Giustino, Cathleen M., Plum, Catherine J. and Vari, Alexander (eds). Socialist Escapes: Breaking Away from Ideology and Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (review)

Abstract

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 578 newspapers and journals. This gives prominence to biathlon’s public image — the excitement and the popularity that surrounded the competitions. However, it tells us little either about the internal evolution of biathlon in sports clubs or about the position of biathlon within the sports ‘machinery’ of the Soviet Union. Other studies on Soviet sports have revealed almost constant discussions about money and resources between sports clubs, the Sports ministry, athletes and coaches, and other stakeholders. Regional and/ or ethnic tensions probably existed in biathlon as well, but would not have found their way into the Soviet press, which was intent on showing Soviet athletes as a harmonious multinational family. Archival documents from the Soviet sports committee and/or Soviet sports clubs might shed some light on these questions. Readers might also want to learn more about the biathletes’ biographies: how were they selected, educated, trained; what were their lives like once they entered the world of Soviet professional sport? There are still many aspects of Soviet sport which remain to be explored by historians — with great gain for both sports history and for Russian/Soviet history in general. Everyone to Skis! shows how these aims can be successfully combined. Schweizerische Osteuropabibliothek Eva Maurer University of Bern Giustino, Cathleen M., Plum, Catherine J. and Vari, Alexander (eds). Socialist Escapes: Breaking Away from Ideology and Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989. Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, 2013. x + 284 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $105.00:£65.00. This engaging, uniformly well-written and remarkably coherent edited volume uses the category of ‘socialist escapes’ as a way to explore the challenges, pleasure and paradoxes of life under Communism in Eastern Europe. These ‘escapes’ are sometimes socialist (even if not always successfully so) as in Catherine J. Plum’s chapter on East German Pioneer camps, or that of Patrice M. Dabrowski on tourism in Poland’s Bieszczady mountains. They are at other times escapes from socialism, and from the heavy weight of ideology and everyday routine, as described by David Tompkins in his chapter on the ways in which Polish music festivals (as compared to East German ones) offered an escape from Stalinist ideology and musical expectations. Finally, and most interestingly,theyareescapesthatareneithersocialistnoroppositional,escapes approved, or at least tolerated, by the state, but cautiously and ambivalently so. Thus the popular tradition of hitch-hiking in Poland, a socialist escape that enabled ‘an escape from responsibility, from inhibition, from society’ (p. 182), REVIEWS 579 but flourished within state sponsored provisions of personal safety, guaranteed insurance and coupons for gasoline. These escapes often involved going elsewhere, be it touristic travel to state museums in Czechoslovakia, as described by Cathleen M. Giustino in her chapter on Czech castles and chateaux, or the more ‘private’ escapes to nonconformist youth camps analysed by Caroline Fricke in her chapter entitled ‘Getting off Track in East Germany’. Irina Costache’s engaging and original chapter considers the experience of those who travelled to a small Romanian nudist beach community. She describes it as ‘an escape into a paradise-like garden’ where ‘sentiments such as shame, guilt, and fear lost their meaning’ (p. 133). Costache makes particularly good use of interviews (as do others in the volume) which enable her to speak more convincingly about the wide range of personal meanings attributed to ‘escape’ under state socialism. It would have been helpful, in this respect, to learn more about the language people used to describe their experiences. How common, for example, was it for individuals to describe tourism or camping or watching motorcycle races as an ‘escape?’ Some of the chapters emphasize the ways in which a growing gap between rising consumer expectations and a persistent lack of consumer provisions was a major reason for the failure of East European state socialism. But, and perhaps more stimulatingly, the book also provides evidence as to why Soviet-style socialism endured for so long. Experiences branded as decadent by Stalinistera regimes were ‘normalized’ and made ‘socialist’ during the various Thaws of the late 1950s and 1960s when many East European regimes, as Alexander Vari argues in the helpful introduction, ‘no longer based their models primarily on...