peasant Economy Memories of Socialism in Zakopane, in: Przegla˛d Historyczny 4 (2018), pp. 651–668. Fennell, Catherine: “Householding.” Correspondences, Fieldsights, August 28 2017, available at: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/householding [6. 04. 2020]. Feinberg, Joseph G.: The Paradox of Authenticity. Folklore Performance in Postcommunist Slovakia, Madison (Wisconsin) 2018. Gudeman, Stephen / Rivera, Alberto: Conversations in Colombia. The Domestic Economy in Life and Text, Cambridge 1990. Gudeman, Stephen: Anthropology and Economy, Cambridge 2016. Gudeman, Stephen / Hann, Chris (eds.): Economy and Ritual: Studies of Postsocialist Transformations, Oxford, New York 2015. Kochanowski, Jerzy: Tylnymi drzwiami. Czarny rynek w Polsce 1944–1989, Warszawa 2015. Kochanowski, Jerzy: “Wolne miasto” Zakopane 1956–1970, Kraków 2019.

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Makovicky, Nicolette: Kombinowanie: agency, informality, and the poetics of self in Highland Poland, in: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24/3 (2018), pp. 493–511. Narotzky, Susana: Provisioning, in: Carrier, James G. (ed.), A Handbook of Economic Anthropology, Cheltenham, Northampton 2005, pp. 78–93. Pine, Francis: Naming the House and Naming the Land: Kinship and Social Groups in Highland Poland, in: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 2/3 (1996), pp. 443–459. Podoba, Juraj: “Svetlé zajtrajsˇky” alebo malomestský blahobyt? Komunistický rozvojový projekt a jeho dôsledky v perspektíve stavebného boomu na slovenskom vidieku v období neskorého socializmu, in: Forum Historiae 7/1 (2014), pp. 44–61, available at: http://forumhistoriae.sk/documents/10180/191412/podoba.pdf [11. 05. 2020].

Part II: Peripheries

Dusˇan Segesˇ

A Failed “Marriage”: The Attitude of the Peasants and the Government Toward the First Stage of Collectivisation in the Presˇov Region (1949–1953)*

When responding to the reports on the growing social tension among the peasants due to the forced collectivisation in the Presˇov Region in 1953, Marek ˇ ulen, Slovak commissioner of Agriculture and Land Reform (povereník pre C pôdohospodárstvo a pozemkovú reformu) and member of the Central Comˇ ) cited a Slovak mittee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (ÚV KSC common expression: “It often happens in the village that John and Mary don’t like each other but, in the end, get used to each other and have a good marriage.”1 However, the prediction of the high ranking Communist and state official was wrong. In July/August 1953, the Presˇov Region2 stood on the verge of an economic disaster and civil war because of opposition to forced “socialisation of rural areas” – as collectivisation was euphemistically described. The events unfolding at the time revealed the truth about the seemingly impressive statistics concerning the number of the newly founded United Farmers’ Cooperatives (Jednotné rolˇnícke druzˇstvo, JRD) in the region.3 Following a rapid decollectivisation process, fewer than a quarter of the total number of nearly 300 cooperatives * This paper has been written as part of Polish National Science Centre-founded project no 2014/ 15/G/ HS3/04344 “Room for Manoeuvre in State Socialism: Between Adaptation and Experiment”. 1 Fiamová 2012, p. 163. Report on the situation in the Presˇov Region by Ignác Rendek, leading secretary of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia (Krajský výbor Komunistickej strany Slovenska, KV KSS) in Presˇov Region, September 1953. 2 The highest level-administrative unit in Czechoslovakia was kraj (translated as region, province, or territory). Presˇovský kraj was one of the six regions in Slovakia. In 1960 it became part of the Eastern Slovak Region (Východoslovenský kraj). 3 JRD: United Farmers’ Cooperative, collective farm, agricultural cooperative or production cooperative. In Czechoslovakia JRDs were engaged in both plant and animal production. For propaganda reasons the use of the term kolkhoz was avoided. Instead, the authorities used the term cooperatives (druzˇstvá), thus referring to a model the tradition of which had its roots in the nineteenth century and which was, unlike the Soviet kolkhozes, seen largely in a positive light. In fact, however, socialist collectivisation based on the Soviet model was contrary to the idea of agricultural cooperatives based on the principles of self-help and democracy.

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remained. The number of members was reduced to one tenth.4 The situation was unique in Czechoslovakia. The paralysis also affected the state administration in the region, as over one hundred Local National Committees (Miestny národný výbor, MNV) dissolved. Even though the region was seen as peripheral, the situation worried representatives of the highest Soviet authorities.5 The communist party-state responded by trying to resolve the situation peacefully. During the so-called “East” (Akcia “Východ”) operation, the government employed, first in Slovakia, units of the Internal Guard of the Ministry of Defence (Vnútorná strázˇ ministerstva obrany). Without any causalities, they carried out over 70 interventions in 36 localities.6 The present article attempts to answer the question about the factors and circumstances that led to the failure and temporary suspension of collectivisation in eastern Slovakia in 1953. What comes to the fore in the investigation are the strategies of social, economic and, eventually, the peasants’ political disobedience. The analysis here also covers the question of the human resources of the state and party apparatus, people who were to serve as an “extended arm of the party” and carry out collectivisation. It takes into account the historical and geographical phenomena that shaped the population of the historical regions of Spisˇ, Sˇarisˇ and Zemplín, which were an integral part of the Presˇov Region. A further theme relates to the link between collectivisation, the individual and collective attitudes of peasants, and the room for manoeuvre during the building of socialism. Can the peaceful strategies of disobedience employed in protest against socialist collectivisation be regarded as part of the struggle to create or preserve the broadest possible room for manoeuvre? The article focuses on the period of forced socialist collectivisation from 1949 until late 1953 and early 1954. In the analysed context, we find several rooms for manoeuvre of varying nature and quality, appearing at various moments over a relatively short period. The contours of these rooms for manoeuvre are consequently blurred. For our purposes, the phenomenon of rooms for manoeuvre has two meanings. Firstly, it is a space in which peasants could fairly effectively employ their strategies of avoiding, postponing or alleviating the effects of collectivisation; secondly, it concerns the peasants’ efforts to maintain islands of tradition in the “sea” of socialist modernisation. With regard to the theme of modernisation and given the symbolic nature of the term room for manoeuvre, 4 As of 1 November 1952 there were 296 cooperatives registered in the Presˇov Region with 20,905 members (according to V. Skrip, in June 1952 there were 402 cooperatives with 20,503 members. Skrip 1984, p. 38). As of 1 January 1954 there were 87 cooperatives and 2124 members. ˇ eské republiky, Praha (in the following: NAC ˇ R Praha), no. 1261/2/1, file 376, Národní archiv C inventory unit 2286, p. 37, Mistakes made during the establishment of JRDs, no date. 5 Barnovský 2002, pp. 37–38. 6 Fiamová 2010, p. 57.

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the author of the article thus also takes into account the desire of people living in rural areas – the peasants’ Eigensinn – to cultivate their traditional way of life and traditional hierarchy of values. The article aims to diagnose the Presˇov Region in the context of the problem of collectivisation in the first half of the 1950s. There is not sufficient space here to provide a detailed analysis of this complex and long process across Czechoslovakia.7 The present author also does not seek to provide a comprehensive comparison between the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and SouthEastern Europe,8 nor to focus on the repressions against peasants in socialist Czechoslovakia.9 The latter was nevertheless unquestionably an integral part of forced collectivisation.

Presˇov Region – Social and Cultural Specificity Judging from the reactions of the peasants from the Presˇov Region to collectivisation, we can assume that there was a clash between the modernist socioeconomic project and conservative society.10 Socialist collectivisation implied a need to redefine the long-standing peasant tradition and replace it by the new moral economy.11 Due to the social transformation of the peasants and the eradication of the kulaks as a social class, a new class emerged in Czechoslovakia – the so-called cooperative peasantry. The ideal of social collectivization came up against insurmountable obstacles in the Presˇov Region, giving rise to the question of characteristic traits of peasants who were critical of collectivisation. What factors determined the historical and social peculiarities of the analysed region and its population? The economy of the highland regions in north-eastern Slovakia declined in the late nineteenth century as a result of the development of ownership structures of the feudal period. The area was characterised by miniature farms, traditional 7 There is a vast literature on the subject, see e. g. Cambel 2005; Jech 2008; Pernes 2009; Rokoský / Svoboda 2013. 8 See e. g. Bauerkämper / Iordachi 2014. 9 For example Blazˇek / Jech / Kubálek 2010; Hlavová 2010; Varinský 2014. 10 The Slovak historian Lˇubomír Lipták has questioned the interpretation of collectivisation as a modernisation process. He presents it as a display of the Soviet political model, in which the real dynamics of modernisation and related changes were distorted to an idea that was to facilitate any acceleration of social, cultural and economic processes. Lipták 1999, p. 276. 11 Lynne Anne Viola describes the new moral economy as “evolving directly from the new collective farm order and consequent economy of scarcity, altering peasant notions of fair play in living and working in the collective farm system, and deriving from a radically altered state perception of economic justice that contrasted sharply with the peasantry’s sense of the grain as their own”. Viola 1996, p. 209.

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forms of agricultural production, a lack of the means essential to development and a poorly developed market. All these factors led to the impoverishment of the peasantry and consequently fuelled economic migration (including overseas migration).12 This remained typical of the population of the Presˇov Region, even in the 1950s, although the closed borders limited movement to the territory of Czechoslovakia. For several decades, economic migration disrupted the family structure as well as gender relations and thus had a profound influence on the traditional patriarchal family model.13 In rural Slovakia at the turn of the twentieth century, social stratification was closely linked to the ownership of land. Land was seen not only as a material good but also had social and cultural value.14 The complex geomorphology (hills, mountains) combined with a comparatively underdeveloped transport infrastructure contributed to the economic and cultural backwardness of the region.15 In the early 1950s, the Presˇov Region had the lowest share of state investment in the local JRD in the entire Czechoslovak Republic.16 The conservatism and high degree of piety in rural areas in the Presˇov Region effectively caused closed communities – resistant to all attempts at modernisation, including collectivisation – to become even more insular. These factors shaped the local social structure, consolidated the local communities and created specific codes of behaviour with regard to broadly defined representatives of the government. The Presˇov Region was the second largest region in socialist Slovakia.17 Onethird of its territory was covered by forests, along with highland areas in its northeastern part.18 A characteristic feature of the region was extensive animal husbandry (sheep, cattle, horses). Agricultural production was dominated by the cultivation of feed grain and potatoes. In terms of population, the Presˇov Region was the second smallest region in Slovakia.19 In 1948, nearly two-thirds of the population worked in agriculture; in

12 Details: Segesˇ 2016, pp. 39–114. 13 A similar phenomenon could be encountered in other regions of the Eastern Bloc, e. g. in the Romanian district of Maramures¸. Kligman 1988, p. 72. 14 Slavkovský 2016, p. 91; Nováková 2012, p. 45. 15 Nationwide the Presˇov Region had e. g. the lowest electrification rate, smallest number of localities connected to the water and sewage network, smallest number of vocational schools etc. 16 Statistická rocˇenka 1958, p. 103. 17 Agricultural land covered 480,000 ha, arable land – 274,000 ha, meadows – 57,000 ha, pasturage – 138,000 ha, non-agricultural land – 353,000 ha (including forests – 304,000 ha). After: Statistická rocˇenka 1958, p. 201. 18 Okresy (districts): Spisˇská Stará Ves, Stará Lˇubovnˇa, Sabinov, Bardejov, Giraltovce, Svidník, Stropkov, Medzilaborce, Snina. 19 The population size was as follows: 420,076 in 1953, 426,976 in 1954, 436,549 in 1955, 444,361 in 1956 and 452,195 in 1957, see Statistická rocˇenka 1958, p. 48.

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the districts (Slovak okresy) of Svidník and Snina this percentage was over 90 %.20 As late as in the 1960s, people living in the region regarded industrial work as a source of additional income, for their main focus was still on their land and farming. A significant part of the money earned outside agriculture was invested in the farms themselves (e. g. to purchase tools, equipment, fertilisers etc.).21 The forced collectivisation of animal production and the compulsory acquisition of farm animals by the state officials provoked even more conflicts between the peasants and the authorities than the process of establishing cooperatives itself.22 The great wave of resistance to collectivisation in the spring of 1953 began when peasants took their own farm animals out of cooperatives, especially in the District of Vranov.

Socialist Collectivisation in Czechoslovakia and Disobedience Strategies ˇ SR. This was a time of the most In 1948–1953, Stalinism reached its peak in the C severe repressions, affecting not only society at large but even members of the ˇ eskoslovenska, Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Komunistická strana C ˇ ). The period was characterised by efforts of the KSC ˇ to transform the KSC country’s society in accordance with the Soviet model. Collectivisation was part of this programme. It entailed an attempt to force upon rural areas a program of radical social transformation.23 There was no clear political concept of collectivisation in the policy pursued by the party-state. In the end, a decision was taken to make the joining accession to agricultural cooperatives voluntary and the principle was included in the JRD Act no. 69/49 of 23 February 1949. Collectivisation was carried out in Czechoslovakia over two stages: 1949–1953 and 1957–1960. The first stage can be divided into two even shorter periods: 1949–1950, when the process was sluggish, and 1951–1953, when collectivisation accelerated. The year 1953 was a turning point marked by a series of events: a supply crisis; the disastrous economic performance of forcibly established farming cooperatives; the cooperatives’ rapid and, in the Presˇov Region, massscale break-up; the broadly devastating currency reform of June 1953. All of these developments forced the party-state leadership to revise the principles of its economic policy, including the collectivisation process. An important, though 20 21 22 23

Sˇulejová 2014a, p. 273. Slavkovský 2016, pp. 90–91. Sˇulejová 2014a, p. 272. Urban 2016, p. 9.

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not always decisive, factor was instructions coming from Moscow. In Czechoˇ leadership to support the collectivisation slovakia, they first prompted the KSC 24 programme in 1948 and, in 1953, after the death of Stalin, they led to the “socialisation” of rural areas being temporarily put on hold.25 The period of “sluggish” collectivisation was marked by the emergence of a whole range of strategies that peasants used to slow it down even further. This was partly facilitated by weak pressure on the part of the local party-state institutions responsible for the implementation of national resolutions and recommendations. The rural community sought to maintain “domestic peace”, which stemmed from firmly rooted attitudes to communal social bonds likes those of neighbourhood and family. In the course of their sui generis political education, peasants in the Presˇov Region found ways to demonstrate their consent to collectivisation, while also avoiding its introduction. They developed a set of actions in order to bring the collectivisation to a standstill, including obstructing the production scheduling, passively or actively resisting in order to preserve their own identity within or outside the dominant order.26 All of these disobedience strategies constituted a kind of intra-systemic escape or a way to “escape the dominant social system without leaving it”.27 Most common were passive forms of resistance, like foot dragging, feigned ignorance of orders, fake actions and false declarations of consent to activities imposed by the authorities.28 Other strategies included prolongation of procedures, passivity and the deliberate avoidance of work.29 The tactics were employed both by the peasants and the employees of the administrative and party apparatus in the Presˇov Region. The division of production cooperatives into four categories, depending on the degree of collectivisation, opened up for the peasants a relatively large room for manoeuvre.30 Wherever cooperatives had not yet been established, criticism 24 A document by Mikhail Suslov, secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party ˇ leadership of a lack of of the Soviet Union, which was sent to Prague, accused the KSC commitment and correct – from the point of view of Moscow and the communist idea – approach to a number of matters, including class struggle in rural areas, of underestimating the dangers of capitalism in agriculture, and lack of a coherent agrarian policy. What also matters was the resolution of the Cominform concerning the situation in Yugoslavia in June 1948. Pernes 2013, p. 9. 25 V. Molotov’s instruction for A. Zápotocký, V. Sˇiroký and A. Novotný of 20 June 1953 recommended that economic plans in industry and agriculture be revised, and that necessary political corrections be introduced. Volokitina 2002, doc. 297, p. 768. 26 Zavacká 2016, p. 69. 27 De Certeau 1984, p. XIII; see also Viola 1996, p. 207. 28 Scott 1985, p. XVI. 29 Fitzpatrick 1994, p. 5. 30 Type I and II cooperatives required collective work on fields and keeping farm animals collectively in barns/stables. Type III cooperatives were characterised by merger of land and

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and pressure from the outside could be shrugged off by setting up supposed Cooperative Preparatory Committees (Prípravný výbor JRD), which then remained inactive. This approach had another advantage, for it did not require any contribution in the form of equipment, work or land. Preparatory committees used state-own land (under the agricultural reform of 1949), which had previously been owned e. g. by the Church, or the so-called American land belonging to those who had emigrated with their families to the United States.31 By joining a preparatory committee, the “kulaks” could at least have temporary access to their own land and means of production, which otherwise would have been eventually appropriated by the state. The numbers are telling in this respect: at the beginning of 1950, over 70 % of all agricultural cooperatives in the Presˇov Region were primary organisations, i. e. preparatory committees or type I cooperatives (not requiring the merger of the land belonging to them). This state of affairs continued nearly until mid-1952, despite the fact that these primary organisational forms had been regarded as undesirable at least since 1951, in line with the collectivisation policy aiming at more advanced forms of cooperatives.32 Often peasants also promised to join the existing cooperatives and then delayed fulfilling this promise under various pretexts ad calendas graecas. They explained that they were prevented from submitting their membership applications by their wives or mothers-in-law.33 It should be noted that the argument concerning spouses allegedly forbidding accession to newly established socialist organisations worked both ways.34 Delaying tactics could be used in a variety of ways. One example was to submit a cooperative membership request, without however signing the form in which

31 32 33

34

joint animal production. Remuneration for work depended on the number of hours worked. In the case of type II cooperatives crops were divided on the basis of the size of the farm given by the farmer to the cooperative. Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest (in the following: OSA Budapest), no. HU OSA 300-1-2-68161, item no. 2126/56, Peasant life in Slovakia, 29 February 1956. Sˇulejová 2014b, p. 62. Often women themselves – like in Blatné Revisˇtia (District of Sobrance) in June 1952, during an extraordinary meeting of the local cooperative, 80 % members of which refused to take part in seasonal work – threatened that they would forbid their men to join cooperatives. Sˇulejová 2014a, pp. 100–101. For example, branches of the Czechoslovak Women’s Association (founded in 1950) were not active in the Presˇov Region, because – as members of the association explained – their husbands objected to their active involvement. An employee of the Local Committee of the KSS in the District of Snina would admit he “would break his wife’s legs”, if she dared to enter ˇ R Praha, no. 1261/2/1, file 376, inventory unit the Women’s Association headquarters. NAC ˇ resolution on 2284, p. 4. Report on the implementation of the Central Committee of the KSC 14–21 January 1952.

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the applicant promised to observe the internal rules and regulations. One of the delegates to a conference of the District Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia (Komunistická strana Slovenska, KSS) in Sobrance described such a strategy: “Some even sign it and you’re ready to congratulate them, and then he [the peasant] will put the application form into his pocket [explaining] that he won’t today, because it’s Friday the thirteenth or provides a similar explanation.”35 The efforts to improve the statistics concerning newly established production cooperatives sometimes led to paradoxical situations in the Presˇov Region. For instance, despite their marginalisation36 (evident from the very beginning of the collectivisation processes), the kulaks found ways to act effectively. Initially, the local officials would often encourage richer farmers to join cooperatives, hoping that this would encourage undecided or resistant peasants. Thus, in 1950 in Zámutov and Plavnica, the local cooperatives were dominated by the “rural rich”37. The “false” collective farms, in the USSR described as lzhekolkhozy,38 which emerged contradicted the main principles of collectivisation, in which decisions in cooperatives were to be made by smallholders and moderately well-off farmers. As the fight against the so-called rural rich intensified, the phenomenon of “self-dekulakisation” developed. It was based on the belief that you should turn yourself into a poor peasant, before the state did it for you. This “dekulakisation” meant that a kulak would transfer any arable land above the statutory limit (15 ha) to family members or friends, i. e. parcel out their land “on paper”.39 In this way, the farmers avoided having to deliver disproportionately high quotas of produce as well as harassment from state officials. The practice violated the Property Conveyance and Land Lease Act no. 65/1951. Still, even if suspicions arose during an inspection, it was difficult to prove anything. A method consisting in intimidation of unruly peasants could result in other consequences not intended by the government. In Kendice, officials of the District National Committee (Okresný národný výbor, ONV) interfered, demanding that kulaks be found and punished. As a result, two individuals with the correct profile were arrested, which led to a rise in requests to join the local 35 Cited after Zavacká 2016, p. 69. 36 In the early stage of collectivisation the “rural rich” were not banned from becoming ˇ leadership assumed that they would “reveal themselves” members of cooperatives. The KSC and that the advantage of their membership was that heavier burdens and duties could be imposed on them. In no way, however, were they be allowed to take part in the management of the cooperatives. Psˇenicˇková 1995, p. 74. 37 Zavacká 2016, p. 60. 38 Viola 1996, p. 207. 39 Land censuses in the District of Stropkov in 1952–1954 revealed a sudden spike in 3–5 ha plots, which must have been a result of self-dekulakisation.

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cooperative. After the membership target was reached, the state administration lost its interest in Kendice. However, the locals retaliated, dismissing the head of the Local National Committee, whom they blamed for instigating the campaign against the local kulaks. Dissatisfied peasants then took control of the cooperative, marginalised the local members of the communist party and strengthened their position so much that the District National Committee leadership was forced to accept them as partners.40 The room for manoeuvre which developed in the successful avoidance of cooperative membership was a product of the poor economic performance of local cooperatives and the new direction in the form of an accelerated forced collectivisation in June/July 1952. Public administration officials and party functionaries in the region were given numerous tasks associated with the implementation of the process, as a result of which maintaining peace in society became far more difficult. The date 1 January 1952 was marked by the entry into force of new regulations concerning mandatory delivery of food, which seriously affected peasant families with many children. This led to disruptions in the ˇ SR established supply of food products.41 In May 1952, the government of the C the Ministry of Purchase responsible for the collection and storage of produce and farm animals according to a government plan. The powers of party functionaries and state administration were expanded under the “JRD Strengthening and Development Resolution” of 3 June 1952, ordering the officials to focus on attracting peasants from small and medium-sized farms to cooperatives. To achieve this goal, they had at their disposal appropriate tools of repression in the form of penal commissions affiliated with national committees.42 During the extraordinary meeting on 17 June 1952, the Regional Committee of the KSS (Krajský výbor KSS, KV KSS) in Presˇov decided to carry out collectivisation as quickly as possible. Party and administration officials were entrusted with the task of establishing as many cooperatives and forcing the Presˇov Region to catch up with other regions as per reliable indicators (percentage of agricultural land owned by the so-called socialist sector). Methods used to implement the decision of the Regional Committee of the KSS in Presˇov resulted in collectivisation hysteria between June and August 1952.43 A veritable race to the top ensued on the district level in terms of the number of newly founded cooperatives of higher types, especially type III. The so-called agitkolony (agitation columns) – comprising district functionaries, 40 Zavacká 2016, pp. 64–65. 41 Sˇulejová 2014a, p. 272. 42 Government ordinance no. 78/1951 of 29 May 1951 on the penal jurisdiction of local national committees. 43 The campaign promoting collectivisation in this period is described by Sˇulejová 2014a, pp. 274–276.

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hundreds of inexperienced activists as well as policemen – prowled various localities. During “training”, agitators were ordered to not return from the destinations they were sent to before establishing cooperatives there (the commonly used phrase was “raising the red banner in the countryside”44). Disobedient peasants were denounced,45 oppressed (e. g. through the requisition of cattle, fines and in extreme cases forced labour camp)46 and blackmailed47. Heavy financial penalties were imposed for failures to attend obligatory cooperative meetings, convened to move to a more advanced form of cooperative, and for failures to obey summons to take part in auxiliary works in cooperatives.48 Often district officials also included in the kulak lists owners of small and mediumsized farms (with less than 10–15 ha of land) who refused to submit applications for cooperative membership.49 Sometimes already imposed penalties were annulled as soon as a peasant signed the membership declaration, testifying to the purely formal value of rapid collectivisation. In addition, control by higher levels of administration and party intensified. This was accompanied by an increase in the number of inspections sent by the Slovak Sub-Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reform (Povereníctvo pôdohospodárstva a pozemkovú reformu), Central Committee of the KSS, regional purchase commissions as well as instructors from the Agriculture Department of ˇ in Prague. The control and the external interventions reduced the the ÚV KSC possibility of implementing local solutions based on the tradition of the various communities. The processes unfolding in the rural areas during the collectivisation period were marked by a search for ways to survive in the social, economic and political conditions which changed after 1948, in most cases for the worse. Despite the repression under the communist party-state, the best method of studying the

ˇ eské republiky, Praha no. 1261/2/1, file 376, inventory unit 2286, p. 37, 44 Národní archiv C Mistakes made during the establishment of JRDs, no date. 45 Through the so-called flash-news (bleskovky) – short news bulletins released in the various localities. 46 Penal labour camps were established in Czechoslovakia under the Act no. 231 of 6 October 1948 and functioned in 1948–1954. A binding court ruling was not a prerequisite for deportation to a camp; an order of the MNV penal commission was sufficient. For more on the subject, see Borák / Janák 2006. 47 In 1952 in the Presˇov Region 3,318 peasants were penalised (the actual number was much higher); 2,032 among them were owners of small and medium-sized farms. Repressions ˇ R Praha, no. 1261/2/1, file 376, inventory reached their peak in the second half of the year. NAC unit 2286, p. 37, Mistakes made during the establishment of JRDs, no date. 48 E. g. in Zbudské Dlhé (District of Humenné). OSA Budapest, no. HU OSA 300-1-2-25486, item no. 12054/52, Forcible Collectivisation and Eastern Slovakia, 17 September 1952. 49 Cambel 2005, p. 268.

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peasants’ response to collectivisation50 does not simply involve applying the rigid rules of anti-communist resistance to interpret the actions of peasants during the collectivisation period. An effective and also the most often applied form of resistance was a combination of activities aimed at slowing down collectivisation or – as in the period of intensified pressure from above – introducing it in a form that would bring with it the fewest limitations and harm. The anti-systemic activities of peasants from the Presˇov Region during collectivisation are best described in economic terms as well as with regard to social disobedience, selfdefence and survival strategies. Though not immediately evident, the peasants’ daily resistance was over the long-term clearly the main obstacle to collectivisation in the Presˇov Region. Various disobedience strategies led to a failure of the central government’s utopian plans and the underlying premises of collectivisation. Specific manifestations of these strategies are not always documented. Even with such sources at our disposal, they do not always convey the full scale of the phenomenon.51 When examining forms of insubordination and the room for manoeuvre aspirations of peasants, it is impossible to ignore actions involving the use of force. Such actions were a radical, temporary, although equally important expression of opposition to forced collectivisation, which complemented non-violent disobedience strategies. The behaviour of peasants or – to be more precise – peasant women in the Presˇov Region fits a pattern known from most countries of the Eastern Bloc. The appearance of tractors on the fields that were to be ploughed by cooperative equipment52, which was a consequence of a shift to type III and IV cooperatives, provoked the first violent reactions from women. In autumn 1952, a group of women from the JRD in Porostov pelted the tractor drivers with stones; at the same time, they threatening to use their hoes to “chop off the head” of anyone who dared to step on their land.53 In the summer of 1953, rapid decollectivisation was accompanied by “female rebellions”54 in Zámutov, Kapusˇany

50 The term used in the Czechoslovak discourse is the third resistance movement. The AntiCommunist Resistance Act no. 219/2006 defines the anti-communist resistance movement as active resistance of citizens against the communist regime in individual or organised from on the basis of civic attitudes or resistance actions in Czechoslovakia or abroad. Available online: http://www.mosr.sk/data/files/650.pdf [21 May 2019]. 51 James C. Scott uses a model dichotomy of powerful vs powerless, which in the context of the topic in question could be replaced with the government vs peasants model. Scott describes daily actions of the so-called powerless, calling them hidden transcripts. These were nonpublic forms of communication, usually not visible to the authorities, which makes their documentation very difficult. Scott 1992, p. 9. 52 This was the so-called economic-technical farming (Slovak hospodársko-technická úprava pôdy – HTÚP). 53 Sˇulejová 2014b, p. 280. 54 Viola 1986, pp. 23–42.

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and Porostov.55 They occurred simultaneously and in a very similar manner as the rebellion in the Polish village of Okół in the Kielce Region.56 None of these incidents in the Presˇov Region resulted in severe punishment for the women involved, which only confirms that women were safer than men in performing acts of resistance.57 This was also because external observers saw the acts – even outside of the Presˇov Region – not as a political demonstration but a manifestation of “ignorant hostility”58 or irrational rebellion59. Despite the spontaneity of local rebellions, they may have arisen from the peasants’ recognition that they were generally seen as simple, uneducated and naive. This was the stereotypical basis of their disobedience strategies.60 Another form of protest was spreading rumours, including rumours about a possible war.61 The proverbial last straw which sped up decollectivisation was the rumours in the wake of President Zápotocký’s speech from 1 August 1953 on the construction of an artificial water reservoir at Klícˇava.62 The speech, which heralded a softening of forced collectivisation, was interpreted as the government’s consent to dissolution of unwanted cooperatives. This conclusion led to acts of lawlessness and consequently the spontaneous break-up of most farming cooperatives in the Presˇov Region.63 An integral part of the communist run economy was corruption. Farming cooperatives were intermediaries between peasants and the local authorities. Those in charge of the cooperatives – i. e. members of purchase commissions, heads of the national committees etc. – could not define production types or volumes, but they did have fairly broad room for manoeuvre when it came to 55 Fiamová 2012a, pp. 157–159; Sˇulejová 2014a, pp. 95–96; Sˇulejová 2014b, pp. 281–282. 56 Jarosz / Miernik, 2016b, p. 37ff. For details, see Jarosz / Miernik 2016a. 57 For example, in August 1952 the perpetrators of an assault on a party functionary and supporter of collectivisation in Lipová (District of Bardejov) were put on show trial in line with a script endorsed by the Ministry of Justice. The perpetrators were described as “rural rich”. Convicted of “terrorist activities”, they were given long prison sentences (from 10 to 22 years), had their property confiscated and had to pay substantial fines. Archiv bezpecˇnostních slozˇek, Praha (in the following: ABS Praha), no. 323-25-1. 58 Miernik 2014, pp. 102–103. 59 Viola 1986, pp. 39–40; Viola 1996, pp. 190, 198. 60 Field 1976, pp. 209–210. ˇ R Praha, no. 1261/2/1, file 376, inventory unit 2284, p. 26, Report on the April meetings 61 NAC and preparations for 1 and 9 May in the Presˇov Region, 7–26 April 1953. Similar rumours also appeared in Poland. Jarosz 1997, p. 302. 62 The main message of Zápotocký’s address was that membership in farming cooperatives was not mandatory but voluntary. Significantly, even prophetically, he said, “We can say quite openly to all those who believe that a way out for them is to escape from their cooperatives: this will not help you at all. In a few years you will again have to set up the cooperatives from which you might escape today.” RUDÉ PRÁVO 1953/213, 2 August 1953, p. 1, “President republiky mezi budovateli Klícˇavské prˇehrady”. 63 Sˇulejová 2014b, p. 99; Zavacká 2016, p. 71.

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regulations and the interpretation of ordinances. This included distribution of seeds and agricultural machinery, but also falsification of statistics and documents, including those concerning actual land possession, farm tools or animals, arbitrary setting of quotas, etc. A simple and often effective strategy that was applied with regard to those coming to the Presˇov Region for the purpose of inspection – national committee functionaries, purchase delegates or agitkolonydelegates – involved food and alcohol. Thanks to the generosity of the locals and heavy consumption, an official or inspector sent by the party or the ministry would often turn a blind eye to any irregularities.64 The effectiveness of those campaigning for collectivisation was very doubtful to begin with, as sometimes even they were against it.65 The peasants often used “economic” tactics as well. This consisted e. g. in sending lower quality animals to cooperatives or diluting milk that was part of milk quotas with water. The illegal slaughter of farm animals was common as well. What is interesting in this case is not so much the offence itself, but the moment chosen to commit it. The peasants’ actions were based on a risk calculation. Thus illegal slaughter in the Presˇov Region took place mostly in the autumn, when the local administration officials were fully engrossed in harvest work, or in the winter, when access to various localities for inspection purposes was difficult. Often animals would be slaughtered also on the premises of the local party and state administration functionaries, which provided additional encouragement for the peasants to follow their example.66 In the summer of 1952, there was a high number of – likely deliberately started – fires in the District of Michalovce (higher than the Slovak average) in grain and wood storage facilities of various cooperatives.67 Another disobedience strategy was escape. At the height of collectivisation, when agitators and penal commissions roved around villages in the Presˇov Region, peasants would sometimes collectively hide in a forest or in the fields. However, the effects of this strategy were usually short-lived.68 What can also be interpreted as escape was the move of the population from rural to urban areas, where they found jobs in state-

64 Zavacká 2016, p. 62. 65 Cambel 2005, p. 271; Zavacká 2016, pp. 64–65. 66 In January 1954 there were over 3,000 verified cases of illegal slaughter of pigs and cattle, with ˇ R Praha, the biggest number of animals being slaughtered in the District of Michalovce. NAC no. 1261/2/1, file 376, inventory unit 2286, p. 3. 67 Kozák 1963, p. 89. 68 In the end, as a result of pressure, half of the population of Porostov applied for membership in type III cooperatives. Merger of land, which characterised an advanced form of cooperatives, met with violent resistance on the part of the peasants, so police assistance became necessary. Sˇulejová 2014a, p. 275.

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owned factories.69 In the 1950s and 1960s, several of these factories were established in the Presˇov Region.70 Yet, in such cases, this was less an act of disobedience than a desire to avoid another wave of harassment. It constituted a last way out of a hopeless situation.71 The most effective disobedience strategies included ignoring obligatory work in the fields as well as quotas for the delivery of grain, meat, milk, eggs, etc. For example, in February 1953, the Presˇov Region came in last in Czechoslovakia in terms of milk collection.72 During harvest time, for example in the District of Michalovce, peasants who were members of cooperatives would sit in front of their houses and watch troops, volunteers and students brought in as emergency replacement labour to work on the fields.73 In this way, in the Presˇov Region, too, the description of a peasant as a “person who stands in the fields and gives instructions to students, the military and intellectuals who work the land” was confirmed.74

Human Resources The disobedience strategies described above only proved effective, however, when the conditions were favourable. To understand how such conditions emerged, it is necessary to take a closer look at the personnel of the local state administration and the communist party in the Presˇov Region. Peasants in the Presˇov Region successfully took advantage of various loopholes. Often, their existence was not the result of negligence or mistakes by the party or state administration. Rather, it was the officials’ deliberate actions based on a compromise with the local community – drawing on traditional values as well as kinship and neighbourhood ties – that resulted in room for manoeuvre. These spheres were fluid. Moreover, they emerged out of chaotic situations resulting from a lack of transparent divisions of powers between the various state authorities and institutions or when various cogs in the system failed to do their job. Archive documents from 1949–1955 concerning the Presˇov Region contain a number of examples of incompetence, sloppiness, superficiality, inability to 69 OSA Budapest, no. HU OSA 300-1-2-25489, item No. 12057/52, Communist tactics of collectivization in Eastern Slovakia, 18 September 1952. 70 Including Chemko Strázˇske, Transporta (later Vihorlat) Medzilaborce, Chemlon Humenné, Východoslovenské celulózky a papierne Hencovce and Bukóza Vranov. 71 This is how the mass move of Belarusian peasants to urban areas in the collectivisation period is interpreted by Siebert 1998, p. 184. 72 Sˇulejová 2014a, p. 279. 73 Zavacká 2016, p. 70. 74 Paraphrase of Kligman 1988, p. 319.

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multitask, failure to compile exact statistics, data falsification, disorganised work, scams and serious omissions on the part of state administration employees. Room for manoeuvre also emerged from the numerous frictions between administrative bodies as well as within the communist party itself. The first step towards collectivisation was to inventory the land, a task entrusted to Local National Committees and local agricultural commissions (miestne rolˇnícke komisie) under the so-called new agricultural reform of 1948. This inventory provided the basis of the purchase of land that was to then be transferred to the first farming cooperatives. The committees and commissions in the Presˇov Region began to implement the new law only in 1950. Frequently, they refused to submit land purchase requests, which made it impossible for district national committees, as higher level authorities, to issue official purchase decisions.75 ˇ visited the In June 1952, an instructor from the Central Committee of the KSC ˇ District of Vranov nad Toplou and noticed a considerable discrepancy between the data of the District Committee of the KSS (Okresný výbor KSS, OV KSS) and the District National Committee concerning cooperative land inventory and membership. This seriously hampered the planning of mandatory deliveries of produce. Many of the representatives of the authorities in the District of Vranov, he argued, had one thing in common: they consumed excessive amounts of alcohol. As he concluded, it was one of “the biggest brakes on socialisation of rural areas.”76 In the Presˇov Region, mandatory meetings of the staff of the state and party apparatus were generally regarded as excessive bureaucracy. While resolutions were adopted, their implementation was not verified. Irregularities were found but nothing was done to eliminate them. Such indifference became routine. The annual reports of the local communist party structures, which were meant to be a vanguard of collectivisation, were a mere formality. This state of affairs was also due to the fact that some functionaries on the lowest level were illiterate.77 The implementation of a new party line – the fight against the “rural rich” – also came up against obstacles. When it came to dekulakisation, local communist party functionaries thought that although intensification of class struggle was indeed appropriate (thereby remaining formally faithful to the party line), its implementation in their own districts/municipalities/villages was unnecessary

75 Sˇulejová 2014b, pp. 59–60. ˇ R Praha, no. 1261/2/1, file 376, inventory unit 2284, p. 4. Report on a trip to Presˇov on 16– 76 NAC 28 June 1953. He also criticised lack of determination in the class struggle against kulaks and priests, who were able to influence even KSS members (ibid.). ˇ R Praha, no. 1261/2/1, file 376, inventory unit 2284, p. 8. Report on the implementation of 77 NAC ˇ resolution in the Presˇov Region on 14–21 January 1952. the Central Committee of the KSC

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and even detrimental.78 The hostility to the nationwide fight against kulaks – which was obvious in the Presˇov Region – had historical roots. When looking at the social structure of the population of Spisˇ, Sˇarisˇ and Zemplín, we see that most of the local inhabitants were poor farmers with land of less than two hectares.79 The savings accumulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through hard work overseas (e. g. in the coalmines and steelworks in North America) were often used to buy land. As result, the argument propagated by the communist propaganda after 1948 against Presˇov peasants, namely that private farmers were exploiters who preyed on the work of others, was spurious. In the course of an investigation carried out by the Regional National Security Directorate (Národná bezpecˇnostˇ) in Presˇov, it emerged, for example, that “the security services in the region are provided with food and accommodation by kulaks.”80 On the other hand, an informational report from the District of Bardejov stated that the various police stations maintained lists of kulaks but supposedly did not know how to use them.81 It would be more correct, however, to replace “did not know how” with “did not want to”. The nationwide campaign against the kulaks – which reached its peak with an expulsion campaign (the so-called Action “K”, from the first letter of the word kulak) – was ultimately ineffective in the Presˇov Region.82 This was because forced collectivisation caused numerous tensions which divided the loyalties of security apparatus personnel. Forced to choose between official duties and family (or neighbourly) ties, they often chose the latter. For instance, a police woman from Vysˇné Nemecké held a child in her arms while protesting against forced cattle seizures. She threatened her fellow police officers and encouraged others to stand up to administration officials and policemen.83 Tried and tested methods of evading the duties imposed by the authorities included providing false alibis and simulating work. Delegates of supervisory institutions visiting district offices and party secretariats in Presˇov during their working hours would often find them empty. To explain their absence, the staff would cite health reasons, training, “study days”, etc.84 On the other hand, in78 Zavacká 2016, p. 61. 79 This state of affairs is very similar to the situation of the so-called biedniacy (the poor) in Poland. Jarosz 1998, p. 111. 80 ABS Praha, no. 310-17-10, p. 10, Report of 12 August 1950; ABS Praha, no. 310-17-10, undated report, p. 1. 81 ABS, no. 310-17-10, p. 13, Information report from the Presˇov Region, 21 November 1950. 82 During the “Action K” 21 “kulak” families were displaced from the Presˇov Region. Given the agricultural nature of the region and situation elsewhere, this was not a high number. Jech 2008, p. 172. 83 Sˇulejová 2014a, pp. 282–283. ˇ came to the office of 84 In April 1952 an instructor from the Central Committee of the ÚV KSC the Local Committee of the KSS in Snina. Although this was a time of cattle purchase and

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structors and agriculture officials from district party committees would sometimes not visit distant localities – where they were supposed to convince the peasants of the benefits of state cooperatives – for a whole year, citing, for example, a lack of a means of transport as an excuse.85 The secretary of the Regional Committee of the KSS in the Presˇov Region, Jozef Sˇisˇka, blamed the Local National Committees staff for the inefficient work of cooperatives and, consequently, for serious disruptions of food supplies. As he concluded, “no one will lift a finger there [in municipalities] until someone from the district comes”.86 For him, the solution lay in entrusting the leadership of the local national committees to committed party members. Yet, there were not many of those. Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, who study human resources in the process of collectivisation in communist Romania, question the historiographic narrative describing collectivisation as a top-down process. When analysing power structures, they point to the existence of “institutional poverty”. Their conclusions also turn out to be correct in the case of the Presˇov Region, where there was a shortage of trained staff. Owing to an increasing number of responsibilities, they drowned in a veritable sea of red tape. This, in turn, caused work inefficiency and confusion. It is precisely because collectivisation was a bureaucratisation process that multiple social links emerged between peasant, state and party structures, which inevitably made negotiation necessary.87 The higher ranking authorities also found serious shortcomings in the regional security apparatus. They stemmed from, among other things, the fact that ˇ SR (primarily police employees of the security apparatus from all over the C [Verejná bezpecˇnostˇ]) were sent to the Presˇov Region as a punishment for committing various offences.88 Staff shortages as well as poor working conditions, including lack of means of transport, were a serious problem that inevitably brought unsatisfactory results.89 This concerned not only the situation in rural

85 86 87 88 89

spring work in the fields, the official responsible for agriculture “took a week off, came to work on Saturday, went to hairdresser and spent the rest of the day sitting down and preˇ R Praha, f. 1261/2/1, file 376, inventory tending to read Klement Gottwald’s book Spisy”. NAC unit 2284, p. 22, Report on the April meetings and preparations for 1 and 9 May in the Presˇov Region, 7–26 April 1953. ˇ R Praha, no. 1261/2/1, file 376, inventory unit 2284, pp. 11–12. Report on the imNAC ˇ resolution in the Presˇov Region on 14–21 plementation of the Central Committee of the KSC January 1952. Sˇulejová 2014b, p. 85. Kligman / Verdery 2011, pp. 61, 208–209, 409, 441. ABS Praha, no. 310-17-10, p. 18, Information report from the Presˇov Region, 21 November 1950. In 1950, the number of people working in the security apparatus in the Presˇov Region was 1138, while at least 1700 people were needed, according to estimates. ABS Praha, no. 310-17-

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areas, but also insufficient security at state borders. The seriousness of the situation was exacerbated by the fact that the Presˇov Region was located on the border with Poland and the USSR.90 Constant pressure from the top, as well as an awareness that the allocated tasks could not be accomplished using the recommended work methods, created tension among the local authorities. During the forced collectivisation period, the authorities of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party and Regional National Committee in the Presˇov Region faced a choice: they could either break the law without any guarantees of achieving the intended results or fail immediately.91 The party-state leadership was convinced that the local party and state officials in the Presˇov Region had failed to implement the changing collectivisation policy. Criticism of their work methods led to a reshuffling of staff. In 1950–1953, the person occupying the position of secretary of the Regional Committee of the KSS changed three times. First, Arnosˇt Psˇenicˇka lost his job for his alleged leniency towards kulaks. In addition, he faced a charge of “bourgeois nationalism” and, in February 1951, he was expelled from the party. The purges, which in 1951 also affected the National Committees in the Presˇov Region, did not bring about the intended results in the context of collectivisation, however.92 The collectivisation hysteria in 1952 included the biggest number of complaints in Slovakia, sent by the aggrieved peasants from Presˇov to the Chancellery of the President of the Republic.93 When rapid decollectivisation in 1953 radically revised the impressive statistics of newly founded cooperatives, the secretary of the Regional Committee of the KSS in Presˇov, Jozef Sˇisˇka, lost his job, along with several district officials who were accused of dictatorial work methods.94 Sˇisˇka was replaced by Ignác Rendek, who was entrusted with the task of acquiring and immediately providing material assistance to the aggrieved peasants under the

90 91 92

93 94

10, p. 26, Report on an investigation conducted at the Regional National Security Headquarters in Presˇov on 7–12 August 1950. During an inspection carried out in the Presˇov Region it was found e. g. that “often undesirable elements come to our side [of the border]” from Poland and the USSR. ABS Praha, no. 310-17-10, p. 18, Information report from the Presˇov Region, 21 November 1950. Zavacká 2016, p. 66. A delegate from Prague concluded that the “working conditions have not changed at all”. ˇ R Praha, no. 1261/2/1, file 376, inventory unit 2284, p. 10. Report on the implementation NAC ˇ resolution in the Presˇov Region on 14–21 January of the Central Committee of the ÚV KSC 1952. Hlavová 2010, p. 56. For example, the secretary of the District Committee of the KSS in Snina was described as a butcher, dictator, stubborn individualist who did not trust his associates and pursued a ˇ R Praha, no. 1261/2/1, file 376, inventory unit 2284, p. 20, Report “harmful form of work”. NAC on the April meetings and preparations for 1 and 9 May in the Presˇov Region, 7–26 April 1953; ibid., p. 6, Report on a visit to Presˇov on 16–28 June 1953.

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amnesty of 4 May 1953.95 An investigation carried out in the region led to the conclusion that the main cause of the situation was “long-standing shortcomings” in the work of the regional KSS and a “distortion” of the party line ˇ leadership found during the founding of cooperatives in 1952.96 Thus the KSC scapegoats for its haphazard policy of collectivisation, launching a process of lower staff turnover in order to stabilise the human resources overall. *** The suspension of forced collectivisation lasted until June 1955. At this time, President Antonín Zápotocký was faced with the consequences of his speech in Klícˇava concerning the collectivisation process and began to view it as “mistaken from the political point of view”97. He thus again raised the question of the key ˇ. significance of cooperatives at a meeting of the Central Committee of the KSC During the second stage of collectivisation, a more conciliatory approach was used with regard to owners of medium-sized farms. Those with required qualifications were even made part of the cooperative management. As the disaster of 1953 had demonstrated, committed communists alone did not guarantee success. In addition, the state increased its investment in cooperatives.98 In the Eastern Bloc, the course of collectivisation, especially of its first stage, showed that an authoritarian state was incapable of forcing people to work productively – even through various means of coercion.99 When force proved ineffective, representatives of the party and the state were compelled to employ different, gentler tactics in their dealings with peasants, which meant a willingness to negotiate. Peasants in the Presˇov Region who had experienced repression associated with the collectivisation hysteria saw this willingness as a sign of weakness on the part of the state. Indirect evidence of this may be found in the situation in rural areas in the Presˇov Region in 1954. Here, opponents of collectivisation used “quiet terror” vis-à-vis those peasants who complied with the quotas of produce and animals imposed on them by the state.100 95 ABS Praha, no. A 2/1, archive unit 534, Speech by the first secretary of the Central Committee of the KSS Karol Bacílek at an extraordinary conference of KSS functionaries in the Presˇov Region on 18 October 1953. ˇ R Praha, no. 1261/2/1, file 376, inventory unit 2286, p. 35, Mistakes made during the 96 NAC establishment of JRDs, no date. 97 Marjinová / Murasˇková 1971, p. 156. 98 Statistická rocˇenka 1959, p. 114. In 1958 the state’s investment in cooperatives amounted to 107.9 million Kcˇs, thanks to which the Presˇov Region moved up in the ranking, from the last ˇ SR). to fifteenth (among the nineteen regions in the C 99 Koenig 1955, p. 5. 100 Afraid of possible retaliation, they often brought grain to state warehouses at night in order to avoid being seen by their neighbours. Peasants from cooperatives who fulfilled 100 % of

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In the Presˇov Region, the authorities would not resort again to the extreme coercion they had used in 1952–1953. This did not mean, however, that gentle persuasion was their only method. Even after 1955, there were cases of assault, harassment, unjustified violations of personal freedom or the forced sale of land and property.101 Yet, as late as in 1956, room for manoeuvre in the form of private farms still had an absolute majority over the so-called socialist sector in agriculture.102 In 1957, the number of members and amount of land owned by cooperatives in the Presˇov Region increased over twofold in comparison with 1956.103 The increase in cooperative membership also resulted from the growing resignation among the peasants, who were exhausted by the long-standing pressure and harassment. Thus, in the end, while collectivisation did bring the desired results, this outcome was influenced by several different social and economic factors.104 The technological progress in agriculture put an end to the era of the universal farmer. When looking at his own children with specialist qualifications, taking over the management of cooperatives, he did not see any opportunities to return to the traditional production techniques. The fact that the idea of socialist agricultural cooperatives eventually took hold is evidenced by post-1989 manifestations of nostalgia for socialism.105 However, such socialist agricultural cooperatives required a major change in the method of its introduction and occurred much later than initially planned. The individual and collective attitudes of peasants in the Presˇov Region and their actions were typologically very similar or identical to the strategies employed by peasants in other countries of the Soviet Bloc. In short, they aimed at rejecting, slowing down or modifying collectivisation to a form that would be relatively beneficial to them. Nonetheless, the objectives in these countries were distinct, as several, often correlated factors were at play: the various countries’ internal policies, the international situation, and the social structure and actions

101 102

103 104 105

their delivery quotas did not want their names to be published on notice boards in villages ˇ R Praha, no. 1261/2/1, file 376, inventory unit 2286, p. 33, and in local newspapers. NAC ˇ on 19 September 1954. Report on a meeting of the Regional Committee of the KSC Fiamová 2012b, p. 75. While across Slovakia there were 1642 type III and IV cooperatives, in the Presˇov Region the number was 119 – by far the lowest in Czechoslovakia. The share of the socialist sector in agriculture in Slovakia was 40.5 % and in the Presˇov Region only 8.9 %. After: Statistická rocˇenka 1958, p. 230. Vojácˇek 1973, p. 916, figure P 209. A more detailed analysis can be found e. g. in Slavkovský 2016, pp. 99–101. For example, the scandal associated with the discovery and, a few days later, destruction of the statue of Vasil Bilˇak in Krajná Bystrá (where Bilˇak was born) in the Presˇov Region in February 2015. Bilˇak served as the first secretary of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia in the Presˇov Region (1953–1958).

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of officials on the local level. It could, therefore, be concluded that repeated model disobedience strategies combined with the specificity of the country and the region produced different results. Translated by Anna Kijak

Archives and Sources ABS Praha [= Archiv bezpecˇnostních slozˇek, Praha], no. 310-17–10; 323-25-1. ˇ R Praha [= Národní archiv C ˇ eské republiky, Praha], sign. 1261/2/1. NAC OSA Budapest [= Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest], no. 300-1-2-25489; 300-1-2-68161. RUDÉ PRÁVO 1953/213, 2 August 1953.

Literature Barnovský, Michal: Prvá vlna destalinizácie a Slovensko (1953–1957), Brno 2002. Bauerkämper, Arnd / Iordachi, Constantin. (eds.): The Collectivisation of Agriculture in Communist Eastern Europe. Comparison and Entanglements, Budapest 2014. Blazˇek, P.etr / Jech, Karel / Kubálek Michal (eds.): Akce “K”. Vyhnání sedláku˚ a jejich rodin z usedlostí v padesátých letech. Studie, seznamy a dokumenty, Praha 2010. ˇ SR 1948–1954, Opava 1996. Borák, Mecˇislav. / Janák, Dusˇan.: Tábory nucené prace v C Brzozowska, Zuzanna: Female Education and Fertility under State Socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, in: Population 4 (2015), pp. 689–725. Cambel, Samuel: Pätˇdesiate roky na slovenskej dedine. Najtˇazˇsˇie roky kolektivizácie. Presˇov 2005. ˇ eskoslovensku se zaBuresˇová, Jana: Politický a institucionální rámec kolektivizace v C meˇrˇením na historická východiska, in: Blazˇek, Petr / Jech, Karel. / Kubálek Michal (eds.): Akce “K”. Vyhnání sedláku˚ a jejich rodin z usedlostí v padesátých letech. Studie, seznamy a dokumenty, Praha 2010, pp. 17–60. de Certeau, Michel: The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley 1984. Fiamová, Martina: Kritické obdobie v kolektivizácii vidieka – dramatické uddalosti roka 1953 v Presˇovskom kraji na príklade obce Kelcˇa, in: Pamätˇ národa 3 (2010), pp. 57–64. Fiamová, Martina: ‘Vydejte nám krávy, my druzˇstvo nechceme!’ Bezpecˇnostná situácia v Presˇovskom kraji roku 1953, in: Securitas Imperii 2 (2012), pp. 150–181. Fiamová, Martina: Metódy presviedcˇania rolˇníkov na vstup do jednotných rolˇníckych druzˇstiev na prelome 50. a 60. rokov, in: Pamätˇ národa 3 (2012), pp. 74–89. Field, Daniel: Rebels in the Name of the Tsar, Boston 1976. Fitzpatrick, Sheila: Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivisation, New York 1994. Hlavová, Viera: Kulak – triedny nepriatelˇ. “Dedinský bohácˇ” v kontexte kolektivizácie na Slovensku (1949–1960), Bratislava 2010.

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Iordachi, Constantin / Dobrincu, Dorin (eds.): Transforming Peasants, Property and Power: The Collectivisation of Agriculture in Romania, 1949–1962. Budapest–New York 2009. Jarosz, Dariusz: Polsˇtí rolníci a kolektivizace, in: Soudobé deˇjin 2 (1997), pp. 292–305. Jarosz, Dariusz: Polityka władz komunistycznych w Polsce w latach 1948–1956 a chłopi, Warszawa 1998. Jarosz, Dariusz / Miernik, Grzegorz: “Zhan´biona” wies´ Okół: opowies´c´ o buncie, Warszawa–Kielce 2016. Jarosz, Dariusz / Miernik, Grzegorz: Kobiety w buncie antykolektywizacyjnym w Okole w 1953 r.: wybrane konteksty interpretacyjne, in: Polska 1944/45–1989. Studia i materiały XIV (2016), pp. 29–60. Jech, Karel: Kolektivizace a vyháneˇní sedláku˚ z pu˚dy, Praha 2008. Kligman, Gail: The Wedding of the Dead. Ritual, Poetics, and Popular Culture in Transylvania, University of California Press 1988. Kligman, Gail / Verdery, Katherine (eds.): Peasants Under Siege. The Collectivisation of Romanian Agriculture, 1949–1962, Princeton University Press 2011. Koenig, Ernest: Collectivisation in Czechoslovakia and Poland, in: Sanders, Irwin T. (ed.): Colletivisation of Agriculture in Eastern Europe, University of Kentucky Press 1955, pp. 103–125. Kovács, József. Ö.: Nútená kolektivizácia polˇnohospodárstva v Madˇarsku v rokoch 1948– 1961, in: Forum Historiae 1 (2016), pp. 119–134. Kozák, Jan: Na ceste… (Ako sa zdruzˇstevnˇoval Michalovský okres), Bratislava 1963. Lipták, Lˇubomir.: Storocˇie dlhsˇie ako sto rokov. O dejinách a historiografii, Bratislava 1999. Marjinová, Valentina V. / Murasˇková, Galina P.: Rozorané medze : K histórii socialistického zdruzˇstevnˇovania cˇeskoslovenskej dediny 1948–1960, Bratislava 1971. Miernik, Grzegorz: Opór kobiet przeciw kolektywizacji – najwaz˙niejsze konteksty, in: Jarska, Natalia / Olaszek, Jan (eds.): Płec´ buntu. Kobiety w oporze społecznym i opozycji w Polsce w latach 1944–1989 na tle porównawczym, Warszawa 2014, pp. 91– 119. Moon, David: The Russian Peasantry 1600–1930: The World the Peasants Made, London 1999. Nováková, Katarina: Polˇnohospodárstvo na Slovensku v druhej polovici 20. storocˇia (Kolektivizácia polˇnohospodárstva a fungovania jednotných rolˇníckych druzˇstiev v okrese Trnava), in: Profantová, Zuzana (ed.): Zˇili sme v socializme I. Kapitoly z etnológie kazˇdodennosti, Bratislava 2012, pp. 44–70. Oprea, Marius: The Final Offensive: ‘The Socialist Transformation of Agriculture (1953– 1962)’, in: Iordachi, Constantin / Dobrincu, Dorin (eds.): Transforming Peasants, Property and Power: The Collectivisation of Agriculture in Romania, 1949–1962, Budapest–New York 2009, pp. 49–80. ˇ eskoslovensku 1957–1960, in: Pernes, Jirˇi.: Záveˇrecˇná etapa kolektivizace zemeˇdeˇlství v C Brˇezina, Vladimir / Pernes, Jirˇi. (eds.): Záveˇrecˇná etapa kolektivizace zemeˇdeˇlství ˇ eskoslovensku 1957–1960. Sborník prˇíspeˇvku˚, Brno 2009, pp. 9–52. vC ˇ po únoru 1948, Pernes, Jirˇi.: Promeˇny mysˇlenky kolektivizace zemeˇdeˇlství v politice KSC ˇ eskoslovensku. Praha in: Rokoský, Jaroslav / Svoboda, Libor (eds.): Kolektivizace v C 2013, pp. 33–46.

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Psˇenicˇková, Jana (ed.): Vznik JZD 1948–1949. Kolektivizace zemeˇdeˇlství. Edice dokumentu˚ z fondu˚ Státního ústrˇedního archive, Praha 1995. ˇ eskoslovenské 1958, issued by Státní úrˇad stastiStatistická rocˇenka Republiky C ˇ stický Republiky Ceskoslovenské, Praha 1958. ˇ eskoslovenské 1959, issued by Státní úrˇad stastiStatistická rocˇenka Republiky C ˇ eskoslovenské, Praha 1959. stický Republiky C Scott, James C.: Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven–London 1985. Scott, James C.: Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts, New Haven– London 1992. Segesˇ, Dusˇan: Die magische Anziehungskraft des ‘Phantoms in Übersee’: Die AmerikaMigration aus den nördlichen Komitaten Oberungarns an der Wende vom 19. zum 20. Jahrhundert, in: Zückert, Martin / Schvarc, Michal / Meier, Jörg (eds.): Migration – Zentrum und Peripherie – Kulturelle Vielfalt. Neue Zugänge zur Geschichte der Deutschen in der Slowakei, München 2016, pp. 39–114. Siebert, Diana: Bäuerliche Alltagsstrategien in der Belarussischen SSR (1921–1941). Die Zerstörung patriarchalischer Familienwirtschaft, Stuttgart 1998. Slavkovský, Peter: Slovenský rolˇník v 20. storocˇí, in: Forum Historiae 1 (2016), pp. 89– 105. Sˇulejová, Lucia: Kríza kolektivizacˇného procesu v Presˇovskom kraji (1952–1953), in: Historické sˇtúdie XLVIII (2014), pp. 272–285. Sˇulejová, Lucia: Odpor rolˇníkov proti kolektivizácii v Presˇovskom kraji 1949–1953. Bratislava 2014 (unpublished PhD thesis). Urban, Jirˇi: Kolektivizace venkova v Horním Polabí, Praha 2016. Varinský, Vladimir: Kapitoly z dejín kolektivizácie na Slovensku (1948–1960), Banská Bystrica 2014. Viola, Lynne: Bab’i Bunty and Peasant Women’s Protest during Collectivisation, in: Russian Review 1 (1986), pp. 23–42. Viola, Lynne: The Peasant Nightmare: Visions of Apocalypse in the Soviet Countryside, in: Journal of Modern History 4 (1990), pp. 747–770. Viola, Lynne: Peasant Rebels under Stalin. Collectivisation and the Culture of Peasant Resistance, Oxford University Press 1996. Vodochodský, Ivan: Patriarchát na socialistický spôsob: ‘superzˇeny’ a ‘velˇké deti’, in: Dudeková, Gabriela (ed.): Na ceste k modernej zˇene. Kapitoly z dejín rodových vztˇahov na Slovensku, Bratislava 2011, pp. 127–145. Vojácˇek, Alois: Vývoj socialistického polˇnohospodárstva na Slovensku, Bratislava 1973. Volokitina, Тatiana V. / Murashko, Galina P. / Naumov, Oleg V. / Noskova, Albina F. / Carevskaya, Tatjana V. (eds.): Sovietskij faktor v vostochnoy Jewropie 1944–1953, Vol. II: 1949–1953. Dokumenty, Moscow 2002. Zavacká, Marina: Vidiecki komunisti ako aktéri a obete nútenej kolektivizácie, in: Forum Historiae 1 (2016), pp. 57–74.

Jerzy Kochanowski

A ‘Free City’? The Zakopane of Władysław Gomułka, 1956–1970*

“The diner here is also state-owned,” commented the renowned Polish writer Stefan Kisielewski in July 1970 on the life of a tiny village in the vicinity of Zakopane. “But the Highlander woman in charge is revered as if she were the owner. She sets out her own rules, and undoubtedly enjoys various types of illegal profits that she makes on the side. Naturally, the authorities let sleeping dogs lie. Anyway, the local authorities are also composed of Highlanders, and the Highlanders stick together. Thus the Podhale ‘microclimate’, which was not eradicated, opposes communism in a solid and conscious way, which accepts what is good for it and rejects what is not. This would never be possible in Warsaw.”1 This ‘microclimate’ was such a nuisance to the communists that in the spring of 1972 the central authorities in Warsaw sent a special commission to the leading Polish winter resort for the purpose of diagnosing the ‘Zakopane malady’ and finding a cure for it. The commission consisted of party functionaries, economists and sociologists. Its verdict was plain and clear: “In Zakopane, the state is in a position worse than in capitalism. It has been reduced to the role of not even a nightwatchman, but of an unpaid street sweeper.”2 In this article, I shall try to answer a crucial question about the reasons for and the contexts of this surprising above-mentioned quote. What were the geographical, historical, social, economic, political, and cultural conditions of Zakopane’s extraordinary status? Was the state, broadly understood, merely a wronged and dissatisfied spectator, or was it also an active actor? It might be surprising that this text only describes the Zakopane of Władysław Gomułka (1956–1970), whose era is usually associated with ‘little stability’, greyness, and

* This paper has been written as part of the Polish National Science Centre-founded project no. 2014/15/G/HS3/04344 “Room for Manoeuvre in State Socialism: Between Adaptation and Experiment”. 1 Kisielewski 1998, p. 436. 2 Kochanowski 2007, p. 86. Circumstances in which the commission was set up, its composition, etc., see ibid., pp. 76–78.

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torpor, that was undoubtedly crucial for the post-war history of Zakopane and continues to influence its image even today.3

The contexts As usual, the reasons for this peculiarity of Zakopane were complex. Like all the Highlander communities,4 the one located in the Podhale region was capable of efficient resistance to external influences.5 The locals spoke a distinct dialect, boasted a unique culture, and had a hierarchy of values which emphasised the “clan”. There was one other significant factor, the belated arrival of modernisation and new political ideas. In the 17th century, when the Polish nobility attempted to introduce serfdom in the Highland regions, the resistance was so strong that it verged on civil war. There was also the influence of banditry, which existed in practice until the late 19th century. Traditional religious attitudes and conservatism, typical of the Highlanders, always drove them to the right wing of the political scene. People subjected to difficult geographical and climatic conditions tend to develop special strategies of survival. One such strategy was the unusual mobility of the Highlanders, of whom at least 42,000 (one-third of the entire population of the Podhale region) emigrated across the Atlantic Ocean during the years 1870– 1930, chiefly to the United States and Canada. The émigrés remained in close contact with their relatives back home, supporting them financially and assisting subsequent waves of Highlanders who left their country to make their living in the capitalistic societies. Another way of finding a source of extra income was connected with the Polish borders: as early as the 19th century, smuggling became an important source of the Highlanders’ income (this illegal transfer of goods across the border could not be stopped even by the Stalinist-era restrictions).6 But a marked improvement in the quality of life in the Polish highlands came as late as in the 1870s, when tourists discovered the Podhale region and Zakopane in particular. Over the subsequent decades, Zakopane became the main Polish recreation centre, and not only for winter sports. Moreover, unlike other Euro-

3 More about Władysław Gomułka in Praz˙mowska 2016, Schreiber 2015, and Bethell 1972. Recently about Zakopane in the Gomułka era – Kochanowski 2018; Kochanowski 2019. 4 More about the highlander communities in Debarbieux/ Rudaz 2015, Jentsch 1977, Funnel / Parish 2001, and Grötzbach 1982. 5 More about the characteristic features of the Podhale region’s history, economy, culture, and society see Roszkowski 1995, Kroh 2002, Hodóra 2002, Leszczycki 1938, Rucin´ski 1981, Rafacz 1935, Górz 1994, Cahalen Schneider 2006, Kochanowski 2019. 6 Bun´da 2005.

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pean mountain resorts, Zakopane soon acquired the status of a hub of ‘high’ culture, which additionally attracted the Polish intellectual elite.7 In the Second Republic of Poland (1918–1939), Zakopane’s profile as the most important year-round resort was elevated even more. When Poland re-appeared on the map, after an absence of more than a century, holidays were guaranteed by the social legislation. The leisure-time culture consequently changed and the importance of sports (including winter sports) and active tourism grew. In the Second Republic of Poland, the large, well-planned infrastructural investments (the cable cars to the Kasprowy Wierch and Gubałówka mountain peaks,8 the modernisation of the railway line to Cracow, with fast trains introduced in the 1930s, the sports infrastructure, etc.) were possible owing to both state and public funding. But construction depended on private investors, local and external. Between 1922 and 1939: 1,620 new buildings were built, largely designed for the service industry). Zakopane was chaotic and unplanned, with notable contrasts in terms of landscape, urban planning, and architecture.9 That chaotic situation played an important role after the war, albeit under completely different social, political, and economic conditions. To say that the Podhale region population enjoyed special autonomy and treated every successive administration in a utilitarian manner is probably not far from the truth. One example of this attitude is found in the behaviour of Polish Highlanders during the Second World War, when a large portion of the community accepted the Nazi offer to create the Goralenvolk as a separate ethnic group distinct from Poles. This decision, however, was not regarded as wilful collaboration with the Germans, but as an element of the community’s survival strategy. At the time, Podhale was still one of the main centres of military resistance, which continued after the war against the communist authorities. Although the communists eradicated the armed resistance, they were unusually tolerant of the Podhale community and even indulged its specificity. It is no

7 More on Zakopane in Dutkowa 1991. 8 Stone 2005. 9 Archiwum Akt Nowych w Warszawie (in the following: AAN), IT, 1069, Anna Kołodziejczyk, Wpływ turystyki na ewolucje˛ socjo-kulturowa˛ regionu Zakopanego od roku 1900 do czasów najnowszych (1977), 1978, p. 13. “Of course, there was no talk of a plan or urban concept. All those who had a plot and money were building. That last condition was not necessary though. Hence, the construction of lots of primitive wooden sheds, much more shoddy than an ordinary highlander’s cottage, calculated for an easy profit and maximum ‘rotation’ of visitors. Of course, almost no one from the property worried about trifles such as water supply or sewage system. The final mess was completed with the chaotic development of retail chains, workshops, industrial plants, and randomly located tuberculosis sanatoriums, which were established in various parts of the city. The result was a monster of a settlement […] built up with a mixture of highlander cottages, wooden chalets, more or less modern villas and guest houses.” Lohman 1960.

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wonder, then, that the title of an analysis prepared by Radio Free Europe was: ‘Gorale’ (the Highlanders) – the privileged class in Poland.10 Although the Highlanders did not respect the post-war government, especially its apparatus of coercion and financial constraints, manifestations of (purely) political opposition were nevertheless not widespread, particularly from the mid1950s to the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. No independent research on the political attitudes of the inhabitants of the Podhale region was conducted during that period, but the opinions expressed in research carried out in the late 1990s reflected the earlier views to a significant degree. Amanda Buczkowska’s research on Podhale between 1999 and 2000 shows that there was very traditional approach to politics. As she writes: politics was perceived as “a thoroughly unfamiliar sphere very distant from everyday life. This entails a sharp division into ‘we’ and ‘they’, which divides social reality into two often hostile camps: the political elite and society.”11 On the other hand, in analysing the Highlanders’ attitude to the notion of freedom, Agnieszka Krzes´niak pointed out that they tended to associate it with economic, not political freedom, with the latter being of relatively little importance to them.12 It may be surmised that the various types of economic relations, partly parasitic and partly symbiotic, determined the attitude of the Zakopane and Podhale population towards the state and its institutions. Both kinds of those economic relations contributed to the unofficial ‘privatisation’ of the state. Of course, similar phenomenon was not unique to the Podhale region, because in the favourable atmosphere of the post-1956 thaw, it spread across the country.13 However, in Podhale, and especially in Zakopane, the room for negotiation, for both society and the state, was of a size and form incomparable to the rest of the country. Both sides constantly explored how far the concessions could go and recognized, at least for some time, the common objective and profitability of a special consensus, even if its foundation flirted with illegality or even crossed it.

10 Herder-Institut Marburg, Zeitungsarchiv (in the following: HIM), P-61221, 2823/61, “Gorale” (the Highlanders) – the Privileged Class in Poland, 3 September 1961. 11 Buczkowska 2005, p. 30. 12 Krzes´niak 2005, p. 143. 13 Kochanowski 2017, pp. 305–328.

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1945–1956: Stalinism in Zakopane or a failed mass vacation revolution Having survived the war largely unscathed, Zakopane quickly resumed its role as the principal Polish resort. The number of holidaymakers visiting the winter capital of Poland soon exceeded the pre-war figures and the private tourist infrastructure was quickly rebuilt. This growth inevitably led to a confrontation with the policy of centralised vacations for the masses introduced by the Polish authorities in 1948.14 This program was not to be implemented through investments, but by taking over private guest houses, hotels, and restaurants. On the other hand, the new communist elites quickly fell in love with the Tatra resort, appropriating the best hotels and guest houses in Zakopane. Nevertheless, it became apparent as early as the beginning of the 1950s the limited extent to which Zakopane had become a people’s holiday destination: 65 per cent of holiday makers in Zakopane were white-collar workers, and only 35 per cent were blue-collar workers and farmers. Virtually the entire party-government elite, all trade union activists, People’s Militia and state security functionaries, as well as people from the world of culture, students, and the still relatively well-off townsmen visited Zakopane, particularly in winter and summer. This shows just how thin Zakopane’s Stalinist veneer actually was.15 Table 1: The number of visitors in Zakopane during 1939–1975* Year 1939 1945

Total number of visitors 60,671 19,000

Visitors from abroad no data (1937 – 2,845) -

1947 1949

43,000 106,000

-

1955 1957

630,000 829,000

-

1959 1961

960,000 985,000

23,000 -

1964 1967

2,004,000 2,487,400

160,000 172,800

1970 1972

2,768,200 2,897,500

245,400 265,700

14 More in Sowin´ski 2005. 15 HIM, P-051, 9565/56, Life in Zakopane, 10 October 1956.

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Table 1 (Continued) Year Total number of visitors Visitors from abroad 1975 3,286,000 296,000 Archiwum Akt Nowych w Warszawie, IT, 1069, pp. 27, 35–37. * Only longer stays. Although is difficult to determine the number of visitors who spent only a few hours or other short periods of time in Zakopane, this figure should also be included in the calculations.

Most guest houses and hotels were inaccessible to visitors who were not a part of an organised trip, so many of them had to stay in private houses. This did not pose a problem, as the informal tourist market was governed by its own rules early in the Stalinist era and effectively exploited the advantage of demand over supply. Unofficial tourism was therefore quietly accepted by the authorities, despite the theoretically rigorous registration regulations.16

1956–1958: the Thaw For communist Poland or perhaps the entire Soviet bloc, the unusual convergence of historical, political, social, economic, and geographical factors flourished in the favourable conditions of the 1956 thaw. In Zakopane relative prosperity continued until 1958, that is, for about a year longer than in the rest of the country. Those two years were crucial for Zakopane. The resort’s symbolic and cultural space underwent a radical change, and so did the urban and architectural space. The approach to the economy, money, state, politics, and law, along with the social networks that were established at that time, persisted at least until the end of the Gomułka’s era. Self-determination and making money became Zakopane’s veritable mottos.17 At the same time, the new municipal authorities planned to transform the town into a Western-style resort and attract wealthy tourists. They therefore consented to the development of private tourist services, such as, guest houses, transportation services, and catering firms. Zakopane quickly began to free itself from the burden of being a holiday resort for the masses. However, during Stalinism not many representatives of the working class spent holidays in Zakopane (in 1957, they constituted only 9 per cent of the holidaymakers). The rest of the visitors were mainly officials (including high-ranking ones), technical intelligentsia, businessmen, and artists. Owing to lobbying, the new municipal authorities also managed to obtain massive state subsidies (government resolution 191, 13 June 1958), totalling a

16 Lohman 1960; HIM, P-051, 05612/53, Zakopane: Rest Centre for the Proletariat, 29 May 1953. 17 Wacowska / Goskrzyn´ski 1957.

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sum that no Polish city had ever received before in proportion to its area and population. By the time the ‘revolutionary’ authorities elected in 1956 were finally removed in December 1958, irreversible changes had taken place in Zakopane and the Podhale region. The ‘big leap’, however, was yet to come.

Leisure and tourism in the 1960s The ‘tourist revolution’ in Zakopane in the 1960s would have had been impossible had it not been for favourable external conditions and, particularly, the profound modernisation processes taking place across the country. Regardless of the political aspects of Gomułka’s rule, a large portion of society began to acknowledge the communist system as natural scenery of life. The great migration wave to urban centres had already subsided, and the inhabitants of villages and small towns quickly became ‘bourgeoisie’ themselves.18 Although not comparable to the West, the standard of living was improving and influenced, for instance, the way people spent their free time, including vacations. While in 1960 about 3,500,000 people took vacations away from home, in 1964 this number increased to nearly 6,000,000, in 1969 to 8,500,000, in 1971 to 11,200,000, and in 1972, astoundingly, to almost 13,000,000.19 Although the more affluent living in urban centres, especially the large ones, were still dominant among holidaymakers, less educated and less affluent Poles were catching up. Their sought-after vacation in Zakopane generally took place in holiday homes and guest houses belonging to the companies they worked for. The popularity of Zakopane grew markedly, even among foreign visitors, after the Nordic World Ski Championships were organised there in February 1962 by the International Ski Federation (Fédération Internationale de Ski, FIS). On the flip side of the coin, although the state spent a lot on preparations for the championships, the new investments, which were mainly in infrastructure, took a back seat to mass tourism. Therefore, there was still practically no low-cost accommodation available to individual holidaymakers. Regard for the sport events helped preserve Zakopane’s rigid power structure until the early 1970s. For example, Zakopane’s party structures remained unchanged in 1960s and changes in municipal authorities were limited to a narrow circle. Those structures were much more susceptible to corruption and less interested in introducing innovations. This was particularly the case since local elites had solid connections with the authorities in Warsaw, which increased both the security and the scope of their activity. The corrupt atmosphere is well illustrated by the description of a 18 Flemming 1967, p. 15. 19 Ostrowski 1974, p. 12.

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night club in Zakopane in 1960: “[The club] is a true Mecca for those who have too much money. All the tables are occupied almost all the time. At the tables sit people of from all walks of life: goldbricks, grifters, smugglers, and traders, surprisingly along with local communist dignitaries! Here a prosecutor fraternizes over a glass of vodka with a smuggler, a policeman with a foreign currency dealer, a petty swindler with a town councillor, a party secretary with a trader selling shoes smuggled from Czechoslovakia. They have fun and do business. Waiters accept all possible currencies. Czech crowns and dollars are the primary medium of exchange.”20

The big boom: 1964–1970 The change of power in 1956 accelerated mechanisms for modernisation throughout East-Central Europe. One such mechanism was the huge increase in recreational needs which could not be satisfied by the state alone. Saved or pooled together, the capital coming from primitive initiatives such as room renting was now invested in more professional and productive private tourist facilities. The process likely developed most in Zakopane, which maintained its renown as the biggest, most important and fashionable Polish mountain resort and winter sports centre. The central government set these objectives for Zakopane, appreciating its therapeutic, recreational, and sporting activities. Everybody, from top communist party officials to common workers, wanted to go there on holiday. But during the years 1958–1964, a crucial period for Zakopane, the state did not invest a single zloty in private tourism, not organised by the state. In the first half of the 1960s the number of visitors to Zakopane quickly began to near 2,000,000, including an increasing number of foreigners (see table 1). And these tourists, who were willing to spend considerable sums on their recreation, yearned for something else than the 2-week stays offered by the state-owned vacation houses. Here, the day was regulated by the dull rhythm of the meal hours in the canteens, which usually served food of unacceptable quality, and stiff social events were organised by the ‘cultural’ instructor. What the individual tourist actually desired was a shorter stay in more intimate conditions that met twentieth-century standards. Some foreign visitors, on the other hand, wished to avoid surveillance by the secret police, who concentrated on hotels. The rapidly growing demand for tourist services combined with low state supply created an economic niche, which was immediately filled by the private sector. This informal

20 HIM, P-051, 1662/60, Shady Characters and Free Spending Party Men Set Pattern of Zakopane Night Life, 3 May 1960.

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part of the economy quickly and effectively surpassed the over-regulated, slow state and city structures hampered by prohibitions, norms, and limits. As a result, Zakopane became a large private construction site in the 1960s. By the early 1970s, about 1,000 new buildings had been erected, mainly to serve the tourist tsunami. The participants and beneficiaries of that great boom were diverse, sometimes surprising local social actors. First of all, there were Highlanders with valuable assets such as land (half of the building plots in Zakopane were Highlander property) and money, but there was also a number of external investors. The latter were able to establish the holiday conditions, which domestic and foreign visitors desired. The private tourist industry was soon booming in the communist country. During 1960–1971, private investment in tourism in Zakopane amounted to 1,400,000,000 zlotys (approx. 15,000,000 US dollars according to the black market exchange rate and 60,000,000 according to the official rate). Half of this money was external capital coming from practically all parts of Poland. Private entrepreneurs, illegal foreign currency traders, petty businessmen, and the communist party establishment all invested their earnings in Zakopane’s tourist industry.21 The local Highlanders’ ‘own capital’ came from savings, which they had stored in the form of dollars or gold since before the war or since the German occupation. They had held on to these assets despite the Stalinist restrictions. They were constantly increased owing to the hard currencies sent over by relatives from the USA, Canada, and elsewhere, and also by the increasing influx of money made by economic emigrants working in these countries (several million dollars returned to Zakopane through that channel every year). Huge sums also came from flourishing legal, semi-legal, and illegal areas of production and services. Though the official annual income of the 700 registered private enterprises amounted to 37,000,000 zlotys, it was in fact many times larger. The income of approx. 230 illegal craftsmen is estimated at 150– 200,000,000 zlotys. But the earnings of the cottage-industry workers, as well as the value of souvenirs that were produced in practically every house, even by office clerks and teachers, remains impossible to assess. The sale of such illegal products was highly profitable: a woman selling souvenirs or the oscypek Highlander cheese (a local speciality) from a street stand considered daily earnings in the amount of 1,500 zlotys a bad day (the average monthly salary in the mid-1960s was not much more – 1,800 zlotys). Catering yielded even more handsome profits as the state-owned restaurants and bars were completely inefficient. It was reported that in Zakopane on some streets illegal liquor was sold in half of the homes.22 Zakopane must have had the highest average rate of alcohol consumption in Poland, because, as the locals said “drinking there give one extra21 Express Wieczorny, Wille w Zakopanem, 7 July 1971. 22 Kochanowski 2007, p. 81.

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ordinary pleasure.”23 Walking with alcohol after dinner was considered a particular nuisance, so it is no wonder than anyone owning a taxi, a horse-drawn cab, or a sledge could earn 1,000 to 2,000 zlotys per day – equivalent to an average monthly salary. Significant profits were also generated by smuggling (often done for a living), money exchange, or the illegal furriery, which developed in Podhale.24 Such activities were relatively safe. However, s People’s Militia functionaries were mostly Highlanders entangled in local connections, they were reluctant to be too active.25 Room-renting, catering, money exchange, legal and illegal manufacturing, liquor peddling, transportation services, smuggling, and prostitution brought the Zakopane ‘capitalists’ a yearly profit of over 1,000,000,000 zlotys. There were also the profits (re)invested in new houses. This is not surprising as even a small private guest house brought a return of up to 35 per cent. The money was chiefly made by renting guest houses, less often to private visitors than to public institutions which did not care about expenses and were eager to organise vacations for their employees in the winter capital of Poland. This situation was brought about by the 1966 legislation that prohibited state institutions from building guest houses themselves, even when they had the means to do so. The same law, however, also permitted the state institutions in question to buy guest houses from private owners.26 That sometimes led to intense bidding between state institutions. For example, a private entrepreneur took advantage of the rivalry between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Warsaw and the Lenin Steelworks in Cracow and sold his lodging house for 1,900,000 zlotys, while the initial price was only 600,000 zlotys.27 State institutions could also lease private guest houses from their owners, with the annual rent constituting up to 25 per cent (or more) of their value. This solution to dealing with the accommodation shortagewas used by the state travel agencies, which were developing rapidly in Zakopane. At the beginning of the 1960s there were 7, while their number increased to 15 by 1972. The agencies were focused less on serving individual tourists than on acting as intermediaries between private owners of guest houses or canteens and the state institutions, which wanted to ensure that their employees have a place to stay in Zakopane. Thus,

23 Ibid. 24 Kochanowski 2007, pp. 81–82; Informacja 1960, p. 19; Róz˙ycki 1959; Marcisz 1959; Wall 1971; Stopka / Stopka 2006; Skalski 2006; HIM, P-6221, 2823/61, “Gorale” (the Highlanders) – the Privileged Class in Poland, 3 September 1961. 25 Kochanowski 2007, p. 90. 26 Express Wieczorny, Zakopane zamknie˛te dla budownictwa pensjonatów, 19/20 November 1966. 27 Kus´mierek 1972; Kochanowski 2007, p. 86.

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they contributed to a huge increase in the number of visitors, without any additional investment in infrastructure.28 Both the huge demand for tourist services, especially accommodation, and the enormous profits they brought in, inevitably created a network of interactions between the ‛private capitalists’ and the local (or sometimes even central) governmental structures. Pressure was exerted in many forms, with all the typical capitalist methods from lobbying to monopolistic practices being utilised. Zakopane was promoted by sports activists (approx. 120 various sports events were organised there every year) and friendly journalists who popularised in the media (mainly the press) a vision of Zakopane that favoured the local ‛interest groups’. These groups wanted to keep the state recreation business as far away from Zakopane and the Tatra Mountains as possible. It was suspected that Zakopane lobbying was the reason ‛socialist social policies’ were suspended in the early sixties in the region, which enabled private enterprise to flourish. Consequently, most tourists were directed to private businesses, while the state-owned companies were compelled to rent private guest houses to their owners’ benefit.29 “Zakopane capitalism” profited handsomely when the management of stateowned shops and restaurants was transferred to commission agents at the turn of the 1950s and the 1960s. The percentage of businesses in the Zakopane region that were transferred in this manner was the highest in the country, with 25 per cent of larger shops, 100 per cent of smaller retailers, 53 per cent of larger restaurants, and 82 per cent of smaller restaurants and bistros in the hands of commission agents.30 Due to ‛useful’ connections it was extremely difficult to remove the agents from their positions in shops or bars. For instance, when the commission agent who ran the famous Poraj restaurant was deprived of his licence due to fraud, the minister of internal trade immediately intervened and had the licence reinstated. A similar intervention by the minister of forestry allowed the directors of the Tatra National Park to cut their private building plots out of the Park’s territory.31 As early as the 1960s, the huge returns from investments in the Zakopane tourist industry led to the formation of illegal developer groups (called ‛organised groups of intermediaries’). They exerted pressure on individual Highlanders to sell their plots, which were then sold to investors at a handsome profit. The 28 Archiwum Narodowe w Krakowie (in the following: AN Kr), Komitet Miejski Polskiej Zjednoczonej Partii Robotniczej w Zakopanem KM PZPR Z, 29/2272/10, Program społecznogospodarczej działalnos´ci KM PZPR Zakopane [program for the social-economic activity of the Municipal Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party in Zakopane], 15 September 1972; Matzenauer 1972. 29 Kochanowski 2007, pp. 87–89. 30 Ibid., p. 87; Express Wieczorny 1967. 31 Kochanowski 2007, p. 87.

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same groups attempted to monopolise construction, draining the job market of construction workers to such an extent that the state-owned companies had to ask the army for help.32 Circumventing particular regulations was not a problem either. Although under construction law a family house could not exceed 110 square metres, guest houses many times that size grew by the dozen. The methods used to semi-legally build such big houses were also standard in other parts of Poland: the luxuriously furnished attics and basements (sometimes covering the area of several hundred square meters) were not considered ‛living space’ and were immediately converted into bars or workshops. “In that way bizarre single-family skyscrapers were erected, which then functioned as profitable guest houses, but were exempt from taxes.”33 Private investors did not have to bother with the infrastructure as those investments were borne by the state; 75 per cent of the 1,190,000 zlotys of public money invested in Zakopane during the 1960s was spent on infrastructure development. The strength of Zakopane’s social networks in the late 1960s led to situation in which building projects were a fait accompli, that is they could be launched without any permits, not only on the plots allocated for communal purposes, but often also on protected areas. Investors, usually local ones, who built on their own plots believed that informal connections would prove more beneficial than the regulations. According to 1971 estimates, about 10 per cent of all post-war construction projects (160) were commenced and usually completed without the required documentation.34 Because they were entangled in the local networks, the Zakopane municipal authorities seldom took note of illegal construction sites or houses much larger than the prescribed 110 square metres. This was not exactly corruption because everyone turned a blind eye to those issues during informal negotiations or interpret the law favourably at the right moment.35 Even though a significant percentage of the local officials, party officials, or militia functionaries came to Zakopane from other parts of Poland, already after a few years they were irreversibly integrated in the local networks. The benefits were mutual: the functionaries in return for a guarantee of security and favour given to the locals, could count on making money in sums unattainable anywhere else in Poland. Observers were astonished to see that common warehouse assistants, accountants, 32 Ibid., p. 82. 33 Magdon´ 1971. 34 AN Kr, KM PZPR Z, 29/2271/22, Protokół z Konferencji Miejskiej zespołu d/s budownictwa [minutes of a municipal conference of the team for construction affairs], 21 October 71; Andrzejewski 1975. 35 Adamski 1968, Lewicki 1969, Ka˛kol 1973; AN Kr, KM PZPR Z, 29/2272/91, Protokół posiedzenia egzekutywy KM PZPR w Z. [minutes of a meeting of the executive of the Municipal Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party in Zakopane], 21 February 1968, p. 111.

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cashiers, and other public trade or gastronomy employees could afford to build a guest house after only a few years of work.36 However, there were also many instances of outright corruption. The most susceptible to it were municipal officials who decided on zoning (municipal or construction purposes), granted loans and construction materials, approved projects and then supervised the construction. One vivid example of corruption in this respect concerned a guest house which was constructed across a road leading to a bridge. As it turned out, the road had to be moved and a new bridge erected. The extreme nature of this case becomes evident when one considers that the construction plans for both the guest house and the bridge were drawn up by the same municipal architect.37 The financial means at the informal ‛interest group’s disposal were so enormous that “the question was not what to corrupt with, but who was incorruptible?”38 The influence of the “Zakopane malady” on local politics was unmistakable. The conditions in the Podhale region and Zakopane, the Highlanders’ conservative religiosity, the lack of industry and consequently the absence of working-class people, and the numerous profit-oriented small bourgeois, to whom the wealthier peasants gravitated, were beyond the scope of communist politics. Consequently, after the war the communist authorities were outsiders, often unskilled and inexperienced, who did not understand the specificity of the region and the complexity of the local conditions. They were also frequently more interested in personal monetary gain than in pursuing a political career. This contributed to the constant rotation of the officials. Those who decided to resign from a political position often remained in Zakopane. They usually blended in quickly, for instance, by holding lucrative positions such as that of a holiday home manager.39 Money was not the only thing that was brought to Zakopane by the flood of tourists. They brought in new modes of behaviour and ideas, which also had an influence on party members. As reported in 1966: “Workers do not really come to Zakopane as tourists. This fact undoubtedly has an impact on the formation of political views and moods among the Zakopane society. […]

36 Kochanowski 2007, p. 80. Particularly the Zakopane inhabitants who did not benefit from the boom of the 1960s took note of the rapid enrichment of people coming to Zakopane from other parts of Poland to hold official positions there: “they come with a suitcase, two years later they have a car, three more years and they have a villa.” Ibid. 37 Ibid., p. 93. 38 Ibid., p. 92. 39 Muzeum Tatrzan´skie w Zakopanem (in the following: MT), AR/NO/765, Zdzisław Lutrosin´ski, Rozwój społeczno-polityczny, administracyjny i gospodarczy Zakopanego 1945– 1978 [social-political, administrative, and economic development of Zakopane during 1945– 1978], Zakopane 1978/79.

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Those who come here on holiday are mainly dignitaries and their families from various Polish towns and cities, with a significant percentage of them from Warsaw. […] They do not go to church in their place of residence, where they may be regarded as atheists, but while being here on holiday they do go to church, and often even by car. This […] has a demoralising effect.”40

At the turn of the 1960s and in the 1970s, 62 per cent of the local state functionaries belonged to the communist party, amounting to 66.7 per cent of all party members in the region (double the average ratio in Poland). Most local power structures in communist Poland were stable, but in Zakopane the state functionaries were a truly irremovable ‛iron guard’, some of whom kept their positions for two decades. Administration was performed “through the first secretary of the Municipal Committee’s direct contacts with the managers of various institutions and branches.” That ‛managerial group’ was the actual, one could even say absolute, governing body.41

The 1970s. New course: “In a few years, Zakopane will have become a model socialist resort.” On the other hand, some wanted to dismantle the fossilised Zakopane structures. These were mainly representatives of the generation of 30 to 40-year-olds, who were thirsty for social and material advancement. They could not pursue their aims, however, without deposing representatives of the older generation. In Zakopane, the ‘young’, especially in the sport and touristic circles, were numerous and determined. They were only waiting for an opportunity to take over the positions that had been occupied, sometimes for over a decade or longer, by the Zakopane apparatchiks. The latter had been firmly integrated in the social networks since as early as the interwar period and were supported by some of the Gomułka elite. The ‘young’ took advantage of the fall of Gomułka in December 1970 and leveraged Edward Gierek’s team’s rise to power. In Zakopane this led to an upheaval which was followed with the construction of a ‘socialist town’.42 In early 1971, there was a propaganda crackdown on crime (including economic crime) and all social ‘pathologies’, which was typical of a sudden change of the ruling team. In Zakopane, an investigation was launched into the corruption 40 AN Kr, KW PZPR, 277, Posiedzenie Egzekutywy KW PZPR w Krakowie, Ocena pracy KP Zakopane [Meeting of the executive of the Provincial Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party in Zakopane, Evaluation of the Zakopane County Committee’s performance], 7 October 1966, p. 111. 41 Kochanowski 2007, p. 94. 42 AN Kr, KM PZPR Z., 29/2272/128, Protokół posiedzenia POP przy PMRN [minutes of a meeting of a basic party cell in the Presidium of the Municipal National Council], 26 July 1972.

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among municipal officials, which accelerated the generational exchange of the local officials. In the autumn of 1971, 39-year-old Lech Bafia became mayor and 37-year-old Stefan Gustek the local leader of the communist party. They were both ambitious and did not hesitate to take radical steps, such as replacing half of the municipal institutions’ employees and purging the local communist party cells. These steps were perfectly in line with the new authorities’ plans to modernise tourism and recreation, which anticipated Zakopane’s practical nationalisation and centralisation and, ultimately, its transformation into a “socialist town”.43 The party commission which was sent to Zakopane in the spring of 1972 (and mentioned in the introduction to this paper) recommended a radical approach. Its report read: “A remedy for this disease should be sought primarily in the sphere of strategic undertakings of the authorities of all levels, aimed at reduction and liquidation of the capitalist sector and strengthening the socialist sector in Zakopane. Otherwise the pathologies in the power apparatus are bound to re-emerge.”44 On the one hand, the commission was charged with the task of reporting to the authorities in Warsaw on the ‘Zakopane malady’. On the other hand, the experts’ merciless criticism of the previous Zakopane municipal and party authorities prompted the new ruling team to counteract the local pathologies even more vigorously. In November 1972, it decided to demolish six illegally constructed houses, the enduring images of which constitute some of the most important icons of the Zakopane urban mythology. Nevertheless, in early December 1972, the government decided to allocate a huge sum (2,000,000,000 zlotys) to Zakopane for the construction of new hotels, sports facilities, two chairlifts, an indoor swimming pool, a large culture centre, as well as to reorganise the transportation system. The adopted resolution also stipulated the strict control of Zakopane’s private sphere of the tourist service.45 Due to both significant investments and the undermining of the whole “privatised” system of tourist services which had been developing since 1956, the beginning of 1973 was supposed to usher in a new era in Zakopane. The needs of tourists were to be met by a monopolistic municipal institution. State institutions and workplaces lost their right to build or buy guest houses and soon even to lease of private houses without suitable permission.46 However, the failure of the 43 Ibid. 44 Kochanowski 2007, p. 96. 45 “Uchwała nr 306/72 Rady Ministrów z dnia 7 grudnia 1972 w sprawie rozwoju Zakopanego w latach 1972–1980” [Resolution no. 306/72 of the Council of Ministers of 7 December 1972 on the 1972–1980 development of Zakopane]; copy in the author’s possession). 46 AN Kr, KM PZPR Z, 29/2272/100, Informacja o realizacji uchwały 306/72 RM od 1 I 1973 do 5 VI 1973 [report on the realization of the Council of Ministers’ ordinance 306/72 between 1 January 1973 and 5 June 1973]; TL 1973.

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Stalinist attempt to nationalise and equalise recreation was repeated here. All Zakopane actors, from the Highlander who had a few rooms for rent to the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, were therefore forced to develop strategies to survive those ‘harsh times’. In fact, in the mid-1970s there were a million more tourists staying in Zakopane than at the end of the Gomułka’s era. Moreover, they were accommodated less by the new hotels, where the number of beds increased from 207 to 1,251 during 1970–1975 (half of them in luxurious Hotel Kasprowy), than by private individuals (over 7,100 beds, including 6,000 unregistered ones)47 or in company houses, whose capacity remains completely unknown. This development is hardly surprising given that the central bodies, such as the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party or the Ministry of the Internal Affairs, simply built new guest houses in Zakopane and were generally unconcerned with any prohibitions or the opinion of the municipal authorities. Minor institutions built, bought, or leased guest houses in the neighbouring localities, where the regulations were more relaxed. As the construction shifted there, land prices increased, and all of the ‘investment’ phenomena discussed above emerged.48 The law of supply and demand was fully realized, prompting the owners of the accommodation units to take the risk and overcharge their guests.49 Bafia’s ordinance of May 1975, which introduced a special permit to rent rooms to tourists and imposed a tax on rentals, met with such strong opposition that it was watered down to a significant extent from early 1976 on.50 In the late 1970s, illegal tourist services were once again just as widespread as a decade earlier, bringing in huge profits. As early as in 1974, one billion zlotys was going into private pockets.51 The situation worsened due to the economic crisis, which was becoming increasingly visible in the late 1970s and left a significant part of Zakopane’s investments in their planning stage. As a result, in late 1980 the government had to adopt another resolution on the development of Zakopane and the Tatra Commune (for the years 1981–1990). The government, however, stubbornly doubled down on most of the points included in the previous resolution. But the results this time were even worse. As it was observed in 1984, in comparison to the diagnosis included in the 1972 expert opinion, the gap between the “state” and the “private” had become even wider.52 In 1986, the head of the Zakopane PZPR cell, Andrzej Wargowski, admitted that 47 48 49 50 51

AAN, IT, 1069, p. 73. Hirnle 1976. Ibid. Ibid., Migdał 1975, Adamiecki 1977. Andrzejewski 1975, Trojanowski 1979, Sztandar Młodych, kiedy zacznie sie˛ sezon, 24–27 December 1979. 52 Zakopane 1981–1990 1980.

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“the expansion of private entrepreneurship is directly proportional to the dwindling of state-owned companies.”53 While the latter were building very little, private investors erected about 1,100 houses in Zakopane and the nearby localities, (the ‘Tatra Commune’), sometimes entering communal areas. The party secretary recalled the expert opinion issued about a dozen years earlier and dreamt of repeating a study which would prove “that certain pathological phenomena have intensified over the last 15 years.”54 Indeed, it is regrettable that Zakopane has not been re-examined in an equally meticulous, albeit less ‘ideologised’ way. The results for the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s would undoubtedly prove fascinating, and perhaps even validate the view that construction law is still not abided by in Podhale.55

Free City or Eigen-Sinn56 ? While expressions such as “specific”, “exceptional”, or “one-of-a-kind” were constantly used in the discourse about Zakopane, even in official party or police correspondence, the title of this text serves best as a metaphor for the actions of the social and institutional actors. Nonetheless, it is difficult to find a common denominator among them in terms of a specific room for manoeuvre, other than in the financial sphere. The term Eigen-Sinn (self-will), which is crucial to research on everyday life and at the same time leaves room for interpretation, was popularised by the German historian Alf Lüdtke in the 1980s. It constitutes a tool that helps put the ‘free city’ of Zakopane in a terminological and methodological framework.57 The researchers who promoted the term Eigen-Sinn (and soon also the method) wished to answer the question about “the relationship between individuals, socialisation, and power seen from the level and perspective of many individual actors […] when it comes to analysing the significance of individual behaviours and actions for the exercise of power and control, oppression and protest, cooperation, resistance, and resignation.”58

On the one hand, a crucial factor was the matter of the social actors’ stances and attitudes towards the authorities (“Whose side are you on?!”). On the other hand, there were the mutual relations that reached beyond the stereotypical “command–execution” or “command–resistance” duality, and showed a much more 53 54 55 56 57 58

De˛bef 1986. Ibid. Hajok 2011. Eigen-Sinn is commonly rendered in English as “stubbornness” or “self-will”. Lindenberger 1999; Lindenberger 2016. Lindenberger 2016, p. 171.

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complex, asymmetric reality and interwoven phenomena. This situation encouraged both parties, the authorities and the social actors to establish their own framework for understanding and negotiating the prevailing circumstances, which were far from the theoretical, ideological basis.59 The concurrence of geographical, historical, political, social, economic modernisation, and cultural conditions, in Podhale, and particularly Zakopane, appears to have been exceptional, even in the scale of socialist countries. It thus created an unprecedented room for manoeuvre, allowing for the simultaneous operation of sometimes surprising actors, from Highlanders to municipal clerks and high-ranking state officials. Although various types of networks involving the municipal authorities, the party, directors from local employing establishments, the People’s Militia, and local judiciary existed in every municipality, they were rarely of supra-regional importance. In Zakopane, there was an additional factor that was unusual for a provincial town with a population of 25,000: close ties with Warsaw. This enabled local actors, both social and institutional, to evade established procedures and even bypass their direct superiors. This was a phenomenon, observed and described both in the early 1960s and in the late 1980s, that persisted for a long time.60 On the other hand, the political and economic centre was not only a frustrated spectator, as the 1972 report pictured it, but also, as an actor of equal standing, it directed or initiated events, and most often acted as a generous patron. The same could be said about the local level. All phenomena of the Podhale and Zakopane “self-will” (Eigen-Sinn) show how little we still know about the functioning of both the authorities and the society during the period of social realism, how obscure and non-stereotypical their mutual relations were, how closely the world of power and the world of money were interwoven, and how easily the political apparatus gave way, letting itself be harnessed and tamed. Translated by Anna Brzostowska and Róz˙a Kochanowska

Archival materials Archiwum Akt Nowych, Instytut Turystyki [Archive of Modern Records in Warsaw, Institute of Tourism]. Archiwum Narodowe w Krakowie, Komitet Miejski Polskiej Zjednoczonej Partii Robotniczej w Zakopanem [National Archive in Cracow, Municipal Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party in Zakopane] (later AN Kr, KM PZPR Z.).

59 Ibid., pp. 178, 181–182. 60 Dudzik 1961, Czypionka 1988.

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Archiwum Narodowe w Krakowie, Komitet Wojewódzki Polskiej Zjednoczonej Partii Robotniczej [National Archive in Cracow, Voivodship Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party] (later AN Kr, KW PZPR). Herder-Institut Marburg, Zeitungsarchiv [Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe] (later HIM). Muzeum Tatrzan´skie w Zakopanem [Tatra Museum in Zakopane] (later MT).

Literature, press, memoires/diaries Adamiecki, Wojciech: Człowiek w tłoku, in: Literatura, 7 April 1977. Adamski, Zbigniew: Perła Tatr w ceglanej oprawie, in: Kurier Polski, 21 August 1968. Andrzejewski, Feliks: Złota z˙yła pod Tatrami, in: Gazeta Południowa, 6 August 1975. Bethell, Nicholas William: Gomułka: his Poland, his communism. Harmondsworth 1972. Brzostek, Błaz˙ej / Zaremba, Marcin: Polska 1956–1976: w poszukiwaniu paradygmatu, in: Pamie˛c´ i Sprawiedliwos´c´ 5/2, no. 10 (2006), pp. 25–37. Buczkowska, Amanda: Potoczny obraz polityki w oczach górali, in: Malewska-Szałygin, Anna (ed.): Rozmowy z góralami o polityce, Warszawa 2005, pp. 19–39. Bun´da, Anna: Pogranicze mniej formalne czyli nielegalne przekraczanie granic na Podhalu, in: Jerzy M. Roszkowski, Jerzy M. / Kowalski, Robert (eds.), Góry i góralszczyzna w dziejach i kulturze pogranicza polsko-słowackiego (Podhale, Spisz, Orawa, Gorce, Pieniny). Historia, Nowy Targ 2005, pp. 127–134. Cahalen Schneider, Deborah: Being Góral: Identity Politics and Globalization in Postsocialist Poland, Albany – New York 2006. Czypionka, Jan: Porza˛dki pod Giewontem, in: Trybuna Robotnicza, 18 March 1988. Debarbieux, Bernard / Rudaz, Gilles: The Mountain. A Political History from the Enlightenment to the Present, Chicago – London 2015. De˛bef, Krzysztof: Zakopane nie jest dla mas. Rozmowa z I sekretarzem KM PZPR w Zakopanem, Andrzejem Wargowskim, in: Sprawy i Ludzie, 22 May 1986. Dudzik, Zdzisław: Zakopian´ski pe˛pek, in: Dziennik Polski (Cracow), 22/23 October 1961. Dutkowa, Renata (ed.): Zakopane. Czterysta lat dziejów, vol. 1–2, Kraków 1991. Express Wieczorny, 21/22 January 1967. Express Wieczorny, Wille w Zakopanem, 7 July 1971. Express Wieczorny, Zakopane zamknie˛te dla budownictwa pensjonatów, 19/20 November 1966. Flemming, George J. [Działak, Jerzy]: Polska mało znana. Paris 1967. Funnel, Don / Parish. Romola: Mountain Environments and Communities, London – New York 2001. Górz, Bronisław (ed.): Studia nad przemianami Podhala, Kraków 1994. Grötzbach, Erwin: Das Hochgebirge als menschlicher Lebensraum. München 1982. Hajok, Dawid: Samowolka po góralsku, hej!, in: Gazeta Wyborcza, 3 November 2011. Hirnle, Piotr: Tatry sa˛ jedne, in: Polityka, 14 February 1976. Hodóra, Jan: Góralszczyzna. Kraków 2002. Informacja o przeste˛pczos´ci gospodarczej w 1959 r., Warszawa 1960.

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Jentsch, Christoph: Für eine vergleichende Kulturgeographie der Hochgebirge, in: Beiträge zur geographischen Methode und Landeskunde. Festgabe für Gudrun Höhl, Mannheimer Geographische Arbeiten, notebook 1 (1977), pp. 56–71. Ka˛kol, Kazimierz: W obronie prawa. Co sie˛ dzieje w Zakopanem?, in:Prawo i Z˙ycie, 7 January 1973. Sztandar Młodych, Kiedy zacznie sie˛ sezon, 24–27 December 1979. Kisielewski, Stefan: Dzienniki, Warszawa 1998. Kochanowski, Jerzy: Socjalizm na halach, czyli “Patologia stosunków społeczno-ekonomicznych i politycznych w Zakopanem” (1972), in: Przegla˛d Historyczny 98 (2007), pp. 71–96. Kochanowski, Jerzy: Rewolucja mie˛dzypaz´dziernikowa. Polska 1956–1957. Kraków 2017. Kochanowski, Jerzy: “Wolne miasto”. Nieco inne spojrzenie na Zakopane Władysława Gomułki, 1956–1970, in: Przegla˛d Historyczny 109 (2018), pp. 611–650. Kochanowski, Jerzy: “Wolne miasto”. Zakopane 1956–1970, Kraków 2019. Kroh, Antoni: Tatry i Podhale, Wrocław 2002. Krzes´niak, Agnieszka: Góralskie pojmowanie wolnos´ci., in: Malewska-Szałygin, Anna (ed.): Rozmowy z góralami o polityce, Warszawa 2005 pp. 141–150. Kus´mierek, Józef: Nie stac´ nas na takie Zakopane, in: Z˙ycie Warszawy, 17 September 1972. Leszczycki, Stanisław: Region Podhala. Podstawy geograficzno-gospodarcze planu regionalnego, Kraków 1938. Lewicki, Bronisław: Dziewia˛ta fala pod Giewontem, in: Trybuna Ludu, 29 August 1969. Lindenberger, Thomas (ed.): Herrschaft und Eigen-Sinn in der Diktatur: Studien zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte der DDR, Köln 1999. Lindenberger, Thomas: Eigen-Sinn – władza i brak oporu. Translated by Katarzyna Kon´czal and Zofia Sucharska, in: Stan Rzeczy 10 (2016), pp. 167–189. Lohman, Jerzy: Zakopane znaczy marzenia, in: Kierunki, 4 December 1960. ´ , Andrzej: Zakopian´ska kuracja, in: Trybuna Ludu, 30 December 1971. Magdon Marcisz, Iza, Na granicy, in: Dziennik Polski (Cracow), 19 February 1959. Matzenauer, Marian: Zakopian´ska wiosna, in: Trybuna Ludu, 1 June 1972. Migdał, Konstanty: Baza dla milionów, in: Dziennik Polski (Cracow), 12 August 1975. Ordyk, Tomasz: Kto rza˛dzi w stolicy Tatr?, in: Przeglad Tygodniowy, 23 December 1984. Ostrowski, Stanisław, Ruch turystyczny w Polsce w 1972 roku, Warszawa 1974. Praz˙mowska, Anita: Władysław Gomułka: a biography. London 2016. Rafacz, Józef: Dzieje i ustrój Podhala Nowotarskiego za czasów dawnej Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, Warszawa 1935. Roszkowski, Jerzy M. (ed.): Regionalizm-regiony-Podhale, Zakopane 1995. Róz˙ycki, Marek: Prawo pogranicza, in: Z˙ycie Warszawy, 24–26 December 1959. Rucin´ski, Henryk: Podkarpacie, in: Encyklopedia historii gospodarczej Polski do 1945 roku, vol. 2, Warszawa 1981, pp. 90–91. Schreiber, Rene: Wladyslaw Gomulka: Aufstieg und Fall eines Politikers, Norderstedt 2015. Skalski, Władysław J.: Nowotarskie kus´nierstwo w PRL, in: Almanach Nowotarski 10 (2006), pp. 88–92. Sowin´ski, Paweł: Wakacje w Polsce Ludowej. Polityka władz i ruch turystyczny (1945– 1989). Warszawa 2005.

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Stone, Daniel: The Cable Car at Kasprowy Wierch: An Environmental Debate in Interwar Poland, in: Slavic Review 234/3 (2005), pp. 60–624. Stopka, Kinga / Stopka, Janusz: Kus´nierstwo nowotarskie w latach 1945–1988, in: Almanach Nowotarski 10 (2006), pp. 73–87. Szlachcic, Franciszek: Gorzki smak władzy. Wspomnienia. Warszawa 1990. Trojanowski, Edward: Zakopian´skie rekordy “Lewej turystyki”, in: Express Wieczorny, 5 November 1979. ´ ski, Edward: Samostanowic´ i zarabiac´. Zakopian´ska Wacowska, Ewa / Goskrzyn “kontrrewolucja” (II)., in: Sztandar Młodych, 18 September 1957. Wall, Grzegorz: Kwiatki do koz˙ucha, in: Walka Młodych, 1 August 1971. Zakopane 1981–1990, in: Z˙ycie Warszawy, 16 December 1980.

Błaz˙ej Brzostek

“Spaces for Freedom” of the Romanian Littoral Zone 1960–1980*

Introduction The Romanian coast of the Black Sea stretches over about 245 km, two-thirds of which is taken up by the picturesque Danube delta and one-third by sandy shores and shallow bays. The delta creates marshes inhabited by birds and other animals; the region has the allure of wild adventure. The present article focuses on a part of the littoral zone that evokes less adventure than sunny days at the beach. In the beach part of the littoral, to the north, lies Na˘vodari. Once a fishing village (like many later resorts), it became an industrial centre in the 1960s. It continued, however, to be associated with beaches and summer camps for children. Further south is Mamaia-Sat, which attracts visitors to private lodgings, while Mamaia proper is located on a strip of land next to Constant,a, a resort with inter-war traditions but today radically changed by a number of big hotels. South of Constant,a, we find the Agigea resort; another four kilometres south, there is Eforie-Nord, which brings to mind the therapeutic mud from Lake Techirghiol. Neighbouring Eforie-Sud is less known to foreign tourists, although it was the first Romanian resort, established in the late of the nineteenth century (as Ba˘ile Techirghiol-Movila˘). Farther south, about 30 kilometres from Constant,a, lies Costines¸ti, where a sanatorium and summer camp were built. The camp became famous in the 1970s as a kind of room for manoeuvre for young people. A dozen or so kilometres further south, a group of resorts emerged around the city of Mangalia from the late 1960s. The names Olimp, Neptun, Jupiter, Saturn and Venus originate from an era in which the communist regime discovered sought to exploit Romanians’ ancient past and the commercial attractiveness of names that Western tourists could easily comprehend. The most resonant name to Romanian ears was probably Neptun, associated with Nicolae Ceaus¸escu’s summer * This paper has been written as part of the Polish National Science Centre-founded project no. 2014/15/G/HS3/04344 “Room for Manoeuvre in State Socialism: Between Adaptation and Experiment”.

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residence. The littoral ends in the village of Vama Veche with a border crossing, a large number of private lodgings and spaces for nudists. In Romania, seaside holidays carry an element of nostalgia for earlier socialism. Despite the grim decline of the system, which was marked by extravagant dictatorship and poverty, and despite the bloody events of December 1989, such nostalgia is now as intense in Romania as in other former “fraternal” socialist countries. One reason for this is the bitter disappointment of the so-called transformation. Most families who had hitherto been able to take advantage of workers’ holidays could no longer visit the sea. It became more remote and associated with the chaos of early capitalism. It was also during this time that images took hold of past prosperity and even – paradoxically – lost freedom.1 *** Romania appeared on the map of international resorts in the early 1960s. Within a decade, it became one of the ten fastest growing tourism markets in the world. The communist government’s propaganda tried to convince its citizens of the country’s popularity, for instance, by showing photographs of smiling Western tourists. In 1970, an engineer from Liverpool apparently said that this, too, was a manifestation of the “heroism of the Romanian people”.2 But, how could restaurants, beaches with parasols, ice-cream stands be viewed as manifestations of heroism? Indeed, the language belonged to the era Stalinism, in which sand went into the concrete that was used to construct factories. In Romania, Stalinism was perhaps the cruellest forms of socialism; its aims clearly conflicted with the atmosphere of the rallies during the Polish autumn of 1956, not to mention the Hungarian Revolution. The process was slow and the language retained many vestiges of Stalinist rhetoric. On the other hand, monumental colonnades and statues rapidly disappeared from Romanian architecture. One reason was tourism, as the regime sought to create special enclaves for visitors from all over the world. In the early 1960s, modernist hotels opened in Mamaia along the beach, which began to teem with tourists. This not only included those who paid “in hard currency”, referred to in party documents as “Westerners” (vestici or Vest), but another group called the estici (Est). These tourists, mainly from Poland, Czechoslovakia and the GDR, did not bring currency; moreover, their food and accommodation was paid for within systems of exchange between the economies of Romania and those of other socialist countries. A third group of tourists was made up of “internals” (din intern): Romanian citizens who were divided into those coming as part of their workers’ holidays and those travelling 1 Pârvulescu 2003, pp. 61–63; LXXX Ma˘rturii orale 2003, pp. 61–63. 2 Roman 1970.

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on their own. The coexistence of all these groups will be explored in the present article under the following thesis: In the 1960s, the littoral became a room for manoeuvre, where supposedly binding rules from the regime were blurred. But this “room” should not be understood only as spontaneous grassroots phenomena. The resorts were created by the state. As a result, this specific zone belonged to the state and corresponded to its economic interests. However, once it created this space, the regime also had to contend with impact of a social room for manoeuvre.

Between Dieppe and Carmen Sylva Resorts were rooms for manoeuvre for nineteenth-century bourgeois society. Bath in England provided an example for continental resorts, which evolved from health resorts to places where it was fashionable to be “seen”. German resorts like Travemünde, then Swinemünde and Zoppot, began to develop from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Slightly later followed the French resorts of Boulogne-sur-Mer, Dieppe and Biarritz, which set trends in leisure time elegance. Every summer the imperial court moved to Dieppe and the Parisian aristocracy followed suit. Biarritz, Empress Eugenia’s favourite resort, was frequented by aristocrats.3 However, the main group that seized the seaside beaches was the bourgeoisie. Getting away from the city to “nature” was a way to find respite from daily tasks and discipline. In the first half of the nineteenth century, this natural space, with its sharp cliffs and high mountains, was a romantic wilderness. Climbing peaks constituted a form of moral instruction in the (male) world of the period. However, with the development of leisure culture, the image of nature became softer. Therapeutic procedures were also significant: throughout most of the nineteenth century, chilly environments such as sanatoriums in the mountains and baths in icy waters were regarded as having healing properties. It was only towards the end of that century that the advantages of the sun and warm water – specifically, the beach – were discovered. Initially, this meant taking cover in beach pavilions and roofed wickers as well as separating male and female beaches. However, family beaches were also rooms for manoeuvre as discipline here was less strict.4 Young people were also allowed greater social freedom: holidays on the beach became a time of liberation from supervision at home and school. Because of the social influence of the bourgeoisie, “integrated” resorts emerged. There were estates made up of villas surrounding resort facilities, while holiday resorts became an extension of big cities, offering restaurants, shops and 3 Rauch 2001, p. 85. 4 Ibid., pp. 88–89.

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promenades and generally serving as alternative spaces. Neighbouring villages offered another kind of liberation: They provided an opportunity to get in touch with the local population, which embodied noble simplicity as well as sexuality. Hearty, semi-naked seafarers became part of the timid erotic imagination of female holidaymakers.5 A profound transformation was taking place, for the elites accepted the idea of leisure as a separate area of life, as an area of new social, natural and patriotic initiation. In the meantime, the Romanian state expanded (1878 and 1913), acquiring Dobruja and, along with it, broad access to the sea. The littoral not only was something the nation could boast about (as an essential element that completed its statehood), but it was also occupied by big city dwellers. This development was greatly influenced by the construction of the railway. The impressive bridge on the Danube (1895) provided a railway connection between Bucharest and the littoral. There were obvious models for the littoral. The Romanian elites, for instance, were familiar with Dieppe and Biarritz. The sunny cost of the Black Sea attracted their attention as well, although it was difficult to imagine that it would also lure high society from all over Europe. Although this reduced its attractiveness, the crucial factor was the price: Even moderately well-off people could afford to create their own room for manoeuvre. A number of spas sprang up between Constant¸a and Carmen-Sylva (today Eforie Nord). In terms of demand, health needs were followed by those of entertainment and the location’s prestige. A lavish art nouveau casino was opened in Constant¸a (1910), while an art déco casino was built a quarter of a century later in nearby Mamaia. The town of Balchik in southern Dobruja (a province lost in 1940) acquired Queen Mary’s summer residence and became a place popular with the elites. Mass tourism developed as well, spurred by the National Tourism Office (Oficiul Nat¸ional de Turism, ONT), established in 1936.6 The Minister of Labour of the late 1930s, Mihai Ralea, was a patron of holidays, student camps and trips organised under the slogan “Munca˘ s¸i voie buna˘” (work and joy).7 After the war, Ralea became an official of the communist regime, imposed on Romania after 1945, and his old programme was used in a top-down “social revolution”.

5 Frykman / Löfgren 2007, pp. 60, 215. 6 Simionescu 1938, p. 235. 7 S¸tefan 2013, pp. 589–590.

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“Obsessive decade” According to Adelina Oana S¸tefan, tourism was used to legitimise the post-war government. It demonstrated its egalitarian principles and stressed the significance of work, because only work gave access to leisure resources. The word “holiday” entered the colloquial language and became a collective experience. This would mean the emergence of a modern type of tourist associated with the industrial society.8 In this respect, the authorities seemed to have sped up the modernisation process. As in other spheres, modernisation was connected with a vigorous battle against all things “bourgeois. ” Toward this end, the elitist form of leisure modelled on Dieppe and Biarritz needed to disappear. As late as 1947, Mangalia was full of holidaymakers who threw around money, which however rapidly lost its value because of inflation.9 Nonetheless, the “obsessive decade” (obsedantul deceniu), as Adrian Pa˘unescu later called it, had already begun.10 In the decade from 1948 to 1958, the regime, which closely adhered to the Soviet models, destroyed the thin strata of bourgeoisie.11 And the entire noteworthy infrastructure on the Black Sea coast was taken over by the party state. At the same time, the littoral disappeared from the public world of ideas. The iconography of tourism of the Stalinist era can be found in the periodical Turismul Popular. Published photographs never showed the sea, for tourism was about climbing peaks and reaching mountain sanctuaries. People in the photographs wore trekking boots or skis; they were shown in boats battling mountain rivers or wrapped in raincoats. An article would only showcase the coastal town of Mangalia, for instance, because a nearby cave was worth visiting.12 With regard to the sphere of ideas, the represented a paradoxical return to the romantic age of bourgeois tourism. In another striking aspect, the mountains were shown to be a refuge for the remnants of anti-communist guerrillas. They were also a region where collectivisation of agriculture was especially challenging. However, the regime did not abandon the mountains in any symbolic way, perhaps because, although they ran across the country, they did not mark its border. The littoral zone, on the other hand, conveyed a place that exposed people to the world and thus connoted escape. It was therefore a politically sensitive sphere. It embodied defining aspects of the period: 1) military-police control, linked to an obsessive concern with the country’s enemies; 2) enclaves for people selected according to a party-ideological formula; 3) totality of ownership transformations, as part

8 9 10 11 12

Ibid., pp. 587–599. Giurescu 2008, p. 146. Goldis¸ 2017. Ta˘nase 1998. Precup 1951.

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which seaside villages were turned into kolkhozes, while crafts and industries were subordinated to the omnipotent state. The openness of the coastal landscape simultaneously became an image of lost freedom and oppression. Indeed, there was even hope that liberation would come from the sea, because the sea had been associated with military matters. Many cherished hopes that “the Americans would come” to liberate the country; there were rumours that they would land in Constant¸a.13 At the same time, the littoral was a militarised area, manned by Romanian and Soviet garrisons. In Constant¸a, the beach was surrounded by a barbed wire fence and bathing was allowed only until 7pm. Later border guards would round up pedestrians, as the authorities feared their escape. The mere trip to the seaside required a special permit. When those who travelled by train saw the construction of the Danube-Black Sea Canal, they were aware that political prisoners worked there.14 The littoral maintained its recreational focus, but it was channelled into organised workers’ holidays. In 1948, the ONT was disbanded and incorporated as the tourism department into the CGM (Confederat¸ia Generala˘ a Muncii), an organisation of trade unions. Its tasks included the organisation of mass holidays. This consisted in trade unions distributing “holiday tickets” (bilete de odihna˘). The “tickets” determined the status of their bearers: they were waivers, complete or partial, of transport, accommodation and catering fees. They were distributed in accordance with the level or pay and family situation, with heroes of labour being entitled to free holidays. In fact, the allocation depended on the relations with the authorities and influences. It mirrored the Soviet model, in which holidays rewarded political attitude. Their purpose was to renew the strength of the working class. Going on holiday became an important social experience, but also a source of tension stemming from the clash between the ideological vision and reality. Authors of party reports wrote about gambling, drunkenness, sleeping with shoes on, smoking in bed and similar trivial problems. On the other hand, they pointed out that workers were a tiny minority among those who participated in organised trips.15 It is worth illustrating the phenomenon with a personal narrative that shows the ordinary reality of Stalinism, but an extraordinary situation of an individual. Dinu Ghika (1926–1995) was a lawyer who, around 1950, had a bleak because he was a member of an aristocratic family. This was compounded by the fact that his brother was in prison. He did have one advantage, however: He was a good rugby player. The authorities supported the sport, with state companies setting up their own teams. In the early 1950s, Ghika was assigned a non-existent white-collar job in a pipe 13 Barbu 2006, pp. 81–85. 14 Martinescu 1997, p. 299 (26 August 1952), pp. 302–303 (29 August 1952); Bîtfoi 2012, p. 333. 15 S¸tefan 2013, pp. 594–595.

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factory; there, he found a place as a highly regarded player in the local team. As he recalled, “In those days I tried to live as discreetly as possible but taking advantage of what was considered to be benefits of the new regime.”16 And so, in the hardest years of the Stalinist period, Ghika found himself at the Black Sea thanks to a “ticket” for his sporting prowess. He obtained accommodation with two friends, thanks to which the men could do favours for each other: leave the room at the disposal of whichever among them wanted to invite his wife. Women had separate accommodations and family holidays were in fact a rare commodity. Although Ghika was not married, his friends left him a room whenever he met a girl on the beach. This is how he created his own room for manoeuvre. The following year he obtained a good “ticket” through a secretary from the factory, who was a rugby enthusiast. He got a place in a seaside villa that was confiscated from its owner (the irony was that Ghika’s family home in Bucharest had also been confiscated), but the holiday was not successful, because the former aristocrat found himself sharing a room with two Transylvanian peasants. Distrustful of the resort’s catering services, they had brought with them huge amounts of pork fat and onion. They did not go to the beach, but instead started the day at dawn washing down those delicacies with a strong alcohol known as t,uica˘. Despite such experiences, Ghika continued to apply for “tickets” in the following years.17 Significantly, the littoral became more broadly regarded as an accessible space after 1958. That same year the Soviet troops left Romania (Nikita Khrushchev was convinced of the country’s absolute loyalty) and coastal zones were opened for free circulation. As the writer Annie Bentoiu recalls, people were discovering the charms of the seaside and accommodation in fishermen’s houses became a symbol of freedom of movement and recovery of harried bodies.18 In 1958, a decision was made to build a resort for “working people” in Eforie-Nord. The holiday facilities were to be constructed quickly, so socialist realist, palatial structures were out of the question. Light buildings were designed in a way that would suggest that there were no political and material gaps between Romania and the capitalist world. The man who was entrusted with the management of the project and who would make his mark on the appearance of successive resorts was the thirty-something Cezar La˘za˘rescu. In a clientelist political system a lot depended on personal contacts and good chemistry – which was apparently enjoyed between the eminent architect and the head of the party Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej – was important. La˘za˘rescu seemed not to feel constrained by the existing aesthetic and functional dogmas. 16 Ghika 2017, p. 70. 17 Ibid., pp. 70–73. 18 Bentoiu 2006, p. 621.

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A new natural resource The construction of the new Mamaia began in 1960. Barely two years later, a row of modernist hotels stood on the long strip of land between Lake Siutghiol and seaside beaches. From the side of Constant¸a there emerged the fourteen-storey tower block of the Parc Hotel, behind which was a row of hotels with names like Dolphin, Aurora or Sirena. The decision to build the resort was linked to a new strategy for the development of the littoral zone. Constant¸a, the biggest city in Dobruja, was the main transport hub and featured ancient ruins that attracted tourists. Archaeological research led to the discovery of, among other things, fragments of buildings from Roman times. Vases and other relics were displayed in a lapidarium. While it took a few more years for the nationalist messaging – combining Romanianness and Roman heritage – to be revived, there was already a noticeable inclination on the part of the regime to build a mythical, harmonious vision of the nation’s history, extending from the Greek port of Tomis to great transhipments in the socialist city of Constant¸a, from Ovid to the “Ovidiu” canned meat factory. Ideological tensions eased as well. Western architecture was no longer condemned. Indeed, the Constant¸a railway station (1960) had a shell roof based on the latest world architectural trends, very similar to the roof of the new market hall in Le Havre, France. Soon an airport building in a similar style was opened in Constant¸a. In 1962, advertainments were published in the Western press that promoted holidays in Mamaia with a direct connection to the coast with the Tarom airlines. In order to lure in tourists, the authorities had to create a positive image of the country and learn advertising techniques from the international tourist industry. It might seem that in a closed country living under the yoke of censorship this must have been a considerable challenge. This was not the case. Romania’s internal propaganda produced brochures for citizens to show them the achievements that improved the welfare of the masses. The canon included photographs of blocks of flats and happy workers’ families. Tourist brochures in the free world were strikingly similar. The set of images was ready: rows of housing blocks were replaced with rows of hotels, and the happy families were spending time on the beach. Nor was it a great challenge to manage the influx of tourists: the elaborate organisational apparatus was well-trained in moving materials and people. Why would it not be able to face such a challenge in international tourism? Obviously, the regime, which had long tried to keep the citizens in fear of foreign agents from the West, had to revise its position. In the early 1960s, Romanian television began to broadcast foreign language lessons; Russian ceased to be mandatory in schools, with students opting more often for French or English. There emerged an atmosphere of some openness to values hitherto

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regarded as highly suspicious. In tourism success was measured by earnings in hard currency, which must have placed tourists arriving from the West in a favourable light. The United States has ceased to be a fire-belching monster, and the Romanian diaspora in the West no longer consisted of renegades. Now, US citizens were associated with the sums of money they would leave behind in the resorts, while Romanian émigrés appeared as nostalgics wanting to see their hometown, get some rest at the seaside and return with souvenirs. In 1964, the party issued a document called “declaration of independence”: a creed, as it were, according to which every socialist country should define its developmental path itself. The anti-Soviet message of the document was obvious. Thus the expansion of holiday resorts became part of a decolonisation of Romania: the resorts were rooms for manoeuvre enabling the regime to generate income thanks to links to the capitalist world. Initially, this “decolonisation” had an economic dimension. The challenge was to find sources of financing for industrial investment projects, which became complicated after simple reserves (from confiscations, tax pressure and available labour pool) had run out. On the other hand, cooperation with the USSR became problematic in the era of Khrushchev, who sought a “socialist division of labour”: Romania would be treated as a supplier of food and raw materials rather than as an industrial country. Resistance to this Soviet policy put the financing of growth into a sharper light. In other words, the regime chased away the spectre of a tomato republic. Ultimately, analyses showed that suntan was more profitable than tomatoes.19 Beaches and sun were recognised as a domestic natural resource, with investment in them outpacing that of industry. The prosperity of the Western middle class created a huge pool of tourists. Rivalries over attracting visitors ensued. In 1963, the French government launched the “Racine” operation, trying to divert tourists from Spain and to transform the Mediterranean coast: the state bought up huge plots of land and built resorts. The most striking example was probably La Grande-Motte, a row of pyramid-shaped concrete hotels resembling the location of Mamaia, whose architecture seemed conservative by comparison.20 As tourism was a key economic and political issue, French diplomats watched the related activities of other countries, including Romania. After the 1962 season, the French embassy drew up a report about Mamaia. It was described as a group of hotels, “very modern in their concept, colourful, bringing to mind an American resort rather than traditional Romania”. In addition to groups 19 Arhivele Nat¸ionale ale României (in the following: ANR), Comitetul Central al Partidului Comunist Român (CC PCR), Cancelarie 113/1965/I, f. 60, 66: Propuneri privind dezvoltarea turismului în Republica Populara˘ Româna˘ în perioada˘ 1966–1970, 26 June 1965. 20 Barancy 2017, pp. 16–18.

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from the GDR and Poland, there were also tourists from Scandinavia, France and America. The occupancy rate was good, but the tourists were apparently dissatisfied with the service, catering and entertainment as well as a lack of Western press and information. In response to the problem, the Romanian authorities brought in, among others, Le Monde and New York Times.21 Observation was mutual. Data submitted to the Romanian leadership showed that the number of tourists in the world doubled in 1958–1965, as did income in hard currency, 70 % of which was generated in Europe. Though the main beneficiaries were the economies of former colonial powers, the rise in income in less wealthy countries was spectacular. Yugoslavia’s hard currency earnings from tourism were ten times lower than in France, but 92 million dollars (1965) was nothing to be sniffed at.22 Bulgaria earned three times less, but nevertheless competed with Romania. According to the French ambassador (1962), Bulgarian resorts were superior to Romanian resorts in the quality of their services; also notable was the “weaker police surveillance”. The ambassador was sceptical about the possibility of maintaining the practice of keeping the visitors in isolation.23 The government in Bucharest drew similar conclusions. In the spring of 1964, it softened its visa and foreign currency restrictions, and allowed tourists to freely travel around the country. Paradoxically, visitors from socialist countries were not granted such freedoms. Romania’s income from tourism was still modest: 19 million dollars in 1963, while Italy that same year earned 931 million, Spain 679 million and Austria 423 million. Tourism generated 1.5 % of Romania’s export earnings, while in Greece it was 21 %.24 However, the general opinion was that the prospects were good, especially with regard to visitors from Northern and Central Europe. Their biggest source of tourism was the Federal Republic of Germany, which was experiencing its Wirtschaftswunder. In 1965, one million Germans spent their holidays in Spain, another one million in Italy; half a million chose Yugoslavia and ninety thousand Romania, a sizeable number given that shortly before it was zero. From another cold-weather country, Sweden, a quarter of a million people went to Italy in 1965, one hundred thousand that same year to Spain, half of that number to Yugoslavia and ten thousand to Romania.25 Incidentally, this was 21 Archives Diplomatiques, Paris (in the following: AD), Europe 1944–70, Roumanie 208, no pagination: Bouffanais to Paris, 11 December 1962. 22 ANR, CC PCR, Cancelarie 113/1965/I, ff. 60, 66: Propuneri privind dezvoltarea turismului în Republica Populara˘ Româna˘ în perioada˘ 1966–1970, 26 June 1965. 23 AD, Europe 1944–70, Roumanie 208, no pagination: Bouffanais to Paris, 11 December 1962. 24 ANR, CC PCR, Cancelarie 113/1965/I, ff. 66–67: Propuneri privind dezvoltarea turismului în Republica Populara˘ Româna˘ în perioada˘ 1966–1970, 26 June 1965. 25 ANR, CC PCR, Cancelarie 150/1966, ff. 15–16: Propuneri privind noua˘ organizare a turismului în Republica Socialista˘ România [1966]; Sect¸ia Economica˘ 17/1970, f. 6: Raportul delegat¸iei

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enough for many Romanians to believe that Swedish women were emancipated and looked for emotions.26 In other words, the country was a destination for would become known as sex tourism. Irrespective of Romania’s place in tourist rankings, the appearance of such a mass influx of foreigners was spectacular. In 1960, there were 9,000 tourists from the West, six years later 245,000.27 Most headed for the seaside. In the first half of the 1960s about 40 hotels were built in the littoral zone (15,000 beds), which turned Mamaia and Eforia into international resorts.28 From the middle of the decade a resort was being designed in Mangalia (18,000 beds), with tennis courts, swimming pools, a casino, concert hall and a huge cinema.29 The Polish intellectual Stefan Kisielewski praised these efforts. In the press, he described his experiences during the 1965 season, writing that he saw a country which had “made a leap” and that “it’s impossible to refrain from admiration and appreciation”. What made the biggest impression on him were hotels, “gigantic machines for earning dollars”. As he wrote, a visitor from Poland was “constantly consumed by bitterness and envy”.30 This was intended as a slight to the communist Poland’s regime, which seemed to be neglecting foreign tourism.

Mass tourism: plan and chaos At the time Kisielewski published his praises, the new party leader in Romania was the 47-year-old Nicolae Ceaus¸escu. Expressing rare words of appreciation, Ceaus¸escu commented on the achievements in tourism in summer 1966: “Judging from what the comrades say here, it’s better than it could be. One should probably congratulate them on the work method.” By and large, the leader’s style was strict. He wanted to know everything and, after forming his opinion, he pointed to shortcomings and mistakes. He accepted no hesitation, which make him look like a man of action, but, in fact, he was swayed by momentary impressions and observations from overseas trips. This contributed to a gradual change in the opinions about the littoral. In any case, by the mid-1960s, the impressions of regular visitors to the Romanian littoral had changed. A French

26 27 28 29 30

Oficiului Nat¸ional de Turism al RS România cu privire la vizita în Republica Federala˘ a Germaniei în perioada 2–10 ianuarie a.c., 30 January 1970. Cloutier 1971, p. 36. ANR, CC PCR, Cancelarie 150/1966, f. 13: Propuneri privind noua˘ organizare a turismului în Republica Socialista˘ România [1966]. ANR, CC PCR, Sect¸ia Economica˘ 31/1966, f. 20: Propuneri privind dezvoltarea turismului în perioada˘ 1966–1970 [1966]. ANR, CC PCR, Cancelarie 109/1967, ff. 228–236: Expunere de motive, ONT, no date. Kisiel 1965, p. 6.

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journalist wrote that Mamaia was losing its spontaneity.31 A solid bureaucratic and professional base emerged that supervised the littoral and drew profits from it. The appetites of the power apparatus grew, but so did feelings of dissatisfaction. The leaders concluded that the prices on the coast were too low, meaning the amount of money taken from visitors. The topic would continually arise, especially when in the late 1960s the economy entered a state of imbalance caused by a growing foreign currency debt. It seemed it would be possible to attract ever growing streams of tourists and hence the pressure on increasing investment and the well-being of guests who should be pampered, because otherwise they would choose neighbouring Bulgaria, for example. Thus the veterans of the “revolutionary struggle” and Stalinists Miron Constantinescu and Leonte Ra˘utu debated about shortages of towels and bed linen in hotels.32 Unlike ordinary citizens, party leaders travelled frequently. In the 1960s, they spent their holidays not only in the Crimea, but also in countries around the world. Ceaus¸escu regarded his opinions as authoritative: following Morocco’s example, artists needed to make attractive souvenirs to be sold from stands in the littoral; simple architectural forms, like those in Morocco, were best; a culinary school should be created like in India; and the dollar exchange rate for tourists should be changed, because it made the various tourist sites too cheap. In America, third-rate hotels were more expensive.33 Irrespective of emotions, Ceaus¸escu was driven by a pragmatism that defined his first few years in power. This characteristic predominates in minutes of meetings of the party leadership, which assumed the role of a supervisory board of the state – the “enterprise”. Without the leaders’ permission, no tourist could set foot on the sands of Mamaia. However, the state, despite being centralised, did not have full control over the various actors bringing their own content into the roles assigned to them. Among them was, above all, the Oficiul Nat¸ional de Turism. A Canadian journalist described the ONT in the late 1960s as a powerful institution whose bosses moved around in black Mercedes, with the Romanians describing it as a capitalist firm.34 When the office was opened in 1955, “Carpathians” was added to the historical name: ONT-Carpat¸i. Its founding testified to the authorities’ renewed interest in tourism, who understood it as something more than organised workers’ holidays. Within a few years ONT-Carpat¸i became a pillar of the new policy, the fruits of 31 Degeorges 1966, p. 194. 32 ANR, CC PCR, Cancelarie 65/1971, ff. 49–51: Stenograma s¸edint¸ei Secretariatului CC al PCR din ziua de 25 mai 1971; Cancelarie 113/1965/I, f. 16: Stenograma s¸edint¸ei Comitetului Executiv al CC al PCR din ziua de 6 august 1965. 33 ANR, CC PCR, Sect¸ia Economica˘ 70/1970, ff. 27–34: Stenograma s¸edint¸ei de lucru cu colectivul de conducere al Oficiului Nat¸ional de Turism, 22 December 1970. 34 Cloutier 1971, p. 28.

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which included Mamaia, and began to establish contacts with Western Europe. In 1963, it applied to the French government for permission to open a Parisian office in a prestigious area near Place Vendôme. At that time, the Romanian nomenklatura developed an appetite for travel, which, however, did not mean a more general liberalisation of it. The Parisian Ministry of Foreign Affairs pointed to the one-sidedness of the relation: Romanians did not travel to France and political benefits from tourism were enjoyed only by Bucharest. The Ministry also expressed fears that French tourists holidaying at closed resorts would form a distorted opinion about the country they were visiting.35 In the second half of the 1960s, the ONT was reformed. “Carpathians” was removed from its name, a logical choice in view of the fact that interest was focused on the coast, which, in 1971, claimed over a half of all hotel beds in the country. The ONT became a separate government agency, managing extensive facilities.36 The management system was highly centralised, which facilitated spectacular actions but at the same time deprived the lower levels of any autonomy, causing people to shy away from responsibility and grey area to spread. “Bureaucratism” grew. If a tourist wanted to borrow a deckchair, he or she had to fill in a form. On the other hand, webs of informal relations emerged. There were reports of hotel managers entrusting various functions to individuals, who, in turn, would bring in their relatives. The latter would then spend long holidays in the resorts instead of working there.37 Another effect of the ONT’s strength was that it could effectively pursue its own policy. In the late 1960s, its management had visions of economic liberalisation; it felt free to negotiate with Western companies and to promote investment in the littoral. At the same time, there was increased pressure associated with envy of lucrative trips and contracts. That much can be concluded from a session of dirty linen washing, into which turned a meeting of the ONT and party leadership in December 1970. Ceaus¸escu, who was listening to the row, dismissed the ONT management in a sign of hard domination of the party leadership.38

35 AD, Europe 1944–70, Roumanie 208, no pagination: [Note], 15 August 1963. 36 ANR, CC PCR, Cancelarie 150/1966, ff. 18–19: Propuneri privind noua˘ organizare a turismului în Republica Socialista˘ România [1966]; Sect¸ia Economica˘ 9/1972, f. 19: Raport cuprinzînd analiza˘ s¸i propunerile comisiei guvernemantale privind îmbuna˘ta˘¸tirea structurii investit¸iilor pe litoralul Ma˘rii Negre…, 28 iulie 1972. 37 ANR, CC PCR, Sect¸ia Economica˘ 45/1967, f. 28: Nota privind activitatea desfa˘s¸urata˘ de ca˘tre unita˘¸tile teritoriale ale Oficiului Nat¸ional de Turism, 14 November 1967; Cancelarie 65/1971, f. 54: Stenograma s¸edint¸ei Secretariatului CC al PCR din ziua de 25 mai 1971; Sect¸ia Economica˘ 9/1972, ff. 58–59: Informare privind concluziile controlului asupra rentabilita˘¸tii unita˘¸tilor de alimentat¸ie publica˘ din subordinerea Ministerului Turismului, 11 December 1972. 38 ANR, CC PCR, Sect¸ia Economica˘ 70/1970, ff. 5–29: Stenograma s¸edint¸ei de lucru cu colectivul de conducere al Oficiului Nat¸ional de Turism, 22–23 December 1970.

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Installing a pump sucking hard currency out of foreign visitors, the party leadership acted pragmatically. Usually, there was no trace of “ideology” at ONT meetings. However, the operation of the pump gave rise to phenomena which sometimes had an “ideological” dimension. The influx of visitors from the West needed to be reconciled with the tourists coming from the East, who did not pay in hard currency, and with organising workers’ holidays. The relations between the trade unions and the ONT became more complicated. There emerged voices within the party that the ONT was pushing through in the littoral, reducing space for “internal” tourists. Pools of places for trade unionists were diminished, when groups from the West appeared.39 A representative of trade unions, Constantin Dra˘gan, stated that workers were being relegated lower and lower in the hierarchy. He admitted that profitability was important in international tourism, but that “the political and social objective our state sets for itself, sending workers to holiday and health resorts” also needed to be taken into account. He criticised the ONT for supporting internal car tourism, which was of interest only to society’s elite, i. e. engineers or artists.40 Negotiations between the trade unions and the ONT, and between Romania and “fraternal” countries, whose tourists became less attractive, were not done openly. While trade unions could plan at least the number of “tickets” to be distributed, and the ONT could plan how to accommodate foreign tourists and “push through” on the coast, many other phenomena did not lend themselves to planning and were negotiated outside the institution. The influx of tourists depended on the global situation, random incidents and weather – things over which the Romanian government had no influence. At a meeting in the summer of 1966 the leadership complained about meteorologists, who had forecasted bad weather.41 In the spring of 1971, more serious problems were associated with floods across the country. The Western media “exaggerated them” and as a result the number of tourists diminished. Another adverse effect was linked to an outbreak of cholera in the Middle East. Despite official denials, the foreign press reported that cases had been recorded in Romania as well.42 Bucharest was powerless: its censorship could not extend beyond the country’s borders. At the same time, its international advertising was part of a free competition system, 39 S¸tefan 2013, p. 594; ANR, CC PCR, Sect¸ia Economica˘ 45/1967, ff. 8–10: Note, 31 May 1967; Cancelarie 96/1966, ff. 43–45: Stenograma s¸edint¸ei Comitetului Executiv al CC al PCR din ziua de 13 iulie 1966; f. 70: Informare asupra modului cum sînt folosite capacita˘¸tile de cazare puse la dispozit¸ia ONT în stat¸iunile balneo-climaterice, în anul 1966, 12 July 1966. 40 ANR, CC PCR, Cancelarie 113/1965/I, f. 15: Stenograma s¸edint¸ei Comitetului Executiv al CC al PCR din ziua de 6 august 1965. 41 ANR, CC PCR, Cancelarie 96/1966, ff. 43, 44: Stenograma s¸edint¸ei Comitetului Executiv al CC al PCR din ziua de 13 iulie 1966. 42 ANR, CC PCR, Sect¸ia Economica˘ 17/1970, ff. 41–45: Nota cu privire la preliminarea realiza˘rii planului de încasa˘ri valutare al ONT pe anul 1970, 7 September 1970.

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which involved unpleasant expenses having to be made in hard currency. The authorities could nothing about the salmonella outbreak either. After a mass poisoning, the plan in 1971 to encourage Swedish tourism collapsed. Ceaus¸escu demanded action, but the Minister of Health claimed that the salmonella could not be eliminated.43 Finally, there was limited control over the myriad of individual tourists. In May 1971, during a meeting of the Central Committee Secretariat, opinions were expressed that the country was not prepared for free tourism and that it was difficult to find room in canteens and washing facilities as well as on the beaches in high season. “In Na˘vodari there were even scuffles between Romanians and foreigners on the beach”.44 This is how interests were “negotiated” on the lower level. For many people, having room for manoeuvre was the most important experience of the littoral. While Mangalia or Eforie-Nord seemed to reflect international trends, Romanians from big cities viewed some villages without infrastructure as a substitute of nineteenth-century bourgeois resorts, where the elite confirmed their existence. The designer of the new Mamaia, Cezar La˘za˘rescu, apparently liked to holiday in the nearby village of Mamaia-Sat: beloved by the Bucharest elites, it did not have a bus connection, but nevertheless a shop and an inn as well as regular hosts, who knew their annual guests.45 It was communist Romania’s Dieppe: with high society but without capital. Romania’s equivalent to Biarritz was a village bearing the intriguing name of 2 Mai. It is worth referring again to Dinu Ghika, a figure emblematic of the evolution of Romania and its littoral. In the 1960s Ghika no longer had looked for employment in factories, but was a lawyer, with family and a Fiat 805, which enabled him to reach the sea in four hours. He began to visit the village of 2 Mai with his family in 1961. Every year there were more and more holidaymakers renting private lodgings and acquiring regular hosts. They made dinners together and sometimes even held dances in formal evening attire.46 Private lodgings were used both by “internal” tourists and those from the East. The ambience was completely different from the atmosphere in resorts, and not only because of toilets in backyards, but, above all, because people felt “at home” there. It was also a village where nudists created a room for manoeuvre of their own.47

43 ANR, CC PCR, Cancelarie 65/1971, ff. 49–51: Stenograma s¸edint¸ei Secretariatului CC al PCR din ziua de 25 mai 1971. 44 ANR, CC PCR, Cancelarie 65/1971, f. 53: Stenograma s¸edint¸ei Secretariatului CC al PCR din ziua de 25 mai 1971. 45 Smigelschi 2013, pp. 81–83. 46 Ghika 2017, pp. 179–182. 47 LXXX. Ma˘rturii orale 2003, pp. 211–213.

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The littoral 1968–1971: police and ludic In August 1968, Ceaus¸escu condemned the Warsaw Pact troops’ invasion of Czechoslovakia. This was the apogee of Romanian emancipation.48 Towards the end of the season, a feeling of anxiety came over the tourists holidaying in the littoral. Twenty years earlier, rumours spread that Americans had landed near Constant¸a to liberate the country from communism. In 1968, rumour had it that a Soviet landing was being prepared to curtail Ceaus¸escu’s policy. A Romanian man told a Canadian journalist on the beach in Mamaia, however, that a Soviet intervention in his country was impossible, because the Romanians, unlike the Czechs, would take up arms. According to the journalist, it was easy to establish contact with Romanians on the beach. The young man, moreover, had no qualms about criticising the omnipresent propaganda and about dreaming about Yugoslavia-style freedoms. The journalist arranged to meet the young man the following day, but he did not turn up. He may have decided that he had said too much.49 Communicating with foreigners was an opportunity to air one’s grudges and, at the same time, to feel more important, an attitude expressed in the national myth expressed by the Romanian sunbather. The beach was a place of observation and encounter, which, in turn, gave rise to commercial and erotic contacts. Such connections were described in personal notes, police reports and even Romanian mass media. These sources reveal characteristic tendencies, including: 1) an increasing awareness of the immense contrast between tourists paying in hard currency and Romanians, and 2) greater interaction between some locals and the visitors, despite obvious police surveillance. Moreover, a considerable number of tourists from the East brought with them goods, like cosmetics, that they sold right on the beach. Romanian traders, on the other hand, sold sunglasses, underwear or fountain pens to tourists – a practice known as bis¸nit¸a˘, which could be translated as “business”. The press wrote about trade in watches, jewellery, razor blades or photographic materials. There were references to girls who befriended foreigners and received gifts. Another stigmatised group was young men showing off in resorts by driving cars borrowed from their parents.50 In a word, the growth of the room for manoeuvre caused some concern, although nothing suggested yet that the government intended to curtail it. In spring 1970, The Times reported that unlike in most countries of communist Eastern Europe, formalities at the Romania border were virtually nonexistent. At the border crossing, a courteous Romanian official would only ask 48 Brzostek 2009. 49 Cloutier 1971, p. 42. 50 Numerous press notes, including those published in Informat¸ia Bucures¸tiului in 1968.

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about the length of stay and stamp a visa in the passport for an approximate number of days.51 The main roads used by tourists were quite well asphalted; they featured rare, but modern petrol stations and bars serving Coca-Cola, produced from 1967 in Constant¸a. These efforts were directly linked to the intensity of tourist traffic, which would not have made a big impression in Yugoslavia, but was nevertheless a striking phenomenon in Romania. In 1968, 160,000 vehicles belonging to foreign tourists entered Romania, ten times more than the number of cars sold that year in the country.52 At this time, the regime yielded to the influences of Western culture. The presence of tourists paying in hard currency prompted the management of the resorts to make them more attractive with live pop music, often performed by Romanian bands in English. From 1967 onwards, a station set up especially for summer holidays, Radio Vacant¸a, broadcast programmes in four languages and played a lot of Western music.53 The young stars of Romanian song, like Doina Badea or Margareta Pâslaru, came to the coast in order to present themselves to an international public. In order to ensure a steady flow of income, the authorities tried to entertain foreigners in ways that went beyond providing them with newspapers from their home countries. A German-language theatre company from Timis,oara was brought in for visitors from West Germany. Sports competitions featuring foreign teams were organised. It was possible to bowl after bowling alley was installed in Mamaia (1967) by the company American Machine and Foundry, which was taking its first steps in the communist bloc.54 As a Swiss journalist reported in the mid-1960s: “One may have great fun on Black Sea beaches, where night bars are in every respect on a par with night clubs from capitalist countries. There is nothing proletarian about the prices in any case.”55 Most Romanian tourists could not hope to take an overseas trip, and yet they were at least able to feast their eyes on attractive cars and clothes. Ioana Pârvulescu recalls that the very smell of foreigners (good soap, sunbathing cream, perfumes) created a magical aura.56 The boundary between the two groups was determined by one magic word: “hard currency”. The best supplied were stores referred to colloquially in Romanian as shops; customers could pay there only in Western currencies. Equivalents of such shops existed in “fraternal” socialist countries (Tuzex in Czechoslovakia, Pekao in Poland, Corecom in Bułgaria). This trend inspired the Romanian authorities, who began to organise its chain in 1964. 51 52 53 54 55 56

McEwen 1970. Beda 1969; Anuarul Statistic 1971, pp. 594–595. Barbu 2003, pp. 300–301. Kane 1968, pp. 197, 206–207. Vaucher 1965. Pârvulescu 2015, p. 273.

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While the “enterprise-state” proved rather effective in the field; however, there emerged contrasts contradicting the alleged advantages of the socialist system, which was supposed to protect citizens against aggressive colonisation by the capitalist economy. “Internal” tourists remembered the humiliation they felt when they could not buy Swiss chocolates for their children.57 In popular culture, one could find the figure of a shop assistant trying to ingratiate herself with an Italian, but also despising a Romanian customer, whose money could not be accepted. Sergiu Nicolaescu vividly expressed this contradiction in his comedy Uncle Marin, the Billionaire.58 The writer Jan Józef Szczepan´ski, as a tourist from the East, had little to say about Mangalia and Mamaia (1972) that was positive. He wrote about a “dollar dolce vita served here particularly shamelessly”, which, furthermore, demonstrated the gap between Western tourists and Romanians, whose complexes in this situation were easily revealed. Szczepan´ski called Mangalia a “socialist pseudo-Riviera”; in “its most luxurious fragments a complex of foreign colonial concessions. The locals are usually crowded together – like us – in peasants’ dwellings with horrible sanitary facilities.”59 Thus inequalities were manifested in the room for manoeuvre and the alleged emancipation (or “decolonisation”) of the country did not eliminate the impression of subordination. Hotels and swimming pools gleaming in the sun created an image of worldly leisure, but Romania did not lose its qualities as a police state. During this period, the tourism industry liked to colonise enclaves in the most authoritarian countries (for example, in North Africa) and most visitors did not seem to care about the fate of the local population, which it viewed only in terms of the services it provided and its folklore charm. Thus if France’s ambassador wrote in 1968 that Romania “did not sell” despite a promotional campaign, it was likely influenced less by the atmosphere of the police state than by organisational and catering shortcomings.60 On the other hand, in the mid-1960s, Degeorges thought that although half of the Romanians in the resorts were busy spying on their compatriots, the Western tourists should still feel at ease.61 Perhaps he failed to notice signs of foreigner surveillance, because the surveillance methods were as sophisticated as the police had described. In any case, Degeorges was profoundly mistaken. The littoral was a sphere in which the Securitate demonstrated its indispensability. In 1967, it concluded that the country’s openness to Western tourists as a result of the “peaceful coexistence” policy made detection of “hostile op57 58 59 60 61

Grigorescu 2008, p. 359. Nicolaescu 1979. Szczepan´ski 2013, pp. 742–743 (15–17 August 1972). AD, Europe 1944–70, Roumanie 208, no pagination: Pons to Paris, 6 August 1968. Degeorges 1966, pp. 194–196.

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erations” very difficult. The previous methods were insufficient, so the police began to train special agents who spoke foreign languages and knew how to deal with foreigners. Typically, they established relations with international visitors in the guise of hotel staff or “ordinary guests”. This required radio communication and additional posts, all without disturbing the tourists. The hotel architecture (inspired by ideas from overseas resorts) made agents’ work difficult, because the buildings had multiple exits. It was therefore impossible to effectively guard all of the foreign guests. Two secret posts were to be set up by every hotel in Mamaia, which would communicate by radio with two cars: one that drove around the resort and one that was stationed along the road leading out of the resort.62 The difficulties in operational work in the littoral zone were discussed in the Securitate’s secret periodical, published from 1968 onwards. As Victor Dra˘goi wrote, in the “not so recent past” spy agencies had had to resort to various illegal methods in order to penetrate the country – and now they were finding many new possibilities. The intelligence agencies of West Germany and the US apparently regarded Mamaia and Varna in Bulgaria as the best strongholds on the Black Sea coast.63 Colonel Victor Burlacu described how agents casted their nets, bribed citizens privy to state secrets or used their pro-Western sentiments. Nationalist German organisations looked for collaborators among citizens of German origin. Reactionary émigrés, especially former legionnaires (members of the inter-war fascist Legion of St. Archangel Michael), came to see their fellow fighters. Emissaries of religious sects tried to disseminate their ideas and their publications.64 All this activity required the Romanian secret services to continuously adapt. Dra˘goi and Burlacu described operations which put an end to the activities of hostile individual and groups in the crowded resorts. The Securitate had various problems here, because (alas!) not everything depended on it. For examples, tapping equipment could not be installed in all hotel rooms and it was not always possible for the subject under surveillance to be put in a bugged room, because the rooms were at the disposal of foreign travel agencies. If, on the other hand, the surveilled person moved around the resort, the agents needed sophisticated devices (for example, microphones in beach umbrellas or deckchairs) as well as methods of surveillance. As Colonel Burlacu writes: “For example, when the individual under surveillance is on the beach, officers in charge of the surveillance must use appropriate camouflage in order to follow him even in the sea.” Burlacu, probably not sure about the intelligence of his readers, decided to

62 Consiliul Nat¸ional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securita˘¸tii (in the following: CNSAS), D 013448: Metode folosite în filajul ceta˘¸tenilor stra˘ini cazat¸i la hotelurile din Bucures¸ti s¸i complexele turistice de pe litoral, 18 December 1967. 63 Dra˘goi 1968, p. 30. 64 Burlacu 1968, p. 53; Burlacu 1971, pp. 22–23.

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explain that the agents should look different, when they were in a restaurant or a night bar.65 In the early 1970s, Romanian cinema goers were entertained by a gang of smugglers on the coast in the comedy Mountain and Seaside Brigade.66 Full of misunderstandings and gags, and featuring the favourite actors of the day, Toma Caragiu and Sebastian Papaiani, the film recalled the movie The Troops of St. Tropez. The Romanian Saint-Tropez was a brand new resort. Called Venus, it boasted crowded beaches and restaurant terraces. Despite the light-hearted tone, the message was clear: evil enters the country through the border in Vama Veche and the beautiful Western cars are used to smuggle drugs. The local accomplices of the gangs are funny rather than dangerous, and the policemen, although occasionally funny as well, are clearly competent. They are also very much in need in the littoral, which was swarming with all kinds of con men. Nevertheless, the comedy did show the charms of summer at the seaside, which the viewers undoubtedly recognised. The public image of the coast underwent a transformation. From the late 1950s, Romanians could buy every year the Almanah Turistic, a thick volume which presented holiday options and featured adverts of state enterprises offering tourist equipment or travel cosmetics. However, until the mid-1960s, the iconography was still dominated by the mountains and rocks as well as a vision of leisure as complementing work. The women’s magazine Femeia reinforced this idea with the concept of eroismul cotidian, everyday heroism, which encompassed work and child rearing. In the summer issues of Femeia, the face of leisure was female workers who allowed themselves a glass of juice on the terrace of a big city café. In addition, leisure was to be active, filled with sports, trips and live performances. Although the fashion section presented beachwear, sunbathing was never shown. It may have been considered too passive or, perhaps, even too erotic. However, around 1968, photographs of attractive bodies on beaches began to appear; they were mostly photographs of girls playing with a ball or posing by the sea. This was again exercise and sport rather than sunbathing, but the change of tone was clear. In any case, the change happened more quickly outside periodicals. An album by the renowned Romanian photographer Heda Löffler, The Sound and Colour of the Coast (1967), features a new and hitherto inadmissible series of images of the littoral. We see no industry (apart from the port in Constant¸a) and no physical labour (with the exception of fishermen). Moreover, there are no construction sites, cranes, means of transport – no images of growth and development characteristic of the propaganda image of the country. The photographer presents a world frozen in time, composed of both old and new 65 Burlacu 1968, p. 57. 66 Dra˘gan 1971.

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elements: ancient houses in Constant¸a, rows of hotels in Mamaia and the shiny exteriors of parked cars. Here, life has come to a standstill, has settled on the sand among umbrellas and deckchairs. What is more, in Löffler’s album we not only see passive, sunbathing bodies, but also naked bodies. The girls playing among the waves have nothing on. We also do not know whether they are even workers.67 This revision of the leisure iconography corresponds to a period of political liberalisation. It was the “early Ceaus¸escu” period, later recalled with nostalgia as a time of openness to the West and its lifestyle models. Consumer appetites were expanding, especially when it came to cars and leisure. During the holiday period, periodicals would show people lying on sandy beaches and Neagu Ra˘dulescu’s cartoons played with the theme of sunbathing, summer romances and nudism.68 The “early Ceaus¸escu” era came to an abrupt end with the “July Theses” (1971). At the height of the tourist season, the regime announced that it had no intention of tolerating the disintegrating influences of Western culture, turning (for reasons that continue to be debated) to a policy of rigorism. Strict rules concerning contacts between Romanian citizens with foreigners were introduced and censorship was tightened. In the following season, the press no longer showed beaches, which were replaced with images of the mountains as well as those of the party leader and his wife. The emerging personal dictatorship combined revolutionary slogans and conservative morals. Leisure again became a complement of work; it was active and required effort, although the depicted climbers and picnickers neither had capes nor muddy boots. Technical cadres were highlighted. For instance, a married couple of engineers “in love with mountaineering” was pictured climbing a (not very steep) mountain, wearing trousers and unisex shirts.69 *** After seeing the Ceaus¸escu convoy near Mangalia in the summer of 1972, Szczepan´ski described his impressions: “A cavalcade of black limousines whizzing past with lights, howling horns and policemen leaning out of the windows, shouting and waving their truncheons. Like a Tartar khan passing through.”70 The leader spent quite a lot of time in his residence in Neptun. This was where he welcomed international politicians and saw his subordinates. The head of the Writers’ Union George Macovescu is said to have taken with him four

67 68 69 70

Löffler 1967. Almanah Turistic 1970, pp. 238–239. Femeia 1972, p. 13. Szczepan´ski 2013, p. 746 (26 August 1972).

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elegant suits to the littoral (for breakfast, lunch, afternoon and evening) in order to be prepared for any sudden summons to the “Neptune palace”.71 Romania was leaving behind the “hope of 1968” and its political system was evolving towards a nationalistic dictatorship of familial-clientelist nature. Foreign tourists in the resorts did not have to realise this change, although the temperature of their relations with Romanians was no longer the same. After the “July Theses”, any significant encounter with a foreigner had to be reported to the police and the atmosphere surrounding these contacts became heavy. One of the results was that the relations between the tourists and the locals were dominated by the black market. This was linked to economic difficulties disguised by the gilding of propaganda. The situation was already serious in the early 1970s, later recalled as a time of milk and honey. The Minister of Tourism Ion Cosma admitted (1971) that it was impossible to ensure fish supply in holiday resorts and that fruit would best be sold in exchange for hard currency. In the logic of the enterprise-state, it paid more to export food and the Ministry of Agriculture was inclined to supply better products to the littoral as exports. Ceaus¸escu objected: How would Romanians be able to buy fruit for their children at the seaside? 72 In the 1972 season, there were about 400,000 Romanian tourists and just as many foreign tourists at the seaside. The latter apparently expressed their admiration for the architecture of the littoral, where Romanian Corbusiers and Niemeyers showed off their skills, as the periodical România Pitoreasca˘ argued.73 Yet, after the end of the season, no less a figure than Ceaus¸escu received a complaint from a German tourist from Hagen (Ruhr), who had spent his holidays in the Jupiter resort. “After these experiences my family and a considerable part of guests at the Scoica Hotel cannot recommend your country as a tourist destination,” he wrote. The German tourist did not get much rest and the food was expensive. The lunch portions were tiny or inedible. Nevertheless, slovenly and slow waiters were quickly replaced, as if by magic, when an inspection from the ONT appeared. The gentlemen from the black Mercedes were provided with excellent services, while other guests on such occasions could order Coca-Cola and beer, usually not available in the evening. When the tourist from Hagen told the organiser of the holidays he was going to lodge a complaint, the organiser asked him not to do it, because the entire personnel would be in big trouble. “I can’t image a socialist state employing Nazi methods,” replied the tourist. However, this response was an expression of his straightforward nature and not perfidy. The letter led to an investigation, which confirmed the charges. A sug71 Zaciu 1993. 72 ANR, CC PCR, Cancelarie 65/1971, f. 56: Stenograma s¸edint¸ei Secretariatului CC al PCR din ziua de 25 mai 1971. 73 Pascu 1972.

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gestion was made to punish all employees and “go through” (prelucrare) the example with the resort staff. The leader gave his approval by writing on the margin of the document: “Agreed, NC”.74 At that time, the number of Western tourists began to stagnate. The international situation was deteriorating, as was Romania’s financial situation. The decrease in hard currency income led to price rises and the introduction of additional fees. In 1972, holidays in Romanian resorts became more expensive than in Bulgarian ones.75 Ceaus¸escu criticised the “cheapness” of tourists coming to Romania. “We don’t need such foreign tourists, it is better to give [what we have] to Romanian workers. Are we doing tourism for charitable societies?!”76 Minister Cosma explained that West German companies demanded swimming pools and a bottle of wine per person, and the most attractive “sixty-dollar” tourists expected air conditioning.77 Yet the maintenance of the littoral became problematic. The existing physical facilities deteriorated – a structural problem of a centrally-managed economy seeking new investments. When hotels were being built in Venus, Jupiter or Saturn, there were not enough funds to keep up the level of service in Mamaia. In any case, the new resorts did not fulfil the hopes the authorities had for them. What was missing was not just decent service, a problem affecting the German tourist from Hagen, but sometimes also running water and electricity because of faulty installations.78 In the second half of the 1970s, Romania, whose contacts with the West had proved disappointing (the country’s debt was increasing, Romanian products did not sell well), began to look for rooms for manoeuvre among Third World countries. This was also reflected in its tourism industry. Hard currency could be earned by sending Romanian specialists to train the staff of hotels and resorts in Pakistan, Morocco, Syria or Ghana. Visiting these countries were chefs, pastry cooks, waiters and receptionists, playing the attractive roles of Second World specialists. For example, a hotel instructor, chef and pastry cook were sent to the Grand Hotel in 74 ANR, CC PCR, Sect¸ia Economica˘ 9/1972, ff. 76–77: Nota în lega˘tura˘ cu reclamat¸ia turistului […] din RFG privind serviciul la restaurantul “Scoica” din stat¸iunea Jupiter, no date; 86–88: [translation from German of a letter to the ONT of 5 August 1972]. 75 ANR, CC PCR, Cancelarie 72/1972, ff. 25–27: Expunere de motive, secret, no date; f. 34: Lista cuprinzînd pret¸urile cu ama˘nuntul la unele produse desfa˘cute prin unita˘¸tile de alimentat¸ie publica˘ de categorie speciala˘ de pe litoralul ¸ta˘rii noastre comparativ cu cele de pe litoralul din Bulgaria; f. 38: Anexul no. 1. 76 ANR, CC PCR, Cancelarie 72/1972, ff. 18–19: Stenograma s¸edint¸ei Comitetului Executiv al CC al PCR din ziua de 20 iunie 1972. 77 ANR, CC PCR, Cancelarie 72/1972, ff. 18–19: Stenograma s¸edint¸ei Comitetului Executiv al CC al PCR din ziua de 20 iunie 1972; 196/1975, f. 39: Stenograma s¸edint¸ei Biroului Permanent al Comitetului Politic Executiv al CC al PCR din ziua de 25 august 1975. 78 ANR, CC PCR, Sect¸ia Economica˘ 9/1972, ff. 19–23: Raport cuprinzînd analiza˘ s¸i propunerile comisiei guvernemantale privind îmbuna˘ta˘¸tirea structurii investit¸iilor pe litoralul Marii Negre…, 28 iulie 1972.

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Khartoum, so that the experts would have an opportunity to learn “the Arab culinary art, given the increased inflow of Arab tourists to our country.”79 At the same time, huge problems with the energy supply prompted the authorities to resort to radical measures, which badly affected tourists from the East. In 1979, about 900,000 Polish and Czechoslovak citizens passed through Romania, mostly on their way to Bulgaria. The latter was associated with the problem of refuelling, which had a negative impact on the Romanian economy.80 At the height of the season, the government suddenly changed the rules for selling petrol to tourists, who were expected to pay for it in currencies the estici did not have. A huge number of people therefore became stranded on Romanian roads, as government committees continued their protracted negotiations. The government of the GDR agreed to an extraordinary export of petrol to Romania as well as export of huge amounts of food to make up for the dent made by the tourists in the Romanian balance sheets.81 The “fraternal” socialist countries were given to understand that the influx of their tourists, in fact, had a negative impact; at the same time, the Romanian government tried hard to preserve the luxurious bubble where the visitors from the West stayed. This further deepened the inequalities between the two groups crowding the seaside beaches. The golden era of the Romanian littoral ended more or less when the propaganda began to persuade the citizens that they were living in a “golden age”. The slogan appeared in the late 1970s and was associated with the cult of Ceaus¸escu. His megalomania and focus on huge investment projects, despite a clear economic crisis, provoked amazement even in the “fraternal” socialist countries. Those travelling to the littoral were able to see the recommenced construction of the Danube-Black Sea Canal, which evoked grim associations with the “obsessive decade”. However, this time there was no labour camp full of political prisoners, and holidaymakers were not chased out from the beach at 7pm. Nonetheless, the border guard patrols did tell tourists to deflate their inflatable boats and mattresses, which they were only allowed to inflate again the next morning82. By this time, Dinu Ghika had settled in France. He took advantage of a legal opportunity to leave his country, where he saw no future. Translated by Anna Kijak 79 ANR, CC PCR, Sect¸ia Economica˘ 102/1979, f. 33: Note, 14 June 1979; ff. 55–56: Trimiterea în Sudan a 3 specialis¸ti români din domeniul turismului, 25 September 1979. 80 ANR, CC PCR, Sect¸ia Economica˘ 102/1979, f. 43: Situat¸ia turis¸tilor sosit¸i în România în perioada 1 iulie-15 august 1979 comparativ cu aceeas¸i perioada a anului precedent, no date. 81 ANR, CC PCR, Sect¸ia Economica˘ 102/1979, ff. 59–61: Nota privind schimburile turistice dintre Republica Socialista˘ România si Republica Democrata˘ Germana s¸i propuneri pentru tratativele pe anul 1980. 82 Pârvulescu 2015, p. 273.

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Archives Archives Diplomatiques, Paris (AD). Arhivele Nat¸ionale ale României (ANR). Consiliul Nat¸ional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securita˘¸tii (CNSAS).

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Markus Krzoska

The Devastation of Villages in the German-Polish Lignite Mining Region of Zittau-Bogatynia between 1980 and 2000. Opportunity or Threat for Local Residents?*

The branch of contemporary historiography which calls itself “research on totalitarianism” has succumbed – often for ideological reasons – to the error of standardization. In order to explore spaces to maneuver in state socialism (and after), it is absolutely necessary, however, not to prematurely commit oneself to supposedly typical behavior patterns that can then be transferred to other fields of research. Simple answers to simple questions, however, cannot be the consequences of an elaborate source-based analysis. It will also have to be shown that while the concentration on state socialism can be helpful, the depth of field increases when we relativize the significance of the caesura of 1989. Villages were abandoned because of lignite mining already before 1945 and even today villages in the Rhineland, Lower Lusatia or in the area of Bogatynia (Reichenau) are threatened by a similar fate. In order to investigate the complexity of the consequences of lignite mining on both sides of the Lusatian Neisse, I would like to concentrate on three villages, two German and one Polish. I want to show that it depended especially on the behavior of some actors how the inhabitants reacted to the dramatic living conditions and the far-reaching plans of the socialist state to destroy their communities. In Deutsch-Ossig, south of Görlitz, almost the whole village was evacuated, and most of the buildings and the whole infrastructure were destroyed. In the end, the mining stopped, but only long after the political changes of 1989. In Olbersdorf, located a few kilometers south of Zittau, only a part of the village was impacted by the mining but there was an intense haggling over the fate of the Protestant church. The strategies of the two Protestant pastors and the resettled population were slightly different. In Polish Wigancice, which was located directly on the border with the Czech Republic and called Weigsdorf before 1945 – not to be mistaken for Böhmisch-Weigsdorf, which is situated on the other side of the border and still exists today as Visˇnˇová u Frýdlantu – the discourse * This paper has been written as part of the DFG-funded project “Rooms for Manoeuvre in State Socialism: Between Adaptation and Experiment” (ROOMS, KR 3510/2-1).

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concerned rather the bad environmental situation and the general wish to resettle soon somewhere else to newly constructed apartments or houses. In the end, the protests were by no means supported by a majority of the population and all of them were ultimately unsuccessful. However, the main focus here is on the protesters’ strategies for exploiting their spaces to maneuver in order to achieve at least limited results. In retrospect, this could be claimed as a success and recalled as a form of resistance. In the GDR, the most far-reaching effects of the state energy policy since the 1970s had become apparent. The two global oil crises resulted in a significant increase in the price of oil and the end of cheap oil supplies from the Soviet Union. The GDR leadership was thus forced to make greater use of domestic lignite, although it was aware that this would have massive geographical, logistical, and also environmental repercussions.1 A strong increase in production and in combustion were inevitable as long as the hopes surrounding nuclear energy could not be realized. In the mid-1980s, lignite covered 85 percent of the country’s energy needs. With regard to the landscape, the decision was taken to excavate further coal deposits, primarily in the Leipzig Basin, Lower and Upper Lusatia. At the same time, this meant dramatic interventions in the lives of the local population. Entire villages had to be resettled and then demolished, the entire infrastructure had to be changed, a large number of new dwellings had to be built and new power stations had to be erected. It is not possible here to go into more detail about the more far-reaching solutions for Zittau’s lignite in the 1980s, including one that provided for the destruction of large parts of the city and another that included the joint German-Polish mining of the so-called “Neisse Pillar. ” We also cannot more fully describe the dire impact of air pollution in a region that, depending on the direction of the wind, was confronted not only with its own pollution, but also with exhaust gases from Czechoslovakia and Poland.2 The Council of Ministers’ resolution of November 6, 1975 not only required the energy industry to become more efficient and economical, but also to prepare “for the preparation for the opening up of replacement opencast mines for phased-out capacities and for the increase in production” of seven new opencast lignite mines.3 This also applied to the existing opencast mines of Olbersdorf and Berzdorf.

1 Huff 2015, pp. 195–197. 2 Since the mid-1980s in particular, parts of the local population have reacted to this, as in Turów in Poland and the Jelenia Góra region, with letters of protest and petitions to various authorities. 3 Bundesarchiv Berlin (in the following: BAB), DC/20-I/3/1284a, Materialien zu den Tagesordnungspunkten: Konzeption zur effektiven Verwendung und zur Einsparung von Energie, Rohstoffen und Material für den Zeitraum 1976–1980, p. 59. – The 9th SED Party Congress of

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In the run-up to the decision, the Minister for Coal and Energy, Klaus Siebold, had already informed the 1st Secretary of the Dresden District leadership of the SED, Hans Modrow, on January 3, 1975 about the plans for the years 1976 to 1980, which included the “Olbersdorf capacity expansion.”4 The basic decision to “plough” the village had already been made. According to a letter the minister sent to the head of the working group for organization and inspection at the President of the Council of Ministers, Harry Möbis, dated August 20, 1975, it had been concluded during the discussion in the inner circle that this was the “best solution from an economic point of view” and that it was therefore possible to begin with the “relocation measures” after 1980.5 The Olbersdorf opencast mine, whose origins go back to the 19th century, employed only a few hundred workers after 1945.6 In 1961, a request was made to extend the mine to two new construction sites, and in 1975 and 1985 the third and fourth sites were opened up.7 The Olbersdorf open-cast mine was central to the energy plans in Upper Lusatia. The Berzdorf coal site due to its geological situation was unable to supply the desired 16 million tons of lignite per year for the neighboring power plants in Hagenwerder and Hirschfelde.8 The situation was complicated by the decision of the SED leadership in 1982, for both economic and political reasons, to immediately stop supplying coal from Turów.9 The basic concept for the development of lignite mining in the Görlitz/Zittau region was formally communicated to the Dresden district in December 1980. The necessary area was to be “cleared” within the next ten years. The decision of the SED leadership was, of course, not openly communicated. Instead, rumors about it first spread in the village when the first surveyors appeared. Two issues in particular quickly attracted the residents’ attention: the question of possible resettlement in connection with plans for replacement housing and the fate of the Lutheran church and cemetery. Soon, it became apparent that those affected employed a similar strategy in each case. In practice, however, fierce disputes took place in which the role of the respective actors was

4 5 6 7 8 9

1976 made plans to increase production capacity an economic priority. But even four years later, party leader Honecker still had to refer in a speech to future additional efforts in this area. BAB DC-20-22687-143. BAB DC-20-22687-141. Kitta / Kulessa / Männig 1999, p. 7. Walter 2001. Kitta / Kulessa / Männig 1999 p. 8. BAB DY-30/J IV-2/2/1954-1955: Protokoll Nr. 25/82 der Sitzung des Politbüros am 22. Juni 1982, TOP 6, resp. BAB DC-20-I/4/4987: 48. Sitzung des Präsidiums des Ministerrats vom 8. Juli 1982, vol. 3, about the “Umstellung der Bekohlung des Kraftwerks Hirschfelde zur Ablösung von Importen aus der VR Polen auf Rohkohlelieferungen aus eigenen Tagebauen […]”.

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not always clear.10 The renovation of the hundred-year-old Olbersdorf church was not completed until 1974. Yet, after the first rumors emerged about the opencast mine expansion, the parishioners quickly realized that it was not going to be saved. At the residents’ meetings starting in 1976, reference was made to “negotiations with the church.” However, at that time no one knew about these talks at the local level, even though the Zittau District Church Office had been involved in the planning since December 1975.11 Initially, these issues also played no role in the meetings of the municipal council. In 1979, it was concisely reported here that representatives of the State Church Office, the Department for Church Affairs of the Dresden District Council, the District Planning Commission and the Church Board had agreed “on a new location for the construction of a multipurpose facility as a community center.”12 Three years later, the new cemetery and the beginning of the exhumations at the old one were reported on.13 The negotiations over the cemetery, in fact, served as a first test for the interaction of the involved actors. As the church did not want to completely surrender its only means of pressure, it only partially complied with the request to hand over the cemetery documentation needed for the reburial. It was only after the mining company got involved in the talks that a first compromise was reached on a replacement plot.14 Based on the experiences in the Leipzig and Lower Lusatia region, those responsible for the construction of the regional church were quite resigned. Their main concern was to avoid any further conflicts. It was also important to avoid an open disagreement with the state authorities, as occurred

10 In addition to the individually cited files, the following passages are based on an interview of the author with former Superintendent Wolfgang Müller (b. 1946 in Weißenberg), who had been a pastor in Olbersdorf since 1972. The interview was recorded in Gaussig on August 6, 2018. 11 See Kreisarchiv Zittau ((in the following: KAZ), Rat des Kreises Zittau, Kreisplankommission (in the following: KPK), no. 4359: Verlegung des Friedhofs in Olbersdorf – Kohleersatzbau, 1979–1984: Letter from the Sector Head of State Policy on Church Issues at the Dresden District Council, Gerhard Lewerenz, to Works Director Reiner Dähnert, VEB Braunkohlenwerk Oberlausitz Hagenwerder, dated 26. 03. 1979. Cf. ibid., letter of the Ev.-Luth. Bezirkskirchenamt Zittau (Superintendent Wolfgang Stempel/Kirchenamtsrat Lenk) to the Council of the Zittau District, Department of the Interior, dated 23. 12. 1975. 12 Archiv der Gemeindeverwaltung Olbersdorf (in the following: AGO), VII-1.1.1. Protokolle Gemeindevertretung 1978–1982, reg. no. 598, Protokoll der 5. Sitzung vom 23. 8. 1979, Report from Mayor Böhme, p. 7. 13 AGO, VII-1.1.1. Protokolle Gemeindevertretung 1978–1982, reg. no. 656, Protokoll der 4. Sitzung vom 9. 9. 1982, p. 12. 14 KAZ, Rat des Kreises Zittau, KPK, no. 4359: Verlegung des Friedhofs in Olbersdorf – Kohleersatzbau, 1979–1984: Protokoll der Beratung vom 6. 6. 1979 zum Ersatz der Kirche Olbersdorf in Zusammenhang mit dem Kohleabbau.

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in the Sorbian village of Tzschelln near Weißwasser in the late 1970s.15 The Olbersdorf parish, therefore, needed to tread carefully. On the one hand, they recognized their own leadership role for all the affected families of the village; indeed, later on, there was occasional criticism that the church had yielded too quickly. On the other hand, they were cautious because there was a real danger of a total disruption. The state, however, seemed unlikely to take a harsh stance given the precedent this would set for the region. In the end, a kind of haggling ensued over issues ranging from the amount of compensation to securing individual parts of the church building. While the lignite plant offered a sum of 500,000 marks, the demands of the church were in the range of 1.1 million.16 After several months, new calculations led to an agreement on a total sum of 1.325 million marks.17 After further unresolved questions had been clarified with the help of the State Planning Commission in Berlin, the new community center was completed in the early summer of 1982. The last service was held in the church on January 15, 1984, which was then demolished. The parish and rectory buildings were then also abandoned. The planned excavation of the entire area never came about because of the political transformation in 1989 and the complete shutdown of the Olbersdorf open-cast lignite mine in March 1990.18 In retrospect, however, the parish still regards the initiative as a success, since a larger community center was created that was better suited for holding events. The situation with the apartments was more complicated. As throughout the GDR, housing construction could not keep up with demand. In the case of Olbersdorf, the plan was to replace around 800 apartments and houses lost to the relocation by constructing a new district with between 1,300 and 2,000 residential units in the prefabricated concrete slab style, commonly known later as the “Golan Heights.” This undertaking and the huge infrastructure investments (relocation of roads, streams, power lines, construction of new schools, crèches, shops, etc.), along with the lack of manpower, posed enormous challenges to all the region’s political offices in the mid-1980s.19 Internally, there were consid15 The then unsuccessful active resistance of the local parish has yet to be historically examined. Joachim Nowotny published a literary treatment of the hopelessness of the time as early as 1981 in the novella “Letzter Auftritt der Komparsen”. 16 KAZ, Rat des Kreises Zittau, KPK, no. 4359: Verlegung des Friedhofs in Olbersdorf – Kohleersatzbau, 1979–1984: Aktenvermerk der KPK, Steinhage, dated 17. 12. 1979. 17 KAZ, Rat des Kreises Zittau, KPK, no. 4359: Verlegung des Friedhofs in Olbersdorf – Kohleersatzbau, 1979–1984: Niederschrift einer Beratung zu den erforderlichen Ersatzbauten für die Kirchengemeinde Olbersdorf, dated 22. 04. 1980. 18 KAZ, Rat des Kreises Zittau, Sekretär des Rates, Abgeordnetenkabinett, no. 4631: Sitzungsunterlagen des Kreistags Zittau, January to March 1990. 19 KAZ, no. 1579: Rat des Kreises Zittau, KPK, Schriftverkehr, 1985/1986: Ausführungen des Vorsitzenden der Kreisplankommission in Auswertung der Tagebauberatung vor Werkleitern des Kreises Zittau, dated 09. 04. 1985.

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erable doubts about the overall project’s feasibility. As early as 1981, a representative of the district planning commission responsible for housing policy complained that the plans for the coming years could not be implemented by the city of Zittau. After all, there were not only over 1,000 housing applications in the city, but given the state of the deteriorating old town, a halt to further construction seemed likely.20 Since November 1984, all the region’s political and economic leaders met regularly in the “Partial relocation of Olbersdorf” working group to improve coordination.21 The discussions with the affected citizens posed an additional problem. Residents’ meetings and individual appointments were arranged in accordance with the legal guidelines and those which had already been in place for some time in other parts of the GDR. As for the appointments, selected citizens of the community were to pay home visits together with representatives of the Hagenwerder lignite works. Handouts were prepared for this purpose. Of course, this procedure had nothing to do with citizen participation in democratic systems. Instead, decisions were being passed on from above in an authoritative manner to those below. After pointing out that “the intensification of the international class struggle” necessitated a change in energy policy, the citizens were informed that the state was addressing the “ever-better fulfilment of all our wishes.” Specifically, the use of the “new WBS 70 type housing from the Bautzen panel factory” was announced in order to create a kind of material incentive for the people to be resettled; in individual cases, it was even possible to build a house and the statutory financial compensation would be paid out quickly.22 It is doubtful whether those concerned found these announcements to be sufficiently credible. In fact, it soon became apparent that delays of up to two years would occur for various reasons (shortage of labor, supply bottlenecks for equipment, geological problems).23 In any event, allusions to the possibility of acquiring land for house construction or selling existing houses proved to be unrealistic. There were virtually no areas or structures available locally for this purpose.24 It is also hard to blame the people to be resettled for using every means at their disposal, both legally and in negotiations, to achieve the best possible outcomes in terms of compensation payments, replacement housing or other benefits. There was a 20 KAZ, no. 1576, Rat des Kreises Zittau, KPK, Schriftverkehr Tagebau Olbersdorf, Entwicklung, 1979–1985: Schreiben des Stellvertretenden Vorsitzenden für Wohnungspolitik an den Vorsitzenden der KPK, 4. 6. 1981. 21 KAZ, no. 1582: Rat des Kreises Zittau, KPK, Schriftverkehr Bergbau, 1984–1988. 22 KAZ, no. 1579, Information zur weiteren Entwicklung des Braunkohletagebaus Olbersdorf of 24. 04. 1985, pp. 1–12 – Strictly speaking, this is a variant of the most popular type of prefabricated concrete slab construction in the GDR, which was first used in 1973. 23 KAZ no. 1579, Einwohnerinformation (undated, probably early 1986), pp. 1–9. 24 KAZ no. 1582, Stellungnahme der KPK Zittau (June 1986).

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certain amount of room for manoeuvre, especially in cases where the mining company had committed to making payments. Here, for instance, some latitude existed in the determination of fair value or the assumption of relocation costs.25 However, there is evidence that the offers made by the state were far from sufficient. State security informants thus reported that 125 Olbersdorf families who were to be resettled in the period up to 1993 wanted these actions to be brought forward during the first half of 1988 “due to the annually deteriorating structural condition of the residential properties and because the value preservation measures had not been carried out in this area since 1975.”26 Moreover, the work of the “leading state functionaries of the municipality” in dealing with the citizens was described as “often lacking any clarity.”27 For their part, however, the attacked officials declared that the governing bodies were acting irresponsibly toward a village with 10,000 inhabitants.28 Objections from affected companies demanding an exact date for replacement services also followed quickly. The number of petitions to various bodies also increased. Between 1983 and 1987, the district planning commission received 17 petitions regarding open-cast coal mining, mainly for replacement housing.29 It is difficult to obtain an overview, however, since citizens could appeal to any government agency. It became problematic for the local party organs in those cases in which the highest authorities of the GDR were contacted, whose representatives were already suspicious of what was going on in the Dresden district and had appointed a special commission to investigate grievances there.30 At any rate, the public’s overall mood in the region deteriorated, as could also be seen from the numerous submissions on environmental protection issues. Above all, for many citizens the resettlement up until the end of the GDR did not go fast enough. And when it was carried out – often under time pressure – there were frequent complaints about the lack of infrastructure.31 The main problem, however, was the heavy workload of the construction companies involved, the 25 KAZ no. 1576, Rat des Kreises Zittau, KPK, Schriftverkehr Tagebau Olbersdorf, Entwicklung, 1979–1985: Argumentationsmaterial zur Bevölkerungsinformation zur Erweiterung des Braunkohletagebaus Olbersdorf,, Rededisposition (undated), pp. 6–7. 26 BStU, Archiv der Außenstelle Dresden, MfS BV Dresden, KD Zittau, no. 7148, Information über Reaktionen von Teilen der Bevölkerung der Kreise Görlitz, Zittau und Niesky zu Maßnahmen der weiteren Entwicklung und Produktion des Kohletagebaues des VEB Braunkohlenkombinat Senftenberg in den genannten Territorien from 06. 09. 1988, p. 4. 27 Ibid., Information über Reaktion der Bevölkerung from 15. 04. 1988, p. 3. 28 Ibid., Informationen Reaktion der Bevölkerung from 17. 03. 1987, p. 3. 29 KAZ, no. 1624, Rat des Kreises Zittau, KPK, Schriftverkehr Teilortverlagerung Olbersdorf, composite from 19. 04. 1988. 30 See, for example, Modrow 1998, pp. 244–250. 31 BStU, Archiv der Außenstelle Dresden, MfS BV Dresden, KD Zittau, no. 7184, letter of the Büro für Bürgerberatung beim Rat des Kreises Zittau (S. Heinrich) to the SED-Kreisleitung Zittau, Abt. Wirtschaftspolitik,, dated 19. 01. 1989.

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lack of manpower and the insufficient supply of building materials for housing construction – deficits that were typical for the entire GDR in the 1980s. Not only was there a lack of housing for additional workers, but there was also a negative attitude towards additional foreign workers in the region.32 Overall, then, Olbersdorf can be regarded as an example of a drastically delayed planned economy and communicative strategy rather than as a model of a struggle to preserve one’s village and living conditions. Indeed, even the massive conflict over the preservation of the narrow-gauge railway to the Zittau Mountains was resolved with economic rather than ecological arguments.33 In Deutsch-Ossig, located about 30 km north of Olbersdorf and the adjacent open-cast mine of Berzdorf, there were a number of similarities, but also serious differences. In this case, not only was an entire village to disappear from the face of the earth, but there were also pastor-led circles who did not want to resign themselves to it. Moreover, there were other social elements who were not convinced by, or were dissatisfied with, the actions of the state authorities. The measures adopted by the Politburo in 1978 to improve the energy system, and thus to mine all deposits, had become known two years later in the area surrounding the Berzdorf open-cast mine. The Reichenbach superintendency was notified by the council of the district of Görlitz that the cemetery had to be moved from Deutsch-Ossig.34 Nonetheless, concrete action was not taken until 1986, when the Council of Ministers of the GDR also decided to effectively abandon the village. In the language of the brown coal combine, which forwarded this information to the consistory of the Protestant Church of the Görlitz church area: “No economically acceptable solution could be found for the stable design of the embankments while maintaining the Deutsch-Ossig location. […] These results were confirmed by an expert commission of the Ministry of Coal and Energy on 04. 23. 1986 and it was recommended that the location be cleared when the open-cast mine is moved alongside it.”35 The implementation was supposed to be completed by 1990, but it did not finally begin until September 1988, and the parish ceased to exist by the end of August 1989. The demise of the GDR had little effect on the rest of the project. In July 1990, 150 people were still living in the partially destroyed village.36 In 1992, a family continued to hold out in the ruins of

32 Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv Potsdam (BLP), Rep. 901 Lausitzer Braunkohlenwerke, Inv. 3378, Entwurf für die Gemeinsame Intensivierungskonzeption des VEB BKKW Oberlausitz und des VEB Kraftwerks Völkerfreundschaft für das Jahr 1990 und für den Fünfjahrplanzeitraum 1990–1995 vom 30. 06. 1989 (Dähnert/Franzke), p. 38. 33 Krzoska 2018, pp. 921–938. 34 Liebig / Richter / Lüttig 2016, p. 77. 35 Quoted from Rogge 1998, pp. 50–51. 36 Liebig / Lüttig 1990, without pagination.

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Deutsch-Ossig.37 The business interest in continuing Berzdorf ’s mining activities up until 1998 was still strong, leaving only a few houses in Deutsch-Ossig until the recultivation of the landscape began with the formation of a lake. Central to the events in Deutsch-Ossig was the figure of its charismatic pastor: Dieter Liebig. Born in 1951, he grew up in Lower Lusatia and was confronted from an early age with the curse and blessings of lignite mining and power generation. In the vicinity of the Boxberg power plant, entire villages were abandoned early on. At the same time, however, many people there found employment in the energy sector.38 From December 1980 to 1989, Liebig was the pastor of DeutschOssig and during this time he fought against the village’s destruction. He would go on to write several books, including novels, about these years and those that followed.39 The church became a symbol of protest – a “place of truth,” on the one hand, and an emblem of survival through salvation, on the other. Liebig decided from the beginning to publicly air from the pulpit all confidential information that had come to his ears, which sometimes led to conflicts with the church superiors. Nevertheless, it was also clear that the fundamental decision to demolish the site could not be successfully challenged. Thus, he saw his role above all in giving emotional support to the congregation and saving the church building, which is also important for art-historical reasons. Unlike his colleague in Olbersdorf, Liebig shined a spotlight on any losses and tied them to the lack of a reaction from the surrounding area (“the silence”). In this context, he mentioned in hindsight the study of the Federation of Protestant Churches in the GDR on the SED’s energy and environmental policy, which was written in December 1988 but still virtually unknown. In addition to the loss of homeland and property, the report emphasized the future restriction of living space, the heavy financial burden despite interest-free loans and the loss of the village community.40 Liebig understood pastoral care as grief counseling. He was all the more saddened about the limits of his power, even when it came to offering emotional support. This was especially the case when he spoke of the suicides that took place in the context of the resettlement and the deportations of the elderly to nursing homes, but also the of the exhumations at the cemetery.41 In the end, the fate of the historically significant church was resolved by means of extensive negotiations and a compromise. A number of solutions had been considered, including the preservation of the church and its relocation on rails 37 Schmidt-Klingenberg 1992, pp. 162–165. 38 In the following, I refer to my interview with Dieter Liebig in Kaaden an der Eger/ Kadanˇ on 15. 6. 2018 (private archive of the author). 39 Liebig 2015. 40 Pflugbeil / Listing 1988, p. 41. 41 Dieter Liebig, Anspruch und Wirklichkeit. Die Energie- und Umweltpolitik in der DDR am Beispiel des Energieträgers Braunkohle, Großhennersdorf no date [2009], p. 31–32.

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according to the model of Brüx (Most District). In October 1986, state security officials said that the expert appraisal of Ernst-Heinz Lemper, director of the Görlitz state art collection, had also been submitted. It was determined that moving the church by 300 meters would be possible, albeit costly. The parish allegedly also proposed the sale of the church to “non-socialist foreign countries,” from where there had allegedly been such offers.42 The relocation to the nearby Görlitz-Weinhübel had already fallen through earlier because of the lack of interest of the higher church authorities.43 In keeping with the usual procedure in such cases, the Senftenberg mining company had initially proposed the salvage of the most valuable parts of the centuries-old baroque church, while agreeing to bear the costs. The church itself was to be demolished.44 Eventually, the council of the district of Dresden approved the application of the consistory for the transfer of the village church to Görlitz-Königshufen on March 3, 1987.45 The VEB Braunkohlenkombinat Senftenberg assumed the expense from the funds of the main coal replacement measures schedule (Hauptfristenplan Kohleersatzmaßnahmen). The old church was designed on Whit Sunday, 1988; the transfer and the new construction began with the laying of the foundation stone in Königshofen on March 8, 1992.46 The church ruin itself was razed in 1993, on Liebig’s birthday, although it was completely unnecessary.47 This undoubtedly was due in part to the fact that after the end of the GDR the two sides had become deeply entrenched: on the one hand, some inhabitants of Deutsch-Ossig supported by Dieter Liebig (now district administrator of the district of Görlitz) and, on the other, the (since privatized) Lausitzer Braunkohle AG (LAUBAG).48

42 BStU, Archiv der Außenstelle Dresden, MfS BV Dresden, AKG PI Nr. 266/86, Informationen über die Reaktionen der Bevölkerung der Gemeinde Deutsch-Ossig/Kreis Görlitz und Aktivitäten der Evangelischen Kirche des Görlitzer Kirchengebietes… of 27. 10. 1986, pp. 3–4. 43 Interview with Dieter Liebig (note 38), minute 43:15. 44 Interview with Dieter Liebig (note 38), minute 41:40. 45 BStU, Archiv der Außenstelle Dresden, MfS BV Dresden, AKG PI 104/87, Informationen über kirchliche Aktivitäten im Zusammenhang des Wiederaufbaus der Kirche von Deutsch-Ossig in Görlitz-Königshufen, Schreiben des Leiters der Kreisdienststelle Görlitz, Major Naumann, an den Leiter der Bezirksverwaltung für Staatssicherheit Dresden, Generalmajor Böhm,, from 20. 07. 1987 under a verbatim reproduction of the letter of approval of the Chairman of the Dresden District Council, Günther Witteck, to Bishop Joachim Rogge of 15. 07. 1987, pp. 3–4. 46 Rogge 1998, pp. 53–55. 47 Dieter Liebig; Matthias Lüttig, Etwas bleibt immer übrig. German Ossig Report II 1990–2005, Dresden 2006. 48 Bergarchiv Freiberg (in the following: BAF), 40192 VEB Braunkohlenwerk Oberlausitz 1947– 991, no. 479: Schriftverkehr Wohnungsbau 1990–1991, (Hübner), Niederschrift über Beratungen im Landratsamt unter Leitung des Landrates, Herrn Liebig, on 23. 04. 1991, p. 4.

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In hindsight, however, pastor Liebig’s grief over the losses predominated. In his own words, he felt “betrayed and disowned [verkauft] by the church.”49 As in Olbersdorf, the unfortunate communication between the various organs of the Protestant Church became apparent here, too, although Liebig did lump together all the participants. Ultimately, the resettlements caused the community to fall apart. Finally, at least the church could be saved because of the negotiating skills of the consistory, the continuing resistance of Liebig and his confidants, and the willingness of the local and regional SED offices to reach a compromise. The priest and his supporters, however, were not the only ones who expressed serious doubts about the implementation of the open-cast mine expansion, although the reasons differed. The state bank of the GDR, represented by the Görlitz branch director, was thus puzzled by the cost-benefit calculations. Due to the declining development in coal mining and the steadily increasing share of overburden, “the most important economic indicators [developed] disproportionately to the basic economic requirements.” It was further suggested that a cost reduction would be possible for instance in the number of new residential units. But, the totality of the data indicated that – from an economic and business management perspective – approval should not actually be granted, for it was also “a matter of guaranteeing security of supply or achieving the production balance sheet figures.”50 In the final analysis, the remarks were more of a general criticism directed at the “treasurer,” which, however, could also be found in other open-cast mining projects such as in Olbersdorf. They never led to delays in taking further action. Another issue was the geological conditions on site and the question of coal quality. In 1988, the four power plant units in Hirschfelde and Hagenwerder supplied about 8 % of the output of the entire GDR. Looking back in 2008, the publication on the history of the power plant issued by the future operator Vattenfall stated succinctly: “The coal quality (calorific value, ash content) often did not correspond to the values projected for steam generation and flue gas dedusting.”51 The result was a gradual destruction of the equipment, on the one hand, and the necessary supply of expensive fuel oil and high environmental pollution for the region, on the other. By the end of the 1980s, it was clear to everyone in charge that massive amounts of coal would have to be brought in from Lower Lusatia until the planned decarburization of Berzdorf around the year 2000 to satisfy the ever-increasing performance requirements for the power 49 Interview with Dieter Liebig (note 38), minute 38:00. 50 BLP, Inv. 888, no. 1293, Investitionsvorhaben im BKW Oberlausitz und VEB Bus Welzow 1981–1989, Stellungnahme der Staatsbank der DDR, Kreisfiliale Görlitz (Böhm, Filialdirektor), zur Dokumentation zur Aufgabenstellung Tagebau Berzdorf, TV 01, Weiterführung Baufeld II, 1987–1990, from 08. 08. 1986, pp. 2, 9, 11. 51 Betriebsgeschichte 2008, p. 96.

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plants.52 This was in addition to the locally available coal, whose ash content had risen from 10 % in 1960 to 27.1 %. Due to delays in the further development of the Olbersdorf mine and in the expansion of transport capacity, the full operation of the power plants seemed to be extremely precarious at the end of the 1980s. In any event, the managers refused to ramp up mining in Berzdorf because of the poor coal quality.53 Despite this, there was apparently still no means or political will to prevent the destruction of a village like Deutsch-Ossig in lieu of a ten-year period of inferior coal mining. Not even the imminent geological hazard which led to massive landslides between 1984 and 1986 had an effect. On the contrary, this danger used as an argument to abandon Deutsch-Ossig. In theory, the matter of replacement housing had been resolved beforehand, including with regard to Deutsch-Ossig. Between 1988 and 1990, some 260 new residential units were to be built at three locations. The actual implementation left a lot to be desired, however, especially at the Kunnersdorf site, where individual homes were built. The 64 RDK 86/4 residential units were to be built by VEB Bau Niesky starting in September 1987 with completion scheduled for 1990.54 Yet there were obstacles early on, partly due to the fact that the work was repeatedly delayed, partly due to the dissatisfaction of the new owners with the construction work. In a survey report of 1988, it was stated: “Citizens noticed defects in materials and workmanship with which they took issue: in the living area, stairs between the ground and upper floors are made of terrazzo, stairs already have gaps and chipped areas. Window ledges are too narrow, thus displaced to the front, and smeared with concrete between window and terrazzo panel. Bedrooms are clearly too small.”55 The companies involved argued in court about the outcomes and the handover dates had to be repeatedly postponed. About six months later it was declared: “In general, there is massive opposition to the type of EH and the level of housing provided.”56 Outside pressure increased significantly as the Deutsch-Ossig community was now on the verge of being bulldozed. During another inspection in January 1989, the district building director explained that a move of the first eight families to the new houses had to be 52 BLP, Rep. 901 Lausitzer Braunkohlenwerke, Inv. 3378, Entwurf für die Gemeinsame Intensivierungskonzeption des VEB BKKW Oberlausitz und des VEB Kraftwerks Völkerfreundschaft für das Jahr 1990 und für den Fünfjahrplanzeitraum 1990–1995 from 30. 06. 1989 (Dähnert/Franzke), pp. 3–4, 7–8. 53 BLP, Rep. 901 Lausitzer Braunkohlenwerke, Inv. 3378, Letter from the General Director of VE BKK Senftenberg, E. Waldmann, to the General Director of the Kombinat BKKW Stammbetrieb, Wilfried Retschke, dated 24. 02. 1988, p. 4. 54 BAF, 481/2 Ersatzwohnungsbau Kunnerwitz bei Görlitz 1987–1990, Festlegungen der Kontrollberatung [with the Dresden District Council] of 10. 3. 1987 […], p. 2. 55 BAF, 481/2 Ersatzwohnungsbau Kunnerwitz bei Görlitz 1987–1990, minutes of the site visit of 20. 06. 1988. 56 Ibid., Protokoll zum Gespräch mit den EH-Bauern für Kunnerwitz 1988 on 29. 08. 1988, p. 2.

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completed before February 28, otherwise “they would be cut off in such a way due to a tracklaying for the pit that a move would no longer possible.”57 The transport was then carried out in chaotic fashion, whereby “furniture trucks were able to use temporary roads.”58 This hardly solved anything, however. Indeed, “special brigades” – specifically, seven 10th grade students – occasionally had to be deployed to help speed up the work.59 The collapse of the GDR did little to change the near catastrophic situation in Deutsch-Ossig, which had still not been completely evacuated, or the situation on the housing construction front. Pastor Liebig, who in the meantime had accepted the post of district administrator, tried to mediate and save the rest of the village. At a residents’ meeting in November 1990, the lignite works in Upper Lusatia was forced to acknowledge that there were still delays in building a house in Kunnerwitz.60 The village of Deutsch-Ossig itself could not be saved in the end. Moreover, the remaining buildings on the edge of the new lake do not give an impression, twenty years on, of its previous vitality as a meeting place. After all was said and done, it remained a question of perspective as to whether the new apartments or the new community center should be considered success stories or if one should rather mourn the loss of a village with its original structure. Similar judgments are weighed in other regions affected by mining devastation, regardless of the respective political system. The situation, though, looked quite different just a few kilometers further east. While the religiosity in Poland was more much deeply rooted with respect to the Catholic church, the latter was virtually absent from the debates on the role of open-cast mining and its industrial consequences. Instead, a kind of civic engagement began to emerge. With the establishment of the state border between Poland and the Soviet occupation zone of Germany at Oder and Lusatian Neisse, the economic unity of the Hirschfelde coal-mining area was abolished. The supply of lignite to the power plant on the German side by the Turów (Türchau) opencast mine on the Polish side was ensured by a first treaty in 1947. Cooperation in this regard continued until the early 1980s. Independently of this, the Polish state and party leadership decided as early as 1955 to build its own power plant. Geological exploration had shown that about 900 million tons of coal could be mined by the end of the 20th century. Today, improved mining techniques suggest that the seams will not be exhausted until 2035. After several delays, a total of ten power plant units were built between 1965 and 1971. The new combine was to cover a 57 58 59 60

Ibid., Minutes of the site visit of 18. 01. 1989, p. 1. Ibid., Minutes of the site visit of 01. 03. 1989, p. 2. Ibid., Minutes of the site visit of 06. 08. 1989. BAF, 479, Schriftverkehr Wohnungsbau 1990–1991, Konzeption für die Einwohnerversammlung am 15. 11. 1990 in Deutsch-Ossig, p. 2.

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significant part of Poland’s annual energy consumption, and the total investment cost was 8.5 billion złoty.61 As the work progressed, the mine’s impact on the environment and people became more apparent. Its constant expansion caused houses, streets, and entire villages to disappear. At the same time, huge, heavily loaded spoil heaps were created. In view of its overall economic importance, the local authorities had hardly any say in the matter. The mine and power plant management decided on the future of the region. Moreover, with their compensation payments and by employing thousands of workers, they were responsible for large parts of the infrastructure. Until the 1970s, Bogatynia was a kind of temporary city. As the state authorities did not want to invest in an area where demolition was expected in the long run, blocks of flats were rather built in Zgorzelec. And even when something like a new urban self-awareness could develop, the situation in the surrounding villages went from bad to worse. The inhabitants there knew that they would have to leave their homes in the next few years or decades. However, there was no clear timetable, and the mine management’s decision-making depended on the economic circumstances. The idea of early resettlement was also viewed critically by parts of the local elite. For example, the early studies which pointed to the impossibility of normal life in the Bogatynia region were considered by many to be unjustified and specifically commissioned by those who advocated the rapid expansion of Zgorzelec.62 I would now like to illustrate with the example of Wigancice the possibilities and limits of civic engagement in the 1980s and 1990s. Almost 2,000 Germanspeaking inhabitants had lived in this forest village (“Waldhufendorf”) before 1945, whereas in the mid-1970s it was about 900 Polish people.63 Many were farmers, but there were also newly built blocks of flats for miners. There were four restaurants, a cigar factory, shops, a pharmacy, and a school. At that time, the decision was made to abandon the village because the spoil heap of the coal mine was getting closer and closer. As early as 1968, individual citizens were told that it was no longer possible to acquire property in Wigancice. However, in 1980/1981, the Doltex Company from Bogatynia still provided modern apartments in Wigancice to young couples who committed themselves to joining the Communist Youth Association (ZSMP).64 During this period, the Turów Combine began to propose compensation payments to residents in order to persuade them to resettle. There were no negotiations. The main problem here was that there were far too few alternative dwellings available to meet the demand. As the offers were not coordinated and therefore not made public, the talks depended on the discretion 61 62 63 64

50 lat Turów 2012, p. 13. Zmieniło sie˛ wszystko 2002, p. 10–11. Prace Instytutu 1996, p. 65. Rozlał 1994, p. 5.

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of the combine. Local authorities did not develop a did not take a stance themselves but simply adopted the positions the two most important employers. At the same time, however, the suffering of the inhabitants of Wigancice grew. Not only did the ban on maintenance work or repairs contribute to this, but the living and environmental conditions became increasingly unbearable due to the nearby overburden dump. Already in 1971, the village was flooded with contaminated water from the Strzegomice reservoir. In the 1980s, however, the attitude of some of the villagers changed and individual citizens began to protest publicly. In testing their room to maneuver within the socialist system, their selfconfidence grew. Leading the protests was the teacher Irena Jabłon´ska (b. 1928), who was initially a member of the PZPR, but left it after 1984. In retrospect, she explained how she was motivated by a pivotal experience in 1984. Jabłon´ska taught children history and geography. On a class trip, she discovered for the first time that the children’s faces were full of ashes blowing from the spoil heap after only a few minutes. She wrote her first petition to the municipal authorities but received no reply.65 In the same year, another wave of mud and dirt moved through the village and flooded everything up to the Czechoslovak side. The newly elected city deputy Jabłon´ska and her son Waldemar informed the voivodeship and the press. Unsuitable heavy equipment was used to clean the devastated village; when the next tidal wave came, there was even more dirt and damage. A delegation of residents went to the mine management. There, the legal adviser promised them that they would all be resettled by 1985. A crisis meeting in the spring of 1985 brought a compromise. The damage was repaired, a shop was re-opened, and the mine agreed to investigate the ecological threats more closely. When mother and son Jabłon´ski were elected city deputies in June 1984, they immediately chose the Environment Committee as their primary focus. They bombarded all the members with questions (“wiercic´ dziury w brzuchu”) and, at every opportunity, they brought Wigancice into the discussion. In the beginning of 1985, when they learned indirectly that the Voivodeship Commission for Environmental Protection would meet in Bogatynia, they “dragged” their fellow committee members to Wigancice. The members of the commission did not believe the conciliatory remarks of the slag heap employees, but only wanted to leave the village as quickly as possible. The commission afterwards discussed the establishment of a protection zone. In the meantime, information on the health risks to the local population had spread under the hand. Since 1985, this has been discussed in municipal committees. The Wrocław Agricultural Academy had been commissioned to carry

65 Rozlał 1988, p. 8/9.

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out extensive measurements. In the drinking water, clearly increased values of lead, carbide and sulphur were found.66 At the same time, experts from the Institute of Environmental Engineering of the Wrocław University of Technology under the direction of Prof. Jerzy Zwoz´dziak examined water, soil and air in the surrounding area. Ten volumes were produced.67 The key takeaway was that nature needs 100 years to recover from the damage. There were 15 hazardous substances identified, including aromatic cyclic hydrocarbon compounds. Some values were three to six times higher than permissible. At meetings with politicians, residents sometimes brought animals with obvious deformities with them. One of the Wrocław studies found that only 4 % of the inhabitants of Wigancice and the neighboring village of Wyszków had no pathological changes due to environmental damage. In addition to lung diseases, these were mainly visual and hearing impairments. The incidence of cancer increased severely.68 The water from the pipes was so reddishbrown and contaminated that it was considered to be water from a puddle when samples were taken. Nevertheless, after further investigations, the official assessment allowed that a brewery could be set up on site. The medical authority was only interested in ensuring that there was enough chlorine in the water.69 Despite the presentation of concrete test results and increasing protests of the political authorities because of the now absent drinking water supply and other burdens, solutions in this respect remained only on paper.70 As the possibilities for protest through the local authorities had been exhausted, the citizens of Wigancice decided to take further steps. On the morning of March 17, 1987, four residents of Wigancice, headed by Irena Jabłon´ska, who was joined by her son Waldemar, and Roman Majewski, who worked in the mine, left the train from Bogatynia to Białystok at Warsaw Central Station. Before their appointment at the TV studio, they went to the 66 Archiwum Pan´stwowe we Wrocławiu (in the following: APW), Branch Office Bolesławiec, no. 183: Rada Narodowa Miasta i Gminy i Urza˛d Miasta i Gminy w Bogatyni, 1973–1990, 22: Protokoły z posiedzen´ Komisji Ochrony S´rodowiska i Gospodarki Wodnej, 1984–1988, sheet 7: minutes nr. 5 from 30. 4. 1985. 67 As an example: APW, Branch Office Jelenia Góra, Urza˛d Wojewódzki w Jeleniej Górze, Wydział Ochrony S´rodowiska, 7620: Badania, Analizy i Oceny. Krzysztof Lorenz; Jan D. Rutkowski (Hrsg.), Opracowanie skutecznej profilaktyki w zakresie ochrony ´srodowiska rejonu turoszowskiego, Wrocław 1988. 68 Rozlał 1993b, pp. 12/13. 69 Rozlał 1993, pp. 12/13. 70 APW, Branch Office Jelenia Góra, Urza˛d Wojewódzki w Jeleniej Górze, Wojewódzka Komisja Planowania. Opinie i Decyzje lokalizacji szczegółowych. Odtworzenie zdolnos´ci produkcyjnej i modernizacja kopalni we˛gla brunatnego “Turów”, 1980–1987, p. 120–126: Narada odbyta […] w dniu 1986–01–29 w sprawie wsi Wigancice Z˙ytawskie. – As to the delays: ebd., p. 133: Letter of the Sejm deputy Kazimierz Janicki (Zgorzelec) to the voivod of Jelenia Góra Jerzy Golaczyn´ski from 3. 5. 1986.

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Belweder Palace, the State Council Chancellery, the Sejm, the Patriotic Movement for National Rebirth (PRON) and the Ministry of Construction. At the TV studio, they were allotted 10 minutes of air time for their cause. They had already written countless submissions to the PRON, the National Council, the Academy of Sciences, the 10th Party Congress of the Polish United Workers Party and the Major Field Inspectorship (Główna Inspekcja Terenowa), which supervised the voivodeships. A few weeks later, a reporter and her team from “Sprawy dla reportera” (Matters for the Reporter) paid a visit to Wigancice in pouring rain. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the streets were full of mud. Previously, with the help of a priest, Jabłon´ska had managed to persuade the inhabitants to undergo medical screening. Her credo was that “one should exhaust every possibility.” After they returned from Warsaw, the four residents reported the details of their trip at a local community meeting. At some point, they sat in front of the television set in a makeshift meeting-room and waited for the program from the Warsaw TV studio. But instead of the story about their village, they saw a lazy panther walking by. Later, it turned out that the broadcast was in fact seen all over Poland, but not in Lower Silesia, where the picture of Czechoslovak television was shown for a short time.71 But the Warsaw excursion did not have any real effect. As would be the case later, the central authorities showed little interest in the fate of Poland’s “sick borderland.” The Voivodeship Administration in Jelenia Góra (Hirschberg) had been confronted with similar problems elsewhere – from massive forest dieback to dramatic air pollution. It brought into discussion the establishment of a protection zone around the opencast mine and the Turów power plant as a means of solving the far-reaching environmental crisis. After heated debates, the protection zone was established in June 30, 1987.72 Mine and power plant were to bear half of the costs incurred. Due to the high air and soil pollution, human settlements in the zone were to be broken up. Moreover, no new settlements were to be built and agriculture and livestock breeding as well as sports and recreational events or allotment gardens were banned. In the eleven affected villages (Białopole, Biedrzychowice, Opolno, Rybarzowice, Strzegomice, Trzciniec, Turoszów, Wigancice, Wolanów, Wyszków and Zatonie) and in parts of Sieniawka (Kleinschönau) and Bogatynia, the citizens were not allowed to use construction materials; investments and renovations were prohibited. By 2030, 176 families were to be resettled. In the end, the plan was only implemented for only became concrete for Wigancice.73 Although 220 families also had to leave Rybarzowice 71 Rozlał 1988, pp. 8/9. 72 APW, Branch Office Jelenia Góra, Biuro Wojewódzkie Rady Narodowej w Jeleniej Górze, Protokoły posiedzen´ komisji ochrony s´rodowiska gospodarki wodnej 1988–1990, minutes no. 1 from 12. 1. 1989, Annex: Informacja nt. Realizacja strefy ochronnej…, p. 34–38. 73 Lis 2001b, p. 17.

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(Reichersdorf) and other villages, this was the result of the encroaching mining. The protests of the mine management against certain details of the protection zone were rejected by the Warsaw Ministry and resulted in only a two-year delay of the designation.74 In the following ten years, however, the delay tactics of the companies responsible for the resettlement continued regardless of the system change. Irena Jabłon´ska had long since been relocated to Zgorzelec and was successfully kept in check by the authorities from continuing her advocacy on behalf of Wigancice. While negotiations were held with the affected people, this also meant that the compensation and new apartments they received largely depended on the negotiating skills of the residents. Those who were not well connected fell through the cracks. On December 31, 1995, almost 50 families were still living in appalling conditions in Wigancice. By this point, the mine had already fulfilled its obligations, whereas the power plant came up short. It had only carried out 20 resettlements, claiming that there was no further obligation to do any more. Many of the remaining residents lacked the stamina to fight for themselves. When all the water pipes froze in the winter, man and animal alike could only drink from a completely contaminated well. Again and again, looting gangs appeared who met no resistance from the police, who maintained that the village no longer existed.75 But Wigancice did exist, even in 1999. The remaining 37 families bargained for the amount of compensation. Sometimes it was paid, sometimes not. In addition, there were residents who had sold their land to the mine and now leased it back. Similar conditions applied to the tenants of the municipal flats. They waited for a modern apartment in Bogatynia only to then accept a hard life in the ruins.76 The resettlements were finally completed in 2001. The municipality of Bogatynia assumed the costs of providing the remaining inhabitants with new housing. At that time, the worst environmental impacts were no longer a concern. Today, Wigancice only shows a few overgrown ruins, although there are some vague plans to reconstruct the whole village. According to the monument protection association, 70 farmhouses would have been worth preserving. These Upper Lusatian half-timbered houses (Umgebindehäuser/domy przysłupowe) from the 18th century were usually plundered and destroyed within a few days of their abandonment. Only one, the cartwright’s house, was relocated to Zgorzelec, where it now serves as a hotel and restaurant. The former inhabitants of Wigancice now live in blocks of flats in Bogatynia with running water and central 74 APW, Oddział Jelenia Góra, Biuro Wojewódzkie Rady Narodowej w Jeleniej Górze, Protokoły posiedzen´ komisji ochrony s´rodowiska gospodarki wodnej 1988–1990, minutes nr. 1 from 12. 1. 1989, Annex: Informacja nt. Realizacja strefy ochronnej…, p. 34–38. 75 Lis 1996, p. 12. 76 Z˙urek 1998, p. 13; Lis 1999, p. 13.

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heating. Most of the young people were happy to leave. Just to purchase a loaf of bread, it was necessary to cycle 5 km to Wyszków. And when it snowed, one was cut off entirely from the outside world. The older residents, on the other hand, missed their room to maneuver in the village and meet their friends nearby. Many wanted to return.77 These experiences largely coincide with villages in other regions, which also disappeared and continue to disappear. The distinction, however, is that most of Wigancice’s inhabitants pushed for their resettlement themselves and made use of all the available resources under the late socialist and early capitalist states. The companies responsible for the environmental damage also used their leeway to minimize the financial impact. At the same time, there was no uniform stance within the context of the state and party organization; temporary partnerships of convenience were repeatedly formed to create different spaces of interaction and entanglement. Thus, despite all its peculiarities, the fate of Wigancice represents a historical process that was not primarily shaped by the existence of different political systems, but rather by a complex interactive network of actors. In view of these three examples – each pertaining to a geographically narrowly defined area where the mining of lignite, its conversion into electricity and the resulting environmental damage in late socialism were common elements – we conclude that there was no uniform reaction to the actions of the corresponding state and party leaderships. The responses to the respective situation were strongly determined by the commitment of individual actors and their attitudes. There was neither a uniform feeling of resistance against the state nor were those affected all content with the decisions. While the younger residents who resettled rather emphasized the advantages of a new modern apartment, the older ones often complained about the loss of their familiar surroundings and their home. Most citizens remained silent. Nonetheless, the cases mentioned illustrate that some room to maneuver always resulted from conflicting interests of state and party authorities at the respective levels. The behavior of the ostensible leaders of the protest was also extremely heterogeneous. While the basic decision to “carbonize” could not be challenged, the protesters first tried to obtain more detailed information and then leveraged their networks and possibilities. It is important to understand that belonging to certain groups alone was not necessarily helpful. The two Protestant pastors had to struggle with disparate views among their congregations and relied mostly on those within their immediate circle. The Polish teacher strove to be heard by various political authorities in the region and also as far away as Warsaw. Ultimately, it was never a fight of “us” against “them”. Representatives of the state-run mining authorities were given more leeway than a district chairman of the SED. On the other hand, they could also resort to forms 77 Lis 2001, p. 27.

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of psychological terror independently of the system if they saw their economic interests threatened. Experts, moreover, could completely ignore the consequences of environmental pollution, but also demand radical changes in internal expert reports. It is not enough to simply highlight evidence of success or failure. Indeed, the reality of life in the 1980s was much more complex than many people acknowledge today. To recognize this, it is not especially useful to analyze the decision-making structures. It would certainly be ahistorical to deny the impact of top-down processes on the macro-economic procedure and the behavior of the people involved. Nevertheless, the psychological consequences of the decisions can be better shown through the respective practices and discourses than through cost-benefit analyses or ideological assumptions. Translated by Christopher Reid

Archives Bundesarchiv Berlin; Kreisarchiv Zittau; Archiv der Gemeindeverwaltung Olbersdorf; Bundesarchiv für Stasi-Unterlagen, Archiv der Außenstelle Dresden; Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv Potsdam; Bergarchiv Freiberg; Archiwum Pan´stwowe we Wrocławiu.

Literature 50 lat Turów, Bogatynia 2012. Betriebsgeschichte Kraftwerk Hirschfelde 1911 bis 1992 / Kraftwerk Hagenwerder 1958 bis 1997. Herausgegeben vom Förderverein e. V. Technisches Denkmal und Museum Kraftwerk Hirschfelde, Hirschfelde 2008. Huff, Tobias: Natur und Industrie im Sozialismus. Eine Umweltgeschichte, Göttingen 2015. Kitta, Dietmar / Kulessa, Monika / Männig, Klaus: Der Tagebau Olbersdorf und das Gelände der Landesgartenschau. Die Entstehung des Zittauer Gebirges und der Braunkohle im Zittauer Becken, in: Zittauer Geschichtsblätter 6/1 (1999), pp. 3–11. Krzoska, Markus: Próby uratowania kolei wa˛skotorowej we wschodniej Saksonii w latach osiemdziesia˛tych XX w., in: Przegla˛d Historyczny 109/4 (2018), pp. 921–938. Liebig, Dieter / Lüttig Matthias: terra infirma / unsichere Erde. Deutsch-Ossig-Report, Görlitz 1993. Liebig, Dieter: Anspruch und Wirklichkeit. Die Energie- und Umweltpolitik in der DDR am Beispiel des Energieträgers Braunkohle, Großhennersdorf 2009. Liebig, Dieter: Faustisch. Ein Deutsch-Ossig-Roman, Görlitz 2015.

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Liebig, Dieter / Richter, Volker / Lüttig, Matthias: Die Zukunft hat schon begonnen. Report III: Deutsch-Ossig, Reichwalde, Boxberg, Nochten, Schleife 2006–2015, Dreieich 2016. Lis, Marek: Dogorywanie Wigancic, in: Nowiny Jelenogórskie 14 (1996), p. 12. Lis, Marek: Wigancic dni ostatnie…?, in: Nowiny Jelenogórskie, 37 (1999), p. 13. Lis, Marek: Requiem dla Wigancic, in: Nowiny Jelenogórskie 42 (2001), p. 27. Lis, Marek: Historia kołem sie toczy, in: Nowiny Jelenogórskie 45 (2001), p. 17. Modrow, Hans: Ich wollte ein neues Deutschland, Berlin 1998. Pflugbeil, Sebastian / Listing, Joachim: Energie und Umwelt: für die Berücksichtigung von Gerechtigkeit, Frieden und Schöpfungsverantwortung bei der Lösung von Energieproblemen in der DDR, Berlin 1988. Prace Instytutu Geograficznego: Geografia społeczna i ekonomiczna. Seria B, vol. 13, Wrocław 1996. Rogge, Joachim: Der Entschluß zur Umsetzung der Dorfkirche in Deutsch-Ossig nach Görlitz-Königshufen aus kirchenpolitischer Sicht, in: Frenschkowski, Udo (Ed.): Von Deutsch-Ossig nach Görlitz-Königshufen: die Rettung einer Dorfkirche, Dresden 1998, pp. 50–54. Schmidt-Klingenberg, Michael: Hundert Meter vor der Kante, in: Der Spiegel 44 (1992), pp. 162–165. Walter, Andreas: Die vorgesehene Entwicklung des Tagebaus Olbersdorf zum Tagebau Zittau-Süd. Konzepte und Realisierung bis zum Jahre 1989, [without place, without date] 2001. Rozlał, Janusz: Ze wsi pod Belweder, in: Nowiny Jelenogórskie 1 (1988), pp. 8/9. Rozlał, Janusz: W cieniu Wigancic, in: Nowiny Jelenogórskie 34 (1993), pp. 12/13. Rozlał, Janusz: Zostalis´my na s´mietniku, in: Nowiny Jelenogórskie 45 (1993), pp. 12/13. Rozlał, Janusz: Jakie picie takie z˙ycie, in: Nowiny Jelenogórskie 33 (1994), p. 5. Zmieniło sie˛ wszystko. Rozmowa z burmistrzem Bogatynii, Gerardem S´wistulskim, in: Bogatynia na przełomie wieków, Bogatynia 2002, p. 10–11. Z˙urek, Sławomir: Prochem jestes´, w pyle mieszkasz, in: Nowiny Jelenogórskie 40 (1998), p. 13.

Part III: Privacy in State Socialism

Jakub Gałe˛ziowski

Single Mothers and Their Babies in Poland in 1945–1949. The Social Care System vs. Female Freedom and Subjectivity*

On 13 August 1949, the New York Herald Tribune published the first of two articles on assistance provided to former Polish female concentration camp prisoners and female forced labourers returning from occupation zones in Germany1. They were based on a report provided by Poland’s communist authorities. Both were written by Mary Dresden Lane, a representative of the International Refugees Organization (IRO), who in March of that year had come to Poland as part of a seven-member-strong delegation to visit institutions providing care for women and children. Mother and Child Homes (MCH, pol. Domy Matki i Dziecka) attracted her attention in particular. She described them without hiding her enthusiasm: “It has established [in Poland – ref. JG] a rather large number of unusual residence centres. Not only they can come to these, but any pregnant woman already living in Poland who has no husband. The Polish government does not blush at the thought of an unmarried mother; it welcomes her as cordially as any other mother; and the word “illegitimate,” however strong it may still be to peasants, has been removed from Polish law and from official consciousness. These residence centres are attractive, well managed, much like family homes, not at all like institutions.”2

Lane was impressed by the fact that the women residing in the MCHs cared not only for their own children, but also for the orphans who were living there. The IRO delegation was surprised also by the high quality of the personnel: “Let a word be said at once about the ability and attitude of staff members and personnel to whom we talked. We were amazed to find the quality of these folk so high. The women are, for the most part, young; they are energetic, interested, well-informed, practical. * This chapter has been written as part of the Polish National Science Centre-founded project no. 2014/15/G/HS3/04344 “Room for Manoeuvre in State Socialism: Between Adaptation and Experiment”. The archive research for the study of the fate of children born of war was conducted as part of a doctoral project at the University of Warsaw and University of Augsburg (“Children Born of War – Past, Present and Future”, CHIBOW, H2020, MSC ITN no. 642571). 1 Lane 1949a; Lane 1949b. 2 Lane 1949a.

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Their eyes are on the needs and welfare of their charges and clients and have both imagination and desire to render as good service as possible.”3

The author of the report stressed that every woman with an illegitimate child who had come from Western Europe could go to one of the “residence centres” and thus did not have to return to her hometown. This provided an additional impulse for mothers who had not yet decided to return to their country of origin.4 The only source of worry was the state’s, in her opinion, excessive control over individuals under its care and the interference of various institutions in the family life of Poles, which in the future might have a negative impact on social relations.5 While the tone of the article was undoubtedly positive, it did not contribute to any increase in the number of Polish women returning to Poland. After the widescale, uncontrolled, so-called wild repatriation shortly after the end of the hostilities, the intensity of returning transports reached its peak in the second half of the 1945 as well as 1946–1947.6 This was also a period in which this particular group of women – in addition to victims of rape on the Polish side of the border – considerably increased the number of residents of the newly founded single mother homes.7 However, most women were returning without their children, having left them in numerous hospitals, shelters and orphanages in Germany and Austria. They hoped that in this way they would be able to forget about their wartime experiences and begin their life anew.

Mother and Child Homes in a study of Polish Institute of Social Service The author of the article cited above did not specifically reveal which MCHs she had visited, limiting herself to just saying that her delegation had visited Łódz´, Katowice, Kraków as well as Warsaw and its environs.8 It is, therefore, likely that the delegation visited facilities located in these particular cities. Lane claims that the delegates themselves were free in their choices and the Polish government did not influence their decision; this was to confirm the objectivity of the inspection.9 Paradoxically, however, the American delegate’s description of the situation – who in her article stressed her independence and immunity to indoctrination – 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Ibid. Ibid. Lane 1949b. Wróbel 2009, pp. 452–453. Manteuffel 1948, p. 2. Lane 1949a. Ibid.

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is surprisingly similar to the one included in papers delivered by government representatives during official congresses or conferences. In all of them, the Polish system for providing care for mothers and children was viewed as at least adequate.10 Yet thanks to research carried out by the Polish Institute of Social Service in Łódz´ (PISS, pol. Polski Instytut Słuz˙by Społecznej), which was led by Helena Radlin´ska11 and followed a commission from the Ministry of Labour and Welfare (MLW, pol. Ministerstwo Pracy i Opieki Społecznej)12, we know that the situation in the institutions active in the field was far from ideal. Their work, from a pedagogical point of view, also often did more harm than good, increasing the already huge numbers of those in need of support.13 In 1948 PISS prepared for MLW notes for international conference based on the data from the research conducted by its staff, where features of “good and bad homes” were listed14. However, only insightful reading over 500 pages of reports and descriptions of the particular institutions, we notice that the latter were more numerous and that positive opinions were only expressed about two homes out of the thirty-four included in the study15. Only one was recommended as a model – the Mother and Child Home in Słupsk.16 MLW representatives aware of shortcomings and malfunctioning of mother and childcare system in Poland wanted to verify the legitimacy of high ex10 Archiwum Akt Nowych wWarszawie (Central Archives of Modern Records), Ministerstwo Zdrowia (Ministry of Health, in the following AAN, MZ), Papers by Maria Skokowska-Rudolf on mother and child topics, no. 120. 11 Helena Radlin´ska (1879–1954) – scholar and social activist, associated before the war with the Free Polish University (pol. Wolna Wszechnica Polska); after the war professor at the University of Łódz´, where in 1945 she established the Department of Social Pedagogy and the Polish Institute of Social Service, both of which she chaired until their closure in turn on 1951 and 1952. Author of numerous publications on social pedagogy, education of children and adults, and promoter of reading. 12 The Polish Institute of Social Service was established at the turn of 1945 and 1946 at the newly founded University of Łódz´, which, in view of the paralysis of Warsaw’s higher education institutions after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising, attracted the biggest scholarly authorities, often with left-leaning views. The main objective of PISS was to – to cite its statutes – “expand the knowledge of social life phenomena”, especially “the causes of social disasters and demoralisation of individuals”. In October 1948 the institution changed its name to the Polish Society of Social Studies and in June 1951 it was closed. The archives of PISS, encompassing over 300 files, were given to the Library of the University of Lódz´. This is also where Helena Radlin´ska’s private archive found itself after her death in 1954. Both collections are yet to be examined in detail and remain in the state in which they were given to the library. 13 Manteuffel 1947, p. 35. 14 Mother and childcare 1948, p. 8–9. 15 Report 1948b. 16 Słupsk – today a city with a population of 91,000 in the region of Western Pomerania. Until 1945 – German town of Stolp im Pommern (with a population of just over 50,000 in 1939), seized by the Red Army on 7 March 1945 and officially handed over to the Polish authorities in April that year. In 1946 it had 34,000 inhabitants.

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penditures relating to the MCHs. Although MLW was the initiator of the action, the circumstances of undertaking the research were more complex. PISS, whose mission was to tackle current and socially relevant issues and “collaborate on solving social problems” was an indisputable partner in this operation.17 One of the first themes researchers tackled was war-related orphanhood, which they regarded as one of the most important social problems in post-war Poland. As we can read in a brochure featuring an analysis of preliminary research in this field, published in 1946 and co-authored by Radlin´ska, “What emerges as the most tragic matter from observations and stories told by people is the fate of children conceived in captivity, born away from home or after their mothers returned home. Young, often very young mothers repeatedly curse the fate that violently imposed a child on them, among feelings of horror and disgust. […] It is hard to help them. Often they find no support in law and no understanding for their experiences in their families.”18

Thus research into single motherhood and the fate of illegitimate children may have been a continuation of earlier activities and stemmed from field experience. It is also possible that the uneasy situation of Mother and Child Homes was particularly dear to Radlin´ska, who had met the founder of the Słupsk Home, Father Jan Zieja19, and its manager, Aniela Urbanowicz20, during the occupation. After the war Radlin´ska had an opportunity to directly see the work of the Home and the difficulties faced by its management when she visited Pomerania.21 In addition, this was a period in which she was favourable reputation among MLW employees (as letters suggest, Radlin´ska was on first-name terms with some of them), and the officials respected her expert opinion on social pedagogy.22 It is 17 Wojtyniak / Radlin´ska 1946, p. 1. 18 Wojtyniak / Radlin´ska 1946, p. 52. 19 Jan Zieja (1897–1991) – Catholic priest and social activist, participant in the Warsaw Uprising, member of the opposition, co-founder of the Workers’ Defence Committee (pol. Komitet Obrony Robotników). Throughout his life he was associated with the Centre for the Blind in Laski, where he was buried in the local cemetery. In 1945–1949 he was a parish priest in Słupsk and Wytowno, Western Pomerania, and in that period founded, among others, the Mother and Child Home and the People’s University (pol. Uniwersytet Ludowy). 20 Aniela Urbanowicz (1899–1988) – socio-political activist, co-founder and active member of the Warsaw Club of Catholic Intelligentsia (pol. Klub Inteligencji Katolickiej), collaborator of Tygodnik Powszechny, Znak and Wiez´ as well as representatives of the Znak Parliamentary Club. In 1945–1949 she managed the Mother and Child Home in Słupsk. 21 Radlin´ska collaborated with Father Zieja in Warsaw during the occupation. Zieja 1993, p. 148– 149. After the war she was involved in the work of the Society of People’s Universities and this was one of the reasons behind her visits to Orzechowo, where Father Zieja had founded such a university. She may have visited Słupsk on one of such occasions. Kaczorowski 2010, pp. 59– 60. 22 Radlin´ska’s private collection includes numerous invitations and programmes of conferences organised by the MLW and attended by the Łódz´ scholar: Biblioteka Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego

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not known when exactly the Institute was requested to investigate the functioning of MCHs in Poland and what the immediate reason was for taking such a decision, but it is almost certain that the MLW was the initiator.23 Its officials were fully aware of the scale of single motherhood as well as the number of illegitimate children and orphans.24 The task was to assess the work of Mother and Child Homes. Three objectives were set: first, to ascertain the organisational basis of the institutions and their operations; second, to check who the residents were and what benefits their stay in the homes brought them; and, third, to analyse the changes taking place among the mothers after the war.25 The work was entrusted to Emilia Manteuffel, a wellknown social activist and pedagogue26, who served as a scholar and secretary general of PISS. Archival documents reveal the organisation of the work of a team of researchers set up at the beginning of summer 1947 and the difficulties faced by the team leader.27 Manteuffel exchanged a number of letters with departments of welfare at various level, which supervised the existing homes administratively and she personally visited some of them.28 She tried to get to know at least one MCH in every region of Poland, aiming in this way to discover any regional differences. An inspection of every home involved a thorough survey and talks with the management, personnel and residents as well as with the local supervisory authority. The purpose was “to evaluate its organisational concept and compare the existing possibilities with the achievements of the homes.”29 In

23

24

25 26

27 28 29

(Library of the University of Lódz´), Spus´cizna Heleny Radlin´skiej (Helena Radlin´ska’s archival collection, in the following: BUŁ, SHR), Correspondence. Significantly, we can learn about the collaboration with the MLW only from the documents preserved in the Library of the University of Lodz. During my research at Warsaw’s Central Archives of Modern Records I did not find a single mention in the documents from the Ministry, of the research itself (although there are several files of records concerning mother and childcare) or even of any collaboration between the MLW and PISS. All information about the study of Mother and Child Homes comes from PISS archival collection and Radlin´ska’s collection, which have been preserved in a fairly good condition. This is evidenced by numerous statements by representatives of both, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Labour and Welfare, as well as by the initiatives undertaken at the time. The first systemic solutions began to be discussed only in the summer of 1945 and implemented – in 1946. AAN, MZ, Congress of the Heads of the Regional Health Departments, 8–9 July 1945, no. 365/2, Shorthand notes from the Congress with attached papers. Manteuffel 1947, p. 3. Emilia Manteuffel-Szoege (1886–1968) – pedagogue and social activist, associated before the war with the Free Polish University, founder and manager of many institutions for orphaned children; from 1945 she worked at PISS and after its closure in the Central Mental Health Clinic (pol. Główna Poradnia Zdrowia Psychicznego) in Warsaw. She was also active in the Society of the Friends of Children (pol. Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Dzieci). BUŁ, Archiwum PISS (PISS archival collection, in the following: BUŁ, APISS), Correspondence dealing with the MCH study, April 1947–May 1948. BUŁ, APISS, Correspondence dealing with the MCH study, April 1947–May 1948. Report 1948a, pp. 4–5.

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addition, in each case the management was asked to fill in a detailed, 204question sheet concerning the functioning of the institution and to prepare a report on the “mother and children traffic”. The researchers themselves filled out a separate survey devoted to the same topic. An extensive questionnaire comprising 65 questions was compiled for the purpose of interviewing the mothers. By this point, Manteuffel must have already prepared the whole concept of the study, which provided for an inspection of all facilities in Poland, as well as all the necessary materials in the form of standardised sets of questions. These provided the basis of the subsequent analysis of the obtained information. This suggests that the preliminary stage of the project must have taken place in spring 1947, although it is not known exactly when the study started or when it was commissioned. In late April 1947, PISS asked the MLW for a list of the existing Mother and Child Homes. The list, dated 1 May 1947, was sent and provided information on 34 institutions. As it turned out, the number was incomplete. The situation was very dynamic, which was due to the organisational chaos surrounding the founding of new homes. While they were set up spontaneously, some were quickly closed and some were transformed into institutions of a different type. The surviving correspondence reveals (from today’s point of view) a rather casual approach to the existing institutions and a total ignorance in this respect on the part of the welfare departments and the Ministry itself. We do know, however, that the Polish authorities wanted to obtain the results of the study as quickly as possible. In September, the PISS began to receive letters urging it to send the results to the Ministry of Labour and Welfare.30 Yet the whole project was a huge challenge, not only when it came to its focus, but above all to the logistics in light of the conditions of travel at the time as well as the speed with which correspondence was circulated. Exchanges of letters dragged on endlessly: various institutions either delayed sending their reports or provided incomplete data. Sometimes a Mother and Child Home was no longer in the given location or was, in fact, an orphanage, or even a nursing home. There were also MCH not present in the ministerial list. Most information, including the addresses of the homes, had to be established by the researchers themselves. Thus, the work on the project involved many additional people and the leader often had to rely on a network of private contacts and friends in order to cope with her task. Particularly problematic were the questions of transport and accommodation. The researchers usually used public transport, but there were situations in which the inspected homes were located more than ten or even several dozen kilometres from the nearest stop so that train and bus were not an

30 BUŁ, APISS, Correspondence dealing with the MCH study, April 1947–May 1948.

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option.31 When one researcher managed to get to her destination, she had to spent at least a few days in the institution in order to make the necessary observations, conduct all interviews and, finally, compile the relevant documentation. Consequently, the project was very time-consuming. Indeed, carrying out the whole study within just one year was an impressive feat. The first, preliminary report was dated October 1947. It contained a theoretical model, devised by Emilia Manteuffel, of a well-functioning Mother and Child Home as well as tentative conclusions from the study showing the gap between the theory and practice. The final report was submitted in April 1948 and was eventually accepted by the Ministry of Labour and Welfare on 21 May.32 In addition to a description of the study, it provided an analysis of the work of the various homes, recommendations and guidelines concerning their management as well as numerous annexes, including sample surveys and questionnaires or proposals for rules and regulations.33 In addition to the reports, Emilia Manteuffel wrote another piece: Mother and Child Homes. Tasks, organisation, results. This was to serve as a manual with an analysis of the phenomenon of extramarital motherhood, and a comprehensive concept for improving the mother and childcare system in Poland. In the end, however, it did not see the light of day, because the MLW withdrew the promised grant for its publication.34 According to its author, the publication was to have been a necessary complement to the picture of the analysed phenomena. Manteuffel was convinced that the right care for single mothers could be provided only on the basis of a proper understanding of their situation. It was therefore necessary to place it within a broader context, both historical – through an analysis of the problem in the past and examination of the beliefs and stereotypes associated with it – and social – through an in-depth analysis of the life stories of the women concerned. One of Manteuffel’s associates, Maria ŁukaszewskaSzubert, agreed with this point of view. Two years after the completion of the study, she consequently examined the interviews with the MCH residents carried

31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 PISS archival collection contains several different versions of the report in typescript form, usually without dates, with notes on the margins and within the body of the text, which makes it even more difficult to indicate the final form of the document sent to the Ministry commissioning the study. 34 Manteuffel 1948. According to the publishing plans of PISS, the manual was to have been published in 1949. However, as the report for that year informs us, the grant from the Ministry of Labour and Welfare was withdrawn. A similar situation occurred the following year. BUŁ, SHR, Reports.

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out as part of the study, and, on this basis, wrote and defended a master’s thesis entitled Single Mothers in 1950.35 None of these texts was ever published. Thus the results of the research were known only to a small group of people associated with PISS and to the staff of the Department of Social Pedagogy at the University of Łódz´.36 It is also hard to say to what extent the Institute’s proposed solutions were actually implemented. According to Irena Lepalczyk, they affirmed an innovative approach to the question of single motherhood and illegitimate children care.37 Today, on the other hand, the surviving documents are first and foremost a unique historical source which makes it possible to assess one of the biggest social problems of post-war Poland.

Single mothers and illegitimate children – an analysis of the support system and its organisation The phenomenon of extramarital motherhood – whether voluntary (albeit attributable to the abnormal situation of the war) or resulting from violence – rose to unprecedented proportions after the war.38 The new Polish government quickly realised this and launched a number of initiatives. It sought, first of all, to change the law, in order to make the status of illegitimate children equal to that of legitimate children.39 At the same time, thanks to, among other things, the fact that the designation of surnames was regulated, the difference between these two groups of children would disappear once and for all. The government also sped up the procedure for officially declaring a citizen deceased, which enabled people who had lost their spouses during the war to remarry.40 In the case of pregnancies resulting from sexual violence in the so-called wartime circumstances, legal abortion was already made possible from 30 May 1945.41 On the other hand, little

35 One of the objectives of the study was to verify the situation of the mothers and their children after leaving the homes. It turned out, however, that in most cases the homes lost touch with their residents after their stay ended. Eventually, in 1949 the author managed to reach less than a half of the study subjects, collecting information about 103 mothers and their children. Szubert 1950. 36 Lepalczyk 1984. 37 Ibid., pp. 71–72. 38 BUŁ, APISS, Documents from the MCH study, Note: “On the assistance to be provided to pregnant women and single mothers”. 39 Decree, 22 I 1946. 40 Decree, 10 XI 1945. 41 Terminating pregnancies resulting from wartime rapes was possible under Ordinance No. 6632/45 issued by the Minister of Justice Henryk S´wia˛tkowski. This task was entrusted to the Polish Red Cross. The order was in force from 30 May to 31 August 1945 and was then extended until 30 November 1945. Archiwum Pan´stwowe w Bydgoszczy (State Archive in

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was done at the time to provide care for pregnant women who wanted to have their children, despite the unfavourable conditions. This primarily concerned two groups of women: former forced labourers returning to Poland and survivors of Soviet rapes. While many women simply did not want to return to their hometowns, there was also a huge number of women who either had lost their families or did not know where they should look for them because of the mass migrations happening at the time. This made providing care for single mothers and their children all the more urgent. In the first few months after the war, this care was spontaneous and disorganised. It was limited to just the possibility of childbirth in one of the many “mother and child stations” run usually by the Polish Red Cross or Catholic organisation “Caritas”. Hospitals with maternity wards were still being organised, as was a network of healthcare centres. The assistance provided was the same for all pregnant women and was basically limited to healthcare, which by today’s standards was far from sufficient.42 When it came to accommodation, pregnant women as well as mothers with infants and small children ended up in hastily constructed shelters together with thousands of other repatriates. There, they could only count on temporary nursing and medical care and use the so-called milk kitchens.43 Nonetheless, had it not been for the work of these organisations, single women would have been left completely on their own as state support was still non-existent. The first public Mother and Child Homes did not begin to emerge until autumn 1945. The delay was due to the slow emergence of central and local welfare structures in the form of welfare departments of various levels, and the fact that officials were at first reluctant to the problem. “Initially, there was neither time, nor the possibility for organising the entire system in which preventive care would be combined with rescue, followed by constructive care setting a demoralised life on a new path.”44 It is thus difficult to imagine the problems facing single mothers and pregnant women, often victims of rape, who lacked any systemic financial, legal, or psychological support. Bydgoszcz), Zarza˛d Wojewódzki Polskiego Czerwonego Krzyz˙a (Voivodeship Board of Polish Red Cross in Bydgoszcz), no. 18, Ordinance No. 6632/45, 30 May 1945, copy, unpaginated. 42 Medical care for pregnant women as well as mothers with infants was formally the responsibility of the Ministry of Health with its Mother and Child Department. The need to organise mother and child units on the regional level was discussed during the already mentioned Congress of the Heads of the Regional Health Departments in July 1945. See AAN, MZ, Congress of the Heads of the Regional Health Departments, 8–9 July 1945, no. 365/2, ff. 82–84. M. Skokowska’s paper. Cf. Kozłowska / Bulsa 2012. 43 Places where special baby food was prepared and served to infants were called “milk kitchens”. They were organised, among other places, at railway stations, where traveling mothers could take advantage of ready-made meals. 44 Manteuffel 1948, p. 3.

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On the basis of their interviews, primarily with the management and personnel of the MCHs, as well as with the women in residence, the researchers noted a huge change which had taken place over a period of less than two years. It was described as the “mothers element”. “In the first period it was very diverse; there was no shortage of individuals of higher culture, education and ethics. Their experiences reflect with all the intensity the individual’s helplessness in the face of the ruthless power of the war disaster.”45 In the year in which the study was carried out, there were still many so-called “wartime cases” in the homes. I will focus specifically on them in what follows. Out of the 255 cases analysed by Maria Szubert, nearly half of the women (125) had been forced labourers in Germany, while 57 got pregnant there.46 In two cases, the father was the woman’s employer or superior; in the remaining cases, the father was a labourer, six of whom were foreigners. Ten men were married and two committed bigamy, for which they were brought to court after returning to Poland. Significantly, many of the former forced labourers in the study became pregnant for the first time when they were still teenagers. Szubert notes that separation from the family and isolation were conducive to sexual relationships.47 Paradoxically, however, the study shows that such relationships lasted the longest, as both partners desired some sort of stability during their stay in Germany. The other women had either been raped during their “wanderings across the still wild West48, during journeys that were not always safe” or had entered into relationships with men who had no intention of committing. In this newly incorporated land, thirty-four women became pregnant. About one-third (12) stopped there on their way back from Germany, five came from Central Poland to loot49, and the rest were displaced from the former Eastern territories.50 Significantly, the report prepared for the MLW did not mention any pregnancies that resulted from rapes; it is limited to the general statements cited above. While some figures only appear in Szubert’s thesis, her commentary concerns the lo45 Mother and childcare 1948, p. 8. 46 In Szubert’s work the total number of the analysed women differs from the one given by Manteuffel in the unpublished manual: the study leader based her analysis on 244 cases, while her associate referred to 255 interviews. The statistics are thus different in the two works. 47 Szubert 1950, pp. 64–65, 73. 48 The territories which became the region of the biggest post-war migrations were commonly compared to the “Wild West” owing to a lack of security. But the term also appeared in various documents, e. g. in reports of the Polish Red Cross. Archiwum Zarza˛du Głównego Polskiego Czerwonego Krzyz˙a (Board of the Polish Red Cross’s Archive, in the following: AZG PCK), Foreign Department, No. 4/76, Report on a meeting of a Red Cross representative at the MLW, Warsaw, 9 June 1945, unpaginated. Cf. Halicka 2015. 49 For more on this post-war phenomenon in Poland (pol. szaber), see: Zaremba 2012, pp. 273– 314; for a discussion on looting in so-called Recovered Territories, cf. Halicka 2015, pp. 220– 225. 50 Szubert 1950, p. 74.

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cations and circumstances of the incidents rather than their perpetrators (she uses language like “while travelling”, “on their way back from Germany”, etc.).51 Only by reading the questionnaires we can establish circumstances of each offence in greater detail. Among the 18 questionnaires in which I have found a note referring to a “rape” (the author mentions 23 cases), in five cases Soviet soldiers were indicated as the perpetrators, in four cases the nationality of the soldiers is not mentioned, four perpetrators were listed as unknown and the remaining perpetrators were Poles – among whom were men previously known by sight, as well as policemen from civic militia (pol. milicja obywatelska).52 One-third of the fathers were uniformed men.53 When the study started in the second half of 1947, the group that predominated in the Mother and Child Homes – as before the war – was abandoned women whose pregnancies were either not attributed to the consequences of war or to post-war circumstances. “As the conditions become more normal, cruel fate becomes less important as the cause of single motherhood, being replaced by pedagogical deficiencies in the upbringing of the girls, as a result of which they easily fall prey to those seeking problem-free ways of satisfying their sexual urges.”54 According to the project leader, the change in the composition of the women who sought help in MCH was a turning point that required a radically new approach to the comprehensive care provided to single mothers and their children, such that the care for the women would directly address the public interest. The new approach consisted, on the one hand, in providing multifaceted assistance to women struggling with single motherhood and, on the other, in working to reduce the scale of the phenomenon itself by helping girls neglected in their childhood. This included providing family counselling as well as collecting financial support from the fathers. The system was designed to offer individualized care on a case-by-case basis. However, the study carried out by PISS demonstrated that the reality diverged widely from this ideal. Most homes failed to accomplish their fundamental objective of preparing single mothers for a life with their children in the real world. In practice, this would have meant “saving the child’s mother” and thus preventing the child from being abandoned.55 In a majority of the MCH organisational chaos reigned supreme, the management had no concept for running them, and conflicts between the residents and the staff often made work nearly impossible. Emilia Manteuffel noted that the women – referred to in the homes as “mothers” – were treated as a “group of creatures not differing from other human 51 52 53 54 55

Ibid. BUŁ, APISS, MCH study, Questionnaires filled by the residents. Files 1 and 2. Szubert 1950, p. 74. Mother and childcare 1948, p. 8. Manteuffel 1948, p. 13.

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beings like e. g. a madman in a lunatic asylum, but nevertheless marked by the strangeness of some unique stigma”.56 Manteuffel cited as an example words by the head of the department of welfare from one of the Province Governor’s Offices, who suggested that unmarried mothers and prostitutes should be locked up in detention centres “taken firmly in hand”.57 According to Manteuffel, such an approach simply attested to society’s hypocrisy. Extramarital relationships were by no means rare, but, as she notes, before the pregnancy “those around the woman usually do not protest and everything seems to be fine”.58 It was precisely the pregnancy that led to the woman being rejected by the man or her family and thus being stigmatised in the future.59 This state of being universally abandoned apparently defined a woman as a single mother. Manteuffel looked for the causes of this ostracism primarily in each woman’s family situation and in her upbringing. One of the main conclusions of the Łódz´ study was that a “childhood of neglect” was the main cause of single motherhood.60 The staff of the homes seemed not to understand this – they merely saw their residents as primitive, fallen women who were difficult to get along with. This mindset was certainly not conducive to fruitful educational work. Yet according to Manteuffel, “a manager and staff genuinely wanting to achieve good results in their educational work, the only way for breaking this evil chain of passing the vicious burden from generation to generation, must constantly bear in mind the following image: a mother’s beloved, very promising daughter goes missing during the war. The mother finds her only more than a decade later. In despair she finds that her child has gone through some bad times, finding herself in unworthy hands and falling, seemingly irreversibly. Will she chase her away? If she is a true mother, she will devote all her life to this one objective, to make up to her child for the harm experienced in her childhood, to raise her from her fall and heal her. Every good manager (and her associates too) must be such a ‘mother’ for the residents of the Mother and Child Homes.”61

The material collected in the course of the Łódz´ study, the results of which were presented to the MLW, features just one such “motherly figure”, who, at the same

56 Ibid., p. 36. The word “mothers” has a pejorative meaning in this context and is an expression of contempt for female residents of MCH. 57 Manteuffel 1947, p. 33. In Polish: za łeb trzymac´ – very negative, even vulgar, expression. 58 Manteuffel 1948, p. 36. 59 Ibid., p. 37. 60 Ibid., p. 9. According to the author, 33 out of the 244 women had both parents when they got pregnant outside marriage, cf. Manteuffel 1948, p. 40. According to Szubert, the proportions were slightly different: 35/255, cf. Szubert 1950, p. 83. 61 Manteuffel 1948, p. 46.

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time, was also the only person mentioned by name – the manager of the Słupsk Home Aniela Urbanowicz.62

The Mother and Child Home in Słupsk Emilia Manteuffel visited the Słupsk Home in person and conducted at least some of the interviews with its residents. She was also the author of the report on the inspection of the Home. The extant documents do not show when she met its manager for the first time. It is likely, however, that the inspection took place in the first stage of the project, i. e. in the summer of 1947.63 Indeed, this is suggested by the fact that the preliminary report contains two references to the institution in question, both in the section devoted to the daily routines of women in Mother and Child Homes: “Wherever the management does their job well (like, for example, in Słupsk), the atmosphere is full of striving for the well-being and respect for every human being, which helps solve problems.”64 The other fragment was similarly an obvious reference to the manager: “There are homes in which the manager, through the example of her own attitude to the staff and the mothers, nearly completely excludes any brutality of conduct. In these (exceptional) homes the mothers greet each other politely, they smile.”65 In reading all the reports, including primarily the description of the Słupsk Home66, there is no doubt that the person concerned was Aniela Urbanowicz. Manteuffel fell under the spell of the charismatic manager (perhaps also of her spiritual mentor, Father Zieja) and the Home she ran became a point of reference for the entire project. In fact, there were frequent comparisons of other institutions to the Słupsk Home, 62 The name of the manager of the Słupsk Home appeared in the final report, despite the fact that she had asked the author for her data to be removed. “The state and level of the Home is a result of collective effort; I urge you not to mention me,” she wrote, see Archiwum Diecezji Koszalin´sko-Kołobrzeskiej (Archive of the Koszalin-Kołobrzeg Diocese), Kolekcja Zdzisława Machury (Zdzisław Machura’s archival collection, in the following: ADKK, KZM), MCH in Słupsk – sources, Remarks to the Report, p. 2. 63 The Słupsk Mother and Child Home was one of the first two homes (with the Łódz´ Home) in which the study was carried out. This is suggested by, for example, the contents of a letter to one of the researchers, Izabela Kuczkowska, of 12 September 1947. BUŁ, APISS, Correspondence dealing with the MCH study, April 1947–May 1948. 64 Manteuffel 1947, p. 50. 65 Ibid., p. 52. 66 There are two slightly different versions of the report on the inspection of the Mother and Child Home in Słupsk – one, from 28 January 1948, was sent to Aniela Urbanowicz with a request for corrections, and another, from February 1948, which had already been updated. The former can be found in the Archives of the Diocese of Koszalin-Kołobrzeg, in the Zdzisław Machura’s collection, the latter is part of the complete report for the Ministry of Labour and Welfare. The following footnotes come from the updated version. Report 1948b.

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which Manteuffel intended to become a role model and a place of training for the staff of other homes. The organisation and the relations in the Słupsk Home were the closest to the ideal model of such an institution drawn for the Ministry of Labour and Welfare (the theoretical model may also have been based to some extent on observations of the functioning of the Słupsk Home). As the Manteuffel’s report describes: “The attitude to the mothers, level of interaction and sentiment of the mothers to lonely infants could serve as an example for all Mother and Child Homes. This attitude is of the kind that in itself shapes the level of interaction. In this Home mothers differ markedly from mothers in many other homes in their cultured looks and conduct.”67

Unlike in other homes, the Słupsk mothers shared breast milk with orphaned infants without expecting to be compensated. Instead, which was also unusual at the time, all residents received an allowance they could spend, for instance, in the cooperative shop on the premises of the Home or in town, where they could go whenever they wanted. This was also the only home where the residents enjoyed self-government and could educate themselves, e. g. by attending evening classes.68 The mothers lived in exceptionally good conditions, despite having cramped quarters – until December 1947 the Home was temporarily located in a tenement house in the old centre of the town as its previously agreed huge building was still occupied by Soviet troops. Also the furnishings, according to the author, were characterised “by a high sense of aesthetics.”69 There was also a high degree of cleanliness and order: “toilets without any smell, bathrooms in a good condition”. The same was true the residents’ personal hygiene: “The children are not chafed, their skin is in a relatively good condition. The mothers look neat and less scruffy than in many other homes. […] The mothers are used to taking daily showers.”70 Positive comments were also made about the food: “The food is devoid of features of mass canteens, the dishes smell and taste like food from a good private kitchen.”71 The positive aspects of the Słupsk Home showed indirectly how the situation looked in other institutions of this kind in Poland. Indeed, the available descriptions of other homes point to their catastrophic infrastructural and organisational condition.

67 Report 1948b, p. 14. 68 Ibid., p. 17. 69 Ibid., p. 8. After arriving in Słupsk in late May 1945, Father Jan Zieja took charge of a building at Lelewela Street 58, intending to turn it into a Mother and Child Home. However, as the building was taken over by the Soviets, the Mother and Child Home was opened temporarily at Zamkowa Street 6, operating in this location until December 1947. Machura 2007, pp. 51– 52. 70 Report 1948b, p. 9. 71 Ibid., p. 8.

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222 women passed through the Słupsk Home by mid-February 1948.72 Who they were exactly is hard to say.73 Amid the 255 interviews conducted by the Łódz´ researchers, there are 12 questionnaires from Słupsk, which were the only questionnaires that were anonymised. Among the women selected for the interviews, three had been raped: one by a Soviet soldier, one at a railway station in Poznan´ by an unknown perpetrator and one by a tailor who was her acquaintance. The other women became pregnant in a variety of locations and circumstances, mostly in the so-called Recovered Territories.74 The fathers were, among other things: soldiers; members of civic militia; an employer’s son; a colleague from work; and a man met at a party.75 We should bear in mind, however, that the data come from the summer of 1947. It is therefore highly likely – as Manteuffel also wrote – that the social structure of the residents the circumstances of becoming pregnant had been earlier considerably different.76 Not everything in Słupsk worked the way the author of the guidelines for Mother and Child Homes would have wished, but suggested changes were accepted thoughtfully and did not “create any problems in the Home”.77 The mothers themselves regarded the institution highly. “The Słupsk Home is the most well-known Mother and Child Home. It is commonly believed to be the only home maintaining full discretion with regard to the mothers: so mothers from all over Poland come there, directed by their doctors or on their own initiative”.78 “Thanks to its traditions”, it was the only such facility that could admit mothers without prior referral from the local department of welfare. The common practice in Poland at the time differed. Manteuffel referred it to as the “official way of admission for mothers”. According to her this procedure was one of the main causes of the disfunction of the mother and childcare system in 72 Prywatne Archiwum Anieli Urbanowicz, (Aniela Urbanowicz’s archival collection, in the following: PAAU), MCH in Słupsk, files of residents, numerical list of “mothers” 1 IX 1945–17 II 1948. The list was prepared for the Manteuffel’s study. 73 In a note dated mid-1948, Urbanowicz also wrote: “290 women means so many dramas and sufferings and many times more various issues that are very difficult to solve”. Archiwum Archidiecezjalne w Warszawie (Archdiocesan Archive of Warsaw), Spus´cizna ks. Jana Ziei (Father Jan Zieja’s archival collection, in the following: AAW, SJZ), Lonely women, note of A. Urbanowicz about Słupsk Home, unpaginated. 74 This was a propagandist term used by Poland’s communist authorities to refer to the territories incorporated into Poland in 1945 and settled on a mass scale by Poles replacing Germans who either had fled or had been expelled. 75 BUŁ, APISS, MCH study. Questionnaires filled by the residents. Files 1 and 2. 76 To some extent, this tendency is confirmed by the memoirs of one of Father Jan Zieja’s collaborators, who also worked in Słupsk and often visited the MCH, and a piece of prose fiction by a friend of Aniela Urbanowicz. Minkowska 2017, pp. 27, 211–217; Krzywicka 2011, p. 200. 77 Report 1948b, p. 7. 78 Ibid., p. 11.

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Poland. She contrasted it with the way acted in Słupsk and called it “social system” in which the first contact with a woman was established by a Mother and Child Home. It was clear to her that a desperate mother would go first to such a place and not to a government office.79 In such policy a crucial role played a staff member responsible for conducting an interview with the mother upon her arrival and honestly assessing her family situation so that the care would respond to her individual needs. This approach corresponded with PISS effort to minimise the role of the so-called comprehensive care in favour of family mediation. As Manteuffel claimed “reconciliation with the family with some external help is sometimes possible and then the expensive stay in the institution can be avoided”.80 The fundamental difference, however, was that the Słupsk Home consistently insisted on the fact that both the childbirth and the stay in the home with the child should be anonymous, which was criticised by Polish Institute of Social Service. According to Institute’s social policy it would be impossible to recover the costs of care, be it from the child’s father or the parents who had abandoned their daughter because of an extramarital pregnancy. Manteuffel thus argued that whenever the costs of childbirth and the mother’s stay in the MCH could be passed on to the family, its staff should try to apply it.81 Though many women, especially in the first period after 1945, wanted to remain anonymous and actively sought anonymity. They were ready to travel across the country to find a place that would guarantee discretion. That is why many of the women who found themselves in the Słupsk Home came from distant parts of Poland. They must have known from various sources that this was where they would find the help they needed. The man who launched the Słupsk Mother and Child Home was Father Jan Zieja, who came to Słupsk in late May 1945 after spending several months in various regions of Germany. He went there voluntarily after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising, and had a short stay in Kraków, to provide spiritual support for Poles working as forced labourers. Zieja remained in Germany until the end of the war; it was also there that he encountered female forced labourers who gave birth to children under inhumane conditions as well as numerous women who had been raped by Soviet troops.82 Almost immediately after arriving in Słupsk, he strove to establish an institution where all pregnant women who, despite unfavourable circumstances, could have their babies and would be provided with loving care. It is worth noting that, in the very same town and a few weeks before the arrival of Father Zieja, the last German parish priest, Paul Gediga, had tried to 79 80 81 82

Manteuffel 1948, p. 60. Ibid., p. 60. Report 1948b, pp. 17–18. Zieja 1993, p. 161.

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defend local women against the Soviets by providing them shelter in the church. According to witnesses, the priest’s efforts were in vain. He was subsequently exiled to the East, where he died of exhaustion within a few weeks.83 Thus, Father Zieja arrived at a place where there was a pressing need and action had to be taken immediately.84 The institution he created was the first of its type in Poland. The idea for its founding was part of a broader project of creating an “ideal parish” which, in addition to providing pastoral care, would also organise cultural, educational and social activities.85 The institution was temporarily located at Zamkowa Street. Within a short period, the Home had to be furnished, staff hired and the work planned out. A document was drafted within a month, “An outline of the organisation of a care institution, Mother and Child Home in Słupsk” comprising 14 points describing the principles according to which the Home should operate.86 The institution was to be an autonomous entity, with its own statutes and legal personality; its task was to provide comprehensive care to every woman expecting a child, but unable “to bear and raise her child in her family”. The Home was conceived to accept all women, regardless of their marital status and the circumstances in which they became pregnant – “in a conscious and voluntary act, unconsciously or as a result of rape”. This open policy was in line with the principle that “every life conceived deserves respect, care and decent assistance from society”.87 According to the Home’s founding principles, a mother could stay there indefinitely, “as long as it is necessary for her and for her child”; moreover, a child born in the Home and abandoned by its mother “could stay in the Home until coming of age” (there were plans for a crèche, nursery school and boarding school for pupils). However, the mother was guaranteed the possibility of being able to take her child back at any time, which – as it turned out – was contrary to the new family law in Poland. The Home was to be maintained by voluntary donations from the residents, income from e. g. workshops, as well as various grants and subsidies. Its supervision fell under the Office of the Province Governor in Gdan´sk.88 Yet within just a few months, it turned out that the Home had problems self-financing. A partial nationalisation therefore became necessary, though it would continue to main-

83 Machura 2007, p. 21. 84 Babisiak 1946 (I would like to thank Dr hab. Marcin Zaremba for indicating this press article to me). 85 Machura 2007, pp. 15–16. 86 ADKK, no. 247, f. 81, Parish of Our Lady, Queen of the Most Holy Rosary in Słupsk, correspondence, various documents 1945–1947, “An outline of the organisation of a care institution, the Mother and Child Home in Słupsk”. 87 Ibid. 88 Following the change in administrative borders, from mid-1946 it was the Office of the Province Governor in Szczecin.

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tain some of its autonomy (including the right to accept residents without any referral and to maintain the residents’ anonymity).89 The whole initiative was widely publicised. From the very beginning the institution was to be open to the whole country and serve, on the one hand, as a model MCH, and on the other, as the central institution for a planned network. In the autumn of 1945, a promotional campaign was organised with a specially prepared leaflet (1,000 copies) being sent to “all priests, educators, doctors and midwives in Poland”.90 As the surviving documents suggest, the information about the founding of the Home was disseminated through various channels with the help of numerous private contacts. Letters were sent to all bishops in Poland.91 In addition, information appeared in the press, both in periodicals for the general public92 and in specialist journals for doctors.93 This resulted in an influx of women from all over Poland, above all, survivors of Soviet rapes. As mentioned above, this was against the common practice at the time. Here, women were supposed to apply to relevant institutions to obtain referrals to a Mother and Child Home, which made it possible to recover the cost of their stay and care provided to them. One year after the submission of materials documenting the MCH study, the Ministry of Labour and Welfare issued an ordinance stating that “occasionally, when the welfare of the women demands it, the costs of their stay in the home should not be recovered from their families or the relevant local authority but should be covered by the State Treasury”. The document also explains the reason behind such a change in the approach to the problem: “Cost recovery is often the reason why women who seek to change their address and do not want to reveal their temporary addresses to their families decide not to take advantage of the benefits provided by the home out of fear of an investigation and interview”.94 Thus it took state institutions almost five years to realize something was obvious to the founders of the Słupsk Home from the very beginning. However, by that time, Aniela Urbanowicz had ceased to be the manager of the MCH and Father Jan Zieja the Catholic parish priest in Słupsk. Both of them left the town in 89 ADKK, no. 247, f. 167, Parish of Our Lady, Queen of the Most Holy Rosary in Słupsk, correspondence, various documents 1945–1947, Father Jan Zieja’s letter to Bishop Edmund Nowicki, Apostolic Administrator in Gorzów of 31 January 1946. 90 ADKK, no. 247, f. 78. The leaflet was dated 14 September 1945. 91 AAW, SJZ, Lonely women, the list of episcopal curias to which letters concerning the Mother and Child Home were sent. Out of 19 letters sent, Zieja received five replies. 92 In 1945–1949 many articles about the work of the Mother and Child Home in Słupsk were published e. g. in Catholic periodicals as well as in regional and national newspapers, see PAAU, MCH in Słupsk, press cuttings. 93 S´la˛ska Gazeta Lekarska, 11 (1 November 1946), p. CXXXIII. 94 BUŁ, APISS, correspondence with the MLW, March 1947–July 1949, letter of the Ministry from 12 July 1949.

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the first half of 1949. For Anna Minkowska, this was above all a “capitulation” of the management to the relentless march of history, which in this case meant a radical change in the approach of the government to religious institutions.95 *** Letters from former residents, which Aniela Urbanowicz continued to receive for many years after leaving Słupsk, paint a picture of an extraordinary place. Women turned to it in despair, hoping to “disappear” or “hide” for a while in order to survive what was often the most difficult period of their lives. Many years later, as independent and happy mothers, women often wrote to express their gratitude to the person who had given them hope, sometimes acting against the law and the system, but in accordance with her own moral compass and abiding desire to help96. Herein, it seems, lay the secret of the unique place, which the first parish priest of Słupsk and his Warsaw associate managed to create. Despite having its challenges, the Home functioned for a few years according to the original idea of its founders, providing a breath of freedom to those who often felt fettered by their tragedy and promoting standards that went beyond the norms of the day. It relied on the trust and self-determination of the women, which was unique at the time. The informal social networks and private contacts of its creators gave the Home room for manoeuvre, allowing it to operate without having to make major compromises. In this sense, then, it is possible to see in the experiment of the Home a specific space of freedom. Mary Dresden Lane’s article, quoted at the beginning, gives the impression that it describes the reality of the Słupsk Home and yet, when the author visited Poland, the institution no longer existed in the described form. The IRO representative – despite her reservations – therefore appears to have allowed herself to be deceived by the communist propaganda. Translated by Anna Kijak

Manuscript Sources and Unpublished Works Archiwum Akt Nowych (Central Archives of Modern Records) Ministerstwo Zdrowia (Ministry of Health). Zarza˛d Główny Polskiego Czerwonego Krzyz˙a (Board of the Polish Red Cross).

95 Minkowska 2017, pp. 219–220. 96 PAAU, MCH in Słupsk, requests for admission; MCH in Słupsk, letters from mothers.

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Archiwum Archidiecezjalne w Warszawie (Archdiocesan Archive in Warsaw) Spus´cizna ks. Jana Ziei (Father Jan Zieja’s archival collection). Archiwum Diecezji Koszalin´sko-Kołobrzeskiej (Archive of the Koszalin-Kołobrzeg Diocese) Kolekcja Zdzisława Machury (Zdzisław Machura’s archival collection). Archiwum Pan´stwowe w Bydgoszczy (State Archive in Bydgoszcz) Zarza˛d Wojewódzki PCK w Bydgoszczy (Voivodeship Board of the Polish Red Cross). Archiwum Zarza˛du Głównego Polskiego Czerwonego Krzyz˙a (Board of the Polish Red Cross’s Archive). Biblioteka Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego (Library of the University of Lódz´) Archiwum Polskiego Instytutu Słuz˙by Społecznej (Polish Institute of Social Services archival collection): Manteuffel, Emilia: Wyniki pierwszych badan´ nad Domami Matki i Dziecka. Sprawozdanie tymczasowe (Results of the first MCH study. Preliminary report), typescript, Łódz´, October 1947. Manteuffel, Emilia: Dom Matki i Dziecka. Zadania, organizacja, wyniki (Mother and Child Home. Tasks, organisation, results), typescript, Łódz´ 1948. “Opieka nad matka˛ i dzieckiem małym” (Mother and childcare), Materials for a paper on mother and childcare, commissioned by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The paper was to have been presented at the SEPEG conference organised by Don Suisse in Otwock on 23–29 May 1948. Maria Szubert, Samotne matki (Single Mothers), typescript, Łódz´ 1950. Spus´cizna Heleny Radlin´skiej (Helena Radlin´ska’s archival collection): “Sprawozdanie z badan´ nad Domami Matki i Dziecka. Cze˛s´c´ I: wste˛p i wytyczne organizacyjne” (Report on the MCH study. Part I: introduction and organisational guidelines), typescript, Łódz´, April 1948. “Sprawozdanie z badan´ nad Domami Matki i Dziecka. Cze˛s´c´ II: wzorzec i opisy poszczególnych DMiD, Dom Matki i Dziecka w Słupsku” (Report on the MCH study. Part II: model and descriptions of the various MCH, MCH in Słupsk), typescript, Łódz´, April 1948. Prywatne Archiwum Anieli Urbanowicz (Aniela Urbanowicz’s archival collection)

Printed Sources and Literature Babisiak, Stanisław: Ne˛dze miasta Słupska, in: Ziemia Pomorska, 10 April 1946. Decree of 29 August 1945 on the procedure for declaring an individual dead, in: Journal of Laws 56 (1945), item 310. Decree of 22 January 1946. Family law, Journal of Laws, 1946, no 6, item 52 Halicka, Beata: Polski Dziki Zachód. Przymusowe migracje i kulturowe oswajanie Nadodrza 1945–1948, Kraków 2015. Kaczorowski, Aandrzej W.: W szarym domu, in: Biuletyn Instytutu Pamie˛ci Narodowej 11 (2010) pp. 57–64. Kozłowska, Urszula / Bulsa, Marek: Rozwój połoz˙nictwa na Pomorzu Zachodnim w latach 1945–1948, in: Problemy Piele˛gniarstwa 20/1 (2012) pp. 113–118.

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Krzywicka, Irena: Trzy wcielenia ksie˛dza Pafnucego, in: Teraz sie˛ nie umiera, Warszawa (2011), pp. 195–214. Lepalczyk, Irena: Domy Matki i Dziecka w badaniach z 1947 r., in: Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Paedagogica et Psychologica8 (1984) pp. 57–73. Lane, Marie D.: A Social Worker behind the Iron Curtain, in: New York Herald Tribune (13 August 1949 / AAN, ZG PCK, no. 244, p. 40). Lane, Marie D.: Mothers and children in Poland, in: New York Herald Tribune (15 August 1949 / AAN, ZG PCK, no. 244, p. 38). Machura, Zdzisław: Był tu ws´ród nas na słupskiej ziemi. Opowies´c´ o ks. Janie Ziei, Słupsk 2007. Minkowska, Anna: Pamie˛tnik: wspomnienia o ks. Ziei, Warszawa 2017. S´la˛ska Gazeta Lekarska, Organ Izby Lekarskiej S´la˛sko–Da˛browskiej i Wojewódzkiego Wydziału Zdrowia [Periodical of the Chamber of Physicians of Silesia and Da˛browa, and the Regional Health Department], ed. Albin Garbien´, Cieszyn 1945–1948. ´ ska, Helena: Sieroctwo. Zasie˛g i wyrównanie, Łódz´ 1946. Wojtyniak, Józef / Radlin Wróbel, Janusz: Na rozdroz˙u historii. Repatriacja obywateli polskich z Zachodu w latach 1945–1949, Łódz´ 2009. Zaremba, Marcin: Wielka Trwoga. Polska 1944–1947. Ludowa reakcja na kryzys, Kraków 2012. Zieja, Jan: Z˙ycie Ewangelia˛, spisane przez Jacka Moskwe˛, Paris 1993.

Barbara Klich-Kluczewska

Far from a Children’s Home. Adoption and the Question of Individual Agency in the People’s Republic of Poland*

“Since we had no children, I decided, with my husband, that we would take care of some child. […] With my husband and Mr Józef Szukała […] we went to the camp. I don’t remember the date, but this was more or less one week before the liberation of the camp […]. I wanted to take a girl from the camp. Because of a fear caused by the arrival of an SS patrol and persuaded by the prisoners, I decided to take the child that was indicated to me. From what the prisoners said, the child I was taking with me was called Kola. No one was able to say where he came from, how old he was or what his surname was. Some said that the child’s mother, wanting to find something to eat outside the barbed wire fence, went outside the camp and was shot by an SS patrol […] Kola was suffering from frostbite in his legs, his little body was nearly transparent, his belly was big – perhaps swollen. His eyes were red and not clear. There was a layer of caked scabs on his head. Having made the decision, I wrapped “Kola” in a shawl and took him out of the camp. […] In 1950 Kola began to attend primary school in Jawiszowice. When we wanted to enrol Kola in school, we had to submit a birth certificate issued by the district physician in Biała, Dr Motylewicz.”1

Emilia Klimczyk, who in 1960 told the story of her adopted son in the Auschwitz State Museum, did not reveal whether she formally adopted Kola. Nor do we learn what surname was put in his birth register issued in 1950. We can conjecture, however, that if the adoptive mother does not devote a single sentence to court formalities in her very detailed and extensive account of the life of Kola, who was already a teenager at the time, it is because she probably had nothing to do with them. She may not have thought it was necessary. Thus the case of Emilia and Kola becomes symptomatic of the thinking about adoption in Polish society as a * The paper has been written as part of the Polish National Science Centre-founded project no. 2014/15/G/HS3/04344 “Room for Manoeuvre in State Socialism: Between Adaptation and Experiment”. 1 Archiwum Muzeum KL Auschwitz (Archives of the Auschwitz Museum), “Os´wiadczenie złoz˙one kustoszowi Pan´stwowego Muzeum w Os´wie˛cimiu Szyman´skiemu Tadeuszowi przez Ob. Klimczyk Emilie˛”, Os´wiadczenia, vol. 12, pp. 48–49, 53, 2 August 1960 (I would like to thank Dr Marcin Jarza˛bek for pointing out to me the statements collected in the Archives of the Auschwitz Museum).

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private act of volition, an independent decision of the child’s adoption parents, put into practice, whenever possible, without the interference of state institutions. In this sense, the story of Kola’s adoption is not unique or characteristic only of wartime. What makes the story special is something entirely different: the honesty with which Emilia talks about her and her husband’s path to parenthood. Talking openly about Kola’s camp background they broke with the adoption taboo domintaed in twentieth-century Poland. Child adoption is a completely marginal phenomenon from the point of view of contemporary historiography devoted to Polish social and welfare policy. A phenomenon, which was usually based on a grassroot need of community activism, was largly hidden in the shadow of homes for children and infants set up to combat wartime and post-war orphanhood Taking into account the two types of children’s homes as well as emergency care shelters, there were between 34,000 (in 1980) to around 50,000 (in 1955 and 1960) children under institutional care in post-war Poland.2 Many of these institutions have been described in extensive monographs, which reinforces the message that care institutions had a monopoly on orphan care in People’s Poland.3 Yet around 20,000 children were raised annually in foster families alone. The popularity of this form of orphan care peaked after the Second World War (68,000 children in 1946) and declined in the 1970s (10,600 in 1975). In addition, the 1960s were marked by the emergence of so-called family group homes (rodzinne domy dziecka). Although in the first decade of their existence few were created, by 1980 their number rose to 112.4 Small family group homes emerged approximately two years after the Thaw. This development was also a kind of symbolic departure from the promotion of state-run children’s homes, which, from 1950, was to become the dominant method for dealing with the effects of post-war orphanhood and, as such, were subordinated to the social engineering of the Stalinist era.5 Although in practice such a monopoly was never achieved, after 1956 there was a frantic search for other mass-scale methods of dealing with a “problem” which, increasingly, had less the face of a wartime orphan than of an abandoned or neglected child (“social orphans”). Before 1989, a lot of research was already being conducted into family group homes, which led 2 Statistics show that the number of children in state-run children’s homes fell sharply – by nearly a half – in the second half of the 1970s (from 31,000 in 373 homes in 1971 to around 17,000 in 327 homes in 1982), which is explained on the one hand by a falling birth rate and on the other – by the development of other forms of care, see Maciaszkowa 1984. 3 See e. g. Baczewska 2017; Doman´ska 2015; Doman´ska 2009; Brenk 2017; Juz´wik 2015; Juz´wik 2016; Kołakowski 2010; Kołakowski 2012. 4 Kelm 1983, pp. 224, 226, table 13: A comparison of forms of child care in Poland. Other children as well as young people until the age of nineteen were put in care and education centres or juvenile detention centres, but they were not just natural or social orphans. 5 Cf. Henschel 2016a; Henschel 2016b; Jarosz 1998.

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to the publication of scholarly and popular studies.6 It may even seem that the number of the studies was disproportionately high in comparison with the overall number of family group homes.7 They were said to combine the advantages of a care institution (professional care, financial guarantees, supervision) with those of a family (strong and lasting emotional bonds). Nevertheless, its defining characteristics demonstrate the liminal nature of the institution, which, first of all, was neither a family, nor a formalized care institution.8 The research also emphasized that the number of children, which was not supposed to exceed ten (but in practice there were often fifteen or sixteen children per home), caused such a community to resemble a large family. The most important and, as the sources suggest, usually quintessential feature of the homes was that they were run by married couples who “raise children following family life models. […] In many homes the roles of mothers are performed by teachers, while their husbands, who work in various enterprises, play the role of fathers.”9 Characteristically, Polish family group homes generated a lot of interest and goodwill in society. The local and national press, newsreels and various artists were more than willing to highlight those who ran such homes. Interviews with heads of homes and pictures of happy children inspired hope in the fight against the everworsening image of the typically “oppressive children’s home”. Throughout the analysed period, there were various forms of adoption of children. Both formalised, or carried out in court, and non-formalised, or practised without any involvement of care and legal institutions. While foster families and family group homes were linked financially to social welfare institutions, in the case of adoption (including formalised adoption) there were no such permanent bonds. For scholars studying the mechanisms of childcare, this circumstance proved inconvenient, especially as it was exacerbated by social norms: “The knowledge of adoptive families and the situation they create for the children is rather limited. The question of adoption does not lend itself easily to research, because people adopting children usually – at least in our social reality – try to erase the fact of the adoption. […] As the adoptive families often wish for adoption not to be revealed, it is hard to determine the number of children to whom this form of care was provided.”10 6 See e. g.: Materiały z Konferencji 1986; Safjan 1983; Popławska 1985, Kelm 1976; Misiorny-Fitz 1977. 7 Maciaszkowa 1984, p. 308. 8 “The law does recognise family-type children’s homes as care and education facilities, but they are facilities of a unique kind. They are to ensure for the children conditions of care and upbringing close to those in natural large families; their basic function is to create a family life atmosphere for the children, provide the children with lasting emotional bonds and stability in life”, Safjan 1983, pp. 62–63. 9 Maciaszkowa 1984, p. 308. 10 Raczkowska 1983, p. 107.

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Every tenth mother who took advantage of the centres run by the Society of Friends of Children (Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Dzieci – TPD) pretended to be pregnant before then adopting a child from a home or a hospital, seeking hide the adoption and to present the child to family members and friends as her biological child.11 The tendency to hide adoptions is, according to researchers, one of the main reasons why only approximate statistical data about the subject are available in Poland. Based on data provided by the Ministry of Justice, the number of adoptions was estimated at about 3,000 a year and there were no major fluctuations. As a social practice, adoption generated, and still generates, a lot of controversy. Usually, it is perceived in terms of a set of social, legal, political and economic practices, characteristic of a given culture and historical period. These practices are used to transfer a child from one family to another, either within or outside of a given kinship group. Sometimes the transfer takes place between social groups that differed in class, ethnicity, nationality and religion.12 In specific circumstances, these practices may become particularly important. On the one hand adoption is used by the authorities to regulate fertility within one national group and contribute to the implementation of eugenic or even racist projects, but it is also occasionally used to promote family forms not typical of a given community. While historians point to symptoms of human trafficking and slavery in adoption practices, the main objective of the promotion and practice of adoption has usually been an altruistic need to help children deprived of sufficient family care and to support couples struggling with childlessness. This article aims to analyse adoptive actions that went beyond the centralised orphan care system in communist Poland, exemplified towards the end of the concerned period by overcrowded children’s homes. The focus is primarily on informal adoptions, particularly on those done in rural areas. These represent an extreme example of a phenomena that was virtually beyond state control and differ from the so-called modern models of upbringing promoted at the time. The interpretative framework is informed by the concept of liminality, which makes it possible to capture relatively obscure links between the above-mentioned social usually grassroots practices, and the central system of care management in Poland. Viewing the analysed actions as liminal, as functioning on the boundaries of the system, is more apt than the notions of room for manoeuvre, “space of

11 The numbers grew among mothers adopting the youngest children, see Archiwum Uniwersytetu Jagiellon´skiego (Jagiellonian University Archives), Wanda Klominek, “Rozwój dzieci adoptowanych w nowym s´rodowisku (badanie longitudinalne)”, doctoral dissertation manuscript, Kraków 1974, p. 26. 12 Homans 2018, pp. 1–2.

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independence” or “room for alternative care”,13 for this liminal sphere is a place where various “incompatible” cultural and institutional models could meet and interpenetrate.14 Thus this article shifts the focus from the central to the seemingly marginal. Above all, it demonstrates the true complexity of a world, which at first sight seems monolithic, by avoiding juxtapositions between the “world of the system / world of control” and the “world of freedom”. Liminality may also be interpreted in this context as the experience of an individual who internalises incompatible cultural models without always being aware of it. At this micro level I am interested primarily in the sense of agency of the various historical actors involved in the analysed practices: parents, children and, finally, experts. A whole range of practices characteristic of the forty-five-year period following the war, which could be described as formal or informal adoption, are either not directly captured in sources or we learn about them only from indirect sources. Although the transformation was slow, adoption became gradually institutionalised. It was launched on a broader scale in the early 1960s; however, it continued to avoid central control owing to its unique nature of a tabooed phenomenon that could arouse anxiety, embarrassment and fear. Limited central control over adoption was also linked to the social or grassroots (though still expert-based) nature of various initiatives. A special role was played here by the Society of Friends of Children’s Adoption Centres, which gradually became – alongside courts and care institutions – the main body determining who had the right to adopt and be adopted. The ultimate breakthrough came in the 1970s, when experts noted with satisfaction that “the involvement and help of a community organisation, the Society of Friends of Children, in the preparation of adoption is gradually replacing the previous practice of each family individually trying to adopt a child, going from one children’s home to another, from one hospital to another or using random intermediaries in trying to find an ‘orphan’ to adopt, which in some cases bordered on human trafficking. The organisation of adoption centres has largely put an end to such practices.”15

Here, Wanda Klominek, a distinguished pedagogue and founder of an Adoption and Care Centre at the Kraków branch of the Society of Friends of Children, is writing about suspicious practices. She refers to non-institutional activities as a result of which, on the basis of the existing social networks, contacts between adoptive mothers and biological mothers were established. This meant bypassing the officially recommended administrative path through childcare institutions 13 As I will demonstrate, “independent” actions concerning children are still subject to control and negotiation, for example on the local level, as one of the accepted ways of dealing with social problems. 14 Wojakowski 2013, p. 420. 15 Archiwum Uniwersytetu Jagiellon´skiego, Wanda Klominek 1974, p. 5.

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and, from the 1960s, also through the Adoption and Care Centres. According to a circular by the Ministry of Health of 7 December 1950, no. 84/50, managers of children’s homes, and mother and child homes, were in charge of applications from prospective adoptive parents of the youngest children (up to the age of three) and the establishment of contact between them and the child’s legal representative. In each case, the manager was obliged to send information about the applicants (especially their social background) to the Regional Advice Bureau for the Protection of Motherhood and Children’s Health (Wojewódzka Poradnia Ochrony Macierzyn´stwa i Zdrowia Dziecka).16 The Bureau had to conduct interviews with the candidates and present its opinion on whether adoption was in the interests of the child. Zygmunt Ziembin´ski, an eminent sociologist of law who studied nearly 800 adoption cases all over Poland in 1953–1954, said unequivocally in 1956 that the recommendations were to a large extent fiction and that judges almost never had the relevant opinions of the Bureau at their disposal. In addition, the queue of prospective parents was so long and the number of children qualified for adoption so low that those interested in adoption preferred to take the matter into their own hands. “It should be noted,” wrote Ziembin´ski, “that contacts between those wanting to adopt a child and those wanting to give up the child are in most case totally accidental (newspapers no longer accept adverts from people offering a child for adoption or wanting to adopt a child17). To illustrate how much blind fate is at play here, one could cite examples in which an adoptive mother learned about a child that could be adopted at the hairdresser’s or during a conversation while travelling by train. In one case the path to adoption began when the future adoptive mother prevented the biological mother from throwing her baby into the river. In another case the adoptive parent was the first person who found the child abandoned on stairs. There was also a story of the adoption of a child who had been given to the person concerned only for a moment to hold at a tram stop (a well-known trick making it easier to abandon a child with impunity).”18

However, in most cases the intermediaries between the biological mother and the future parents were nurses and midwives. Although Ziembin´ski did not condemn the practice, he did cite an example of a provincial midwife for whom helping desperate mothers was a source of additional regular income: “She dealt with several dozen children and would have probably continued her practice, if it had

16 Ziembin´ski 1956, pp. 106–107. 17 “I will adopt a 10-year-old girl, from good home, childless couple, possible inheritance, applications with photograph”, “I will give my 3-month-old girl, non-baptised, to good people”, “orphaned boy, one-year old, looking for a good family” – these are examples of advertisements published in the Kraków daily press in 1945 and 1946, see Klich-Kluczewska 2005, p. 96. 18 Ziembin´ski 1956, p. 106.

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not been for the fact that she also issued the women taking the child with a certificate that they had given birth to that child, which was soon discovered.”19 According to the scholar’s calculations, in three-quarters of cases in the mid1950s the encounter between the biological mother and adoptive parents, which ended in court, began through unofficial channels. In other words, the two sides had known each other earlier or come to know each other through third parties, including healthcare professionals. Conducting interviews in various parts of the country, the lawyer also observed an interesting practice of moving around the country in search of a child. In Kraków, he met prospective parents from Bygdoszcz and in Poznan´ he met future parents who ultimately found their child near Warsaw. Without a doubt, these “pilgrimages” stemmed from a need to hide any traces of adoption. Even stronger opinions were expressed against informal adoptions. Thanks to an emotional debate from the 1960s, in which a significant role was played by journalists as observers of court cases, we have fragments of accounts of social activities which generally remained outside the state welfare or education system. One of the most interesting phenomena of this type was the rural dochowaniec.20

“They wanted children, so they took them” “You can’t buy, but you can give away for free. A farmer watches, selects. This one will be good for herding. ‘Go with the farmer?’ asks the lady. ‘There are cows, horses in the country. The farmer has brought sausages for you – eat.’ The formalities were to be dealt with later and on that same day the boy saw for the first time the room where his bed would stand for the following ten years. He saw people who were to take him as one of their own.”21

The shocking article “Who wants an orphan?”, a piece of court reportage published in the mid-1960s in Gazeta Krakowska, told the dramatic story of a boy who was taken in by an elderly couple living in the countryside and totally unprepared for parenthood. Consent to the adoption was apparently given by the director of the children’s home and by the Municipal National Council. The author of the article criticized state institutions not interested in the fate of the boy, parental practices at odds with modern social norms and, finally, antiquated ideas about the role and rights of the child. The child was apparently deprived of his right to play and learn, and for ten years forced to work hard on the farm. The 19 Ibid., p. 105. 20 A person who has been informally adopted as child in exchange for work and a guarantee of inheritance of new parents’ farm (or part of) it in the future. 21 Magdon´ 1965, p. 5.

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farmers were “sloppy” and “old” and the boy had to live in conditions that were an affront to common decency. A similar, though not identical theme of what was described as “rural slavery” appeared at the time in, among others, an article by the well-known Kraków journalist Anna Stron´ska. Also with great pathos, she described the story of Anna Borczyk from Kleszczowa as well as the Niepołomice story of “household workers” with mental disabilities, whose care was passed on to a man from his father, along with a farm: “Andrzej Czuma, residing at Kolejowa 42, has inherited from his father farm buildings and 4.58 ha of land. There are also two household workers to be kept by him in perpetuity; they are Bronisłwa Nadel, aged about 70, who has been working on the farm since her childhood, and her son Wojciech Nadel, aged about 40, mute and retarded. Both do the hardest jobs, they are treated by the farmer worse than animals, they are beaten, kicked around in an inhumane way. They are hungry, wear very shabby clothes and get bitten by lice, but they cannot complain to anybody.”22

In both stories, which, significantly, were based on ongoing court cases, the loneliness, innocence and helplessness of the wards are contrasted with the ruthlessness and primitivism of their adoptive carers. These persuasive accounts, which unequivocally denounce the “evil reality”, reveal the dominant idea in urban culture of the socially acceptable fate of children left without family care. Indirectly, they shed light on a hidden world that was in no way compatible with the ideological or conceptual model of the urbanising Polish society of the day. Aside from the tragic consequences of the adoptions described above, both articles present to the public a unique, forgotten, distinct and, to some extent even parallel social reality. This reality closely associated with the traditional forms of rural ownership and the functioning of the rural family. As Stron´ska describes, Bronisława Nadel found herself at the Czumas’ when she was eight years old, which was in the early twentieth century. We also know that she was not paid for her work. Instead, the old Czumas promised her a piece of land in her old age, but “somehow they did not get around to transferring it (to her).”23 Anna Borczyk, the other victim whom Stron´ska “discovered” in 1953, had been working in exchange for bed and board. Her documents, however, were still at her parents’ home in a neighbouring village. Both of these cases are typical. Representing an exception is the boy brought to the countryside from a care institution. People from rural areas looking for a child to bring up in this way were in fact quite rare. “Uncovering” the still present phenomena of informal adoptions of children in Polish villages in the 1960s was not solely a domain of socially engaged journalists. Other professionals asked questions about the fate of rural orphans. 22 Stron´ska 1965, pp. 15–30. 23 Ibid., p. 18.

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For instance, lawyers made inquiries in the context of questions about social acceptance of the existing legal norms and attitude towards employment of juveniles, and sociologists and ethnologists investigated in the context of research into the family and upbringing. All the experts mentioned above ultimately sought to solve the puzzle of the tiny number of formal adoptions of children in Polish villages.24 At more or less the same time as the press in the Małopolska region25 reported on the abuses of informal adoptions in rural areas, a young sociologist, Włodzimierz Wincławski, took a job at a school in the small village of Ciche Górne in the Podhale region, in the mountains. While he worked as the headmaster of the village school, he conducted research for his doctoral dissertation devoted to the fate of children in rural areas.26 In his notes from field studies conducted in 1966, he wrote without much surprise: “The adoption of children is fairly common (about ten children at our school). Children are adopted by childless couples from couples with many children as well as by lonely elderly people running farms and still physically fit. It turns out that in most cases they are not guided by their feelings but by their needs – children are needed as workers. This is evidenced by a conversation with the grandfather of Krystyna […] (from form four): ‘Sir, do something about Krys´ka, because she doesn’t study at home.’ ‘Alright, I’ll tell her she should be ashamed that her grandfather has to complain about her.’ ‘Oh no, don’t tell I was here, ’cause she’d go to her mother and it’s spring and we need help.’ On the other hand the girl’s mother has told me that her daughter works a lot at her grandparents’, but they cannot take her, because the situation at home is hard (it has to be said that the father has a weakness for liquor).”27

Similar, though much later and indirect, evidence can be found in accounts used in ethnographic research conducted in rural areas: “There were cases,” recalled a 56-year-old man from a village near Przemys´l in 1986, “when a strange child was taken in by a family as its own; when parents had no children and wanted children, they took them, and if they took them, they had to take care of them and not harm them, and then leave their property to their adopted child, and sometimes such children beat up their parents, when the children were bad, this could

24 Among the adoption cases studied by Andrzej Stelmachowski in 1951 only 18.1 % concerned rural families, see Stelmachowski 1957, p. 242. 25 Malopolska region is located in southern Poland with Kraków as the main city. 26 The doctoral dissertation was published as a book in 1971, see Wincławski 1971. 27 Archiwum Muzeum Tatrzan´skiego (Tatra Museum Archives), Zakopane, no. AR/NO/7 “Materiały socjologiczne z Cichego 1958–1969, Włodzimierz Wincławski”, Note of 5 May 1966.

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happen. They took such children from strangers, from large families, for a few zlotys or even for free, if the family couldn’t afford to feed the child.”28

However, in ethnographic studies we will find more on the significance and assessment of the social phenomenon in question than on the specific period in which it occurred or on its intensity. Wincławski’s notes, first of all, point directly to a concrete historical fact. But they also, thanks to detailed data on the numerous and very heavy duties of all underage inhabitants of the village, soften the picture of adopted children being ruthlessly made to work on the farm. In his notes, Wincławski used the term adoption, which was reserved at the time, however, for formal adoptions. The more appropriate term in this case appears to be the traditional term, used in rural communities, of dochowaniec or wychowaniec. Deeply rooted as it is in rural tradition, the term is much better at conveying the specificity of the phenomenon. The term was also used by lawyers, judges and barristers in the 1950s and 1960s when dealing with the problem of adoption, not only in court, but also in the study of family law. Taking in dochowan´cy – foster children who in exchange for helping at the farms of neighbours or relatives acquired the right to inherit it in the future – had a very long tradition. The strength of the custom was also evidenced by the sanctioning of the phenomenon in nineteenth-century Galicia, in Article 186 of the Austrian Civil Code. Yet the phenomenon did not fit in with modern adoption, which in Poland stemmed from a 1939 act of parliament and whose incontestable basis was the welfare of the child.29 Dochowan´cy, on the other hand, were associated primarily with the economic needs of farms and their fate was linked to the exploitation of children found in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century law codes.30 “It would be too much of an oversimplification, if we said that the welfare of the child did not play any role and that the egoistic interests of those taking the child in came to the fore,” wrote Andrzej Stelmachowski about 28 Os´rodek Dokumentacji i Informacji Etnograficznej Instytutu Etnologii i Antropologii Kultury Uniwersytetu Jagiellon´skiego (Ethnographic Documentation and Information Centre, Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University), Archiwalne Materiały Terenowe (Archive Field Materials) 8143 (1986), Przemys´l region, witness b. 1931; similarly see ibid., Archiwalne Materiały Terenowe 8111 (1986) Krosno region, witness P.K., 1986: “If the family was decent, they took such a child in, if they knew the child was milling around alone, all the more so.” 29 However, the Act of 13 July 1939 did maintain adoption restrictions stemming from the prospective parents’ religion and marital status, see Walaszek 1966, p. 33. 30 The example given was the Prussian Land Law of 1794 under which after the age of fourteen a child had to work for free for the benefit of those who had brought him up for the number of years he or she had been kept by them. A similar approach could apparently be found in nineteenth-century legislation supplementing the Austrian Civil Code, e. g. a decree of 1813 whereby those brining up foundlings had a right to use them as labour until they were 22, see Stelmachowski 1957, p. 240.

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dochowan´cy in 1956. “Nevertheless, it can be assumed as a matter of certainty that the interest of the child was not the only interest. Those taking the child in usually counted on its help on the farm and even if they took the child in when the child was still little, they had this moment in mind.”31 Thus dochowan´cy, who already in the inter-war period were interpreted as an irrelevant social phenomenon, could in no way find a place in the world of socialist family relations. But, they existed nevertheless. Their distinct status as strengthened by the fact that the relation between the dochowaniec and the adoptive family existed outside the law. For in communist Poland, there were no positive legal norms regulating their rights and responsibilities.32 Stelmachowski also admitted that he knew no reliable statistical data that would make it easier to estimate the number of such people or to determine unequivocally whether this institution was declining or was still going strong. “In any case,” he wrote, “at the moment the problem of wychowan´cy does exist and concerns a relatively high number of people living in rural areas.”33 Władysław Patulski explored the seemingly inaccessible, diffuse world of dochowan´cy in the greatest detail. Later a long-time Supreme Court judge, in the 1960s he was a young lawyer assisting in court cases dealing with unregulated property matters in rural areas. He decided to examine the situation of informal adoption at the source. In 1965 and 1966, when working on his doctoral dissertation, he set out to a region near Bochnia. He came himself from Radłów, located several dozen kilometres away, and may have already encountered dochowan´cy in his home village. Thanks to his detailed doctoral dissertation, which was based on an analysis of three gromadas in the District of Bochnia (Bogucice, Lipnica Murowana and Trzciana), we now have a unique opportunity to take a close look at social practices that were marginalised in the public discourse and even regarded as dying off, and to discover the specificity of the material world and the world of values of dochowan´cy and their carers. His peregrinations across over one hundred villages in Małopolska contributed to a radical change in his personal views on the rural community. The results of his field studies differed so much from the results of his analysis of court cases that, in the end, Pałuski experienced an epiphany as a researcher, as it were:

31 Stelmachowski 1957, pp. 238, 253–254. In stressing the need to solve the problem of wychowan´cy (dochowan´cy) in Poland, the author referred to the experiences of the USSR, where, owing to a considerable number of informal adoptions, a law was introduced, making it mandatory to pay maintenance for children who had been taken in to be raised. 32 Archiwum Uniwersytetu Jagiellon´skiego, Włodzimierz Patulski, Pozycja społeczno – prawna dochowan´ca na Ziemi Krakowskiej, doctoral dissertation manuscript, Kraków 1967, Faculty of Law, no. 41/68, pp. 1–2. 33 Stelmachowski 1957, p. 242.

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“Community studies, especially direct interviews with dochowan´cy, farmers and field activists, have enabled me to look differently at the institution of dochowaniec and change my mind with regard to a demand for it in society. Before, judging from my court practice, I was rather prejudiced with regard to its relevancy, considering it to be a harmful relic of the previous era making it possible to exploit underage, underdeveloped and generally vulnerable individuals. This was obviously associated with dozens of actions I dealt with, actions brought by dochowan´cy, which, like a number of other court cases, were a pathological phenomenon, presenting people’s lives in a slightly distorted mirror.”34

Even if we assume that the scholar was a bit uncritical in trusting his interviewees, from today’s point of view Patulski’s unpublished study makes a strong case for decriminalizing the rural practice of informal adoptions. Patulski was determined to find out how many dochowan´cy were living in Polish villages and why young people continued to “assume the duties of a dochowaniec and remain in such a status for many years, if since the Liberation it has been possible to find the right job in the communalised economy or to obtain education at the State’s expense in all kinds of schools.”35 First, he collected the documentation of 101 cases concerning dochowan´cy, heard before the district court in Bochnia. Next, he prepared a questionnaire, on the basis of which he conducted interviews with 130 social workers, activists and rural officials. Finally, using the information obtained during the interviews, he compiled a list of 280 dochowan´cy living (as it later turned out) fairly peaceful lives in 131 villages of the District of Bochnia, as well as a list of 480 former dochowan´cy, 82 % of whom did receive the promised plots of land from their adoptive parents (farmers). This high number of dochowan´cy amazed Patulski, because this meant that there was at least one dochowaniec in every village. In one village, he even talked to as many as four of them. And none refused to speak with him. In the villages he visited, the lawyer observed a number of non-codified, quasiadoption social practices. Dochowan´cy in the strict sense of the term (i. e. people taken in by families as family members in exchange for work and also promised to receive the farm or a part of it in the future), lived and worked alongside orphans brought up accidentally in rural families as well as adult domestic “servants” who became close with their employers’ families. A special group of dochowan´cy “for life” was made up of individuals “of limited mental capabilities, mentally ill, cripples, physically subnormal, taken in grudgingly, as it were, by the farmers and in exchange for their not very effective work received only food, clothes and accommodation”.36 It was precisely those from this last vulnerable

34 Archiwum Uniwersytetu Jagiellon´skiego, Włodzimierz Patulski, op. cit. p. 12. 35 Ibid., p. 3. 36 Ibid., p. 6.

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group who were typically the subjects of the harrowing articles published in the press. Although the form of the word dochowaniec suggests that mostly boys were taken in, in practice the majority of the dochowan´cy were girls (63 % in the analysed group). When Patulski visited the villages, he was directed to forty children who were not yet thirteen, including no fewer than twenty-five who were under seven. In addition, he visited eighty-eight teenagers and ninety-seven adults aged between nineteen and sixty. Although he expected to find more older dochowan´cy of both sexes (over the age of sixty-one), he found only thirty of them in the villages around Bochnia. A simple calculation would suggest that 55 % of these individuals had been taken in the Stalinist period and in 1955–1965 (including a fairly large group in 1956–1960), and only 38 % before the Second World War, which hardly suggested that the phenomenon was fading. Given that there were 3,500,000 individual farms in Poland, Patulski, after contacting judges and lawyers from all over the country, estimated the number of dochowan´cy at a dozen or so up to even thirty thousand, taking into account only individual farms from the Province of Kraków as well as provinces with a similar structure of agriculture, that is Kielce, Lublin and Rzeszów. What he found particularly interesting was the fact that the number of adopted children had not declined for fifteen years in the district, although the rural population had decreased in that period both in the district and in the country as a whole by about 15 %.37 The public debate about informal adoptions was governed by a conflict of values. It would be hard, however, to find similar tensions in the everyday experiences recorded in the sources. This obviously does not mean that there were no such tensions. In the case of the Patulski’s questionnaires, which were written with an aim to reconstruct the social ideas of legal norms, individual disappointments and internal family conflicts may have easily escaped his attention. Contrary to Patulski’s assumption, conflicts did not necessarily have to concern the relations between the farmer and the adopted child. What could be interpreted as a suggestion of the causes of the break-up of the rural adoption system in the late socialist period, is one of the memories from the Podhale region collected by Wincławski for the purpose of his research. Stefania Kołtas´, born shortly after the war in Witów and from 1969 headmistress of the school in Ciche, wrote in her diary: “In the sixth and seventh form I dreamed of continuing my education. And here I came up against problems posed by my parents. They wanted to give me to my uncle, who wanted to take me in, giving me 5 ha of land. I didn’t want to agree, saying that I would get a scholarship at school and that I wanted to continue my education. I said that when I finished school, I would return to the farm. However, the neighbours often talked with 37 Ibid., p. 31.

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my parents that I would be fine at the farm and that my parents wouldn’t have to pay for me. Throughout the year (seventh form) I helped my uncle at the farm. In the morning I would milk the cows, carry the milk to the dairy and go to school. After returning from school, I would work on the fields, manage the cows, clean my uncle’s house and in the evening I would start doing my homework. Yet despite having so many things to do, I had very good grades at the end and received a prize.”38

While the practice of giving children away to be raised may have been undermined by increasingly strong intergenerational tensions (as is evidenced by the above account), during the first twenty-five years after the war there were important factors contributing to the sustainability of traditional practices of adoption. They included above all the decreasing number of people living in villages and also of family members who could help on small farms often lacking sufficient equipment. This was also why it is difficult to compare the informal quasi-adoptions in rural areas with the formal adoptions in cities. Adopting a village child as a dochowaniec played a complex social role within the rural community. In addition, it was not encumbered with the taboo typically surrounded adoption. The handover of a child from one family to another was known to everyone in the village where the transfer took place. Usually children found their way (or were given) to close or distant relatives, or even strangers, but they were, in any case, from the same village. Occasionally, “unknown” children – that is children from another village or care facility – were accepted.39 Both the child’s parents and the new caregivers/guardians took care of family interests in this way. For instance, elderly relatives, often ailing and childless or abandoned by their own children, not only got help with the farm, but the assurance that someone would take over the land after they died. An excellent illustration of such an understanding is presented by a conversation with a woman from Brzez˙any, who farmed some eight acres of land, which was recorded by Włodzimierz Wincowski: “‘How do you manage without a man[?]’ ‘It’s hard for the moment, but I’ve taken in [the neighbours’] daughter, who is 17, and I’ll leave everything to her and there’ll be a man in the house’.”40

Relatives guaranteed that the child would be provided for, which the parents were not able to ensure. This was also a way of solving the problem of orphans and illegitimate children. Sometimes after both parents died, their children would be immediately adopted by different farmers. Patulski’s interviews with social

38 Archiwum Muzeum Tatrzan´skiego, Zakopane, no. AR/NO/7 “Materiały socjologiczne z Cichego 1958–1969, Włodzimierz Wincławski”, p. 4 (f. 244). 39 Archiwum Uniwersytetu Jagiellon´skiego, Włodzimierz Patulski, op. cit., pp. 47, 54. 40 Archiwum Muzeum Tatrzan´skiego, Zakopane, no. AR/NO/7, op. cit., f. 53.

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workers and local activists do not suggest that they saw this practice as contradicting the state’s social policy. The quasi-adoption practices in rural areas were distinguished by the fact that they functioned outside of the centrally controlled childcare system and family law. We cannot exclude the possibility that the local authorities and representatives of the welfare and education systems interfered in the mechanisms of informal adoptions, yet, so far, the sources do not indicate that their role was particularly active. On the other hand, members of Municipal National Councils, village heads or teachers, not to mention priests, were probably very well informed of the dense network of mutual dependence in rural families, which included the dochowan´cy. It was no coincidence that Patulski expressed his gratitude to the local authorities, which helped him to fairly quickly collect the necessary data about all cases in the villages that were of interest to him. By contrast, the informal rural adoptions were based on a different system of values, in which a leading role was played by the rural community and the farm. But the system, too, was growing increasingly incompatible with a modern (here primarily bureaucratic) world governed by the now-formalised division into natural orphans, social orphans, adoptive families, foster families, children’s homes, etc. Dochowan´cy were not necessarily orphans or half-orphans. In fact, a village child handed over to neighbours to be raised because of overcrowding or poverty could be categorised as a social orphan, although the term does not seem to precisely convey the nature of the relations between the child, on the one hand, and the child’s old and new family, on the other. In the case of informal adoptions in rural areas, we are thus dealing with a very clear interpenetration of very different cultural models associated with ambivalent classifications and judgements. This phenomenon was an important liminal zone of the care system and a constant point of reference for the dominant models. In this instance, liminality was linked to a clash between modernity, defined by the rights of the child, including primarily the right to education and personal development, and traditional values, primarily encompassing the needs of the rural community. Translated by Anna Kijak

Archives Archiwum Muzeum KL Auschwitz (Archives of the Auschwitz Museum) Os´wiadczenie złoz˙one kustoszowi Pan´stwowego Muzeum w Os´wie˛cimiu Szyman´skiemu Tadeuszowi przez Ob. Klimczyk Emilie˛, Os´wiadczenia, vol. 12, 2 August 1960.

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Archiwum Muzeum Tatrzan´skiego (Tatra Museum Archives) Zakopane, no. AR/NO/7 “Materiały socjologiczne z Cichego 1958–1969, Włodzimierz Wincławski”, Note of 5 May 1966. Archiwum Uniwersytetu Jagiellon´skiego (Jagiellonian University Archives) Wanda Klominek, Rozwój dzieci adoptowanych w nowym ´srodowisku (badanie longitudinalne), doctoral dissertation manuscript, Kraków 1974. Włodzimierz Patulski, Pozycja społeczno– prawna dochowan´ca na Ziemi Krakowskiej, doctoral dissertation manuscript, Kraków 1967, Faculty of Law, no. 41/68. Os´rodek Dokumentacji i Informacji Etnograficznej Instytutu Etnologii i Antropologii Kultury Uniwersytetu Jagiellon´skiego (Ethnographic Documentation and Information Centre, Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Jagiellonian University) Archiwalne Materiały Terenowe (Archive Field Materials) 8143 (1986), Przemys´l region, witness b. 1931. Archiwalne Materiały Terenowe 8111 (1986) Krosno region, witness P.K., 1986.

Literature Baczewska, Narcyza: Domy dziecka w województwie s´la˛skim w latach 1945–1950, doctoral thesis defended at the Institute of History, Silesian University, Katowice 2017. Brenk, Mikołaj: Wychowanie socjalistyczne w domach dziecka w pierwszych latach Polski Ludowej (1944–1953), in: Nawrot-Borowska, Monika / Zaja˛c, Dariusz (eds.): Dziecko i dziecin´stwo. Wybrane konteksty badan´, Bydgoszcz 2017, pp. 105–113. ´ ska, Joanna M.: Domy dziecka na Warmii i Mazurach w latach 1945–1989, Lublin Doman 2015. ´ ska, Joanna M.: Przemiany organizacyjne domów dziecka w latach 1945–1989, in: Doman Zeszyty Naukowe Akademii Marynarki Wojennej 178/3 (2009), pp. 133–144. Dowlasz, Grzegorz: Legenda domu przy ulicy Ma˛cznej, Warszawa 1965. Henschel, Frank: A Project of Social Engineering. Childhood–Experts and the ‘Child– Question’ in Socialist Czechoslovakia, in: Acta Historica Universitatis Silesianae Opaviensis 2016, pp. 143–158. Henschel, Frank: Children’s Homes in Socialist Czechoslovakia as Laboratories of Social Engineering, in: Bohemia 1 (2016), pp. 122–144. Homans, Margaret: “Introduction”, in: Adoption and Culture 1 (2018), pp. 1–4: Critical Adoption Studies, Ohio State University Press. Jarosz, Dariusz: Główne kierunki działalnos´ci pan´stwa w zakresie stalinizacji wychowania dzieci w Polsce w latach 1948–1956, in: Mazowieckie Studia Humanistyczne 2 (1998), pp. 105–140. Juz´wik, Aleksander: Robotnicze Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Dzieci w latach 1944–1949. Funkcjonowanie i problem ideowo–organizacyjne, in: Polska 1944/45–1989. Studia i Materiały (2015), pp. 15–27. Juz´wik, Aleksander: Placówki opieki całkowitej i otwartej Robotniczego Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Dzieci i Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Dzieci w latach 1945–1952, in: Polska 1944/ 45–1989. Studia i Materiały (2016), pp. 5–28. Kelm, Albin: Rodzinny dom dziecka na dorobku, in: Dom Dziecka 1959/11.XI, p. 17.

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Kelm, Albin (ed.): Odzyskane domy rodzinne. Z dos´wiadczen´ rodzinnych domów dziecka w Polsce Ludowej, Warszawa 1976. Kelm, Albin: Formy opieki nad dzieckiem w Polsce Ludowej, Warszawa 1983. Klich-Kluczewska, Barbara: Przez dziurke˛ od klucza. Z˙ycie prywatne w Krakowie 1945– 1989, Warszawa 2005. Kołakowski, Andrzej: Opieka nad dzieckiem osieroconym w województwie gdan´skim w latach 1945–1956, Gdan´sk 2010. Kołakowski, Andrzej: Reorientacja celów wychowanie dzieci osieroconych w Polsce po II wojnie s´wiatowej w s´wietle czasopis´miennictwa pedagogicznego PRL, in: Przegla˛d Pedagogiczny 21/1 (2012), pp. 127–138. Maciaszkowa, Janina: Problemy opieki nad dzieckiem w 40–leciu PRL, in: Problemy opiekun´czo-wychowawcze 7 (1984), p. 308. ´ , Andrzej: Komu sierote˛?, in: Gazeta Krakowska 1965/244, p. 5. Magdon Mateˇjcˇek, Zdeneˇk: Wioska dziecie˛ca jako nowa forma zaste˛pczej opieki rodzinnej w Czechosłowacji, in: Zagadnienia Wychowawcze a Zdrowie Psychiczne 4–5 (1973), pp. 23–55. Materiały z ogólnopolskiej konferencji pos´wie˛conej dos´wiadczeniom rodzinnych domów dziecka w Polsce Ludowej, Warszawa 1986. Misiorny–Fitz, Maria: Rodzinne domy dziecka, in: Problemy opiekun´czo-wychowawcze 2 (1977), p. 7. Popławska, Wanda: Osobliwy dom rodzinny, in: Problemy opiekun´czo-wychowawcze 8 (1985), pp. 382–383. Raczkowska, Jadwiga: Kiedy rodzina zawiedzie, Warszawa 1983. Safjan, Marek: Osamotnione dzieci. Rodziny zaste˛pcze i rodzinne domy dziecka, Warszawa 1983. Skrzydło-Tefelska, Ewa: Rodzinne domy dziecka. Historia, załoz˙enia ogólne, organizacja, in: Nowe Prawo 6 (1980), p. 53. Smith, Mark: Rethinking Residential Child Care: Positive Perspectives, Bristol 2009. Stelmachowski, Andrzej: Przysposobienie w polskim prawie rodzinnym, Warszawa 1957. ´ ska, Anna: Niewolnicy z Niepołomic. Reportaz˙e, Kraków 1965. Stron Telka, Lucyna: Rodzinne domy dziecka – zarys historyczny, in: Studia Pedagogiczne. Problemy społeczne, edukacyjne i artystycyne 11 (1996), pp. 47–55. Walaszek, Bronisław: Przysposobienie w polskim prawie rodzinnym oraz w polskim prawie mie˛dzynarodowym prywatnym i procesowym, Warszawa 1966. Wincławski, Włodzimierz. Przemiany s´rodowiska wychowawczego wsi peryferyjnej: studium wioski Ciche Górne powiatu nowotarskiego, Warszawa 1971. Wojakowski, Dariusz: Kłopoty z pograniczem. Socjologia wobec tradycji i ponowoczesnos´ci, in: Zeszyty Naukowe Politechniki S´la˛skiej 65 (2013), pp. 419–431. ´ ski, Zygmunt: Podłoz˙e społeczne przysposobienia dziecka w Polsce Ludowej, Ziembin Warszawa 1956.

Maria Buko

Repressed Personality – Privacy as a Room for Manoeuvre of Sybiraks in the Polish People’s Republic*

In Poland, the term Sybiraks (Sybiracy) is commonly used to refer to people sentenced, as part of Soviet political repressions, to exile or forced labour in the Gulag system (Glavnoe Uprvlenie Lagerei – Main Camp Administration). Poles were one of the nationalities deported to special settlements from the territories incorporated into the USSR after the outbreak of the Second World War. It is estimated that, in the years from 1928–1953, twenty-five million people passed through the Gulag system.1 Between January 1940 and June 1941, a period during which four “peaks” of activity can be identified2, around 320,000 Polish citizens were deported from the eastern regions of the Second Polish Republic, which was annexed by the USSR. The Gulag system was formally set up in 1929.3 It comprised prisons, forced labour camps and so-called special settlements, where individuals were forced to live. Not only was the Gulag system used to terrorise society, but, through forced labour, it became a tool for supporting the quickest possible implementation of Stalin’s plans of collectivising agriculture and industrialising the USSR. The system covered the entire territory of the USSR: “The Gulag’s most famous camps were in Siberia and the far North, where prisoners worked in mines and cut timber. But… from Aktyubisk to Yakutsk, there is hardly a single major population centre in the former Soviet Union that did not have its own local camp or camps, or a single industry that did not employ prisoners.”4

The system was formally dissolved in 19575 after the events of the Thaw6, but until the very end of the USSR convicts were put into the remaining prisons and * This paper has been written as part of the Polish National Science Centre-founded project no. 2014/15/G/HS3/04344 “Room for Manoeuvre in State Socialism: Between Adaptation and Experiment”. 1 Figes 2007, p. xxxi. 2 Sword 1994, p. 15. 3 Applebaum 2003, p. 50. 4 Applebaum 2011, p. ix. 5 Applebaum 2003, p. 510.

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government opponents were politically persecuted. In this sense the Gulag, as a system terrorising society, continued to function for some time. It was not until the era of perestroika (a period of reforms started by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985), when political prisoners were freed and rehabilitated, that the Gulag ceased to be a taboo and people began to talk and write about it. This nearly half-century-long moratorium on any discourse concerning Soviet repressions resulted in a limited presence of the topic in the Western discourse (and the collective imagination). As a consequence, until then concentration camps and mass repressions were associated primarily with the Holocaust. The victims of the Soviet repressions therefore felt deprived of their right to speak and commemorate their own experiences. People who managed to return to the Polish People’s Republic from forced labour camps or exile had no possibility of publicly communicating their experiences and identity. For several decades, their experience was taboo: there was no place to speak about it in the official discourse, urban space, clubs or associations. It might, therefore, be surprising to learn that in the late 1980s the government of the Polish People’s Republic finally gave its consent to the founding of the Association of Home Army Soldiers – Former Labour Camp Prisoners (Zwia˛zek Byłych Łagierników Z˙ołnierzy AK), and even to the organisation of an official congress of the survivors featuring several hundred participants. It was also at that time that the Association of Sybiraks (Zwia˛zek Sybiraków) was revived.7 Obviously, these organisations did not emerge overnight; the Sybiraks had remained in touch with each other for many years and were simply waiting for an opportunity to officially express their identity. However, where and how did they manage to survive for such a long time, manoeuvring not so much against the space provided by the Polish People’s Republic, but within it? The present article defines the private sphere – the closest circle of relations (family as well as friends with similar experiences) – as a room for manoeuvre which enabled former camp prisoners and exiles to cultivate their identity for decades.

6 The period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were relaxed due to Nikita Khrushchev’s policies of de-Stalinization. 7 The association that was revived in the 1980s continued the tradition of the interwar’s Association of Sybiraks – back then it referred to Poles who returned from Russia after 1918.

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Methodology and theoretical context In any study of privacy, finding sources is always a challenge. The present analysis is based on personal sources – specifically, oral history interviews and published memoirs created as soon as possible after the experience in question. This means that the interviews in the analysis are first of all accounts that were recorded in the late 1980s and early 1990s and kept in the so-called Eastern Archive, a documentary project initiated in 1987 by the contributors of the “KARTA” association. The testimonies are those that originated in the Polish People’s Republic and were primarily in secret circulation. The accounts collected in the Eastern Archive are not biographical but thematic interviews; as such, they contain little information about what happened before and after a key biographical event. In addition, those whose stories were recorded did not necessarily intend to reflect on their life, but, rather, to provide additional information about Soviet repressions. Their value lies in the fact that they were recorded before the topic of Soviet labour camps was officially included as part of the Polish remembrance policy. They are therefore devoid of martyrdom. The survey of the Eastern Archive is complemented by a survey of the Oral History Archive of the History Meeting House and the KARTA Centre, as well as the oral history collections and published memoirs from the Archives of the Sybir Memorial Museum in Białystok. In such interviews one can observe both the process of remembering and narrating. Therefore not only what people tell, but also how they tell it is worth scrutiny. In this context, both the remembered past and how this past affects the narrator’s present should be emphasized. In such oral history sources one can hope to find “the under-story8 of the Gulag, a rooted sense of how people lived with the experience of authoritarian violence of the camps when they could not discuss that openly.”9 The repression of the memory of the Gulag for so many years had a considerable impact on the possibility of expressing this trauma by narrative means. As Jehanne M. Gheith describes using the example of Russian society: “Partly as a result of this imperative not to speak, Gulag survivors often find nonnarrative ways to deal with their time in the Gulag. Because, in the USA and the UK our most powerful ways of understanding trauma centre around narrative, we have had a hard time interpreting the Soviet and post-Soviet experience, a hard time seeing the non- narrative as powerful. A second factor that it is important to underline: The Gulag

8 This term seems to be the author’s reference to “the under-life” in total institutions – term developed by sociologist Erving Goffman. Under-life is an adjustment made in order to get around authority’s assumption on what one should be or do. 9 Gheith 2007, p. 161.

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was in many ways continuous with Soviet society. This means that it is harder to separate the trauma of the Gulag from the trauma of living in Soviet society (or even to decide if trauma is the right word for this living)”10

On the basis of their oral-historical study of the Gulag, Jehanne M. Gheith and Katherine R. Jolluck estimate that what was dangerous in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia was not just talking about it, but even just remembering it. “Inevitable, if difficult to define, traces are left on a culture in which both remembering and telling were dangerous for at least two generations, and in which many people spoke rarely, if at all, about their experiences in the Gulag… personal memory had to evolve in relation to a cultural narrative that often denied Gulag survivors’ experiences.”11

Any attempt to present the trauma of Soviet repression by means of oral history eludes the traditional perspective of Western scholars, in which talking about the past serves a therapeutic and emancipating function for the witness in question. As the Russian historians Daria Khubova, Andrei Ivankiev and Tonia Sharova describe it, “the Soviet Union is perhaps the most remarkable case of all: a society […] where remembering has been dangerous at least since the 1920s. The cumulative effect of fear of public remembering, together with the fact that so many families had members who were politically oppressed, and so had bitter memories, is very difficult for Western historians to understand. It is not just the political impact… but also the dramatic longterm effect on personal remembering.”12

Obviously, the situation in the Polish People’s Republic cannot be equated with the situation in the USSR. Nevertheless, the fact of remaining within the Soviet sphere of influence also had a considerable impact on the memory of Polish victims of Soviet repressions. The quotations used in the present study, therefore, can be productively viewed as narratives that were constructed after the respondents had already functioned for many years outside of the official narrative. At the same time, they also can be placed within the context of their long participation in an oppressive system. According to Dominick LaCapra, the turn to experience at least to some extent has led to “an awareness of the importance of “traumatic” history and what occurs in those living through the limit or extreme events attending it. And it has prompted attempts to read the archives differently by interrogating how they have been constructed and main-

10 Ibid., p. 161. 11 Gheith / Jolluck 2011, p. 7. 12 Khubova / Ivankiev 1992, p. 89.

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tained, even their very silences, for traces of the experience and outlook of seemingly voiceless or underrecorded groups.”13

The present study also avoids treating oral history only as a source of anecdotes, illustrations that increase the attractiveness of the text but in themselves have a rather auxiliary, marginal role to play. The fragmented accounts and memories presented below will be treated on par with other sources in the article. History from a bottom-up perspective – empowering history – enables scholars to attempt to at least partially recover the experience of groups that were sidelined for various reasons. In this case, the recovery of private memories involves an attempt to weave the narrative scraps left in various archives from an ephemeral and exceptionally personal sphere. For this reason, I extensively quote interesting threads in order to give readers closer contact to each source. In this way, they can get to know a story’s broadest possible context and interpret it for themselves. However, it is just as important to give voice to the narrators or witnesses themselves – to stress the fact that they made a conscious decision to share their traumatic experience and that such stories are told, if not through the voice of the witnesses, then at least with them and thanks to them. I agree with Jehanna Gheith that “because these memories are not widely known, it allows them to find their way into public discourse; and the nature of memory and its interpretation means that short quotations from all of the interviews would not demonstrate the context and sense of the memories discussed.”14 In Poland, the memory of the war is considered to be worth cultivating. It is interesting to note that it is, and was, strengthened mainly through family accounts.15 Thus themes tabooed in the Polish People’s Republic were cultivated in familial and then opposition narratives. These sources were used after 1989, when the history of Poland was starting to be described anew.16 In the Polish People’s Republic, this cultivation of memory among family members and friends was also a form of resistance to the government; it effectively thwarted the latter’s propagandistic and educational efforts. However, this symbolic violence did have its impact on collective memory. Therefore, one’s own private memories were not always consistent with the broader social remembrances of the past.17 According to Dominick LaCapra, traumatic events can provide the basis of the identity for individuals or groups and thus have foundational character: “In perhaps its most politically pointed dimension, the founding trauma may be a way for an oppressed group or an abused individual to reclaim a history and to transform it 13 14 15 16 17

LaCapra 2009, p. 11. Gheith 2007, p. 166. Rokuszewska-Pawełek 2001, pp. 168–169. Kaz´mierska 2008, p. 96. Kwiatkowski 2010, p. 18.

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into a more or less enabling basis of life in the present. But, insofar as it fixates one obsessively on old grievances of dubious dynamics and even induces a compulsive reenactment of them, it may also function to undermine the need to come to terms with the past in a manner that constructively engages existential, social and political demands and possibilities of a current situation.”18

Indeed, it seems that the trauma associated with the labour camps and/or the impossibility of expression afterwards may have been a founding factor for former prisoners. In fact, it was so strong that it was sufficient for groups functioning only in the private sphere to survive. Using Katyn as an example, Dominik Bartmanski and Ron Eyerman have demonstrated how trauma may affect groups whose experience is suppressed. Their identities could survive not only in the private sphere, but also thanks the Polish diaspora. According to Bartmanski and Eyerman, the symbolic potential of suffering is realised after the public finds out about it. This is why Katyn became a cultural trauma for Poles only after the caesura of 1989.19 Their observation is compelling that, paradoxically, the insufficient information, the power of the official discourse and the weakness (also emotional) of the victims (although they introduced a sense of fear and confusion) simultaneously became a factor that increased and consolidated the Poles’ emotional trauma. This is what allowed the experience of certain individuals to become a tragedy of the entire nation.20 The ephemeral and intimate nature of the experience in question has generally made it impossible to reflect or at least describe the events of the past. The present article therefore attempts to reflect t h e v i s i o n of the past which the Sybiraks cultivated, both individually and among their inner circle. It should be noted, however, that the former type of memory does not contradict the latter. It is an oversimplification to claim that collective memory by nature departs from the historical truth.21 Although the separation of memory from history allowed memory studies to become an independent scholarly discipline, today the preferred research perspective is not a separation of memory from history, but an acknowledgement of their mutual relations: “Professional history written by historians and the memory of ordinary people are for me undoubtedly separate but constantly interacting currents in the cultural attitude to the past. What is firmly rejected as a consequence of the recognition of their equality are memory studies consisting in showing the differences between what people remember and what really happened. For me memory is a value in itself and the pursuit of the historical truth is completely inappropriate in this respect.”22 18 19 20 21 22

LaCapra 2009, pp. 77–78. Bartmanski / Eyerman 2013, p. 240. Ibid., pp. 247–248. Szpocin´ski 2010, p. 58. Wylegała 2014, pp. 67–68.

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Also important to the present analysis is Harald Welzer’s concept, often juxtaposed with Jan Assman’s theory. Welzer’s research into intergenerational memory transmitted within the family (the famous “Grandpa wasn’t a Nazi”) has demonstrated that – deliberate or not – gaps in family narratives were often supplemented by media or cultural accounts in an attempt to achieve completeness. Thus memory involves discursive practices; telling is remembering and interpreting is structured by a cultural framework.23 According to Welzer, autobiographical memory easily reaches “for the established elements of reality, which – from the point of view of the present – seem to ‘fit in with’ their own past […]. Just as individual memory fills in patterns, by means of associations, which it then treats like its own ‘memories’, so too chains of associations emerge through communication on the collective level. These in turn are complemented until there emerge collective models of the past, which we usually refer to as ‘history’.”24

In research on traumatic experiences, which often defy recollection, description, not to mention analysis, the individuals in question are likely to draw on cultural accounts as well as scholarly publications to illustrate their experiences. Nevertheless, the fact that the subjects use clichés in their narratives does not undermine their power. The greater the distance between an event and the moment when it is described, the more important it is for a memory researcher to recognize such pre-made images and try to understand the reasons behind using them. Thus accounts can be used to analyse the long-term impact of a traumatic experience on the narrator: “There are times when memories cannot be checked for factual accuracy and when that is the case, the most useful thing that we can do is to look for how they operate in the present. Considering how memory works in the present provides information about how the events continue(d) to be experiences and how the memory itself continues to affect lived realities. This in turn provides a sense of the subtle, long-term effects […] on individuals.”25

The memory of an experience The story of the son of a former camp prisoner and soldier from General Anders’ army (a man I came to know quite by accident) shows how difficult it is to analyse the schizophrenic life in the Polish People’s Republic. Jan Grudnicki admits that, in his family and hometown, people did not talk about wartime experiences and 23 Welzer 2009, pp. 41–42. 24 Ibid., p. 57. 25 Gheith / Jolluck 2011, p. 9.

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yet “everyone knew who had been with Anders and who had been in the labour camp”. Children of local dignitaries or law enforcement officers were not invited to their friends’ homes, for “one had to be on one’s guard when talking in their presence”. However, discretion even had to be maintained with those who could be trusted. Grudnicki, for instance, remembers that his parents discussed important matters in French, but only gave general information when the children were present. Grudnicki, though, knew about Katyn from his parents; he knew how to write a CV, what to include in passport applications, but also that he should not mention outside home that his friend’s father was sent to a labour camp after the war or that his teacher was a pre-war army officer. All this information was divulged in a very tight local community; people knew a lot, but they did not talk openly. Grudnicki describes his father’s legacy as both a burden and something precious. A high-ranking officer, his father was forced to work as a Russian-language instructor, while Grudnicki himself was bullied in his successive jobs. However, his story remarkably describes how someone always appeared “out of nowhere” wanting to help him whenever there was repression – someone from the Eastern Borderlands, someone involved in clandestine activities during the war. In a word, someone emerged who was on the same side. Grudnicki even says that he would not have become so courageous were it not for the experiences of his father and the consequences it had for Grudnicki personally.26 Paradoxically, his exclusion from official life caused him to become firmly rooted in communist Poland’s underlife.27 In general, the Sybiraks remember life in a system created by the regime that had oppressed them earlier. It was a continuation of the oppression they already knew. Oppression in this case was not only about the impossibility of talking about their experiences, but also about difficulties with finding a job or a place to live; it was about a social stigma. In my research, I encountered methodological difficulties – how could I capture a past private life, even inner life, which appeared as the only space of freedom for identify cultivation? Clearly, my study cannot present an accurate picture of what Sybirak life actually looked like in communist Poland, only how it was r e m e m b e r e d . Although historical research based on memoirs is not wholly reliable in terms of dates or statistics, I agree with Anne Applebaum that such sources at least permit us to gain insight into the psychological aspects of the life of members of a given group.28

26 Archiwum Historii Mówionej Domu Spotkan´ z Historia˛ i Os´rodka KARTA (in the following: AHM)_3457. 27 A concept popularised by the American sociologist Ervin Goffman, referring to the strategies that people apply to distance themselves from, to resist a dominant situation. 28 Applebaum 2011, p. xiii.

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“The Sybiraks, victims of the red tsarist regime who managed to make it to Poland, were condemned here to an additional, special kind of exile – silence of several decades. Back in their home country, they could not speak of their Siberian experiences. The sentence was compounded by the indifference of those around them […] As I had been brought up in a patriotic family from the Borderlands, it really pained me to see that so much was said about Nazi crimes and nothing about us, exiles to Siberia.”29

Irena Głowacka recalls the communist Poland period in a piece that describes her initiative to revive the Association of Sybiraks. Narratives like this dominate in my sources: the Sybiraks were disliked not only by the authorities, but also by society at large. Głowacka explains her motivation as follows: “Every Sybirak could say a lot about the suffering they had experienced. I longed for this suffering to be documented. This thought as well as my knowledge of the hard conditions in which the Sybiraks lived were my inspiration, when in 1987, in connection with the referendum, it became possible to found associations”.30

This explanation suggests – although not explicitly – that the Sybiraks kept in touch with each other. Głowacka knew that they were living under difficult conditions and that every one of them wanted to share their trauma. The Sybiraks were excluded from the official memory and often disrespected by the rest of society. Obviously, their trauma could not be publicly acknowledged. “The time spent in Siberia was not mentioned throughout the communist Poland period. In all questionnaires and CVs (especially at the university) we would write ‘I spent the war in the USSR’,” remembers one of the former exiles.31 “One could not speak too openly about our deportation and the suffering in that foreign land,” says another.32 Another exile remembers threats against his family: “[In 1946] we were given a farm. When we were living there, my father told our acquaintances about our hard life in Siberia. He was summoned by the Office of Security (Urza˛d Bezpieczen´stwa). And he was warned that if he did not stop speaking badly of the Soviet Union, he would have to face the consequences.”33 At the same time, they remained in touch with each other and in some testimonies one can observe a sense of fixation on their past suffering. Głowacka’s description of the attempts to collect the signatures needed to register the association attests to the emotional problems the Sybiraks had to face in the Polish People’s Republic. She remembers that the people whom she approached did not believe that the plan would succeed; they did not want to return to difficult memories and 29 Reaktywowanie 1993, f. 11. 30 Reaktywowanie 1993, f. 11. 31 Muzeum Pamie˛ci Sybiru w Białymstoku (in the following: MPS), Archiwum Dokumentacji Zsyłek i Deportacji (in the following: ADZID)/W/32, f. 38. 32 Gryc / Kostera 2013, p. 94. 33 Ibid., p. 127.

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some were even scared to do so (“During the martial law period I was even suspected of making new lists of people to be sent to Siberia! […] From the very first day after the meeting people queued to preliminarily register as members […]. Many cried and asked for an assurance that they would not be sent back to Siberia.”).34 I assume, once again, that for the former exiles to Siberia the room for manoeuvre in the Polish People’s Republic was quite limited – sometimes to even just their inner life. Głowacka recalls that during the registration of association members “we had to patiently listen to often very similar accounts, because we knew that most of these people for the f i r s t t i m e d a r e d to speak about their fate. They appreciated the possibility to let these nightmares out at last, to open up at last. We encouraged them to write down their memories”.35

Memories of repressions How did the Sybiraks remember the time of communist Poland? As they recalled it, there were persecutions by the authorities, difficulties with finding a job, social stigma, mental problems. However, it is worth noting another important aspect: sources with material relating to research subjects, but which, paradoxically, contain nothing of relevance. Among the 1,500 accounts – oral and written – what happened in the Polish People’s Republic period was mentioned in only a fraction of them. This may, of course, have had to do with methodological issues or temporal circumstances or the fact that the period was of little significance to most Sybiraks. Here, following Alfred Schütz, significance relates to when an individual organizes what he remembers according to the meanings he attributes to his memories – on his own or under the influence of a group. The relationship between meaning and identity can be bidirectional: what we regard as significant to our biographical story shapes our identity, while our identity influences the way we organize our memory.36 What does this mean for researchers? In this case, they only have access to accounts of people for whom communist Poland was significant, since they constructed the stories of their lives as former exiles to Siberia. Individuals whose accounts did not describe this history must have either viewed their role in the Polish People’s Republic and in their families as being insignificant in terms of supporting their Sybirak identity or even “switched off” this identity. They later revived it (or perhaps created it), however, under the impact of the political transformation in Poland – of the publicity given to the 34 Reaktywowanie 1993, f. 14. 35 Ibid. 36 Schutz 2008, pp. 73–75.

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topic, the encouragements to remember and talk about their experiences. For them, the Sybirak identity may have been something they were able to experience only much later, retroactively. However, my discussion here focuses on those who experienced their former exile identity in communist Poland’s underlife. It is difficult to find specific and salient examples in stories of being pushed out of public life. As we read from a former camp prisoner: “When I returned to Poland [in December 1955] I had to report to the Office of Security. Then I had to go there for three months, I had to report to them […] And one year later the Security no longer bothered me. They no longer summoned me. A lot of sadness, despair, tragedy. We were stigmatised in a way. Not by people, by the government.”37

Although the story ends in this way, it actually says nothing about being permanently stigmatised by the authorities. This is a narrative cliché that obscures important context – the Sybiraks felt unwelcome in the Polish People’s Republic, because they often had to build their professional, financial or family life from scratch, but they blamed the troubles on the government, not the vicissitudes of war. This bitterness about the government’s actions is well illustrated in the following interview from 1990: Q: ‘How was your life after returning to Poland [in 1958]?’ A: ‘Very bad. I thought I would get some help from the state – I didn’t get any. I got no help, just 200 zlotys of an allowance at the border and that’s it, and I got nothing more. I got no flat. […]’ Q: ‘The authorities were not interested in you?’ A: ‘No at all, they didn’t help me as a repatriate. And in those days to say that one had been in a camp, I never said that until last year, until January.’ Q: ‘So you were afraid, am I right? Did you get such threats?’ A: ‘Well, they told me I could not say I had been in the Home Army or something like that.’ Q: ‘Who told you that and when?’ A: ‘They told me when I came to Poland.’ Q: ‘Ah, so it was a piece of advice?’ A: ‘They advised me that it would be better for nobody to know anything and nobody knew anything. Until the Association of Sybiraks was set up and I joined it. I have all the documents.’38

There are three interesting aspects to the conversation. First, the interviewee bears a grudge against the communist government for not helping him after his return to Poland. For instance, it did not allocate a flat to him, whereas most 37 AHM, AHM_1324. 38 AHM, AW_I_0273.

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citizens had to wait for years to get one. Significantly, the interviewee even interpreted the interviewer’s question about surveillance on the part of the authorities through his dominant narrative frame. Second, the interviewee resents the fact that the authorities were not interested in his difficult situation. Third, he suggests that admitting to be a former camp prisoner was dangerous and that no one could speak about it. However, after the interviewer enquires further, it turns out that the alleged threat was not from the authorities but was merely a piece of advice he had received after returning home. Another former exile connected his difficulties with finding accommodation to a form of repression: “Harassment also continued in the Polish People’s Republic. My mother was fired four times only because her brother-in-law and brother had served in Anders’ Army. We didn’t get allocated a flat and had to live in rented accommodation for twenty years, on twelve square metres.”

At the same time, he identified the experience of repression as something that toughened him up and prepared him for a life in the Polish People’s Republic: “I didn’t despair, however; the resilience I had acquired in Kazakhstan enabled me to overcome such obstacles with a smile.”39 The accounts also mention being summoned by the police or being pestered by the police at home. “They gave us 300 zlotys and let us go. […] Two weeks or so later I learned that the Security had already visited my aunt and asked about me. […] [but] I managed to evade them. My wife had a friend in the Kielce region, in the municipal office, and they had me registered there. But in 1975, I think it was, the community policeman came and said, ‘Sir, I have a telephonogram that you are to report to the police in Lublin tomorrow.’ […] I report and a young guy, perhaps thirty years old, asks me, ‘What did you do during the occupation?’ This was probably because of that book. Zbigniew Jakubik published a book in which he describes what units I had and what weapons. […] They released me, paid for my travel and I left. And I didn’t even suspect that as I left the police station, they had me followed. So I’m in Lublin and I get on the bus, but not the one I was supposed to take to the station, but a different one, and it took me to a different part of Lublin. I look back and the same man is still there. Well… I ask which bus I should take to the station. I got there in the end, but this shows I was under surveillance to check where I’d go, whom to inform.”40

In light of this example, it is worth noting that the interest of the security services was often motivated not by the experience of deportation or life in a labour camp, but by involvement in the resistance during the occupation: “We were not left in peace in our own Homeland, but also at home. Initially, the Security from Augustów visited our home, looking for my uncle, my father’s brother, who had 39 MPS, ADZiD/W/120, f. 25. 40 AHM, AHM_0247.

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been in the Home Army and had to flee and hide, until he disclosed his identity [as a former Home Army member]. The famous 3xYES referendum, this was forbidden for my mother. She was an outlaw. My brother Czesław was conscripted into the army and worked in a penal division in a mine in Silesia. The simple conclusion was that we were still citizens without any rights. And this is how our longed for Homeland received us.”41

Yet it was possible to adapt to the society. For example, although Barbara Dobrzycka recalls that “They even came to our house. They were looking for weapons, they suspected that my brother was working for the Intelligence Service. They sat in the trees, looking into the house… such silliness. It was hard. First everybody called: ‘Come back to Poland, come back!’”, when she was asked whether she experienced any direct problems from the authorities, she responded: “Apart from the fact that I wasn’t admitted to the university, no, I didn’t. I somehow managed to blend in…”42 The Sybiraks also cite problems with obtaining education or pursuing a professional career – so-called efforts to “push them out” of society: “It didn’t finish after our return. A Sybirak was a suspicious character, an enemy even. They would come to the farm, took the grain, the so-called dekulakisation. And our late father told us: boys – because there were two of us, my brother died three years later – go to school, you’ll be clerks at a kolkhoz, for I don’t see a place for you at the farm. […] As soon as they heard the name Kasjanowicz – absolutely, he doesn’t have a right to go to school here, at all. So we went to Olecko, to the Recovered Territories, there were fewer people living there, they weren’t concerned about this and we attended high school there. I graduated from high school, went to college, got a PhD, worked all my life and I am still working, I’m an expert witness. This practice in Siberia gave me the drive.”

This is how the hardship experienced is recalled by another former exile, although his account contains the already mentioned character strengthening and enriching dimension, which I will elaborate on later.43 Another Sybirak also did not manage to escape difficulties in his professional career; however, in his case, it seems that what the authorities found problematic was not so much his experience as an exile to Siberia, but his previous involvement with the Home Army (Armia Krajowa). As he relates: “I was offered a position at the university and a possibility of pursuing an academic career, but in October [19]50 […] Professor Lewandowski came from a meeting approving candidates for assistant lecturers very changed ‘You haven’t been approved!’ The only comment he heard was ‘This Vilnius Home Army member should be happy he’s not in prison yet!’”.44

41 42 43 44

MPS, ADZiD/W/3, f. 6. AHM, AHM_0252. AHM, AW_I_0744. AHM, AHM_2297.

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Another former exile recalls the support of “former” colleagues in getting a job; on the other hand, in his academic career, obstacles were placed in his way by the authorities, obstacles which, again, seem to be linked to his past in the Home Army: “Naturally, I turned to by colleagues from the pre-war military medical school and the Home Army and immediately I heard: where do you want to work? I said I’d go for tuberculosis surgery. […] I think I was the only doctor with a past in the Home Army there. But somehow I survived everything. […] I had huge problems with my doctorate. I obtained my doctorate almost immediately, quickly, already in 1951. And then I should have received a post-doctoral degree, become assistant professor, but the process was constantly hampered. Someone decided I should go through the candidate of sciences procedure, I did – I’m the only physician in Poland with a doctorate in medicine and a candidate of science degree. I should have been automatically promoted, but they didn’t agree… Constantly, again and again, my past in the Home Army, I wasn’t allowed in any way. Similarly, for example, I wanted to get a big ward, but I didn’t, precisely because… I knew I was being watched, I felt that, I constantly felt I was being watched, always under surveillance. I remember a congress of the former prisoners of the Borovichi camp and they were there as well. This was where I met Tusk for the first time. I started to tell him how life looked in Borovichi and immediately a man came up and said we couldn’t talk about this. Yes, I felt this all the time.”45

Another former exile says that he was not subjected to any repression in communist Poland, yet he explains, regarding his membership in the party, that there was pressure from the authorities: Q: ‘Where you repressed by the Bierut regime?’ A: ‘No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t involved in politics; true, I was a high-level trade union member. I was a party member until 1970, until December, that is events in Gdan´sk.’ Q: ‘Why did you join the party?’ A: ‘Because they had worked on me, urged me, confused me. They said that everything happening in Russia during the occupation had happened only because Russia had been afraid of Poland, distrusted Poland, considered Poland to be its enemy, and so on… […] There were many people like me, thinking that if we got down to work together, we would somehow put Poland back on its feet.’46

45 AHM, AHM_1811. 46 AHM, AW_I_1140.

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Suppressing identity The following account illustrates well the ban on communicating in public about one’s experiences, whether at school and at work. “I worked at a POM (Pan´stwowy Os´rodek Maszynowy – State Centre of Agricultural Machinery) for seventeen years. They were young people and always looked at me why I was so crooked. I have a paretic right hand and whenever I took a pencil into my left hand and tried to write with the left hand, my mum would slap me and told me to write with my right hand […]. They would always ask me: why are you so crooked, what’s wrong with you? And I told them that as a young man I had been in the Siberian taiga, that this and that had happened there […]. Among fifty people working there nearly ten were in the political department. And they listened to what I was saying. Every month or twice a month I would be summoned to the Office of Security, to the police station… One year later I was summoned to the Office of Security and told: if you continue to say bad things about Russia, we’ll have you transported there not for six, but for ten years, you’ll go there again. This is how they shut me up. It was then that they started to pester me: join the party. I told them I wasn’t going to be part of such a Left, that I didn’t want to, because I was disgusted, I didn’t feel responsible, I didn’t want to join. So they blacklisted me and instead of being promoted, I was moved from position to position, increasingly worse, earning less and less.”47

Another characteristic story is that of a former exile who as a child found it difficult to accept restrictions on her ability to communicate about her experiences. This account clearly shows that the schizophrenic rules of life in communist Poland were not easy to master, especially for a child: “I did quite well at school, I had friends in the neighbourhood, it was, I would say, normal. Once a teacher asked us during a lesson about what we, the children, knew about the USSR. I raised my hand and talked about the omnipresent poverty I had seen there; after all, I could compare that to the situation in Poland. I thought that the ban on talking about these things in public no longer applied, because I w a s n o w i n m y o w n c o u n t r y . Unfortunately, someone denounced me to the Office of Security and my mother was summoned for an interrogation. I don’t know how it went, my mum was absent for a long time, I was given a trashing and learned not to be honest about such things for a long time. This was all strange, because our favourite game during playtime at school was throwing a wet rag at a portrait of Bierut. […] In the fifth grade our teacher of Polish told us to write an essay about the Polish Army. I described my encounter with a Polish soldier in exile, in a sovkhoz. This provoked another scandal. The soldier was fine, because he was from the Kos´ciuszko Division, but – why the sovkhoz, the Kalmykian steppe. My essay was sent to the Education Authority and my mum was summoned again. Fortunately, a wise man was in charge of the case and, saying that what a silly child had written was not important, he tore the incriminating evidence to pieces. I was saved and my stay in the steppes of Kalmykia was forgiven. I had big 47 MPS, AHM_232.

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problems because of my past, as a former exile, i. e. daughter of enemies of the people. I learned that my life story should include only that I was born and began to attend school, that I had to hide the fact I had been deported. It was only during Gierek’s era that it was possible to write ‘I was evacuated to the USSR’.”48

Significantly, the narrators all reflect disappointment at a lack of understanding from their compatriots in their homeland. It should be borne in mind that the Sybiraks saw their return to Poland as being tied to the very freedom they had longed for, while, in fact, it turned out to be a bitter disappointment. Not only did they not enjoy freedom that had anticipated, but it was also difficult to find sympathy among those who had witnessed the violent dimensions of the war “locally” – i. e. bombings, round-ups, street executions – or even among those who had lived through an experience perhaps comparable to Siberian exile, but wrote about, and even promoted as part as the government’s historical policy, such as the Nazi concentration camps or forced labour. Significantly, such friction – which may have even turned into rivalry among victims – could appear within the same family. Here, the story of Teresa Drzal is especially informative. Deported along with her mother and sister, she describes her post-war difficulties in finding sympathetic listeners among her peers, which also extended to her relationship with her own father: “That return wasn’t sweet… The joy was absolute, it was just this feeling we had… A feeling of inferiority. Because here all of them had fought, all of them had something to be proud of. And we, nothing… ‘You were just living there, you saw no Gestapo men, no mass shootings. There was no threat of being sent to a camp.’ There wasn’t, because we were already in a camp. ‘You had a rosy wartime experience…’ That hurt. When I was over there, I thought: when I return, when I start telling my father, my grandma, my aunt, my friends how it was… Yet no one asked me and no one listened to me. And no one wanted to – it wasn’t interesting. […] My father couldn’t believe that there had been hunger, that they hadn’t given us enough food. He wrote letters… He knew Russian very well, because he had gone to school in Kiev. And he sent postcards to Siberia until it was still possible to send them, to the head of the special settlement, asking him to treat his wife well – because until 1920 they had both been in Russia, because they were friends of Russians and so on. My mother was furious and torn the postcard to pieces. And the father did not understand that 1920 was one thing and post-1920 was something completely different… People didn’t understand, they simply didn’t comprehend it. The Borderlands were cut off, people knew nothing. When I was arrested and said during the investigation, ‘When I was in Siberia…,’ they replied, ‘Quiet, what are you… That’s off topic. I’m not talking to you about Siberia.’ I couldn’t say a word. We were hushed up.”49

48 MPS, ADZiD/W/29, f. 28. 49 AHM, AHM_V_0119.

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Former exiles express regret that Sybirak children were often stigmatised as “Russkis”. Having learned to speak Russian in Siberia, they often spoke with a characteristic accent, used calques and sometimes simply spoke Polish very poorly. As one former exile recalls: “We came to Poland as illiterates. We knew only as much as our uncle Tadeusz and our mum had taught us, drawing letters in the sand, and what we had learned from prayer books. We didn’t have a Polish accent or an accent from the Lublin region. I was bullied at school because of that and was called a ‘Russki’.” The speaker, however, imbues these difficult experiences with meaning, pointing to them as a character strengthening factor which motivated him to work hard at school and helped him in his career.50 Even if there were attempts to provide institutional support for the new arrivals, their peers were sometimes distrustful: “I and my sister would go to classes, to lunches. We were given clothes which the orphanage had received from UNRRA or the State Repatriation Office (Pan´stwowy Urza˛d Repatriacyjny). […] We had to start our life from scratch. […] I received a new red coat and a priest who taught us religion joked: it’s easy to know where you’ve returned from by the colour of your clothing. This wasn’t said in a mean-spirited way, but it hurt. After our return we spoke Polish badly. We found it difficult to communicate with our peers, who laughed at us, because we often replaced Polish words with Russian ones. Every step of the way we had our pronunciation corrected, for example at the shop where we bought various things we needed, the shop assistant would tell us that we weren’t speaking Polish well. She would correct us and would look at us as if we were Russian.”51

Supporting “one’s own” These above-mentioned stories can be contrasted with counterexamples, however. For instance, we read about the following positive experience: “I was very well received in Poznan´. I’ve often heard that ‘unwelcome arrivals from the east were treated badly’, but I can’t say that. I got my own gang of friends almost immediately.”52 According to another account, one could organise a lot with help from friends. Having a “bad past” in these cases not only turned out to be an asset, but successive obstacles posed by the system were overcome thanks to the help of friendly and informed individuals. Sometimes one’s unfortunate background was seen in a completely different light and encouraged people to be tremendously helpful:

50 MPS, ADZiD/W/120, f. 23. 51 MPS, ADZiD/W/12, f. 49–50. 52 AHM, AHM_2297.

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“I worked in this timber agency and my job was to send timber to yards. I went to a lumber mill in the Olsztyn region and the owner was a man from Biłgoraj. I told him I had come from Russia. [My boss let me buy timber at eighty zlotys per metre and the guy at the mill said:] ‘If you came from Russia and you don’t have money, I’ll sell you at forty zlotys.’ Thanks to such a sympathetic attitude, I earned about half a million then. That was a lot of money.”53

Regina Wencław gets emotional when she recalls her very difficult return home. Although she literally had to rebuild her life from scratch, she received help from friendly neighbours: “I came back to an empty house, to nothing, to nobody [cries], there was nothing, the house was empty – no furniture, no family, because the Soviets had destroyed everything, including my family. I came back alone, my sister came after me, I was the first to come back. To be honest, it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t easy, because I returned like Lazarus: naked, hungry and barefoot. An empty house, no family, no one to help, nothing to eat, no money, difficult situation. But I really had wonderful neighbours, wonderful people, they understood me. One brought some flour, another something else, yet another something different, and slowly, step by step, with people’s help. I began to look for my family, for a job, to live, to put down roots.”54

In hindsight, the attitude of the neighbours is all the more moving given that there was an atmosphere, if not of open hostility, then at least of distrust and anxiety regarding those returning from the East. The accounts convey a feeling of great loneliness. We learn for instance: “A few months after I had been hired, my mother was fired and remained jobless for over a year. For eighteen years we lived in the attic, in a rented flat. Acquaintances were afraid to be in my company, I had no friends.”55 There are striking situations recalled in the accounts of the speakers being literally “hushed up” (to quote Teresa Drzal). This may have been at work “We couldn’t say anything about Siberia, I didn’t even know that the chief accountant and the director were both Sybiraks. I only saw the director at a pilgrimage to Cze˛stochowa after the establishment of the Sybirak association. We worked so many years together and we didn’t know”56

And the same could happen even in one’s closest circle: “I knew a boy for four years and I didn’t know he had been in Siberia and he – that I’d been in Kazakhstan. It was only before our marriage, when his mother came to my mother to organise the wedding, that they talked about themselves, about their stories

53 54 55 56

AHM, AHM_0427. MPS, AHM_87. MPS, ADZiD/W/95, f. 4. MPS, AHM_54.

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and it was only then that my husband learned I had been in Kazakhstan and the other way round. Because we didn’t say anything, it was a secret.”57

When asked about whether she talked about her experiences, a woman recorded by the Oral History Department of the Sybir Memorial Museum in Białystok, Poland, responded in the following manner: “No, no one asked, some didn’t admit even to their children that they had been deported, I don’t know why. I heard about a man who graduated from university and his mother hadn’t told him she had been deported. I don’t know if they were afraid or what. I always wrote in my CV that I had been an exile in Siberia for six years […]. I always admitted that, because what could they do, is it a crime? But no one really asked anything, no one was interested, so I won’t tell myself, if they don’t want to know.”58

Another woman remembers experiencing widespread compassion (which also means there was a general awareness of their experiences) but, at the same time, her parents’ silence: “I was sixteen and when I came here […] I wish so much I had asked my parents more about this, my parents didn’t want to talk about this, it was something shameful, a taboo, even after coming here to Poland. Everybody felt sorry for us, but I don’t know why my parents didn’t want to talk about it, they just didn’t want to talk about it.”59

As Jan Grudnicki mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Drzal spoke to a group with similar experiences. Within this group, she re-lived her exile experience again and again: “It was only when we met within a circle of a few families – from over there – that we talked about everything and it was only then that we really felt we were among friends.”60 Another former exile recalls: “The friendship of these families [who had been in exile together lasted] until the grave, everybody… As somehow we ended up living near Kraków, we visited each other, helped each other, reminisced together and called ourselves Siberian family.”61 Yet another former deportee even recalls a “happy” atmosphere– “…to finally be in Poland, finally with our families, to finally be able to console each other for the losses of the most important, eldest family members.”62

57 58 59 60 61 62

MPS, AHM_234. MPS, AHM_123. MPS, AHM_11. AHM, AHM_V_0119. MPS, AHM_229. MPS, AHM_244.

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Trauma and fortitude Those who returned from East Kazakhstan while still children frequently speak of their hardships as a kind of trauma, as a burden to be carried for the rest of their lives. “Everything was new, alien, unknown or forgotten. […] The very first contacts with our peers proved to be very difficult. I was ten and looked rather unappealing – gaunt, hair cropped because of lice, skin covered by traces of scabies and sores. Scared, shy and insecure, an illiterate with a Russian accent, I aroused aversion in my peers, who bullied me and called me a Russki. I felt inferior, unwanted and, as a result, lonely. I became increasingly withdrawn and avoided unnecessary contact. For many years I was plagued by nightmares associated with my experiences in Kazakhstan. I would wake up terrified, with my heart beating like mad, unnaturally fast. […] Generally speaking, I was a child with a warped psyche – distrustful, alienated, confused and not accepted by my peers, I was painfully aware of my otherness. I felt better only among family members and friends. […] Thanks to our parents great care, we slowly recovered physically. Mental recovery was more problematic. I grew up constantly racked with guilt, I lacked selfconfidence and self-esteem. I lived with a belief that I wasn’t entitled to anything. Throughout my adulthood this caused me a lot of problems – at school and especially at the university, from which I dropped out, in my work, in my family life, in my social life.”63

The lifetime impact of being rejected by one’s peers is viewed in similar terms by Jadwiga Pacanowska: “I was terribly bullied [by other children]. Emotionally, this was a very, very difficult time for me. For these children in Lublin couldn’t have had a terrible experience of the war, I didn’t see any ruins there… […] I think that to a large extent I lacked, I probably still lack somewhat, I lack self-confidence. I always felt I knew little, that everybody else was right and I wasn’t right, I was imbalanced emotionally, I remained so for many years. Although I do try to fight this. […] I simply felt inferior, different, less capable of everything.”64

A former labour camp prisoner recalls his mental difficulties, vividly bringing to mind the post-camp trauma of former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps, the so-called KZ syndrome: “One had the nerves under a very thin skin, sometimes a thing that wasn’t worth two words, one responded and a row would erupt. [My loved ones] initially, well, it wasn’t easy for them, sometimes a word and one immediately… Only later did it begin to calm down… Eventually my nerves got less excitable by 70–75 per cent after I retired […] in July 1982 […]. After I returned, for two or three years I couldn’t shake off all these ailments, illnesses. [I had dreams about] some experiences from the camp, but they were 63 MPS, ADZiD/W/108, ff. 18–19. 64 MPS, AHM_247.

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unreal, bizarre, nightmarish. Kind of a mixture of several situations. I just saw myself […] being transported in a wagon, there was this tundra, I see a man escaping from the wagon and going towards the station, I see them waiting for him with their weapons ready to shoot, I want to scream but I can’t, I see and I can’t, and it turns out I’m really screaming, my wife had to wake me up. Such bizarre things.”65

Halski found release for his stress in an unusual way – he effectively created his own room for manoeuvre.: “I had this silly [hobby, which helped me calm my nerves]. […] Heaps of typescripts. For years I waged a private war against them. [From the 1960s] I made six copies of all books that were unavailable, I bound them and sent them […] to Wrocław, Tarnów, Giz˙ycko, where I had… […] People would bring books [from the West], books like Najlepszy sojusznik Hitlera (Hitler’s Best Ally), Bez ostatniego rozdziału (Without the Final Chapter), Solzhenitsyn, these kinds of books. Why? This is how I understood this. Perhaps I was wrong, but most people knew little about the Soviet Union, and this takes its toll today. And it’s about people knowing who they are dealing with, what it really is. I collected these things, the first books, I had this idea and with my uncle we […] began to copy them manually, but it took too long. […] And then my uncle got an old typewriter from somewhere, a Remington, this was shortly after my arrival, 1960s. I would be new machines and make six copies, carbon copies. […] Some people would always read them. I distributed them. I was convinced that if I worked alone […] I’d know what I was doing. I turned the radio on at full blast and I made these copies.”66

Yet, once again, Sybiraks sometimes view hardship as a strengthening or enriching factor. As one says: “Our lives in these hard conditions also made us tough and capable of overcoming difficulties in the Polish People’s Republic.”67 Another Sybirak recalls: “I talked very little about this. [People at work] say: we want to talk to you, who are you really? I was always calm, even on the first day, when we went for a walk, they said that Adamek was a bit different, so calm. After university, when I was already working, my colleague said: why were you so calm and a bit different? I say: you know, I tell you, I worked already when I was eleven, and I was immediately older, an old man, but when my mother died [in exile], I changed completely. How should I put it, not just calm, but it was as if I were an old man in comparison to other colleagues. I never swore, I never cursed.”68

A long-time president of a branch of the Association of Sybiraks describes the mental state of the group, while also pointing to the post-1989 period as a time of recovering the Sybirak memory:

65 66 67 68

AHM, AW_I_0240. AHM, AW_I_0240. MPS, ADZiD/W/120, f. 25. MPS, AHM_207.

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“Among those who came were also people who after many years could finally vent their grievances, often crying. We had to calm these people down, take breaks to enable them to control themselves. […] My father, when I was going out to the office of the Association, told me not to go there, because I would be deported to Siberia again. He was afraid of another exile until the end of his life. […] We’re not trying to present ourselves as martyrs, we’re trying to pass what we went through to younger generations. We don’t want this experience to be forgotten. The experiences of Poles during the German occupation are generally well-known to society at large. After the war the topic was constantly discussed. But the fate of Poles exiled deep into the USSR remained unknown. It has only been over the last decade that people have become more familiar with what the Polish nation experienced from the Soviets. However, we try to approach this calmly and show that this is another chapter in the history of the Polish nation, that Poles not only suffered at the hand of the Nazis, but they were also taken from their own homes and thrown into the inhuman lands of Kazakhstan and Siberia.”69

Jan Grudnicki, whose story was mentioned earlier, described with great emotion the death of his father in 1978 and how he was overwhelmed by loneliness at the time in the face of the difficulties posed by the system. The funeral mass could not be celebrated in the church; there were also problems with transporting the body to the cemetery. It is a harrowing image: the twenty-nine year old Grudnicki dragging her father’s coffin at night with the help of a friendly neighbour. However, what makes an even stronger impression is the description of the funeral, which thousands of people attended. Neither Grudnicki nor his father could have known all of them, and yet the memory of Soviet repression, which his father had experienced, persisted in the local community. Its influence was so strong, in fact, that it even turned into a local political demonstration. As already noted, when studying the private, inner lives of individuals, extending conclusions to a whole group has its risks. Bearing in mind that the available accounts are from people identifying themselves in one way or another with the Sybirak identity, it can be said that the Polish People’s Republic is not always remembered by this community as a time of identity cultivation, as a time that required them to look for a space within the system in order to express themselves. It seems likely that people who suppressed or suspended their Sybirak identity and past in communist Poland (so as to “blend in”) may have found as much room for manoeuvre as other citizens who took advantage of the defects of state socialism. Those who construct their biography – including the communist Poland period – as a Sybirak biography remember the system as a space with very little room for manoeuvre. Some Sybiraks see this as a period of survival among loved ones, who usually had similar experiences, and of consciously cultivating sympathy based on shared memories. Others view the period as a time of being 69 MPS, ADZiD/W/120, f. 42.

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pushed to the margins of society, of carrying the “Eastern stigma”. It is difficult, therefore, to speak of a room for manoeuvre in the full sense of the term. In some cases, room to freely expressing one’s identity was provided by groups of close friends of relatives, who usually had similar experiences; in other cases, one turned to spiritual life. Drawing on the narrative fragments mentioned at the outset, I have managed to reconstruct an analogously partial room for manoeuvre in the Polish People’s Republic. This testifies to the existence of a profound trauma and tabooisation of the Sybirak experience – in the case of such a strongly stigmatised history of repression, people could only look for freedom within their most trusted circle. Translated by Anna Kijak

Archives, manuscript sources and unpublished works AHM [= Archiwum Historii Mówionej Domu Spotkan´ z Historia˛ i Os´rodka KARTA – Oral History Archives, History Meeting House and KARTA Centre], AHM_234, Jerzy Kubin’s oral account; AHM_252, Barbara Dobrzycka’s oral account; AHM_427, Czesław Muz˙acz’s oral account; AHM_1324, Tadeusz Bukowy’s oral account; AHM_1811, Sergiusz Hornowski’s oral account; AHM_2297, Janusz Downarowicz’s oral account; AHM_3547, Tadeusz Olszewski’s oral account; AHM_V_0119, Teresa Drzal’s oral account; AW_I_0240, Józef Halski’s oral account; AW_I_273, Władysław Jakowczyk’s oral account; AW_I_0744, anonymous oral account; AW_I_1140, Szymon Cyrulnik’s oral account. MPS [= Muzeum Pamie˛ci Sybiru w Białymstoku – Sybir Memorial Museum in Białystok], ADZiD [= Archiwum Dokumentacji Zsyłek i Deportacji – Archives of Exiles and Deportations]/W/32; ADZiD/W/120; ADZiD/W/3; ADZiD/W/29; ADZiD/W/12; ADZiD/ W/95; ADZiD/W/108; AHM_11, Lilianna Zalewska’s oral account; AHM_54, Józefy Klej’s oral account; AHM_87, Regina Wencław’s oral account; AHM_123, Stanisława Napora’s oral account; AHM_207, Adam Chwalin´ski’s oral account; AHM_229, Barbara Łuczyn´ska’s oral account; AHM_232, Tadeusz Karas´’ oral account; AHM_234, Józefa Samek’s oral account; AHM_244, Janusz Da˛browski’s oral account; AHM_247, Jadwiga Pacanowska’s oral account.

Literature Applebaum, Anne: Gulag: A History, New York 2003. Applebaum, Anne (ed.): Gulag Voices, An Anthology, New Haven & London 2011. Bartmanski, Dominik / Eyerman, Ron: The Worst Was the Silence. The Unfinished Drama of the Katyn Massacre, in: Eyerman, Ron / Alexander, Jeffrey C. / Butler

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Breese, Elisabeth (eds).: Narrating Trauma. On the Impact of Collective Suffering, Boulder–London 2013, pp. 237–266. Figes, Orlando: The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, New York 2007. Gheith, Johanne M.: ‘I never talked’: enforced silence, non-narrative memory, and the Gulag, in: Mortality 12/2 (2007), pp. 159–175. Gheith, Johanne M. / Jolluck Katherine R.: Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile, New York 2011. Gryc, Alla / Kostera, Irena (eds.): Wspomnienia deportowanych z ziemi podlaskiej na Syberie˛ i do Kazachstanu w latach 1939–1956, Hajnówka 2013. Kaz´mierska, Kaja: Biografia i pamie˛c´. Na przykładzie dos´wiadczenia ocalonych z Zagłady, Kraków 2008. Khubova, Daria / Ivankiev, Andre / Sharova, Tonia: After Glasnost: Oral History in the Soviet Union, in: Passerini, Luisa (ed.), International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories, vol. 1, Memory and Totalitarianism, Oxford 1992. Kwiatkowski, Piotr T.: Wprowadzenie. Dos´wiadczenie II wojny s´wiatowej w badaniach socjologicznych, in: Kwiatkowski, Piotr T. / Nijakowski, Lech / Szacka, Barbara / ´ ski, Andrzej (eds.): Mie˛dzy codziennos´cia˛ a wielka˛ historia˛. Druga wojna Szpocin s´wiatowa w pamie˛ci zbiorowej społeczen´stwa polskiego, Gdan´sk 2010. LaCapra, Dominick: Historia w okresie przejs´ciowym. Dos´wiadczenie, toz˙samos´c´, teoria krytyczna, Kraków 2009. Reaktywowanie Zwia˛zku Sybiraków 1989 r., in: Sybirak. Pismo Zwia˛zku Sybiraków 9 (1993), pp. 11–15. Rokuszewska-Pawełek, Alicja: Druga wojna ´swiatowa – pamie˛c´ i toz˙samos´c´, in: Kultura i społeczen´stwo, 3–4 (2011), pp. 167–180. Schütz, Alfred: O wielos´ci s´wiatów, trans. Barbara Jabłon´ska, Kraków 2008. Sword, Keith: Deportation and Exile, Poles in the Soviet Union, 1939–1948, New York 1994. Welzer, Harald: Materiał, z którego zbudowane sa˛ biografie, in: Saryusz-Wolska, Magdalena (ed.): Pamie˛c´ zbiorowa i kulturowa. Współczesna perspektywa niemiecka, Warszawa 2009, pp. 39–58. Wylegała, Anna: Przesiedlenia a pamie˛c´: studium (nie)pamie˛ci społecznej na przykładzie ukrain´skiej Galicji i polskich “Ziem Odzyskanych”, Torun´ 2014.

Part IV: Rooms for Experts

Matthias Barelkowski

Communication with(out) Borders? Amateur Radio in the People’s Republic of Poland – From Personal Hobby to Social Imperative and State Surveillance*

Amateur radio – questions, sources, terms, and early development “While the prospects for international communication created a great deal of excitement and anxiety about mid century ham radio, Americans dominated the hobby. In 1960, when more than 200,000 amateurs in the United States held licenses, Great Britain had the second most hams, with only around 9,400. Roughly half the world’s countries then had less than 25 registered hobbyists each, and only 16 countries had more than 1,000 hams. These figures […] speak to the political, economic, and technical position of the United States as well as to the American enthusiasm for technology at mid century. Increased Cold War funding military technology and the championing of electronics for strategic, productive, and recreational purposes supported the hobby. At the same time, the climate of secrecy and isolation prevalent during this period of global tension meant that hams who sought private, international ties provoked suspicion.”1

According to Kristen Haring’s appraisal, amateur radio in the 20th century was a rather ambivalent hobby, mainly practiced in the USA. While it enabled direct individual and private communication over short and long distances by means of radio waves, it was also precisely for this reason that it was difficult to monitor its contents. Amateur radio operators often have considerable technical knowledge and, not infrequently, are pioneers in the testing of new technologies. For this reason, they have been, and continue to be, of great benefit to countries’ development of telecommunications, not least militarily. At the same time, however, by transmitting unwanted content and setting up international networks, they could sometimes circumvent the countries of the Soviet bloc, which were oriented towards strict political monitoring, especially in times of crisis. The following contribution will first explain some technical basics and terms as well as the organizational structures of the pre-war period. This will then allow for a better understanding of the development of this hobby in the People’s * This paper has been written as part of the DFG-funded project “Rooms for Manoeuvre in State Socialism: Between Adaptation and Experiment” (ROOMS, KR 3510/2-1). 1 Haring 2007, p. xiii.

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Republic of Poland in comparison with other state socialist countries. The focus will be on the nearly permanent conflict between the demands of nation-states for supervision, control and organization and a technical hobby that is, by its very nature, an individualized, borderless activity with independent, internationally integrated organizational structures. At the outset, we can formulate the following key questions: Where did interests with state bodies overlap and where were there conflicts? How did the organizational structures of Polish amateur radio compare with those of the socialist neighboring countries and how did they fit into the international umbrella organization of amateur radio operators, the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU)? How did amateur radio operators respond to political crises and what kinds of tactics did they use? How did the practice of an essentially individualistic hobby develop under state socialism? This last question in particular requires further explanation. Although the term “hobby” originates from the English language, it is now used internationally. It refers to the pursuit of a certain activity with a degree of passion and dedication in one’s free time, i. e. free of remuneration. Under ideal circumstances, a hobby can also become one’s vocation. The boundaries here are fluid, however. In any case, a hobby does not serve the purpose of earning a living. The term “amateur” in amateur radio signifies the activity’s unpaid hobby character, not the level of technical knowledge. In fact, amateur radio operators are often specialists in their professions, for instance as telecommunications experts. Therefore, amateur radio can be characterized as a strongly individualistic pastime, pursued especially by men of the middle class in their leisure.2 Typically, the radio operator sits alone in his “ham shack,” which is full to the brim with technology. He tries to make contact with other radio operators around the world, often also in sport-like competitions or “contests.” The objective here is to confirm as many connections as possible with certain stations within a given period of time. Apart from the constant security concerns, under state socialism the problem arose that until the late 1950s the terms leisure and hobby were not even in use. In connection with amateur radio, one thus often merely spoke of “sport.”3 In order to offer the undeniably existing enthusiasts (who were urgently needed as specialists) the chance to participate in ham radio and maintain a presence in the 2 On the gender balance in amateur radio during the Cold War and the attempts of women to disrupt the established social roles and spaces via this hobby, see Gessler 2017, pp. 279–298. 3 Christian Senne has analyzed this conflict thoroughly for amateur radio in the GDR; the tension is clearly highlighted in the subtitle of his book. Christian Senne, Rahmen- und Organisationsbedingungen für Funkamateure in der SBZ und DDR (1945–1990). Zwischen Selbstzweck und gesellschaftlichem Auftrag, On the development of the terms leisure and hobby in the GDR, see Senne pp. 64ff and Prahl 2002, pp. 112–119. I would like to thank Christian Senne for many valuable insights into state socialism and amateur radio.

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airwaves, the state tacitly agreed to a compromise. Particular stress was placed on the pre-military training aspect of the activity and the group exercise of the “sport” in club stations. Here, a transmitter was shared and older ham radio operators passed on their knowledge to the younger generation. Private use of the airwaves from home was not completely banned, but it was marginalized and severely limited. As a result, we will also examine below the tension between personal hobby and “collective social activity.” The source-material situation for Polish amateur radio is rather complicated. As there is only scarce material remaining from the pre-war period, I have relied on the little extant literature and some online publications.4 The records of the Polski Zwia˛zek Krótkofalowców (PZK) [Polish Association of Shortwave Amateurs] after 1945 are in the organization’s archives in Bydgoszcz. They were previously not indexed and are currently being digitized by the State Archive Administration. Consequently, I draw mainly on the parallel records in the Institute Pamie˛ci Narodowej (IPN) [Institute of National Remembrance]. The advantage is two-fold: On the one hand, amateur radio was closely monitored in the PRL; on the other, the PZK as a “charitable organization” had been partly under the control of the Ministry of the Interior since 1963, into which the State Security Service (SB) had also been organizationally integrated since 1956. Accordingly, the IPN contains both files on the organization of the PZK itself (minutes, accounts, statistics, correspondence, etc.) along with numerous surveillance files.5 Other sources include record fragments from the State Archive (AP) in Szczecin, information from individual Polish amateur-radio operators and various digitized documents and publications, which can be found mainly on the portal of the Oldtimers Club of the PZK and the Fundacja Ogólnopolskiego Porozumienia Organizacji Radioamatorskich (OPOR) [Foundation of the AllPoland Association of Radio Amateurs].6 In order to understand what is meant by amateur radio, some terms should be clarified first. Amateur radio is a technical pastime involving wireless communication on defined frequency bands (short wave, ultra-short wave, etc.) by means of different modes of operation (telegraphy, radiotelephony, teletype, etc.). Those who carry out this activity must comply with the global regulations of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for the radio communication service and pass a state-recognized proficiency exam. Once they pass this test, they are assigned a call sign by the responsible national telecommunications authority. The prefix of the call sign indicates the person’s nationality. For Poland today, this code is usually SP, followed by a number indicating the region 4 Ciepielowski; Ciepielowski / Czlijanc 2008; Rybka / Wyporski / Ziembicki 1970. 5 The relevant records on the PZK of the post-war period were viewed in the IPN at Poznan´. 6 SPOTC; Fundacja Ogólnopolskiego Porozumienia Organizacji Radioamatorskich.

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within the country and other letters that allow for the clear identification of the transmitting station. In English, practitioners are referred to as “amateur radio operators” or colloquially as “hams.” In Polish, however, the radio amateur is characteristically referred to as “krótkofalowiec” [literally: shortwave users], while “radio amateur” today generally means hobbyists and people interested in radio technology. Before the Second World War, these terms were often used interchangeably. They are occasionally still confused. For instance, there are radio amateurs who are not active on short wave, so that “krótkofalowiec” would not apply to them. To verify a successful radio contact, so-called “QSL cards” are sent out. Often designed graphically like postcards, they contain not only the operator’s own call sign and the location of the station, but also the call sign of the remote station as well as precise information on time, frequency, mode and connection quality. Before the advent of the Internet, these cards were usually sent via nationally organized QSL card offices. The QSL cards are ultimately the linchpin of the hobby or sport: They not only provide the only means of proving successful radio receptions, but they are also a prerequisite for obtaining certificates.7 Following the Titanic disaster, the US Congress passed the so-called “Radio Act” in 1912, which allocated frequency ranges to the individual radio services for the first time. Radio amateurs were given the wavelengths below 200 m, which were considered unusable.8 Nonetheless, this inadvertently marked the birth of worldwide amateur radio. Soon, it became clear that broadcasts in this waveband could be sent around the world with much less power than in the long waveband (and therefore less technical effort). The first two-way radio communication between the continents probably took place in November 1923 at a wavelength of 110 m between a US-American and a French amateur radio station.9 Before this, however, the First World War in Europe had demonstrated the enormous importance of wireless communication in both a positive and negative sense, especially to the military of all countries involved. With attrition warfare, sprawling fronts and troop displacements, the new technology improved troop command and coordination. Yet, at the same time, the troops themselves were also more vulnerable, since everyone could hear the radio transmissions (hence the need for encryption). Moreover, spies could relay important information from within one’s own territory to the enemy.

7 Certificates are mainly issued by the amateur radio bodies of the respective countries. For this purpose, QSL cards are used to prove a certain number of radio connections with radio amateurs of the country concerned from different places/areas of the country. 8 The wavelength is calculated with the formula wavelength (λ) = phase velocity (c) / frequency (f). The higher the frequency the smaller the wavelength. 9 On this and the early development of amateur radio, see: Zenker 2000.

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Amateur radio in Poland, 1925–1990 Given these experiences, and the fraught post-war atmosphere, it is not surprising that the European governments showed considerable mistrust of the new hobby of amateur radio, which was just emerging in the ranks of former army radio operators. In the reconstituted Polish state, the mere possession of radio receivers was officially forbidden until 1924. Even after that, the ownership of radio technology was subject to strict legal regulations. Private radio broadcasting, on the other hand, still took place and was not regulated at all.10 Finally, in 1930, an independent amateur radio association (PZK) was successfully established, which also became member of the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU).11 For many years, however, the Polish association was plagued by organizational squabbles. Put simply, the bone of contention was whether it should be centralized or regionally decentralized. Shortly before the war began, the PZK was thus in danger of splintering. Despite this in-fighting, the radio amateurs had been preparing for the army’s telecommunications support. Nevertheless, and most likely out of fear of treachery, all hams were obliged per decree to abandon or shut down their facilities at the beginning of the war.12 Noteworthy and important for the later course of events is the fact that the telecommunications department of the Armia Krajowa [Home Army] (AK)13 consisted almost exclusively of radio amateurs who already knew each other from the PZK. The broadcasting station called “Błyskawica” [lightning] would be instrumental in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. It was primarily designed and built by Antoni Ze˛bik, a technically highly skilled radio amateur from Cze˛stochowa. Apart from having to cope with the general chaos, the post-war period initially resulted in a practical obstruction for Polish radio amateurs: Their hobby was not regulated by law. Furthermore, important locations for pre-war amateur radio clubs such as Lwów and Wilno now lay outside the new Polish borders so that they could not be reactivated. Still, an attempt to revive the PZK was made as early as 1946. When taking a closer look at the list of the 24 participants of the founding meeting of October 1946, it is striking that it was not only military men from the security organs of the new “People’s Power” who sought to reorganize their hobby. Rather, there were several officers from the intelligence department of the 10 See Rozporza˛dzenie 1924; On amateur radio in Poland during the interwar period, see Barelkowski 2018, p. 850ff. 11 For its part, IARU was founded in 1925 as an umbrella organization to better represent the interests of radio amateurs at the World Radio Communication Conferences and also to coordinate the distribution of QSL cards. See: International Amateur Radio Union. 12 Rozporza˛dzenie 1939. 13 The AK was the military wing of the Polish underground movement against the German occupation. Their major political action was the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

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AK among them. At the same time, there were officers who came into the country with the Polish units within the Red Army and were now active in the security organs and Gwidon Damazyn, a former prisoner of the Buchenwald concentration camp, who had operated the secret radio station there.14 What connected them was the fact that they had already been active radio amateurs in the pre-war period and some of them had served on the executive boards of the PZK at the central or regional level.15 At least for the time being, political or personal differences seem to have taken a back seat. Instead, as in the pre-war period, the government tried to legalize the common hobby by “re-founding” the PZK, providing it with a charter and appointing a founding board of directors. In this context, it is interesting to note that two main points of § 1 of the charter, probably proposed by the former AK officer and pre-war treasurer of the PZK, Wacław Musiałowicz, were removed without replacement at the suggestion of Anatol Jeglin´ski. The minutes state concisely: “Removed are § 1 point 4: The association is an apolitical organization as well as § 1 point 5: The association is a member of the International Amateur Radio Union.”16 On the other hand, the pre-military and patriotic character of amateur radio was underscored. Undoubtedly, the aim was to convince the distrustful state authorities of the group’s political trustworthiness and the “right” attitude to achieve the statutory regulation needed for legalizing amateur radio. This also correlates with the composition of the first regular board of directors elected at the general meeting on February 1, 1948, which was headed by the non-radio amateur Tadeusz Z˙arnecki. As an electrical engineer who led the reconstruction of the electrical industry in a central position in the Ministry of Industry, he therefore had official authority. The same can be said about the second chairman Anatol Jeglin´ski, who had already belonged to the main board of the PZK in the pre-war period and now worked as a major in the telecommunications department of the Ministry of Public Security (MBP). The former AK officer Jan Brodziak became treasurer. Ten regional departments were also set up in Warsaw, Bydgoszcz, Cze˛stochowa, Gdynia, Łódz´, Kraków, Katowice, Poznan´, Szczecin, and Wrocław. The work was to focus on the club stations, where the hobby was pursued collectively. Accordingly, radio communication was established with radio amateurs from all over the world, devices and antennas were

14 See Hartung 1974, p. 163ff. 15 An (incomplete) list of names of pre-war radio amateurs and their call signs can be found in Rybka / Wyporski / Ziembicki 1970, pp. 67–70. Before the war, the composition of the PZK executive board (ZG PZK) was regularly printed in the association organ Krótkofalowiec. 16 The minutes of the founding meeting of PZK of 01. 02. 1948 can be found in AP Szczecin, Liga Obrony Kraju, Zarza˛d Wojewódzki w Szczecinie, Wyział Organizacyjny, Statut, organizacja PZK…, sygn. 65/475/0/1/173, without pagination.

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built and interested young people were taught the essentials – especially Morse code. Nevertheless, the necessary legal regulations were not enacted until October 1948. As in the pre-war period, there were considerable legal hurdles to obtaining a broadcasting license.17 The first licenses, which were only valid for one year according to the decree, therefore probably were not issued until August 1949.18 In any case, only few permits were issued until the mid-1950s. And, as there was no publication and often no infrastructure to form club (premises, broadcasting and receiver technology), there was hardly any publicity for the hobby. It is therefore not surprising that as early as March 1949 the PZK’s main board of directors called on the members to establish cooperation with the organization Słuz˙ba Polsce19 [Service to Poland] to ensure a more favorable development. Even so, the findings were probably rather disillusioning. In June 1949, the initiator of the Szczecin department, Ignacy Budzin´ski, reported signs of dissolution and the complete lethargy of the chairman there, who had announced his resignation.20 Already in the summer of 1950, the PZK was dissolved at a special meeting of members and the amateur radio was incorporated as a department into the Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Z˙ołnierza [League of Soldier Friends]. In 1962, the latter was then absorbed into the Liga Obrony Kraju (TPZ˙/LPZ˙/LOK) [League for National Defence], seemingly without any major official discussion.21 Shortly thereafter, other, previously independent organizations such as the Liga Lotniczna [Flying League] and the Liga Morska [Sea League] suffered a similar fate. This centralization of recreational sports (gliding, sailing, motorcycling, etc.) in a single, paramilitary-oriented organization can be observed throughout the entire Soviet sphere of influence in the early 1950s. In the Soviet Union itself, the relevant body was the Volunteer Society for Cooperation with the Army, Aviation, and Fleet (DOSAAF), which was regarded as model for the other socialist states; 17 Rozporza˛dzenie 1948. 18 Rybka / Wyporski / Ziembicki 1970., p. 107. 19 The organization Słuz˙ba Polsce was a paramilitary organization in which young people between the ages of 16 and 21 performed compulsory work and were prepared for military service. It existed from 1948 to 1955. The letter of the PZK board of directors to all departments for cooperation with Słuz˙ba Polsce dated 22. 03. 1949 can be found here: AP Szczecin, Liga Obrony Kraju, Zarza˛d Wojewódzki w Szczecinie, Wyział Organizacyjny, Statut, organizacja PZK…, sygn. 65/475/0/1/173, without pagination. 20 Ignacy Budzin´ski to Urza˛d Wojewódzki Szczecin´ski, 28. 06. 1949 r., AP Szczecin, Zarza˛d Miejski i Miejska Rada Narodowa w Szczecinie, Polski Zwia˛zek Krótkofalowców, Oddział Szczecin, sygn. 65/386/0/2.2/204, p. 23. 21 The Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Z˙ołnierza (TPZ˙) has a longer tradition and cannot be called a newly formed communist organization. It still exists today as Liga Obrony Kraju (LOK) and continues to operate amateur radio clubs. Just how centralization took place in this paramilitary organization and how it successfully managed political upheavals is still largely unexplored; only a single anthology exists: Bonin / Da˛browski 2016.

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the Society for Sport and Technology (GST) was founded for this purpose in the GDR; in Czechoslovakia, it was the Union for Cooperation with the Army (SVAZARM).22 It is interesting to note in this context that the LOK in Poland emerged from older pre-war organizations and sought to pick up on their traˇ SSR ditions under the auspices of communism. By contrast, in the GDR and C new organizations were created which immediately integrated amateur radio. All the same, this integration into a much larger and better equipped body did not lead to increased activity in Polish amateur radio. On the contrary, in 1954, the magazine Radioamator, which also devoted itself to the interests of radio amateurs to a limited extent, announced that so far only 48 licenses had been renewed in all of Poland.23 At the beginning of 1955, the journal tersely stated: “In the period from mid-November to mid-December the activity in the airwaves of Polish stations was exceptionally weak. Many stations are still waiting for their licenses to be renewed.”24 It is probably no coincidence that a short note on the developments in the neighboring state was printed directly next to this report under the title “New Licenses in the GDR.” A sharp contrast emerges: “Amateur radio in the GDR is taking off. The amateurs there can be heard on all frequencies, every day; they participate in all the radio competitions.”25 But this was obviously an optimistic outsider’s view. Indeed, the GST did not want to promote individualized “Nursportlertum,” i. e. hobbies. In a programmatic article in the GDR trade journal Funkamateur in 1955 on the subject of licenses, open threats were even made: “Amateur radio, however, like all other branches of training in the GST, is not an end in itself but serves to consolidate our state power and to qualify our members, who are committed to the utmost to strengthen the defense readiness. […] The call to improve the patriotic educational work in our organization is of particular importance in the training of radio operators. In this connection, it is important to fight vigorously against any manifestation of pacifism and mere hobbyism (Nursportlertum)”.26

As early as 1956/1957, the “thaw” in Poland led to a break-up of the monopolized structures of Zwia˛zek Młodziez˙y Polski (ZMP) [Polish Youth Association] and the League Przyjaciół Z˙ołnierza. Several recreational activities were allowed to reorganize and reactivate their old associations. Besides the amateur radio operators, this also included the Zwia˛zek Harcerzy Polskich (ZHP) [Polish Scout Association] and the gliders (Aeroclub). Against this backdrop, the third (re-)

22 The relations between the individual paramilitary organizations in the Soviet orbit are still largely unexplored. 23 Amatorskie radiostacje 1954, p. 6. 24 Na pasach 1955, p. 18. 25 Ibid. 26 Es geht um die Lizenz 1955, pp. 3–4.

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foundation of the PZK took place in January 1957. This development deserves special attention, for it marked the beginning of an organizational conflict that would strongly impact the years ahead. If we follow the official announcements, then the removal of the amateur radio from the LPZ˙/LOK and the re-establishment of the PZK does not seem to have taken place without some form of intimidation. In the first appeal of the new PZK board of directors to the country’s radio amateurs in April 1958, rumors were therefore already refuted that joining the PZK could lead to the loss of the broadcasting license, albeit without naming the source of this threat: “This is a regrettable form of scaremongering.”27 At the same time, it is pointed out that the PZK had been granted by the state the right to apply, renew or modify licenses for its members after they have passed their exams. In addition, as the sole representative of the Polish amateur radio, the PZK would represent its interests in IARU28: “It should be stressed, however, that even though our association was only reactivated a year ago, it already enjoys a high standing both in society and with state authorities, as well as on the international stage.”29 In a second appeal of June 1958, it is nevertheless somewhat contradictorily stated that all radio amateurs had the freedom to organize: “We welcome all radio amateurs who are honestly excited to work at PZK. Those who do not want to join the PZK can still work unhindered on their own or in any organization. Apart from ensuring the freedom of choice of organization to every radio amateur, the PZK has undertaken the task of preserving the hard-won independence of the association, which it must not forfeit in the interests of Polish amateur radio.”30 At the first general meeting in January 1958, the association had only 750 members. Next to the major association LPZ˙/LOK, the PZK resembled David fighting Goliath. Nevertheless, by the end of 1959 the telecommunications minister issued a new ordinance which made membership in the PZK obligatory for obtaining a broadcasting license. All club stations also had to be registered via the PZK.31 In the neighboring GDR, where there was barely a “thaw” and certainly no organizational changes, this development was perceived as a dangerous coup for Western propaganda. The new Polish amateur radio association was vigorously attacked under the telling heading “The IARU as a wolf in sheep’s clothing”:

27 Odezwa 2. 04. 1958, p. 2. 28 With this statement, previous provisions were ignored, whereby members no longer belonged to the IARU. The IARU itself seems to have been accommodating. A corresponding amendment to the Articles of Association followed later. 29 Odezwa 1958a, p. 2. 30 Odezwa 1958b, p. 3. 31 Rozporza˛dzenie 1959.

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“Anyone who knows the aims and nature of Western politics will soon hear the Nightingale’s noisy steps (hört bald die Nachtigallen trapsen), as exemplified by the amateurs of the Polish People’s Republic. They heard the Western mating call, believed in it and even quit the ‘League of Soldier Friends,’ our Polish brother organization. Now, they only had purely professional goals and yet, even after this fait accompli, they still were not accepted into the IARU. As a consequence, the Polish amateurs no longer have a permanent organization, and the Polish “League of Soldier Friends” has been severely compromised by the withdrawal of well-trained technical cadres. The actual goal was achieved, namely the fragmentation and dilution of the organization, the weakening of the defensive power of the Polish state.”32

In fact, the author was ill-informed. The PZK had been quite active in IARU since its refoundation. In the years that followed, it even represented the GDR amateurs, who were not admitted to the umbrella organization until 1975. This was because until then they did not at least have a formally independent professional association, but were organized exclusively within the framework of a paramilitary organization.33 After the legal regulation in favor of the PZK, it initially also looked as though a common denominator could be found with LPZ˙/LOK and ZHP, i. e. the large associations that also operated club stations. Representatives of both organizations were elected to the extended board of the PZK at the so-called “Unification Congress” in 1960 and the minutes recorded the following: “The PZK is the only representative of all Polish radio amateurs in the country and abroad and plays an essential role in the polytechnization of society in accordance with the decisions of the 4th Plenum of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party. The PZK is the only association of all socialist states that belongs to IARU. It participates actively in their congresses and discussions and takes the floor there on amateur radio matters.”34

On the last point in particular, it is possible to identify the overlapping of the interests of the state and party leadership with those of the radio amateurs of the PZK, which had opened up a certain room for manoeuvre for amateur radio in Poland. While the PZK was interested in strengthening its hobby and the necessary organizational and technical conditions, the communist rulers urgently wanted recognition by Western-dominated organizations such as the IARU for their legitimacy. VHF radio amateur Wojciech Nietyksza deserves credit for recognizing this. Nietyksza not only had a very good command of English, technical knowledge and organizational talent, but he had also already been working in IARU, Region 1, since PZK’s revival in 1956. Furthermore, as dis32 Der Wolf im Schaffell 1957, p. 24. 33 Senne, p. 187. 34 AIPN BU 1585/20532, pp. 79–85, here p. 79.

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cussed below, he managed to bring several major events to Poland in the subsequent decades. Indeed, the state authorities agreed to this bargain. They offered PZK funding and travel permits with foreign currency support for radio amateurs or delegations to events in Western countries for international recognition and a coordinating role in amateur radio in the socialist camp. Yet, all this came at a high price: It meant the consent and cooperation in the spying on and monitoring of one’s own as well as Western colleagues.35 Another important milestone was the recognition of the PZK as a “non-profit organization” by the ministry of the interior (MSW)36 in 1963. Thus, it also assumed supervisory functions, which further facilitated the monitoring of amateur radio. Functional supervision remained with the ministry of telecommunications; and, from 1968, the newly created Pan´stwowa Inspekcja Radiowa (PIR) [State Radio Inspectorate] was responsible for issuing licenses and technical supervision. With the decree of 1959, for the first time even young people from the age of 15 were allowed to broadcast, though only with low transmission power. Despite these otherwise positive legal framework, a paradoxical situation arose in the ensuring years. Namely, most of the club stations and thus the actual work with young people was carried out by the LOK and the ZHP. Of a total of 345 club stations that existed in Poland in 1969, 220 were operated by the LOK, 104 by the PZK and 41 by the ZHP.37 While the cooperation with the ZHP seemed to go smoothly, there was continuous friction with the LOK. On the one hand, tension arose over dual memberships. As a member of the LOC, a person also had to be a member of the PZK to be a radio amateur. This was accordingly perceived as a compulsory twofold membership. On the other hand, the LOK, as a much larger organization, evidently could not resist the temptation to challenge the PZK’s claim to sole representation in amateur radio. Ideologically, this dispute is hard to justify, as it was the state officials in both organizations who dictated the tone. The division, ironically, was supposed to be mediated in 1974 by the state security service. For example, Anatol Jeglin´ski – occasional head of the intelligence department of the secret service with the rank of colonel – was the prime mover in the re-establishment of the PZK in both 1946 and 1957, and finally served as its 35 The comprehensive surveillance of all amateur radio in Poland is very well documented in the surviving records of the MSW. For reasons of space, data protection and personal rights, it will not be described here in any detail. Some figures and examples are given below. 36 LOK and ZHP had held this status since 1963. It referred to the law on associations of 1932 and was awarded to organizations that were considered to be of particular importance for the development of society. The organizations in question were thus legally constituted, and were allowed to accept donations and acquire wealth without further approval. However, in 1989, before the introduction of the new law on associations, only 45 associations held this status. See: Stowarzyszenie wyz˙szej uz˙ytecznos´ci. 37 Notatka słuz˙bowa majora Z. Orłowskiego, 14. 02. 1970 r., AIPN BU 1585/20531, pp. 38–39.

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full-time office director from 1974 to 1982.38 Between 1969 and 1980, even the commander of the intelligence forces, General Leon Kołatkowski, was chairman of the executive board of the PZK.39 Nevertheless, the LOK functionaries were repeatedly accused of “Stalinist-style command.” This prompted members to call for its organizational independence, while emphasizing their own ideological integrity. In an overview of the history and development of amateur radio in Poland from the end of 1969, the executive committee of the PZK also did not hesitate to mathematically verify the “correct” ethos of Polish radio amateurs on the basis of the radio connections made and confirmed by QSL cards: “Taking into account that 266,000 amateur radio stations are registered in the USA and 15,085 in the USSR (including 5,008 private stations), Polish radio amateurs contact their colleagues from the Soviet Union 26 times more often than those from the USA.”40 This comparison is nevertheless somewhat ambiguous, as it implicitly shows the enormous technical gap between the USA and the Soviet Union at that time and the low distribution of the hobby in the socialist motherland. Just the same, ideological conformity with state power and the good intentions of promoting young talent did not lead to better equipment or personnel. At the end of 1969, the PZK had only 21 employees in the whole country, of which only 7 were full-time; 11 worked for the executive board, 10 for the voivodeship boards (ZOW).41 There was also a lack of available space. The entire program was mainly financed by subsidies from the ministry of telecommunications. However, complaints about these shortcomings and requests for more subsidies were later ignored by the responsible ministries. This also affected the truly important public relations work. After the revival of its own monthly magazine under the title Krótkofalowiec Polski in 1958 as part of the organizational reorientation, it was already merged with the magazine Radioamator in 1961 due to lack of demand and funds.42 On top of this came the general lack of technical infrastructure, which could not always be remedied by “in-house construction.” As a consequence, many clubs did not even have a transmitter. Paradoxically, the organizational fragmentation of amateur radio also led to an increasing number of licensed amateurs with their own station, who were neither formally PZK members nor involved in a club station. They thus 38 Biography and career history of Anatol Jeglin´ski can be found in his personnel file, AIPN BU 0193/3401. 39 See: Biography of Leon Kołatkowski. 40 ZG PZK, Materiały do zagadnien´ rozwoju krótkofalarstwa w Polskiej Rzeczypospolitej Ludowej, Warszawa, listopad 1969, AIPN BU 1585/20531, pp. 14–32, here p. 26. 41 Ibid., p. 31. 42 Information on the publication history of Krótkofalowiec and digital copies of numerous volumes can be found at swiatradio.com.pl.

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carved out a space for their hobby, if only a tenuous one. A nationwide audit carried out by the ministry of telecommunications in 1977 is instructive here. Statistically, the situation was as follows: “As of December 31, 1976: 187 club stations of the PZK, 451 club stations of the LOK and 114 club stations of the ZHP (according to the information on licenses issued by the general inspection of the State Radio Inspectorate). On December 31, 1976, PZK had 3,739 full members (holders of broadcasting licenses) […]. The number of individual broadcasting licenses of categories I and II issued by the Radio Inspectorate at that time was 5,749. The difference between issued broadcasting licenses and full membership in the PZK is thus 2,020, i. e. over 35 % were only organized in the ZHP, the LOK or not at all.”43

At the same time, the inspectors concluded that many of the club stations obviously only existed on paper. The minimum number of members in a club station was 7 people. The Opole Voivodeship is thus mentioned where out of 31 registered stations of the LOK, 19 did not meet this condition; 7 had no members at all.44 The PZK itself offered a mixed assessment at its VIII national congress in early May 1980, which also included the results of the above-mentioned inspection: “Regarding those persons who, despite being requested to do so, did not specify their organizational affiliation, the Radio Inspectorate requested the cancellation of their broadcasting license. The requirement for all broadcasting license holders to belong to a club station should be clearly reflected within the developed guidelines. Of the PZK members, 4,408 work in PZK club stations, 1,167 in the ZHP (which is legally on a par with PZK club stations) and 1,321 in LOK club stations. Given the noticeable increase in interest in amateur radio, the growth in the number of amateur radio operators could be considerably greater; the main obstacle, however, remains the difficulty of obtaining or building transmission and reception technology that meets modern technical requirements.”45

In fact, the PZK had already demanded the industrial production of its own transceiver46 in Poland in 1969. But unlike in the GDR47 and Hungary, for example, it was not possible. The Polish radio amateurs were therefore dependent on home-built equipment and imports, for instance through contacts with 43 Protokół z rewizji przeprowadzonej w okresie od 5 do 24 wrzes´nia 1977 r., 30. 11. 1977 r., AIPN 1585/20539, pp. 7–19, here p. 8. 44 Ibid., p. 9. 45 Sprawozdanie z działalnos´ci ZG PZK w okresie pomie˛dzy VII a VIII Zjazdem Krajowym PZK (27. 03. 1973–03. 05. 1980), AIPN BU 1585/20531, pp. 87–134, here p. 88. 46 A transceiver is a device that can both transmit and receive on the various amateur radio frequencies. 47 The transceiver “Teltow” was produced in limited series in different versions starting in 1970 in the GDR and was made available to the club stations by the GST. Cf. Teltow (amateur radio transceiver).

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Western radio amateurs. However, these were to some extent illegal and also very expensive.48 The congress of May 1980 also represented a certain turning point, with the introduction of martial law in December 1981 leading to a complete ban on amateur radio in Poland. All wireless equipment had to be surrendered and was deposited in secured rooms. The equipment was only gradually re-authorized and returned at the end of 1983. It is therefore possible to speak of a veritable flowering of amateur radio in the People’s Republic of Poland, especially for the years between ca. 1960 and 1981. While there were only 694 issued broadcasting licenses in 1960, the number on December 31,1979 was 6,242. “As of 12. 31. 1979, 238 club stations of the PZK, 127 of the ZHP and 435 of the LOK were operating in the country.”49 Such a development was obviously reason enough for the security organs to thoroughly monitor and control amateur radio from the 1960s onward. On the one hand, this was done through official channels. The PZK, as a “non-profit organization,” was accountable to the ministry of the interior as a supervisory body and, as shown, the ministry of telecommunications also carried out inspections. On the other hand, there were also centrally ordered operational surveillance actions by the secret service, which took place in all voivodeships under the name “Fala” [radio wave]. Numerous so-called unofficial employees (TW) and operative contacts (KO) spied on all levels and reported extensively on activities, internal disputes, violations of the radio regulations, contacts with capitalist foreign countries, and so on. For just one example of the tremendous monitoring density, consider the situation in the voivodeship of Piła: According to a memo from the secret service, in 1987 there were a total of 82 people with a broadcasting license and 9 club stations; 6 radio amateurs had personal connections to “capitalist foreign countries.” For the monitoring of this quite manageable group, 4 TW and 3 KO were available, two more were about to be brought on board. Two years later, it was additionally stated that a further TW had been acquired to monitor the now 100 licensees, 5 radio amateurs might have acquired a western device, and that the remainder only had primitive home-made technology.50 The security organs were particularly interested in the contacts of radio amateurs in “capitalist foreign countries.” PZK, on the other hand, was particularly proud of its active participation in IARU, Region 1, which led to the election of Wojciech Nietyksza to the organization’s executive committee in May 1972. It was 48 This of course also opened up the possibility of black market trading, which was also criticized in monitoring protocols and a source of much displeasure among the radio amateurs. 49 AIPN BU 1585/20531, Sprawozdanie, pp. 87–134, here p. 89. 50 Sprawa objektowa “Fala” w Pile, AIPN Po 0062/102/1, pp. 22–30.

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the first time that a country of COMECON was represented in this body. Things could not have turned out better for the secret service. At that time, Nietyksza had already been working as an unofficial employee for many years. He also coordinated practically every one of his appearances at the IARU with the supervisory authorities in subsequent years, tried to exert influence on decisions of the association in the interests of state power and provided a lot of information about his colleagues there.51 In August 1973, for the first time a meeting of this Executive Committee was held in Warsaw. In April 1975, the PZK hosted the 10th General Assembly of IARU, Region 1, and in 1978 the IARU-supported World Championship in Fox Hunting (Amateur Radio Direction Finding, colloquially known as Fox Oring)52 was organized. The secret service saw this as a ripe opportunity. It organized comprehensive surveillance, especially for the first two events, including bugging the conference rooms, searching the hotel rooms of Western delegates and shadowing them.53 All this was done with the active representatives of the PZK. This included in particular Anatol Jeglin´ski, who had been the full-time office director of the PZK’s executive board of directors since July 1974 and provided additional information for the SB between 1975 and 1983 as KO “Adamski.”54 What exactly the secret service hoped to achieve, however, remains a mystery. At the IARU Congress, technical developments such as satellite radio, new frequency bands or telex links were discussed in English – topics which were by no means confidential and about which an official conference report was prepared. But bizarrely enough, the all-watching intelligence service again needed the help of the radio amateurs to even be able to evaluate the report: “We are interested in some of the addressed topics, which is why we need a full version of the conference documents. However, these are only available in English. Our KO Adamski will try to obtain translations of some of the reports we are interested in.”55 On the whole, based on the files handed down in the IPN, it can be stated that the PZK leadership always reacted willingly to the inquiries of the secret service. The boundaries between providing official information to the ministry of the interior as the state body responsible for the PZK and functioning as TW or KO were quite fluid. For instance, visits of Western radio amateurs or the use of

51 Information about Nietyksza’s spying activities, who had worked for the secret service under various aliases since the 1950s, can be found under AIPN BU 0227/605 and in numerous other files. 52 Fox hunting (Fox Oring) is a sporting competition in which transmitters hidden in a certain terrain have to be located in the shortest possible time by radio direction finding. 53 The surveillance is comprehensively documented in AIPN BU 0999/98 t.1–3. 54 The file “KO Adamski” can be found under AIPN BU 01043/3426/J. 55 Ibid., p. 21.

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illegal call signs56 were reported, but also internal disagreements or the permanent dispute with the LOK. It is difficult to ascertain the extent to which radio amateurs became involved in the opposition over the years. In any case, according to the available sources, this topic did not play a role in the executive bodies of the PZK. Conversely, there were repeatedly illegal radio activities which contradicted the international rules on amateur radio, a fact which was officially denounced even in the communist motherland. In 1963, the youth daily newspaper Leninskaya Smena [Lenin’s Change], which was widely distributed in the Soviet Union, pointed out with a tone of protest to the alleged illegal activities of radio amateurs in Kazakhstan: “But there is another kind of ‘ham operator’. There are those who, having contrived a homemade transmitter, go on the air, litter it with trivial melodies, empty conversations, and sometimes even uncensored swearing. Being confident of not being punished, all these ‘kings of the happy kingdom’, ‘alchemists’, ‘cobras’, and ‘broken wine glasses’, carry on broadcasts in bands forbidden to amateur communications, willfully appropriate call signs for their radio stations, and interfere with normal communications work.”57 It remains unclear where this information came from and who was actually behind the broadcasts. The quote nevertheless illustrates well the ambivalent attitude towards the activities of radio amateurs – and not only of the government. On the one hand, they were seen as technology pioneers. As their knowledge was urgently needed for the implementation of new technologies, they were therefore to be supported by the state. On the other hand, radio activities were difficult to monitor and triggered massive protests among the population, such as when television reception was disrupted. These interferences, also known as television interference (TVI), were particularly common in densely populated urban areas and they severely damaged the reputation of radio amateurs. While in Western countries interference suppression technology made television receivers more resistant, this was rarely the case in socialist countries. In his work on amateur radio in the Soviet Union in 1965, based on officially available documents, Gayle Durham Hollander aptly states: “In the USSR the state of the relationship is such that, at first sign of difficulty with a television set, the local amateur radio operator is blamed; it is then up to the ham to prove that his set is TVI free.” This observation is no doubt applicable to the other socialist countries.58 56 QSL cards that arrived at the QSL card office for unassigned callsigns were reported to the control authorities as probably illegal amateur radio activity. The same is true for broadcasting outside the amateur radio bands. 57 Hollander 1965, p. 44. 58 Ibid., p. 45. The author of this article was still active in the early 1980s as a radio amateur at a club station in Berlin-Pankow, where he was involved in the suppression of television interference and the easing of conflicts in the affected housing complex.

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Amateur radio became a political priority during systemic crises, such as during the “Prague Spring” in 1968. As part of the liberalization process, Czechoslovak radio amateurs had also demanded their own organization. When the troops of the Warsaw Pact marched in in August 1968, these efforts were abandoned. Nonetheless, it prompted many amateur radio stations – using made-up callsigns – to spread political appeals, organize aid networks in the country, and send news about the situation to Western colleagues, who passed it on to the press.59 Lacking other sources, the latter often quickly made the headlines. This had already been the case during the events that took place in Hungary in 1956. The Ministry for State Security of the GDR (MfS) saw this as a massive threat to the information monopoly and, as a reaction, temporarily enforced a total radio ban for the amateurs of the GDR. Equipment was confiscated, rooms were sealed off and reports were collected about West German radio amateurs with a particularly “counterrevolutionary” attitude.60 As a consequence, the legal footing was worked out “for the temporary suspension and for the decommissioning of the amateur radio service in the GDR” in “times of tension” and “in case of defense” in close cooperation with the Ministry for Postal and Telecommunication.61 Although Poland, unlike the GDR, participated with its own troops to quell the “Prague Spring,” amateur radio operations there were surprisingly not shut down. Polish hams, however, were massively boycotted in the airwaves by their Czech colleagues.62 In Radioamator, the events in Czechoslovakia were not even mentioned. By their very nature, illegal broadcasting activities were rarely or never recorded. For instance, the story of a radio amateur from Gdynia, Zbigniew Ejtminowicz, who is said to have been the first to provide information about the bloody suppression of the protests on the Polish Baltic coast in December 1970, is based on hearsay. However, he told the story to his son in 2009 shortly before his death, who recounts it as follows: “He rushed into the apartment, wrote a few lines in English on a piece of paper and then nervously began to turn the frequency knob to find a station somewhere in the world. He finally received the signal from an Australian radio operator, made contact and transmitted in Morse code: ‘Tell journalists. In Poland, in Gdynia, a massacre is taking 59 On amateur radio and “Prague Spring,” cf. for example the compilation of statements under the title Období 1968–1970. Prazˇské jaro, normalizace a radioamatérˇi. 60 The radio ban was in effect until December 1968 without any legal basis. Cf. Senne, p. 216f. 61 The statement of the MfS can be found in: Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes (BStU) Archiv der Zentralstelle, MfS-HA XX, Nr. 17304, pp. 91–93. 62 This was the statement of Polish radio amateur Tomasz Ciepielowski, who was already active at the time, in conversation with the author. I want to specially thank him for the extensive information he provided on the history of Polish amateur radio.

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place. The army is firing in the streets, blood is spilling, people are dying.’ […] After a few moments, the reply came: ‘Okay, understood.’ Father turned off the transmitter and walked through the woods to work. When he came back in the afternoon, he tuned in to Radio Free Europe as usual. The information he provided was reported in the news by Reuters.”63

There is little evidence to support such stories. In any case, the possibility for such communications existed mainly for radio amateurs who possessed their own transmitters at home and dared to violate the international amateur radio codex, which actually prohibited the passing on of information from or for third parties. ˇ SSR, similar illegal broadcasting activities took place during As in 1968 in the C the Solidarnos´c´ wedding in the early 1980s. It is hard to know exactly to what extent this was supported by individual radio amateurs. Certainly, these “broadcasting activities” could not have been undertaken without the technical support of skilled actors.64 The MfS was again particularly alarmed, ordering large-scale radio surveillance operations “in connection with counterrevolutionary events in the VR Poland since August 1980,” “with the aim of detecting counterrevolutionary activities of both Polish and radio amateurs of Western states and their connections and contacts.” The conclusion reached in June 1981 was extraˇ SSR, Polish ordinary: “Contrary to the findings during the events of 1968 in the C radio amateurs do not comment on the situation in their vicinity. In response to inquiries from foreign contact partners, they deflected or ended the conversations.”65 Despite this, the MfS felt compelled to constantly elaborate new concepts and action plans for the surveillance of the “security area amateur radio” in its own country. Indeed, the radio amateurs of the GDR in particular had good contact opportunities with West Germany and were therefore already suspect.66

63 Fryc 2017. 64 On the subject of underground work and broadcasting, see Wcis´lik, 2017, pp. 175–210. 65 Situation in amateur radio of the VR Poland, information G/4752/05/06/81, BStU, Archiv der Zentralstelle, MfS HA II/10, No. 800, pp. 263–264. 66 Thus, in 1987 a “Concept for the political-operational securing of amateur radio” was developed, in which it was stated, among other things: “The radio amateurs of the GDR are permanently exposed to the effects of political-ideological diversion and the contact policy/ activity of the enemy through their communications with radio amateurs in the area of operations.”, BStU, Stasi-Unterlagen-Archiv Berlin, MfS, BV Berlin, Department III 13, pp. 6– 24, here p. 9.

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Summary With relatively few protagonists, Polish amateur radio negotiated with the state authorities, both in the pre-war period and under changed political conditions after 1945, to achieve legal standing for exercising this hobby. Nevertheless, it was always suspected that the hobby, which is per se borderless, was being used for espionage and propaganda activities. For this reason, there were strict licensing procedures and almost permanent surveillance. As a consequence, but also due to internal organizational disputes, the room to maneuver for the radio amateurs was greatly restricted. It remains unclear to what extent the consent and personal participation in the surveillance of the secret service must be seen as a concession to the doctrinaire state authority in return for even being able to legally practice the hobby. The path to getting a home transmitter was in any event paved with many concessions to the licensing authorities and probably scared off a lot of people. Yet there was also agreement with the state, at least as concerned the joint interest in technical progress in wireless communication, Polish presence in the airwaves, international recognition and the recruitment of young people for state radio services and technical professions. In contrast to most other Warsaw Pact states, Polish radio amateurs were able to establish an independent organization as early as 1956 in the form of the PZK. Unlike the GST in the GDR, the PZK was not merely an arm of an organization geared toward pre-military training. In substantive terms, however, this was ultimately a Pyrrhic victory. The financial and personnel resources were considerably worse than in the large paramilitary organizations (LOK in Poland, GST in the GDR), which in turn severely restricted sporting and technical activities, the acquiring of new recruits, but also public relations work. In the GDR, for example, the magazine Funkamateur was able to establish its own professional journal for the hobby (which still exists today), while the revival of Krótkofalowiec Polski, which was successful in the pre-war period, as an independent communication organ of the movement failed after only a few years of publication (1958–1961). Also unlike in the GDR, where GST took over the financing, the industrial production of transceivers for equipping club stations could not be realized in Poland. The dispute between the PZK and the LOK about organizational supremacy, which was hard to comprehend from the outside, ultimately thwarted the much invoked unity of the amateur radio movement. It also consumed significant resources, while leading to longstanding personal enmities that continue to this day.67

67 Information from Tomasz Ciepielowski.

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The continuity of the personnel at PZK is remarkable. One example is Anatol Jeglin´ski: He was already active on the main board of the PZK in the pre-war period and after 1945 worked doggedly on the revival of the association, which he continued to influence until the 1980s. Another example is Wojciech Nietyksza: He successfully represented Poland in the IARU for several decades. Although he already belonged to the next generation, he was likewise a very willing unofficial employee of the security organs for many years. As a result, he could travel to Western countries in exchange for information. Apart from the legal obligation to be a member, what actual power did the PZK have? Other than being able to co-decide on the granting of licenses, in this analog age without Internet the organization that operated the country’s official QSL credentials office ultimately held practical power. Because the private postal address of the receiver was usually not transmitted during the radio communication and postage was expensive, this was the only way to obtain confirmation of radio contact. In this respect, membership in the PZK was in fact compulsory, which constituted the organization’s monopoly position. Translated by Christopher Reid

Archives Archiwum Instytutu Pamie˛ci Narodowej, Oddział w Poznaniu. Archiwum Pan´stwowe w Szczecinie. Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen DDR (BStU), Berlin.

Bibliography Amatorskie radiostacje w PRL, in: Radioamator 4/3 (1954). Barelkowski, Matthias: Hobby bez granic? Rzecz o krótkofalarstwie w Polsce w latach 1925–1990, in: Przegla˛d Historyczny 109/4 (2018), pp. 847–866. Biography of Leon Kołatkowski, available at: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Ko% C5%82atkowski [19. 03. 2020]. Bonin, Elz˙bieta / Da˛browski, Stanisław Jan (eds.): Od Emilii Plater do Ligi Obrony Kraju czyli Zarys dziejów Ligi Obrony Kraju i jej poprzedniczek 1918–2015, Lublin 2016. Ciepielowski, Tomasz: Krótkofalarstwo w Polsce. Geneza ruchu, available at: http:// www.wotpzk.org.pl/zjazd%202016/historia%201939.html [19. 03. 2020]. Ciepielowski, Tomasz / Czlijanc, Georgij: Lwowski Klub Krótkofalowców. Zarys dziejów, Warszwa 2008. Die IARU als Wolf im Schaffell, in: Funkamateur 6/12 (1957), pp. 24–25.

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Es geht um die Lizenz, in: Funkamateur 4/9 (1955), pp. 3–4. Fryc, Katarzyna: Krótkofalowiec, nie bohater. Nieznana historia Grudnia ’70, in: Gazeta Wyborcza, 17. 12. 2017 (Internet edition). Fundacja Ogólnopolskiego Porozumienia Organizacji Radioamatorskich (OPOR), available at: http://www.opor.org.pl/opor.html [19. 03. 2020]. Gessler, Anne: Dust mop or mic? Women’s utopian border-crossings in Cold War ham radio, in: Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media 15 (2017) 2, pp. 279–298. Haring, Kirsten: Ham Radio’s Technical Culture, Cambridge, MA, 2007. Hartung, Hans-Joachim: Signale durch den Todeszaun. Historische Reportage über Bau, Einsatz und Tarnung illegaler Rundfunkempfänger und -sender im Konzentrationslager Buchenwald, Berlin 1974. Hollander, Gayle Durham: Amateur Radio Operation in the Soviet Union. Center for International Studies. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1965. International Amateur Radio Union, available at: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inte rnational_Amateur_Radio_Union [19. 03. 2020]. Na pasach amatorskich, in: Radioamator 5/1 (1955). Období 1968–1970. Prazˇské jaro, normalizace a radioamatérˇi, available at http://www.ok 2kkw.com/1968/ [19. 03. 2020]. Odezwa, 2. 04. 1958, available at: http://www.swiatradio.com.pl/virtual/download/Odezwa 1_58.pdf [19. 03. 2020]. Odezwa, 10. 06. 1958, available at: http://www.swiatradio.com.pl/virtual/download/Odez wa2_58.pdf [19. 03. 2020]. Prahl, Hans-Werner: Soziologie der Freizeit, Paderborn, München, Wien, Zürich. 2002. Rozporza˛dzenie Ministra Przemysłu i Handlu z 10. 10. 1924 r., in: Dziennik Ustaw (Dz.U.) 1924 no. 99 poz. 915. Rozporza˛dzenie wyja˛tkowe Ministra Spraw Wewne˛trznych z 01. 09. 1939 r., in: Dz.U. 1939, no. 88, poz. 561. Rozporza˛dzenie Ministra Poczt i Telegrafów, wydane w porozumieniu z Ministrami: Obrony Narodowej, Bezpieczen´stwa Publicznego, Przemysłu i Handlu oraz Skarbu o prywatnych radiostacjach dos´wiadczalnych z 30.10. 1948 r., in: Dz.U., no. 52, poz. 417. Rozporza˛dzenie Ministra Ła˛cznos´ci w sprawie warunków udzielenia zezwolen´ na posiadanie i uz˙ywanie radiostacji amatorskich i dos´wiaczalnych z dnia 19 grudnia 1959 r., w: Dz.U. no. 2, poz. 14. Rybka, Zbigniew / Wyporski, Ireneusz / Ziembicki, Jan: Historia krótkofalarstwa polskiego, Warszawa 1970. Senne, Christian: Rahmen- und Organisationsbedingungen für Funkamateure in der SBZ und DDR (1945–1990). Zwischen Selbstzweck und gesellschaftlichem Auftrag, Hamburg 2008. SP Old Timers Club, available at: http://spotc.pzk.org.pl/ [19. 03. 2020]. Stowarzyszenie wyz˙szej uz˙ytecznos´ci, available at: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stowa rzyszenie_wy%C5%BCszej_u%C5%BCyteczno%C5%9Bci [19. 03. 2020]. Swiatradio.com.pl, available at: http://www.swiatradio.com.pl/virtual/modules.php?na me=Sectionsop=printpagertid=72 [19. 03. 2020].

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Teltow (amateur radio transceiver), available at: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teltow_ (amateur radio transceiver) [19. 03. 2020]. Wcis´lik, Piotr: The Rubber Waistband and the Resistor: Solidarity Radio and Media Fantasies of Emancipation under late Socialism in Poland, in: Acta Poloniae Historica 115/7 (2017), pp. 175–210. Zenker, Hardy: Vortrag auf dem Inseltreffen in Göhren am 30. Sept. 2000, available at: http://www.qslonline.de/hk/eigen/historie.htm [03. 19. 2020].

Theodore R. Weeks

Esperanto in People’s Poland: Internationalism, Public Space, Propaganda*

Esperanto, it would seem, was perfectly suited to socialism. It was modern (manmade, so to speak), idealistic, and aimed to join together diverse races and cultures around the world. In reality, of course, the relationship between socialism and the international language was far more complex and troubled. Sociologically speaking, Esperanto was a mainly middle-class, liberal movement for most (perhaps all) of its existence and from the very start of Esperanto in institutional form, the political “neutrality” of the language was stressed. In interwar Poland, Esperantists were at pains to stress their patriotism and distance from socialism.1 After the Great October Socialist Revolution, Esperanto was welcomed as proletarian, progressive, and an important step toward (of course) international brotherhood. The romance, alas, ended quickly. By the 1930s Stalinists condemned Esperanto as bourgeois and many of its practitioners landed in the Gulag or worse.2 Throughout East-Central Europe, Esperantists were targeted as liberals, Jews, free-thinkers, and bourgeois; the movement in Poland was by 1945 a shadow of its former self, having lost a high percentage of its practitioners to war and death camps. Ideally, however, it seemed in 1945 that Esperanto could once again rise and indeed take on even more important tasks in the new socialist reality than before the war. In People’s Poland (the PRL), Esperanto was not persecuted and at times it was supported (institutionally and materially), but the socialist regime never truly * This paper has been written as part of the Polish National Science Centre-funded project no. 2014/15/G/HS3/04344 “Rooms for Manoeuvre in State Socialism: Between Adaptation and Experiment”. 1 I argue this point in more detail in my unpublished article, “Polish (or Jewish?) Internationalism: Esperanto in the 1920s.” For an admirable overview of the Esperanto movement (not just in Eastern Europe) in its first stages (to the 1920s), see Drezen 1972. 2 For example, the Latvian-Soviet Esperantist Ernest Drezen (cited above) was arrested and shot in 1937. The best analysis of the persecution of Esperantists during the Soviet and Nazi regimes is Lins 1988.

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embraced Esperanto as a practical solution to link up diverse cultures and nationalities. No single “party line” was adopted toward Esperanto but a general policy of semi-benevolent neglect was followed, with periods of greater and lesser support for the language. Thus Esperanto – in particular from the mid-1950s – became one of the many “semi-autonomous” spaces where Polish citizens could find a relatively high level of personal freedom. By “semi-autonomous” I mean that while the socialist state was never absent, it allowed citizens a certain amount of room for manoeuvre to meet people, even foreigners, and to associate with other Polish citizens on a non-official basis. As we will see in what follows, Polish Esperantists used this “Esperanto space” to expand their knowledge of the world, to correspond with people outside Poland, to travel, to meet foreign guests in Poland, to socialize with like-minded individuals at home, and even to make a little money (this latter aspect is quite difficult to document – for obvious reasons – but I will argue that Polish Esperanto entrepreneurs definitely took advantage of foreign links to make a few grosz). A look at Esperanto as part of the “public sphere” of the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL) is warranted for a number of reasons. Most obviously, Esperanto brought together people interested in overcoming national and cultural boundaries, learning about the world, welcoming foreigners to Poland, and visiting foreign lands (including, but not limited to, “fraternal” socialist countries). Within the PRL itself, the Esperanto movement brought together individuals from Wrocław to Gdan´sk, coalesced into local clubs, summer camps, language courses, lectures, and publications. Most notably on the international scene, Polskie Radio (in particular, “Radio Polonia”) broadcast regularly for decades in Esperanto – by far the most significant radio broadcasts in this language on earth (and of course financed by the Polish state). While Esperanto inevitably tends toward the international, at home in the PRL it provided thousands of Poles with an opportunity to meet others who shared similar interests. Thus Esperanto also opened up and defined a specific kind of public space within the PRL, a public space that was both domestic and extending across the borders of the country. In what follows, I would like to describe certain contours of this peculiar public space and to make certain conjectures on why the socialist regime supported Esperanto and how Polish citizens used the “Esperanto space” to their own advantage.

Esperanto before 1945 Esperanto was born, so to speak, with the publication of a pamphlet (in two versions, Russian and Polish) in Warsaw in 1887. In the thirty years between this publication and the death of “la majstro” (the master, i. e., inventor of Esperanto)

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Ludwik L. Zamenhof (1859–1917), adherents to the international language had set up regional, national, and international organizations, translated many of the treasures of world literature into Esperanto, and established dozens of Esperanto periodicals in Europe, the Americas, and Asia.3 In Poland, Esperantysta Polski / Pola Esperantisto began published in Lwów in 1906, moving to Warsaw two years later. The first “Universal Congress” of the movement was held in Boulogne sur Mer (France) in 1905; these were to become annual events (and remain so in the 21st century). In 1912, the Universala Kongreso was held in Cracow, to the great pride of Polish Esperantists.4 In Poland, probably even more so than elsewhere, Esperantists argued vociferously that patriotism and Esperanto went hand in hand. A pamphlet published in 1910 pointed out that for non-dominant nations like Poles, Esperanto provided a first step toward “equal rights” for all. No longer would Poles be forced to learn French, for example, while few French/wo/men learned Polish. Hence it was a patriotic duty of Poles to join thousands of other Poles in supporting the Esperanto movement. A 1912 bibliography of Esperanto works published in Poland listed over two hundred works, as well as several periodicals.5 The title of an editorial in Pola Esperantisto perhaps reflected the mood best: “The Victory of Esperanto.”6 The blood-letting of the first world war necessarily dampened pre-war enthusiasms about international brotherhood and progress, but for Polish patriots, the war did have one very positive outcome: the rebirth of independent Poland. Polish Esperantists insisted (repeatedly) on their own patriotism and on the utility of the international language for Esperanto. Clearly, they were arguing against a strong counter-narrative peddled by nationalists and many in the Catholic church who saw Esperanto (indeed, any form of internationalism) as subversive, anti-Polish, secular, socialist, and – to put matters succinctly – Jewish. Certainly, many early Esperantists were of Jewish origin and the Polish right’s chauvinism and even outright racism (if we accept Grzegorz Krzywiec’s argument) certainly pushed Poles of a more liberal outlook to the left. But despite serious “Esperanto outreach” to the working class, on the whole the movement in Poland and elsewhere remained solidly bourgeois.7 3 For a specifically Polish example of an Esperanto translation of a classic literary work (Antoni Grabowski’s translation of Pan Tadeusz, 1918) see Dobrzyn´ski 2017. 4 See, for example: Ilustrata Gvidlibro 1912. 5 Dobrzan´ski 1910; Zakrzewski 1912. Zakrzewski was one of the most energetic early Esperantists and author of one of the movement’s earliest histories (unfortunately it contains relatively little about Esperanto in Poland per se): Zakrzewski 1913. 6 “Zwycie˛stwo Esperanta,” see Pola Esperantisto, vol. 4 (1911), 57–58. 7 I refer, of course, to Krzywiec 2009. I would say, on the basis of limited knowledge, that the Polish right became even more racist in a doctrinaire sense in the interwar period. For an example of Esperanto-outreach to workers, see Gelenberg 1931.

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War, Destruction, Building People’s Poland The war was absolutely devastating for Esperantists, even more than for ordinary Polish citizens (and we recall that nearly 20 % of the population perished in the period 1939–1945). The first issues of Pola Esperantisto published in 1946 make for sad reading. The first post-war issue which appeared on 1 May 1946 stressed that after so much destruction and hatred, Esperanto could help heal wounds and encourage friendship among peoples. An article in the same issue entitled “Instead of a program” lamented that “The losses among Polish Esperantists [la pola esperantistaro] are great, not just numerically, but first and foremost in quality.” Another article in the same issue, penned by an important post-war Polish Esperantist, Jan Zawada, praises the present steps taken toward “democracy” (i. e., toward People’s Poland) by criticizing the interwar republic in very Soviet terms as “sinjora, nobelula, aristokrata, burghara, kapitalisma …” (more or less, “lordly, noble, aristocratic, bourgeois, capitalist”).8 The first two issues published in 1946 conclude with pages listing those who perished in the past seven years – “In memory of those who are no more.” Other articles discuss the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and the rebuilding of Warsaw. While the touchy issue of Jews is generally avoided, the article on efforts to reconstruct Warsaw specifically mentions the Jewish Ghetto uprising of 1943, noting “The Jews wanted at least to die with honor.”9 Pola Esperantisto continued to publish – if not entirely regularly – for three more years, through 1949. In October 1947 Polish Esperantists gathered in Warsaw for a congress “under the auspices of the President of the Council of Ministers, Józef Cyrankiewicz” to assess their movement and plan for the future.10 Representatives from Esperanto organizations from all parts of Poland attended, there were special “sections” for scouts and for the cooperative movement, books and textbooks were available for purchase, in short, the movement was gearing up for recovery and growth under the new political circumstances. However, clearly not all was well. The only issue of Pola Esperantisto that appeared in 1947 was the Congress Issue (which was more than half in Polish). Still, one should remember that this was in general a time of huge shortages and enormous efforts to re-establish a semblance of normal life after the devastations of the war and the first years of Soviet occupation. That Esperantists felt insecure about the future is reflected in an article ˆ u Esperanto estas aktualna?” published in 1948, “Czy Esperanto jest aktualne? C 8 Pola Esperantisto XXIV/1 (May 1946), pp. 1–3, 6–9. 9 Dratwer 1946. 10 Pola Esperantisto XXXV, 1/6 (September 1947) is “Numer zjazdowy / Kongresa numero,” including the program for the two-day congress.

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The fact that the only the title was bilingual (the article was only in Polish) indicates the intended audience. As an answer to the question posed in the article’s title one finds the following (in the original, all in block letters): “Supporting Esperanto and its introduction to schools lies the most crucial interests of socialism and the working people of cities and villages of all countries.” The article concludes, “One native tongue [ je˛zyk ojczysty] – for one’s own country / One international language – for all of humanity!”11 As both of these quotations indicate, by this point the Esperanto movement had firmly embraced socialism (to be sure, any open attempt to resist would have been met with harsh repression). The high percentage of Polish-language text in the journal during this year indicates either that the editors were not certain about the level of their readership’s Esperanto or that the target audience was, at least in part, not Esperantists at all, but a Polish-language public. Two Esperanto publications of 1948 emphasize the link between Esperanto and rebuilding a new, democratic/socialist Poland. One, published in Stockholm, bore the title, “Poland Rebuilds from the Ruins”. In its fifteen pages the enormous losses suffered by Polish people, industry, railroads, communications (etc.) are emphasized. Backed up by numerous statistics, the pamphlet argues that no other country suffered as much as Poland (not even the USSR…), but that in the short three years since war’s end, Poland was energetically rebuilding. The agrarian reform, it is argued, had laid the foundation for a more efficient use of agricultural lands (the statistics contrast a noble figure in plaid, tie, and walking stick with a peasant family of four), the “re-Polonization” of the western regions of the new Poland Republic (these areas had, of course, been German in 1939), and a very rapid growth in industrial production, education, and culture.12 Similarly, but in considerably greater detail, the short book Contemporary Poland emphasized that Esperanto as a language of bridge-building was particularly appropriate for Poland, a country in the center of Europe which aimed to live in peace and security with its neighbors. The new Polish border on the west was necessary both to prevent future German aggression and to partially repay Poland for the massive damages suffered during the war. Polish foreign policy would of course be particularly close to that of the USSR on the basis of “mutual understanding on the socio-economic order”, but Poland wished to live in harmony with all neighbors. The articles included here where not mainly by Esperantists but by officials (e. g., the vice-minister of education, Wilhelm Garncarczyk), economists, and scholars. One may, however, guess at the book’s political stance by noting the fact that it begins with three portraits of key socialist

11 Pola Esperantisto XXXVI, March-April-May 1948, 9–11, pp. 2–4. 12 Pollando 1948.

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politicians of the People’s Republic: Bolesław Bierut, Józef Cyrankiewicz, and Władysław Gomułka.13 The following year, Pola Esperantisto continued to publish, with articles about Esperanto in different countries and a report from the Universal Congress in Bournemouth, England, in August. More than half of the articles in the journal appeared in Polish, indicating that the editors were not very sure about the Esperanto fluency of their readers (or that the articles were actually aimed at non-Esperantists). Learning Esperanto by tuning in to radio programs was frequently mentioned, as was an experimental television station in Holland (Eindhoven). Esperantists from various countries (in particularly Denmark) joined Bulgarian comrades to build the “Georgi Dimitrov” dam – thereby overˇ SSR issued an Esperanto version of its fulfilling their norms by 278 %. And the C (new, communist) constitution in 15,000 copies. The final issue of 1949 contained several pages dedicated to Stalin on the occasion of his 70th birthday. As one can imagine, the tone was laudatory. Be that as it may, no further issues of Pola Esperantisto would appear during Stalin’s lifetime. Whether this was a matter or lack of funding or more direct censorship is impossible to say at this point – probably a mixture of the two causes. One is tempted to conclude that state-sponsored Esperanto opened up too great a space for Poles to interact with the world, at least according to their Stalinist rulers. In any case, looking at the catalog record for Pola Esperantisto at Biblioteka Narodowa, 1949 was year 37 of the journal – as was 1957. The cataloger could not resist placing a “!” in the record. The Polish Esperanto League (Zwia˛zek Esperantystów w Polsce, in what follows PZE) was officially registered as a legal organization in early 1948. In March 1951, apparently feeling the cold winds of Stalinist xenophobia, the organization’s board petitioned the government for “moral and material support.” They pointed out the potential utility of Esperanto in propaganda and spreading the proper perspective on Poland in the rest of world. Moreover, they stressed, “the Esperanto movement in Poland which has arisen since the last war rests on the ideological foundations of People’s Poland and the countries of People’s Democracy.” One of the primary goals of the Association of Esperantists was “spreading the idea of proletarian internationalism through the propagating in international space [teren] the values [walory] of Polish culture and the creativity of the Polish folk masses, as well as the struggle for peace.”14 Unfortunately the archival file does not include a reply or any information about support (or not) for the Esperantist movement in this period of deepest Stalinism. However, when Esperanto as a movement revived in the mid- to late 1950s, the Esperantists who 13 Rodan 1948. 14 Letter of Zwia˛zek Esperantystów w Polsce, Zarza˛d Główny, to Komitet Współpracy z Zagranica˛, dated 5 March 1951. AAN, signatura 0095.

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had petitioned for government support in 1948 would continue to hold important positions in the organization’s leadership.

The Thaw and 1960s 1956 marked a serious caesura in the history of the PRL. With the worker protest in Poznan´ and the narrowly averted Soviet intervention, both Moscow and the Polish United Workers’ Party concluded that serious reforms were necessary.15 The excesses of late Stalinism, with its paranoia about all things foreign and its harping on the hostility of the capitalist world, gave way to a relatively (always “relatively”) more open policy, at home and abroad. This broadened the space in which Esperantists could learn and teach the international language and, of course, participate both in international correspondence and even (for the more privileged) by attending Esperanto gatherings abroad. Pola Esperantisto reflected this new openness, with articles on outings to Budapest and Marseilles, Esperanto in the USSR (including Vilnius), and the visit of Bulgarian Esperantists to Poland. Aside from an off-hand reference to “thirty years of silence” (specifically, in Esperanto publishing, but readers would have no doubt extrapolated this idea) in the USSR, the previous period of Stalinist repression was ignored. No explanation, for example, was offered for the interruption of Pola Esperantisto for nearly a decade.16 A huge milestone was the 1959 Universal Congress of Esperanto in Warsaw. As we have seen, the last time that Poland had hosted this important gathering was in 1937. Now, seizing the opportunity of the centenary of Zamenhof ’s birth, Polish Esperantists gained official permission to open the Polish capital to colleagues from around the world. The congress took place under the “honorary patronage” of Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz17; festivities took place around Warsaw and in other Polish cities, but the main center of the congress was the newly-opened (in 1955) Palace of Culture and Science.18 The “official bulletin” explained to 15 For a sophisticated and very readable account of the social/economic impact of the political changes of 1956, see Kochanowski 2017. 16 Pola Esperantisto XXXVII (!), November-December 1957, 2, passim. 17 I remain puzzled at the nature of Cyrankiewicz’s link to Esperanto. For a contemporary ˆ efministro 1957. In this monthly periodical aimed at a foreign audi(laudatory) view, see C ence, in 1956 and 1957, Cyrankiewicz appears nearly as often as Gomułka. 18 Cyrankiewicz was a quite amazing political survivor, serving in the communist government from the very beginning to the early 1970s, and living to spring 1989. He held the post of “Prezes Rady Ministrów” in 1959. The post is usually translated (inadequately, at best) as “prime minister” in English and “ministro-prezidanto” in Esperanto. The “honorary patron” of Universal Congresses is usually a distinguished political figure, sometimes even the reigning monarch of the country.

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participants that export and import of Polish złoties was prohibited and gave the address of three banks where foreign currency could be exchanged (at the special tourist rate of 24 zł./US $).19 The bulletin also gave instructions to Congress-goers who might be coming by automobile, including the rules and regulations of crossing the GDR (East Germany) or Czechoslovakia. Before the Congress itself, the youth conference (“Internacia Junular-Kunveno de TEJO”) was held in Gdan´sk, excursions to Białystok (Zamenhof ’s birthplace), Z˙elazowa Wola (Chopin), and Łowicz were planned. After the congress, delegates could select from two excursions. The “Katolika grupo” would visit Cze˛stochowa with its famous miracle-working icon, while the “Turista grupo” would join the Catholics in Cze˛stochowa and both groups would proceed to Zakopane. The excursions were quite reasonably priced at zł. 511 / $21 for the longer “Catholic” one (three and a half days) and 438 zł. / $18 for the shorter tourist trip.20 The official “Kongresa Libro” set down the festivities in greater detail. The president of the Polish Esperanto Association, Andrzej Rajski, welcomed the congress delegates, calling the congress a “meeting of civilizations on the basis of absolute equality … based on peaceful co-existence (paca kunvivado), reciprocal respect and toleration, … using the common neutral language.”21 The “libro” gave Congress-goers a short history of Poland, emphasizing the massive destruction of Warsaw during World War II and noting the modernization of the city since 1945, with the East-West traffic axis (“Trasa W-Z” in Polish), modern housing areas such as MDM (“Marszałkowska Housing District”), and important factories such as the “FSO-Z˙eran´” plant where the “Warszawa” automobile was produced. The cultural program included Esperanto performances of plays by Shaw and Molière, concerts, a “fine arts competition,” children’s congress, and congress of blind Esperantists. In short, everything was done to make Esperantists from all over the world feel at home and to acquaint them with Poland as a prospering, cultured nation. Nearly 3000 Esperantists attended, from places as diverse as Vietnam, Kuwait, Israel, Argentina, Canada, and the USSR.22 This influx of foreigners was one of the largest since the founding of People’s Poland, opening up various formal and informal spaces for Poles to observe and interact with foreign citizens.

19 44-a Universala Kongreso de Esperanto. Varsovio-Pollando. 1–8 Au˘gusto 1959. Dua oficiala bulteno (Warsaw: n.p., 1959), [not paginated]: “Valutaj legˆoj en Pollando”. 20 Ibid. Unfortunately this “bulteno” is not paginated. It also includes lodging information – “(nur por okcidentanoj)” from $10/night in Kategorio A (luksa) to $3/night for “Studentaj logˆejoj” (multiple beds in a room but with “plena pensiono”). 21 Fighiera 1959, p. 15. 22 Fighiera 1959, pp. 185–320 gives the name and address of all Congress-goers, with pp. 287ff listing attendees according to their home country.

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By the 1960s, it was clear that socialism was a permanent condition – at least for the immediate future – in Poland and other countries of East-Central Europe. For most Poles (despite heroic narratives developed in recent years), the main and logic course was to avoid head-on conflict with the existing political situation while developing personal networks and increasing, as much as possible, individual and private enjoyment and fulfillment. Public space was considerably extended by relaxation of the censorship (always relative, of course, to the period before the mid-1950s and compared to other countries like the GDR or Czechoslovakia) and increased numbers of private (or, at least, not governmentsupervised) entities, including Esperanto clubs, summer camps, and classes. One should not exaggerate the extent to which Esperanto (or other “non-state”) groups were free of government influence; Esperantists were always happy to take money from state sources (though they were not always particularly successful in this endeavor) and the Polish socialist state, for its part, did its best to employ Esperanto and Esperantists to educate foreigners about Poland and to improve the PRL’s standing abroad. The 1960s in the PRL, I would argue, were a period of pride and hope. Pride, because of the great advances in the economy and in rebuilding after the war, and hope, because it appeared that economic growth and relative personal freedom were becoming permanent. By providing a venue for similar-minded Poles to gather together fairly freely and to establish contact with foreign Esperantists, Esperanto opened up significant social spaces in the communist state. Around 1960, a number of impressive photo books were published showing the destruction and rebuilding of People’s Poland and particularly of Warsaw. Many of these were also published in Esperanto editions. One of the earliest of these (1959) is a book entitled simply Varsovio with a short introduction in Esperanto and hundreds of marvelous pictures by Edward Lisowski. The book invites the reader to wander through Warsaw, starting with the Syrenka (symbol of enduring, militant Warsaw), showing a number of pictures of ruins and empty places, then turning to images of workers constructing and repairing streets and ˆ ie bolas laboro.”), to a number of famous (and famously re/conbuildings (“C structed) parts of town (“La urboplaco de malnova urbo” / Rynek starego miasta; “La barbakano flanke de strato Freta”; “La ponto de Poniatowski” – with the Palace of Culture in the background; etc.), all interspersed with pictures of adorable Polish children, everyday workers, humorous juxtapositions, and beautiful detail of (the reconstructed) historical buildings. With few words (but all of them in Esperanto!), the book tells the reader that despite recent traumas, Warsaw is proud, beautiful, confident, and striding into the future. The last images in the book show crowds at the “Stadiono de Dekjaro”, the Polish flag, the

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Syrenka (again), with the words: “La urbo levigˆinta el detruo vivas!” (“The city, having risen up from destruction, lives!”).23 Around the same time, a somewhat less arty photographic album of Warsaw was published. Whereas Lisowski’s photos concentrated on present-day Warsaw, this book specifically contrasted the Warsaw of 1945 (almost total destruction) with present-day, thriving Warsaw. This album was published in a number of languages, including German, Polish, French, English, and Russian – but also in Esperanto. Interestingly, the book’s introduction stresses the Nazis’ crime of genocide, both against the Jews and against the Slavic nations and especially the Poles. The heroism of both the Ghetto Uprising and the Warsaw Uprising are mentioned, the latter event being portrayed as a spontaneous outpouring of anger against the Nazi occupiers (obviously, the failure of the Red Army to offer any assistance is left unsaid).24 The bulk of the book, however, juxtaposes the ruins of 1945 with the rebuilt (even improved) aspect of the same site in 1962, e. g., Urboplaco de Malnova Urbo, Strato Freta, Mariensztat, Strato Nowy S´wiat, Monumento de Nikolao Kopernik, Kvartalo Muranów (ex-ghetto), Strato S´wie˛tokrzyska, Urbocentro de Varsovio. The book’s final section features pictures from 1962 showing a new, modern Warsaw: The North-South Trafikarterio (later Marchlewskiego), housing developments in Praga and Z˙oliborz, Trasa W-Z, new schools, and factories. Here the message is a clearly triumphant one: the Nazis tried to destroy Polish culture and the Polish capital, succeeded in causing massive damage, but in the end Poland/Warsaw survived and is flourishing.25 Esperanto was also employed by the PRL in its historical battle to justify the post-war borders of the Polish state. As Gregor Thum has shown so well in his book on how Breslau became Wrocław, the communist regime joined forces with Polish nationalists to come up with a historical narrative that effectively erased centuries of German settlement and culture in places like Danzig, Breslau, and Posen.26 A key work illustrating this narrative, on “Poland’s western and northern territories” was also published in Esperanto translation. Here we see that Poland under its first king (Bolesław the Brave, 11th century) was practically identical to post-1945 Poland, that Poles made up a very large percentage of the population in these lands incorporated into Austrian and Prussian states, and that the 1945 borders reflected international agreements and legal order. Possibly of even greater importance, the Polish state since 1945 had energetically developed, repopulated, and re-built these territories, not just repairing the extensive damage from the war years but in essence creating entirely new cities and industry. In 23 24 25 26

Varsovio 1959. Ciborowski 1962, pp. 12–15. Ciborowski 1962. Thum 2006.

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short, to simplify somewhat, these territories had always been Polish, were mainly neglected or destroyed by the Germans, and since 1945 had been properly restored to Poland, where they have prospered.27 Among the most important motivations for learning Esperanto continued to be the desire to travel. The craving to see the world and to get acquainted with exotic climes and people is reflected in nearly every Esperanto publication, periodical, and get-together. An early example of this tendency is an illustrated book by a Kraków Esperantist, Zdzisław Wójcikiewicz, of his trips to various parts of Europe while attending Esperanto conferences in 1957, 1958, and 1959. The “Universalaj Kongresoj” of these years were held in Marseilles, Mainz, and – as we have seen – Warsaw. But on his way to these (and other national) congresses, the author – in “la multpersona grupo da krakovaj esperantistoj,” as he stresses – visited Prague, Nürnberg, Frankfurt/Main, Baden-Baden, Karlsruhe, Worms, Bonn, Cologne, Arnhem, Amsterdam, The Hague, Antwerp, Brussels, Paris (of course), Avignon, Monte Carlo, Cannes, Genoa, Milan, Pisa, Florence, Bologna, Venice, Lausanne, Vaduz, Salzburg, and Vienna. For Polish readers of this period, the photos of traffic jams and massive Buicks parked on the streets of Frankfurt, not to mention advertisements of “Nescafe” in Milan, may have been even more interesting than the tourist sights. Throughout, the narrative (bilingual in Polish and Esperanto) makes clear that many Kraków Esperantists attended these conferences and were thus able to see Europe. In other words, everyday people can enjoy extraordinary travel experiences – thanks to Esperanto.28 At a time when mass tourism for Poles was just beginning, this argument must have had some considerable force. During the 1960s, Esperantists continued to build their movement in Poland, in particular aiming to get Esperanto introduced into Polish schools. Already in 1960 the educational authorities in Warsaw had agreed that Esperanto might be taught in public schools, as long as a group of at least twenty students signed up.29 By 1965, there were Esperanto courses in schools not only in Warsaw, but at least fourteen other Polish cities.30 As part of this Esperanto-offensive for education, a book with the (positive) opinions about Esperanto of “eminent Poles” was published.31 It was further pointed out that Esperanto could be a cornerstone for educating young Poles with an “international world view”.32 27 28 29 30

Deriatka 1966. Wójcikiwiecz 1961. Kune: Bulteno de Varsovia filio de Pola Esperanto-Asocio, (1960), 1, pp. 11–12. Tamen: Organo de Pola Esperanto Junularo kaj Unuigˆo de Polaj Studentoj, VII, 1965, 6, pp. 19– 20. 31 Włodarczyk 1964. Among the contemporary Polish intellectuals quoted in favor of Esperanto was Leszek Kołakowski. 32 Tyblewski 1969.

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Esperanto in the Period of “Developed Socialism” In his classic 1977 text, “A Historic Stage on the Road to Communism”, the brilliant Marxist theorist and beloved Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev argued that by the mid-1970s the USSR had reached a new stage in the march toward communism: that of “developed socialism”.33 In retrospect, we have come to see the Brezhnev period (or, in Poland, Gierek to early Jaruzelski) as a period of ideological decadence, cynicism, and economic stagnation. At the time, however, one could with equal validity emphasize the stability of these years, the relative economic prosperity (in particular for those who remembered the 1950s and earlier), and – in Poland – the increasing ability of citizens to travel abroad. It is not by chance that this was also the period in which more and more Poles came to own personal automobiles – the first Polski Fiat 126 (universally known as the “Maluch”) rolled off the assembly line in 1973. Esperanto in Poland was certainly affected by these changes. On the one hand, summer camps, conferences, courses, and touristic outings continued. On the other, the increasing availability of other modes of tourism and probably also the relentless forward march of “Euro English” (as I call that peculiar dialect used when, for example, a Spaniard and a Pole speak “English” together) had a negative impact on the movement. Increasingly, it seems, the leaders in the Esperanto movement were middle-aged or elderly, born in the 1930s or earlier. On the other hand, Polish Esperantists found new uses for their movement, in particular in more intensive cooperation with Esperanto associations in other “fraternal socialist countries.” Esperanto opened a social and practical space for its practitioners both to travel abroad and to gather with like-minded individuals at home. The single most important aspect of Esperanto continued to be its ability to bring together Poles of an international bent and to enable exchange (both by letter and in person) with the entire world. Pola Esperantisto reflected these interests in nearly every issue. Every issue in the 1960s and 1970s, with few exceptions, ended with the rubric “Deziras korespondi”, with addresses of Esperantists from various countries interested in exchanging letters, postcards, and postage stamps (these seem to play a fairly large role among Esperantists, a topic that will have to wait for further investigation). Those “wanting to correspond” hailed from nearly every country and continent, but with the largest numbers from other socialist countries (Bulgaria, for some reason, looms large here), with fewer (though still quite frequent) individuals from Asia, South America, and Africa. And, of course, many Poles figured in this column and were no doubt contacted both by their compatriots and by Esperantists who happened upon this periodical outside Poland. Pola Esperantisto also informed its readers about 33 Breznhev 1993.

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possibilities for Esperanto-related holidays abroad34 and at home35 and many others: the International Esperanto Vacation Camp in Mie˛dzygórze which operated from 1965 through the 1980s.36 For the Polish communist state, Esperanto also fulfilled various functions. It could help educate foreigners about Polish history (obviously from a specific point of view), enhance knowledge of the PRL and its achievements, and demonstrate the Polish people’s support for the peace movement and against imperialism (i. e., the USA, NATO, etc.). Looking at the organ of the Polish Esperanto movement, Pola Esperantisto/Esperantysta Polski in these years, one learns a good deal about triumphs of Polish culture, science, and foreign policy, for example: Gomułka’s initiative to open 1000 new schools for the Polish Millenium37, developments in Polish scientific research38, women’s equality in the PRL39, the new constitution of the PRL40 and almost yearly articles on the liberation of Warsaw, the re-building of the city (and country) after 1944, and the like. The peace movement also made a frequent entry onto the pages of Pola Esperantisto.41 While the period of “developed socialism” cannot be dated exactly and had distinct periodizations in different socialist countries, a key event of its early period was the Soviet (and Warsaw Pact) invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 to crush the heretical socialist ideas of the Prague Spring. Around the same time, Poland was shaken by a party-inspired antisemitic (“anti-Zionist”) movement that led to the emigration of the bulk of the PRL’s small Jewish community.42 A major event leading to the antisemitic upheaval of 1968 was the stunning victory of Israeli arms in the six-day war, 5–10 June 1967. Ironically, the Universal Congress for that year – for the first (and only) time ever – was to be held in Tel Aviv. Because of international tensions, the congress was transferred at the last minute to Rotterdam. But before that happened, a number of Polish

34 Pola Esperantisto 1968 nr. 2, pp. 26–27: Yugoslavia. 35 Pola Esperantisto 1972 nr. 1, pp. 8–9; Pola Esperantisto 1979 nr. 3, p. 14. 36 See, for example, a list of the foreigners who took part in this Esperanto summer camp in 1969: eleven from Bulgaria, thirty-three (!) from the GDR, fifteen from Hungary, ten from Romania, four from the USSR (Sochi and Riga), two from Sweden, and one each from Austria, France, and Yugoslavia. “Wykaz obcokrajowców – uczestników V Wczasów Esperanckich organizowanych w Mie˛dzygórzu w dniach 16–29.IX.1969 r. )”, IPN, BU1585–20370. 37 Pola Esperantisto 1963 nr. 5–6. 38 Pola Esperantisto 1964 nr. 3–4. 39 Pola Esperantisto 1969 nr. 2, p. 10. 40 Pola Esperantisto 1974 nr. 1–2 and of course numerous jubilees (25, 30, 35 years of PRL). 41 to name a few examples: Pola Esperantisto 1961, nr. 3/4; 1967, nr. 1, p. 19 [against the Vietnam War]; 1968, nr. 3/4; 1979, nr. 1, p. 4–5; 1980, nr 2, p. 4. 42 On the events of 1968, their causes and impact, there is a huge literature. A good overview is provided in the articles collected in Kosmala 2000.

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Esperantists had asked permission to attend (and in some cases, to attend with state financing).43 A secret government memo of 1969 on the Esperanto movement (in Poland and in general), rather defensively complained of the anti-Soviet character of the Anti-nationalist International Association (“SAT” after its Esperanto initials), noting without a hint of irony that SAT was financed by the “Socialist Internationale” (indeed the SAT was too truly left-wing to regard the USSR as embodying true socialism). Furthermore, the Chinese Esperanto Association and its ˆ inio (about which more later) denounced the USSR as reorgan El Popola C visionist and a traitor to third-world countries. Closer to home, the West German (FRG) Esperantists supposedly used 1937 maps and “attack Poland” in its periodicals. And “in the past year, the Israeli Esperantists have added their voice to the chorus of anti-Polish propaganda.” However, the document does not criticize any Polish Esperantists, noting, indeed that Pola Esperantisto answered the calumnies from abroad (especially from Israel). On a more positive note, representatives of Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, and GDR Esperanto organizations had met together in February 1969 to discuss “a common platform of action […] for peace and the defense of the People’s Democracies from a Marxist point of view on the international stage”.44 While the “Esperanto establishment,” as represented by the central PEA in Warsaw and its organ Pola Esperantisto, supported the PRL during the turbulent final years of the 1960s, it is clear that there was some fervent, in particular in the youth movement. This sentiment of independent thought comes through clearly in the youth movement’s organ, Tamen, published from 1959 to 1967. For several of those years Tamen was edited by Adam Ples´nar45 who was later jailed for anti-state activities, supposedly for refusing to recognize the leading role of the PZPR.46

43 The Ministry of Internal Affairs provided the Ministry of Culture and Art (usually responsible for the Polish Esperanto Association) a “Sprawozdanie z ucze˛stnictwa w 52. S´wiatowym Kongresie Esperantystów w Rotterdamie.” (“Report on the participation at the 52nd World Congress of Esperantists in Rotterdam”) Here we learn that Isaj Dratwer, “emigrant z Polski” (already in the early 1960s) had helped secure the congress for Israel. While forty-two individuals had requested to attend the congress in Tel Aviv (a list of their names and addresses is provided), only five Poles went to the Ersatz-Kongreso in Rotterdam, where a generally weak attendance “from the People’s Democracies” was noted, IPN, BU1585-20370. 44 IPN, BU1585-20371. 45 see his article in Tamen, IV, no. 3 (1962), pp. 54–55, urging young Esperantists to engage in social activities. 46 Wojtakowski 2007, pp. 77–78. On Adam Ples´nar who combined dissident with Esperantist ideals, see WALIGÓRA 2009. Ples´nar is mentioned in a “Notatka” concerning the activities of Polish Esperantists (dated January 12, 1966)) as being influenced from ideas spread by the Chinese Esperantists. IPN archive, BU1585-20401 (“Notatka dot. działalnos´ci Polskiego Zwia˛zku Esperantystów,” 12. I. 1966, p. 4).

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Polskie Radio and Esperanto As already mentioned, Polskie Radio had a robust Esperanto service throughout this period. The archives of “Polskie Radio i Telewizja” contain a letter from the Polish Esperanto Assocation dated 24 October 1957 (addressed to the Komitet do Spraw Radiofonii), referring to their “repeated requests” to use Esperanto as one of the broadcast languages for PR’s international service. The letter refers to the already repeated “argumentacja” for Esperanto and stresses that the number of listeners to programs from other countries in that language has of late grown considerable. Hence, the neglect of Esperanto for broadcasts from its “fatherland” (ojczyzna) can only stymie “the popularization of Polish culture abroad”.47 Beginning in 1959, Polskie Radio began broadcasts in Esperanto. Pola Esperantisto announced in its first issue of the year, “Polish Radio is broadcasting every day a two-hour [long] program in Esperanto at 17.30 (16.30 Central European time),” giving the frequencies upon which the program could be heard.48 While there were numerous other radio programs in Esperanto, such as Radio Moscow49, Polskie Radio broadcast both longer and more frequently than any other station. Polskie Radio continued to having programming in Esperanto until 2006.50 And Esperanto broadcasts were made not only from the central Polskie Radio / Radio Polonia station in Warsaw, but also from regional broadcasters. For example, on 25 April 1962 Esperantist Tadeusz Szewera spoke on Łódz´ Radio in the cycle “Parolas Lodzo pri esperanto-movado” about translating poetry into Esperanto, using the example of Władysław Broniewski’s poem “Kverko” / Da˛b.51 Numerous Polish Esperantists also worked for Polskie Radio’s Redakcja Esperanto and, among other things, broadcasted from international Esperanto gatherings. In 1969, for example, the indefatigable Andrzej Pettyn was sent by PR to Helsinki to help put together broadcasts from the Universala Kongreso there. Working together with the director of the Department of Cooperation with Foreign Countries, Sergiusz Mikulicz, they recorded some 360 minutes of what PR called “sound material” to liven up PR’s fall and winter programs. The official report argues that Polskie Radio’s operations at the Congress “brought us ad-

47 APRiT, PS: Sekretariat Generalny 863/2/1. 48 “Pola Radio dissendas cˆiutage duonhoran programon en Esperanto je la horo 17.30 (16.30 de mezeu˘ropa tempo) sur mallongaj ondoj 25,39, 30,98, 31,45, 31,50 41,12, 50,12; mez ondo 249.” Pola Esperantisto, January-April 1959, 1-BPDDP / 52 kat.A / Polskie Radio S.A. / Biuro Programowe PR Dokumentacja programowa z dnia: 1–30.11 1998 r. 2, p. 1. 49 Pola Esperantisto 1978 nr.1, p. 13. 50 APRiT. 51 Kune: Bulteno de orienta regiono de Pola Esperanto-Asocio, July-August 1962, pp. 5–6.

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ditional propaganda benefits” since other European broadcasters took up some of PR’s coverage.52 Around the same time, an internal memo on foreign broadcasts of PR discussed the Redakcja Esperanto [sic] at some length. Among the programs mentioned were daily news, “this week in Poland,” “what Poland is talking about,” the Catholic church in Poland, the role of women in the PRL, sport, touristic, youth, and musical broadcasts. Besides these programs on general topics, PR broadcast specific Esperanto-themed programs, on the language itself (i. e., common errors and how not to make them, history of Esperanto), “sound reports of Esperanto events,” and (nearly once a month) “the little corner for non-seeing Esperantists”.53 It is difficult to know just how many people tuned into the Esperanto programs on PR, but in the early 1980s the Redakcja Esperanto received more letters from abroad than any other of the foreign-language broadcasts except for the German.54

Esperanto and Polish Foreign Policy From the mid-1960s at latest, Esperantists in the PRL attempted to participate – in a small way – in the making of Polish foreign policy. Or, at the very least, they tried to harness the international power of Esperanto to Polish socialism in an effort to increase their own power and funding.55 One may see this effort in several ways, for example, the Esperanto-language broadcasts of Polskie Radio (from 1959), the rhetoric that Polish Esperantists used to justify requests for state support to attend international conferences, and the increasingly tight relations between Esperanto organizations of the different “fraternal socialist countries.” The international connections of Esperantists also came to the fore in their portrayal of China through the prism of Chinese Esperanto publications (in particular the glossy monthly El Popola Cˆinio) in these years. Despite the freezing 52 APRiT, 1401/87 (1969). 53 Rocznik Polskiego Radia 1969, pp. 96–103. 54 Radio Polonia. Redakcja Ła˛cznos´ci ze Słuchaczami. Wybór listów od słuchaczy Radia Polonia, November-December 1980, at APR (not yet catalogued: “Radio Solidarnos´ci” collection). 55 Space precludes a more thorough examination of how Esperantists not only traveled abroad but managed to get the Polish state to pay for it. This phenomenon started early: already in the 1950s and 1960s official documents express dismay at the failure of some Esperantists to return from congresses abroad (IPN BU1585-20414). By the 1970s, it became normal for a certain number of Esperantists to travel to Congresses “on business”, i. e., paid for by government funds. See, for example, IPN BU1585-20367 with reports from the London Congress (1971) at which sympathies for Israel were expressed; IPN BU1585-20389 on the 1975 conference in Iceland; and many other files in the APRiT (where most files of the Redakcja Esperancka seem to have ended up).

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of relations between the Soviet block and China after the early 1960s, Polish Esperantists continued to have access to the Chinese material in Esperanto, a fact remarked upon with consternation in various documents. Judging from reports and advertisements in Pola Esperantisto, this Chinese propaganda material was never forbidden in the PRL. A long document penned by GDR Esperantist Detlev Blanke, in September 1968, made its ways into the files of Polish interior ministry in Polish translation (the original was apparently in Esperanto). Blanke points out that the entire membership of the Chinese Esperantist League consists of less than 700 members – “less than in Sofia,” suggesting that the “ideological offensive” found in Chinese Esperantist materials is simply a policy of the central government. Esperanto ˆ inio groups in the People’s Republic dated back at least to 1951 and El Popolo C published its first issue in 1952 (as a quarterly, from 1967 as a monthly). Blanke pinpoints the shift to a blatantly anti-Soviet line in Chinese Esperanto publications in the mid-1960s, noting that in 1962 mentions of the USSR were still positive, and even in 1965 despite a marked increase in the “personal cult of Mao”, treatment of the Soviet Union and its allies remained neutral or positive. After that point, however, Chinese Esperanto periodicals and brochures began to function as “organs of the Chinese ‘cultural revolution’”, constituting a “smear campaign” (nagonka) against the USSR.56 Curiously, despite his denunciation of these Chinese publications, Blanke did not suggest any specific measures against them, perhaps merely wishing to protect himself and the Esperanto movement against accusations that they neglected to perceive the ideological danger of the Chinese, but not wishing to invite the state authority to interfere in communication with Esperantists around the world. In any case, as mentioned, the Chinese materials in Esperanto appear to have been readily available for purchase at the Warsaw central of the Polish Esperanto Association. And several Polish Esperantists (including the ubiquitous Andrzej Pettyn and the head organizer of the 1987 Warsaw Congress) attended the 1986 Universala Kongreso in Beijing.57 Another curious development of the period of developed socialism was the coming together of Esperanto associations from various socialist countries. From around 1967, the Esperanto leaders of these states began to meet regularly to discuss common goals, programs, and initiatives. I have been unable to determine just how these annual (and sometimes more frequent) meetings came to be, but I surmise that they arose from a commonality of interest among local Esperanto leaders (who would get some funding and travel) and the individual 56 IPN BU1585-20369. The Blanke document is also included in IPN BU1585-20405. 57 Sprawozdanie delegacji oficjalnej PZE z udziału w 71 S´wia˛towym Kongresie Esperantystów w Pekinie (“Report of the official delegation at the 71 World Congress of Esperantists in Beijing”) in IPN BU1585-20428.

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socialist countries. In particular, in the 1970s and later, one runs across frequent references to these meetings. The tenth such meeting was held in the southern ˆ SSR, GDR city of Karl-Marx-Stadt, attended by representatives from Bulgaria, C th GDR, Hungary, Poland, and the USSR. Here the importance of the 60 -anniversary of Great October was emphasized, while discussions included practical measures on cooperation in the fields of teaching Esperanto, cultural exchanges, and tourism.58 The next meeting of this “Esperanto internationale” met in Popraga (Czechoslovakia) for nearly a week in March 1978. The upcoming World Congress in Varna (Bulgaria) was discussed and it was noted, “The Bulgarians expect to earn around 160,000 dollars from this Congress.” A number of specific Esperanto leaders were mentioned, mainly in the context of limiting their would-be antiSoviet bias (e. g., Professor Ivo Lapenna and the West German Prof. H. Frank). Propaganda efforts against the American neutron bomb were discussed, as were relations of western European communist parties toward Esperanto (Italy – negative, Catalunya and Austria, very positive). Various fields of cooperation considered, such as the exchange of publications (especially from Hungary and Bulgaria). The successes of the Polish Esperantists in the field of radio broadcasts and tourism won praise. The next meetings were slated to taken place in Budapest (March 1979), Plovdiv (June 1980), and “in the Czech Socialist Republic” in 1981.59 The deliberations apparently continued to the late 1980s. Poland hosted the 1983 meeting in Radziejowice near Warsaw and attended by representatives from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Mongolia (!), the GDR, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, Vietnam, and the USSR. The main goal of this meeting, following the 1982 consultations in Erevan, was specifically given as “the working out of [a mutual position on] international politics of the Esperanto organizations of socialist countries at international Esperanto forums, and the coordination of mutual cooperation of these organizations”.60 Three years later, in April 1986 representatives from the “fraternal socialist” Esperanto organizations met in Volgograd and issued a statement in favor of “peace and disarmament”.61 The same month a similar meeting of Bulgarian, Czech, Slovak (curiously, there was no unified “Czechoslovak” Esperanto organization), Soviet, Vietnamese, Hun-

58 IPN BU1585-20389. 59 IPN BU1585-20429. Another file gives evidence of the thirteenth “consultative meeting”, April 1980 in Sofia (with travel costs paid for by the Bulgarian Esperantist Association) IPN BU1585-20373. 60 IPN BU1585-20368. 61 See the report by W. Wesołowski on this conference in Volgograd dated 30 April 1986 contained in IPN BU1585-20438.

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garian, and GDR Esperantists met in Popraga (Czechoslovakia) to support the Soviet proposition to liquidate all nuclear arms by the twenty-first century.62 What are we to make of these consultative meetings? I would interpret them primarily as an opportunity for Esperantist leaders from different social countries to travel, meet their colleagues from other organizations, and get wined and dined on state expense. Esperanto allowed various Poles to travel abroad at government expense despite their lack of official government positions, opening a significant space for travel and leisure under the auspices of Esperanto-related socialist internationalism. For the socialist governments, these annual meetings may have seemed worthwhile for their propaganda value at the international meetings and as a semi-genuine way to foster good relations between the “fraternal socialist countries.”

Communism’s Last Decade in Poland As one might expect, one gets little direct information about Solidarnos´c´, strikes, or unrest from reading Pola Esperantisto. However, the nature of the periodical changed significantly during the 1980s, becoming a significantly smaller and more poorly printed quarterly (and in a given year usually less than four issues appeared). It is difficult to know whether general interest in Esperanto waned during this period; I have not been able to find specific data on membership numbers and the like. Nonetheless, the Esperanto movement did continue, possibly as one way for Poles to continue their international connections and, for some, as a continuation of the idealistic path started earlier. The 1980s were in any case a kind of “lost decade” in the PRL. After the repressions of martial law, the communists led by General (now always in mufti) Wojciech Jaruzelski desperately sought solutions to the PRL’s very profound economic problems. As we now knew (but few appreciated at the time), the coming to power of M. S. Gorbachev in Moscow was the beginning of the end for communism in the Soviet Bloc. But that is another story. The one huge triumph of Polish Esperantism in the 1980s was bringing the Universal Congress (back) to Warsaw for the centenary of the international language. Already in June 1981 the Polish Esperanto Association was in contact with the central authorities to obtain permission to host the 1987 Congress.63 The 62 IWPZE, April-May 1986, 2, pp. 8–10. Representatives of Esperanto organizations from socialist countries had already met in Popraga in March 1978. See the report in IPN BU158520429. 63 Protokół z III zebrania Rady Głównej Polskiego Zwia˛zku Esperantystów (Proceedings of the 3rd Meeting of the Main Council of the Polish Union of Esperantists, Warsaw, 17 June 1981) in IPN BU1585-20372. This same file contains (from the late 1970s/early 1980s) a good deal of

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permission was presumably given (I have been unable to locate that document) since in May 1982 the Committee to Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Esperanto (within the PZE) was formed, led by Stanisław S´wistak, to plan for the congress in Warsaw and several smaller get-togethers (youth, doctors, railroaders, Esperanto teachers, anti-war activists, etc.) that were to be held in different corners of Poland.64 In 1986, with planning well under way, the PZE pointed out costs for the upcoming congress (in a letter to Aleksander Krawczuk, the Minister of Culture and Art, 9 December 1986). Participants would pay some 350 million zł., of which 50 % in convertible currency (much of which would end up in state coffers via hotels, ORBIS, LOT, etc.) and the PZE asked for a subsidy of 52 million zł., mainly to pay the cost of renting halls for activities and to pay the honoraria and travel costs of (Polish) “theatrical and musical groups and actors”.65 Despite all complications, the 1987 Universala Kongreso came off well (to this day no other congress has attracted so many delegates – almost 6000). The account of the Congress is the informational publication of the PZE admitted that not everything went smoothly, that some might say “[that] the Warsaw Congress was a chaotic congress, disorderly and full of improvisations” and specifically admitted “niedocia˛gnie˛cie, brak, and fuszerka” (roughly, shortcomings, deficiencies, and screw-ups) in its planning and administration. Still, the “central organ” of the Universal Esperanto Association (Rotterdam) proclaimed the get-together “la plej impona Universala Kongreso.” The great number of artistic programs (dramatic works, art exhibits, concerts, puppet theater), religious services in Esperanto for both Catholics and protestants, peace declarations, exhibitions of Esperanto books, meetings with the Esperanto team of Radio Polonia – the Congress held the delegates attention and kept them entertained for its entire duration.66 A personal note: I happened to be in Warsaw during the Congress (not as a participant, but by chance) and I well remember the green star of Esperanto adorning the tip of the Palace of Culture (with the words, if I remember correctly, “Centenario de Esperanto”), people speaking (or trying!) Esperanto on the trams, and Zamenhof ’s grave in the Jewish cemetary, under meter-high heaps of flowers. Warsaw was not the only site of the Esperanto centenary. Smaller Esperanto conferences were held around the country for various specialized Esperanto groups. Among these were the Federation of Esperantist Railwaymen (Katowice), Conference of Esperantist Teachers (Gdan´sk), TEJO (International Esperanto Youth Group, Kraków), MEM (peace group) just across the border in Popraga, information about accusations (apparently well-founded) of illegal profiteering among Esperantists and in particularly linked to the Bydgoszcz travel agency, Esperantotur. 64 IPN BU1585-20427. 65 IPN BU 1585-20428. 66 IWPZE, 1987, 5: this entire issue is dedicated to the Warsaw Congress.

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Czechoslovakia, International Meeting of “Feinetists”-Esperantists (a specific method of Esperanto teaching, Poznan´), as well as the Esperanto League of Medics, the League of Non-seeing (blind) Esperantists, the World Esperanto Ecumenical Congress (Catholic), and the International Meeting of the Esperanto tourist organization Monda Turismo.67 A thick file in the IPN archives shows that the security services were hard at work attending, listening in on, and noting down suspicious individuals, both foreign and Polish, in Warsaw, Bydgoszcz, and elsewhere. The sub-congress of “Monda Turismo” (in Bydgoszcz) seems to have been of special interest, possibly because of the obvious connections between illegal currency exchange / smuggling and smuggling, a particular kind of “public space” much frowned upon by the official socialist state.68 It is perhaps fitting that this “Jubilee Year” for Polish Esperanto also attracted the interest of a security apparatus that was soon (happily) to find its way to the ashbin of history. Esperanto aimed to break down barriers, to unite nations, and to encourage world peace. Only the last of these goals was one ostensibly shared by the People’s Republic of Poland. The PRL, for all its internationalist rhetoric, hampered access of its citizens to international travel and tried to run a semi-autarchic economy (like its “master”, the USSR, and other Soviet Bloc countries). But for citizens of the PRL, Esperanto opened considerable public space. Within Poland, it allowed like-minded individual to gather together for lectures, entertainment, and domestic travel. And the internationalist nature of Esperanto opened up vistas that most Polish citizens could hardly access in the official media (for example, about People’s China after the mid-1960s). Polish Esperantists traveled abroad, hosted foreigners, and – for a select and ambitious few – even managed to get the PRL to finance trips and foreign visits. For the PRL, it was natural to foster Esperanto in the land of its birth. The internationalism of Esperanto could, with some selective interpretation, also be harnessed to the socialist internationalism preached (but not always practiced) by the Soviet Bloc countries. In short, Esperanto offered something both to everyday citizens of the PRL and to its rulers. With the collapse of communism in 1989, Esperanto in Poland entered a new phase. But that can be a topic for a future paper.

67 PZE Zarza˛d Tymczasowy, “Imprezy mie˛dzynarodowe zwia˛zane z obchodami 100. Lecia Esperanta w Polsce,” (“International events connected with the celebration of the centenary of Esperanto in Poland”) 6 February 1986 letter to Ministry of Culture and Art, in: IPN BU158520428. 68 IPN By 069/1375. It is possible that my perception of “security agent” interest in Bydgoszcz and Monda Turisto is skewed because I found this file and not others which may exist from other cities. However, included here are also some materials from the Warsaw Congress.

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Archives AAN [= Archiwum Akt Nowych]. APR [= Archiwum Polskiego Radia], signatura 0095. APRiT [= Archiwum Polskiego Radia i Telewizji], 1401/87 (1969); PS: Sekretariat Generalny 863/2/1; BPDDP / 52 kat.A / Polskie Radio S.A. / Biuro Programowe PR Dokumentacja programowa z dnia: 1–30.11 1998 r. IPN [= Instytut Pamie˛ci Narodowej], BU1585-20367; BU1585-20368; BU1585-20369; BU1585-20370; BU1585-20371; BU1585-20372; BU1585-20373; BU1585-20389; BU158520401; BU1585-20405; BU1585-20414; BU1585-20427; BU1585-20428; BU1585-20429; BU1585-20438; By 069/1375.

Published Works Brezhnev, Leonid: A Historic Stage on the Road to Communism, in: Daniels, Robert V. (ed.): A Documentary History of Communism in Russia, Burlington University of Vermont Press 1993, pp. 314–316. ˆ efministro Cyrankiewicz, Józef: Fotoraportajˆo, Pollando, 3–4 (1957) pp. 9–11. orig.: C ˆ EFMINISTRO 1957 = C ˆ efministro J. Cyrankiewicz: Fotoraportajˆo, Pollando, 1957, 3–4, C pp. 9–11. Ciborowski, Adolf / Jankowski, Stanisław: Varsovio rekonstruita, Warszawa 1962. Deriatka, Tadeusz / Lubojanski, Józef: Polaj okcidentaj kaj nordaj teritorioj, trans. Jerzy Grum and Jerzy Us´pien´ski, Warszawa 1966. ´ ski, Stefan: Esperanto u nas, Warszawa 1910. Dobrzan ´ ski, Roman: Sinjoro Tadeo parolas esperante / Pan Tadeusz mówi w je˛zyku Dobrzyn Esperanto, Warszawa 2017. Dratwer, Isaj: Septembro, monato de rekonstruo de Varsovio, in: Pola Esperantisto, XXIV (August/September 1946) pp. 35–38. Drezen, Ernest: Analiza historio de Esperanto-Movado, Moscow 1972 [first published Moscow, 1931]. Fighiera, Gian Carlo (ed.): Kongresa libro. 44-a Universala Kongreso de Esperanto. Varsovio (Pollando), 1–8 Au˘gusto 1959, Warszawa 1959. Garvía, Roberto: Esperanto and Its Rivals. The Struggle for an International Language, Philadelphia 2015. Gelenberg, Menchaem M.: Esperanto far arbeter, Warszawa 1931. Ilustrita gvidlibro tra Kraków kaj cˇirkau˘ajˆo, Kraków 1912. Informator Wewne˛trzny PZE. ˆ efo de la Pola Sˆtato, in: Pola Esperantisto 5–7 Karolczyk, Stanisław: Józef Piłsudski. C (1922). Kochanowski, Jerzy: Rewolucja mie˛dzypaz´dziernikowa: Polska 1956–1957, Kraków 2017. Kosmala, Beata (ed.): Die Vertreibung der Juden aus Polen 1968. Antisemitismus und politisches Kalkül, Berlin 2000. Krzywiec, Grzegorz: Szowinizm po polsku. Przypadek Romana Dmowskiego (1866– 1905), Warszawa 2009.

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Kune: Bulteno de Varsovia filio de Pola Esperanto-Asocio 1 (1960). Kune: Bulteno de orienta regiono de Pola Esperanto-Asocio (July-August 1962). Lins, Ulrich: Die gefährliche Sprache: Die Verfolgung der Esperantisten unter Hitler und Stalin, Gerlingen 1988. Pola Esperantisto 4 (1911); XXIV/1 (May 1946), pp. 1–3, 6–9; XXXV, 1/6 (September 1947); XXXVI, 9–11 (March-April-May 1948) pp. 2–4; XXXVII, 2 (November-December 1957); (JanuaryApril 1959); 3/4 (1961) 5–6 (1963); 3–4 (1964); 1 (1967); 2 (1968); 3/4 (1968); 2 (1969); 1 (1972); (1974); 1 (1978); 1 (1979); 2 (1980). orig.: PE= Pola Esperantista / Esperantysta Polski. Pollando rekonstruigˆas el ruinoj, Stockholm 1948. Rocznik Polskiego Radia 1967, Warszawa 1969. Rodan, E.: Nuntempa Pollando, Warszawa, 1948. Sieroszewski, Wacław: Marsˇalo Józef Piłsudski, Warszawa 1934. Tamen, IV/3 (1962). Tamen: Organo de Pola Esperanto Junularo kaj Unuigˆo de Polaj Studentoj, VII/6 (1965). Thum, Gregor: Die fremde Stadt: Breslau nach 1945, Berlin 2006. Tyblewski,Tyburcjusz: Esperanto pomaga kształtowac´ s´wiatopogla˛d internacjonalistyczny, in: Os´wiata Dorosłych 9 (1969), pp. 563–566. Varsovio. Fotoj, sistemigo kaj grafika prilaboro Henryk Lisowski, Warszawa 1959. Waligóra, Grzegorz: 40 lat w opozycji. Biografia polityczna Adama Ples´nara / Kvardekjaroj en opozicio. Politika biografio de Adam Ples´nar, Wrocław 2009. Włodarczyk, Walerian: Esperanto? Wypowiedzi wybitnych polskich intelektualistów / Eldiroj de eminentaj polaj intelektuloj, Warszawa 1964. Wójcikiwiecz, Zdzisław: Z podróz˙y po Europie / El la vojagˆo tra Eu˘ropo, Kraków1961. Wojtakowski, Edward: Historia s´la˛skiego ruchu esperanckiego (1897–2007), in: Dolny S´la˛sk, 12 (2007), pp. 69–82. Zakrzewski, Adam: Esperanta-Pola kaj Esperanta-Litova bibliografio 1887–1912, Warszawa 1912. Zakrzewski, Adam: Historia de Esperanto 1887–1912, Warszawa 1913.

Authors

Matthias Barelkowski (Berlin) received his master’s degree in History and Polish Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin and is a freelance historian with a special interest in Polish and German history in the 19th and 20th century and Polish-Jewish-German relations. He also works as a Polish-language translator and as a researcher for a wide range of projects related to Eastern Europe. Recent Publications include: Zygmunt Mycielski: Ein Aristokrat im kommunistischen Polen. Tagebücher eines Komponisten 1950–1970. Herausgegeben und übersetzt von Matthias Barelkowski, Wiesbaden 2017. Gemeinsam mit Claudia Kraft und Isabel Röskau-Rydel (eds.), Zwischen Geschlecht und Nation. Interdependenzen und Interaktionen in der multiethnischen Gesellschaft Polens im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Osnabrück 2016. Gemeinsam mit Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, Friedrich II. zwischen Deutschland und Polen. Ereignis- und Erinnerungsgeschichte, Stuttgart 2011. E-mail: [email protected] Błaz˙ej Brzostek is a historian employed at the University of Warsaw. He deals with the social and cultural history of cities in the 20th century. He has published works on the social experiences of workers in the 1950s, everyday life in cities of the communist era, and the period’s gastronomy. He is author of Robotnicy Warszawy: konflikty codzienne (1950–1954) (Workers of Warsaw: everyday conflicts (1959–1954), Warszawa 2002 and Paryz˙e Innej Europy: Warszawa i Bukareszt XIX i XX wiek (Parises of the Other Europe: Warsaw and Bukarest in the 19th and 20th centuries), Warszawa 2015, a comparative history of Bucharest and Warsaw in the 19th and 20th centuries. Juraj Buzalka is an associate professor at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia, at the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences, Institute of Social Anthropology, where he currently serves as its director. His research interests include anthropology of political movements, cultural economy, politics of memory, populism, politics of religion, particularly in the region of East Central Europe. Buzalka has been a postdoctoral scholar at various research institutions,

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including Central European University, Institute for Advanced Studies in Budapest, SUNY Binghamton, Aleksanteri Institute of University of Helsinki, Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and others. He has participated in various research projects as researcher and/or principal investigator. Buzalka recently completed his work on the monograph Cultural Economy of Protest in PostSocialist European Union (contracted by Routledge). He is also the author of Nation and Religion: The Politics of Commemoration in South-East Poland (Münster: Lit 2007) and author of a collection of essays published in Slovak (Slovenská ideológia a kríza. Eseje z antropológie politiky, Bratislava: Kalligram 2012). He publishes regularly in the leading Slovak press and journals and serves as a member of the board of directors of the Nation’s Memory Institute. Maria Buko studied Applied Social Sciences and History at the University of Warsaw. She completed her studies with a thesis on female memories of the experience of totalitarian places of isolation and on the post-prison fates of Polish victims of Stalinism. Since 2015, she has been a PhD candidate at the Interdepartmental Doctoral Studies at the Faculty of History, located at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences (University of Warsaw). Her primary research focus is on the memory and experience of the descendants of Polish survivors of the Nazi concentration camps in the context of Polish-German memory politics. She is manager of the Oral History Archive of the History Meeting House and the Karta Center in Warsaw, Poland. Jakub Gałe˛ziowski holds a PhD in history from the University of Augsburg and the University of Warsaw (2021). He wrote a dissertation about Polish children born of war – whose mothers belonged to the occupied society and fathers to the occupiers. He works at the University of Warsaw (Faculty of Culture and Arts) with an interest in oral history and biographical studies, as well as in ethical aspects and the role of emotions in academic research. He is a co-founder of the Polish Oral History Association and was its first president, as well as a member of editorial board of the Wrocławski Rocznik Historii Mówionej – the Polish academic journal devoted to oral history. Maria Hetzer is a cultural anthropologist specialising in the exploration of everyday strategies to cope with social crisis. Her analysis of the agency of ordinary people handling resource conflicts in disprivileged regions of Africa inspired her interest in rural anthropology, land reform, gender and agency in post/socialist spaces. Another part of her research agenda involves the performance of historical evidence and documentation of everyday practices and culture in archives. Her ethnographic fieldwork, based on body practice and participation is supported methodologically by archival research and oral history methods. She

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holds a practice-based PhD in German and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick (UK, 2016) based on research into the German “bodies of crisis 1989” and its potential for translating female crisis experience. Maria received her training as an ethnographer and cultural researcher from the University of Leipzig, Trinity College Dublin, and Humboldt University of Berlin. Recent publications include: Gleichberechtigung im Alltag aushandeln: Erwartungen und Erfahrungen von Frauen im ländlichen Raum, in: Braun, Karl et al (eds.): Wirtschaften. Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven. Marburg: dgv, 2019, pp. 582–589; Negotiating memories of everyday life during the ‘Wende’. In: New approaches to GDR research. IMAGINATIONS 8.1. (Special issue 2016, Issue ed. Marc Silberman, online); Transitzone Dorf – Ein Ort zwischen Bodenreform und Kollektivierung [with Leonore Scholze-Irrlitz et al]. Berlin: Zank, 2015. Martin Jemelka is a senior researcher at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague. He studied History (2002, MA) and then Economic and Social History (2006, PhD) at the University of Ostrava. He was a visiting fellow at universities in Jena (Imre-Kertész-Kolleg, 2013–2014) and Vienna (Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte, 2015–2017). His research addresses topics in modern economic and social history, urban and religious history and the history of the Bat’a concern. His publication activities include the monographs Na Sˇalomouneˇ: spolecˇnost a kazˇdodenní zˇivot v nejveˇtsˇí moravskoostravské hornické kolonii 1870–1950 (In the Salomon Colony: Society and Everyday Life in the Largest Mining Colony in Moravian Ostrava, 1870– 1950), Ostrava 2008, Lidé z kolonií vypráveˇjí své deˇjiny (People from Colonies Tell Their Stories), Ostrava 2009, and Tovární meˇsta Bat’ova koncernu: evropská kapitola globální expanze (Company Towns of the Bat’a Concern: the European Chapter of Global Expansion), Prague 2016 (with Ondrˇej Sˇevecˇek). His monograph “In the Salomon Colony” was awarded the Josef Pekarˇ Prize for the best book by a historian under 35 years of age (2009). His latest publication is an edition of the memoirs of the personal secretary of Jan Antonín Bat’a, Poznamenaný: deset meˇsícu˚ s Janem A. Bat’ou (Stigmatized: Ten Months with Jan A. Bat’a, Zlín 2019). His new book on the religious life of industrial workers in the interwar Czech lands will be published soon (Prague 2021, with Jakub Sˇtofaník). Barbara Klich-Kluczewska is an associated professor at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, at the Department of Historical Anthropology. Her fields of research include the cultural history of post-war East-Central Europe, especially the histories of family, sexuality, and gender. Currently, she is working on a monograph dedicated to biopolitics and expert knowledge in communist Poland. She was a research fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena (2019), visiting fellow in Prague (project: “Sozialistische Diktatur als Sinnwelt,” USD AV and the ZZF

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Potsdam, 2009), Berlin (project: “Physical Violence and State Legitimacy in Late Socialism” ZZF Potsdam, 2013) and a visiting professor at University of Rochester, United States (2009) and at Martin-Luther-University, Halle-Wittenberg (2018). Barbara Klich-Kluczewska is author of the following books: Rodzina, tabu i komunizm w Polsce (1956–1989) (Family, taboo and communism in Poland, 1956–1989), Kraków 2015 and Przez dziurke˛ od klucza. Z˙ycie prywatne w Krakowie 1945–1989 (Through the keyhole. Private life in Krakow, 1945–1989), Warszawa 2005. Her recent publications include: Biopolitics and (non-)modernity. Population micro-policy, expert knowledge and family in late-communist Poland, “Acta Poloniae Historica” 115, 2017 and Biographical Experience and Knowledge Production. Women Sociologists and Gender Issue in Communist Poland, in: Gender, Generations and Communism in Central and South-eastern Europe. Concepts, Discourses and Practices, eds. Agnieszka Mrozik, Anna Artwin´ska, Routledge 2020 [with K. Stan´czak- Wis´licz]. Jerzy Kochanowski is a professor at the Institute of History, University of Warsaw. His main area of interest is the social history of Poland and Eastern Europe in the 20th century. From 2000–2005, he was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw; in 2007, a visiting professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz; and, in 2011–2012 and 2018, a senior fellow at the Imre-Kertész-Kolleg, Jena, Germany. From 2013–2018, he was editor-in-chief of the historical Polish quarterly “Przegla˛d Historyczny.” His most recent publications include: “Wolne miasto”. Zakopane 1956–1970, Krakow 2019 (“Free city”. Zakopane 1956–1970; as the outcome of the “Rooms for Manoeuvre” project); the award-winning Rewolucja mie˛dzypaz´dziernikowa. Polska 1956–1957, Krakow 2017 (‘An inter-October-Revolution: Poland 1956–1957’), and Through the Back Door: The Black Market in Poland, 1944–1989 (Peter Lang, 2017). Other books include the high school textbook Deutschland, Polen und der zweite Weltkrieg (‘Germany, Poland and the Second World War’, with Beate Kosmala, Warsaw-Potsdam 2009 and 2013) and People on the Move: Forced Population Movements in Europe in the Second World War and its Aftermath (with Pertti Ahonen et al., Bloomsbury 2008). Claudia Kraft has been a professor of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna since March 2018. Previously, she worked at the University of Siegen as a professor of Contemporary European History (2011–2018) and at the University of Erfurt as a professor of Central and Eastern European History (2005–2011). She spent several years as a researcher in Poland and was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw (2001–2004). She specializes in 20th century comparative European and particularly Central and Eastern European History. Her main fields of research are the history of everyday life in state

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socialist societies after the Second World War gender history, history of forced migrations, memory cultures and politics of history in Central and Eastern Europe, comparative legal history and new approaches to area studies (e. g. postcolonial studies, critical geography). Her recent publications include (with Ulf Brunnbauer): Statehood in Socialism, in: Włodzimierz Borodziej, Sabina Ferhadbegovic´, Joachim v. Puttkamer (eds.): The Routledge History Handbook of Central and Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. Volume 2: Statehood. London/New York 2020, 215–290; Spaces of Knowledge and Gender Regimes: From Double Marginalization to a Gendered History of Knowledge in Central and Eastern Europe, in: Acta Poloniae Historica 117 (2018) (Gender and Science in Eastern Europe), 7–25; Struggles for Recognition and the Concept of Gender in Twentieth-Century Poland, in: Gosewinkel, Dieter/Rucht, Dieter (eds.): Transnational Struggles for Recognition. New Perspectives on Civil Society since the Twentieth Century. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017, 184–204. Markus Krzoska is a private lecturer at the Justus Liebig University in Gießen. In 2001, he received his doctorate at Free University of Berlin with a thesis on the Polish historian Zygmunt Wojciechowski, and in 2012 he completed his habilitation at Justus Liebig Universität Gießen with a book on the history of Poland after 1945. He was a research assistant at the universities of Trier, Mainz, Gießen, and Siegen as well as at the German Poland Institute (Deutsches Polen-Institut) in Darmstadt. Most recently, he published (with Thomas Bohn and Aliaksandr Dalhouski) Wisent-Wildnis und Welterbe. Geschichte des polnisch-weißrussischen Nationalparks Białowiez˙a, Cologne 2017. His history of German-Polish entanglements since 1945, co-written with Paweł Zajas, will be published in 2021. Dusˇan Segesˇ is a historian working as a research associate at the Institute of History (Department of Contemporary History) of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava. He graduated in History and German at the Comenius University in Bratislava, before moving to Warsaw and completing his MA in Specialized East European Studies at the Centre for East European Studies of the Warsaw University. He finished his PhD in 2006, analyzing the history of the Slovak question and political and diplomatic relations between the Czechoslovak and Polish government in exile during the Second World War. He wrote the award-winning book Dvojkrízˇ v silocˇiarach Bieleho orla: Slovenská otázka v politike polˇskej exilovej vlády za 2. svetovej vojny (Double-Cross in the Field of Interest of the White Eagle, 2009), which was translated into Polish (Partnerzy czy petenci? Słowacy i Słowacja w polityce rza˛du RP na obczyz´nie podczas II wojny ´swiatowej, Gdan´sk 2012). He is the editor-in-chief of the comprehensive volume of Polish and Hungarian diplomatic documents on the Slovaks and Slovakia in 1938–1939 (Bratislava 2012) and the co-editor of the book “Neighborhood in the

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Period of Crucial Changes” (2009). His current research centers on the Cold War broadcasting of Western stations to Czechoslovakia and Poland in the 1950s and 1960s, including topics such as propaganda, emigration, cultural transfer, and secret service operations. Theodore R. Weeks is professor of History at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where he teaches courses on the modern world and European, and Russian history. He also teaches at the College of Europe, Natolin (Warsaw). His works include: Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914 (1996), From Assimilation to Antisemitism: the “Jewish Question” in Poland, 1850–1914 (2006), and Vilnius between Nations 1795–2000 (2015). Theodore’s research interests range from nationalism, ethnic relations, and antisemitism to, more recently, the history of technology. He is presently working on a history of radio in interwar Poland (1920–1939).