Pozniak, Kinga Nowa Huta: Generations of Change in a Model Socialist Town (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 374 revealing fascinating new dimensions to these individuals, whose opinions on other matters are well known. Nevertheless, the increasing number of rogue or wild settlements, along with both local and international criticism of functionalist urbanism by architects and social scientists, signalled the shift towards Belgrade’s second socialist master plan that took place between 1968– 1972 and which draws Le Normand’s study to a close. By looking at its urban planning, building and housing, by illuminating the housing element of mid-1960s economic reforms and by showing the influence and responses of ordinary citizens to elite decisions, this study makes an important contribution to the social history of Yugoslavia. Anyone questioning Yugoslavia’s different socialist path and its democratic aspects will easily find a many counterarguments here. Unfortunately, Le Normand stops short of delving deeper into major political or economic issues. Rather, they feature in the background or as the side effects of urban planning, such as (the ethnic impact of) migration to Yugoslavia’s urban centres, the tension between rural and urban society, and most of all the protracted inability of the system to provide housing to Yugoslavia’s working people. UCL SSEES Bojan Aleksov Pozniak, Kinga. Nowa Huta: Generations of Change in a Model Socialist Town. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2014. x + 227 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $27.95 (paperback). Nowa Huta is a fascinating study of ‘how people’s memory, identity, and sense of place are shaped and articulated with relation to events that have taken place in a concrete locality’ (p. 180). The locality is the town of Nowa Huta, built in the Stalinist era as a suburb of Kraków, together with the vast Lenin Steelworks. Pozniak lived in Nowa Huta in 2009–10 and engaged in extensive participant observation, for example by working as a volunteer in local museums and a cultural centre, as well as conducting numerous interviews with residents of different ages. Pozniak writes modestly (p. 19) that ‘I cannot pretend that this work reflects all the voices and experiences that exist in Nowa Huta; however, I hope that it captures some of that polyphony’. This hope is fulfilled, and one of the many strengths of the book is the great variety both of apt quotations to illustrate specific points, and life stories of individuals. The book consists of five chapters, discussing in turn the cityscape, with its iconic buildings, street names and monuments; the steelworks; museums and commemorations; memories of the Communist period among middle-aged and older interviewees; and the identities and attitudes of younger residents. REVIEWS 375 Pozniak argues that in Nowa Huta, as in Poland generally, ‘the socialist past tends to be depicted and perceived through the keywords of repression, resistance and inefficiency’ (p. 8). Nowa Huta’s history lends itself to such interpretation since, although built as a model socialist town and showcase social experiment, it turned out to be a bastion of resistance to secularization and the Communist regime. However, like Ewa Ochman in her recent volume, Postcommunist Poland: Contested Pasts and Future Identities (Abingdon, 2013), Pozniak emphasizes that local discourses can be different. Schools and museums in Nowa Huta have to accommodatethoselocalpeoplewhosememoriesareatoddswiththedominant narrative. They do this in particular by organizing events which celebrate the achievements of the builders of Nowa Huta, rather than stigmatizing them as constructors of Stalinism. As Pozniak demonstrates, individual narratives challenge the prevailing national discourse about the Polish past, although she also explores the inconsistency of that challenge, showing how in other contexts those same individuals reproduce the narrative of ‘repression, resistance and inefficiency’. Moreover, fond personal memories of the period before 1989 and regrets about the passing of full employment and de-industrialization in the 1990s can co-exist with the acceptance, on a more abstract level, of the need for capitalism. This is partly because nostalgia for the Communist period is not political, but — as illustrated by other anthropologists of post-socialist Europe — often focuses on memories of everyday life. Reminiscing about a summer camp in the 1980s, one of Pozniak’s interviewees comments: ‘When people talk about PRL they always talk...