Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945-1950 by Padraic s> Kenney (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 367 internallygenerated pressurefor group conformity remained as strong as in the 'official' milieu: each unofficial coterie thus tended to reproduce the tendency to total conformity on pain of oblichenie (unmasking)and expulsion without appeal. In general, Kharkhordin'sapplication of a Foucaultianmethodology pays off well. Foucault's major weakness, his uncertain sense of where power is located in any given society,is not a seriousone in analysingthe SovietUnion, since the locus of power there was so unambiguous. At the same time, the analysisof the provenance of the Soviet sense of individual and collective is fruitful.I would not, though, alwaysaccept the conclusionswhich Kharkhordin reaches. I doubt if confessionaland penitential practiceswere decisive in generating the Soviet mode of self-consciousness.The gap from the seventeenth century,when Orthodox practiceswere at theirmost distinctive,to the twentieth is simply too long. In any case, Protestantpractices differed even more from Catholic ones than the Orthodox did, so that the division into 'east'and 'west'fallsdown. I suspect that there were two sets of intervening variables to which Kharkhordindoes not give sufficientweight. One was the mode of decisionmaking in the village community, which continued without radical change right up to the I920S: under krugovaia poruka (mutualresponsibility)there was continual peer surveillance,strongpressurefor consensus and a tendency for persistent non-cooperators to be deprived of influence and ultimately ostracized. The other was the culture of the nineteenth century kruzhok and even more of the revolutionarycell, where ascetic, egalitarian,goal-oriented intellectualsexercised a high degree of mutual surveillancewhich resultedin frequent splits and expulsions. It was in this milieu that Lenin imbibed his sense of kul'tura and found his model foira futuremore humane society, which of course strongly influenced the concepts of successive Communist leaders and their propagandists. The results for Soviet society are well analysed in Robert Tucker, PoliticalCulture and Leadership in SovietRussia.fiom Leninto Gorbachev (Brighton, I987). I would add that Vladimir Makanin'snovel, The Green Baize Tablezith Decanter, which won the Booker Prize in I993, vividly portraysthe difficultyof extracting an individualpersonalityfrom the milieu of universal mutual surveillance. In spite of my reservations about its conclusions, this book offers an original and challenging reinterpretation of fundamental features of Soviet society, which makes it essential reading. Schoolof Slavonnic andEast EuropeanStudies GEOFFREY HoSKING UTinversitj' College London Kenney, Padraic. Rebuilding Poland. Workers and Communists, I945-I950. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 1997. xvii + 360 pp. Notes. Illustrations.Figures.Maps. Bibliography.Index. ?3I .50. WVITH the passage of time and the opening of archives after the fall of Communism new and more soundly based academic perspectives are emerging about many key issuesconcerning the establishmentof Communist 368 SEER, 79, 2, 200I rulein EasternEurope.Kenney'swell-documentedstudyrefutesboth extreme views Marxist-Leninistpropagandadepictinga heroicworkingclasssetting up People'spower in post-warPoland and the hardlinewesternpicture of the Red Army mechanically imposing Soviet rule over a sullen population. He tracesout a more complex and dynamic interpretation.By doing so he throws significantnew light and fleshes out the specific realities of the two stages of the establishment of Communist power in Poland as well as the subsequent Stalinist process of disciplining the working class and subordinating it to communistcontrol. Kenney presentstwo detailed, but highly contrasting,case-studiesof L6&d and Wroclaw in the I945-50 period. The former was Poland's main manufacturingcentre with a strongtraditionof workingclassorganizationas well as a complex inheritance of class and ethnic conflicts. Unlike heavily destroyed Wroclaw, L6d2's industrial infrastructure emerged relatively unscathed from the war to the extent that it was seriously considered as a possiblenew capital. Itspopulation had sufferedextremes of Nazi oppression as well as almosttotal annihilationin the case of the largeJewish community. Kenney shows how a new national homogeneity allied to older cultural traditions of working class pride and organization, especially in the textile factories,to produce long drawn-outstrikes,protestsand industrialresistance in L6d2. This was only broken by the Communist authorities after 1947 through the adoption of divisivepracticesof Stalinistlabour competition and resource-allocation as well as outright repression. Industrial politics in Wroclaw,a frontier-citywithin the Recovered Territories,was dominated by the expulsion of the Germans and their replacement by an inflow of Poles from the Eastern Territories lost to the USSR, demobilized veterans and varied individuals from all...