Nowa Huta: Generations of Change in a Model Socialist Town by Kinga Pozniak

Abstract

Reviewed by: Nowa Huta: Generations of Change in a Model Socialist Town by Kinga Pozniak Natalie Misteravich-Carroll (bio) Kinga Pozniak. Nowa Huta: Generations of Change in a Model Socialist Town. 227pp. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014. ISBN 9780822963189. Built in 1949 and slated to become a “bastion” of socialism, Nowa Huta was the greatest endeavor of the Six-Year Plan in Stalinist Poland. Often likened to its Russian variant Magnitogorsk, the purpose of the Polish steelworks city was threefold: to stimulate Stalinist industrialization, to create a workers’ utopia, and to act as an ideological model for Polish citizens. Perceived as both a welcome opportunity for social and economic advancement after WWII and as a detested symbol of Stalinist hubris, Nowa Huta’s contemporary identity remains locked in this ambivalent dichotomy. Though Polish sociological and anthropological studies of this socialist city can be traced back to the 1950s and 1960s, only after 1989 has Nowa Huta become a major topic of global interest for a wide variety of scholars. Recent scholarship has focused on history, labor and economics, place identity, and myth, and two of the most noteworthy texts to have appeared in the last few years are Katherine Lebow’s Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–56 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni versity Press, 2013) and Monika Golonka-Czajkowska’s Nowe Miasto Nowych Ludzi: Mitologie nowohuckie (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2013). Kinga Pozniak’s Nowa Huta: Generations of Change in a Model Socialist Town is a fine addition to the growing scholarship on Nowa Huta, and by investigating Nowa Huta through the lens of memory, her work directly ad-dresses the ambivalent dichotomy of Nowa Huta’s postsocialist identity. Pozniak’s aim is to look at “how the socialist period is remembered and represented in various contexts, and what these memories and representations can tell us about people’s experiences of the political, economic, and social changes that have taken place since the collapse of the socialist government in 1989” (180). She succeeds in doing so by focusing primarily on physical spaces of memory in Nowa Huta. The book is divided into five chapters that examine the cityscape, the steelworks, museums and sites of commemoration, the older generation of “builders,” and the younger generation born around or after 1989. With great attention to historical and cultural detail, each thematic chapter considers the way in which the transition from socialism to capitalism, the introduction of neoliberal economic reforms, and deindustrialization have affected the everyday lives of Nowohucians, all of which have influenced the inhabitants’ relationship to the past, especially in the case of the older generations. Pozniak’s anthropological study of Nowa Huta is made up of numerous interviews, as well as her observations and participation in local commemorative [End Page 163] events marking the 60th anniversary of Nowa Huta in 2009. The extensive fieldwork is framed by the work of major scholars engaged in investigating memory in postsocialist societies. It is worth noting that Pozniak situates Nowa Huta alongside the experiences of postindustrial cities in North America and Western Europe. This comparison provides a much needed global context to the case of Nowa Huta and turns the focus away from looking at Nowa Huta as a failed socialist experiment to investigating how a postindustrial society negotiates major political and economic transformations on the local, national, and supranational levels. The significance of her study lies in her comparative approach to memory. She situates the memories of the older generation against the attitudes of the younger generation, who have no direct memory of the socialist period and whose relationship to the history of Nowa Huta is questionable. Is the past important for younger generations to recognize, and if so, which narratives of the past do they appropriate: those from their families, their teachers, or the contemporary hegemonic attitudes? Pozniak claims that the national hegemonic attitudes prefer to characterize the socialist period as one of “repression, resistance, and inefficiency” (4). These three keywords repeat often throughout the text and serve as the benchmarks against which Pozniak problematizes the memories and experiences of her subjects. Thus, not only does she examine contested memories between generations, she also investigates...