Socialist Escapes: Breaking Away from Ideology and Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989, edited by Cathleen M. Giustino, Catherine J. Plum, and Alexander Vari

Abstract

Socialist Escapes: Breaking Away from Ideology and Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989, edited by Cathleen M. Giustino, Catherine J. Plum, and Alexander Vari. New York, Berghahn Books, 2013. ix, 284 pp. $105.00 US (cloth). This collection is a very welcome addition to the recent spate of publications on leisure in communist eastern Europe. The volume's ten chapters provide broad chronological, geographic, and topical coverage. Some contributions are absolutely excellent, and others are very good. Following Alexander Vari's detailed introduction, the chapters are grouped into five, not always useful, sub-categories: Concert Halls and Estate Museums, Cabins in the Woods, Beach Parties, Roadside Adventures and Bright City Lights, and Sports and Stadia. Cathleen M. Giustino's conclusion helpfully ties the chapters together. Among the themes the authors address are productive leisure, the socialist escapes of the title, and a variety of transgressions, including nudism and political jokes. Cathleen Giustino's, Patrice Dabrowski's, and Mary Neuberger's contributions are among the most conceptually anchored and best argued of the chapters. They address the socialist states' attempts to build support for their respective regimes by providing their citizens a variety of leisure pursuits: The Czechoslovak state sought to build support for the regime through controlling public perception of newly nationalized castles and chateaux in the late- and post-Stalinist era--the popular depiction of the Bieszczady Mountains in southeastern Poland as the Wild West, and the malleable parameters of socialist leisure in socialist Bulgaria began in the late 1950s. Giustino analyzes aristocratic residences the state had seized and transformed into state-owned museums to demonstrate how Czechoslovaks were able to produce meaning in their lives independent of party intentions. She argues that the state's inability to influence visitors owed to its inconsistent employment of socialist codes and narratives. Dabrowski asserts that tourism took a back seat to regional economic development under Polish socialism, and was less an aim than an afterthought. She demonstrates that the newly opened Bieszczady Mountain region was attractive to groups and individuals, if for varied, and unexpected, reasons. The Polish public was not interested in mass tourism with a socialist content, but rather in more leisurely, decidedly unproductive Moreover, the problems--including shortages--that tourists in the Bieszczady experienced were simply another small side of the increasing gulf between real lived socialism and the expectations of the Polish population. Neuberger analyzes the links among smoking and drinking and tourism in Bulgaria between 1956 and 1976 (the country was the eighth largest tobacco producer in the world and by 1966 the greatest exporter of cigarettes) when smoking among Bulgarians of every stripe was expanding more rapidly than drinking. The so-called debauched practices that accompanied Bulgarian tourism eventually came under official scrutiny, which favored healthy, active tourism. …