Nowa Huta: Generations of Change in a Model Socialist Town

By Kinga Pozniak

In 1949 construction of the planned town of Nowa Huta began on the outskirts of Krakow, Poland. Its centerpiece, the Lenin Steelworks, promised a secure future for workers and their families. By the 1980s, however, the rise of the Solidarity movement and the ensuing shock therapy program of the early 1990s rapidly transitioned the country from socialism to a market-based economy, and like many industrial cities around the world Nowa Huta fell on hard times.

Kinga Pozniak shows how the remarkable political, economic, and social upheavals since the end of the Second World War have profoundly shaped the historical memory of these events in the minds of the people who lived through them. Through extensive interviews, she finds three distinct, generationally based framings of the past. Those who built the town recall the might of local industry and plentiful jobs. The following generation experienced the uprisings of the 1980s and remembers the repression and dysfunction of the socialist system and their resistance to it. Today's generation has no direct experience with either socialism or Solidarity, yet as residents of Nowa Huta they suffer the stigma of lower-class stereotyping and marginalization from other Poles.

Pozniak examines the factors that lead to the rewriting of history and the formation of memory, and the use of history to sustain current political and economic agendas. She finds that despite attempts to create a single, hegemonic vision of the past and a path for the future, these discourses are always contested—a dynamic that, for the residents of Nowa Huta, allows them to adapt as their personal experience tells them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9780822980247

Kinga Pozniak

Sandra M. Gustafson is associate professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

Book preview

Nowa Huta

GENERATIONS OF CHANGE IN A MODEL SOCIALIST TOWN

Kinga Pozniak

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2014, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pozniak, Kinga.

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

      pages cm. — (Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8229-6318-9 (paperback: acid-free paper)

1. Nowa Huta (Kraków, Poland)—History. 2. Nowa Huta (Kraków, Poland)—Social conditions. 3. Kraków (Poland)—History. 4. Kraków (Poland)—Social conditions. 5. Socialism—Poland—Kraków—History. 6. Social change—Poland—Kraków—History. 7. Memory—Social aspects—Poland—Kraków—History. 8. Collective memory—Poland—Kraków—History. 9. Intergenerational relations—Poland—Kraków—History. 10. New towns—Poland—Case studies. I. Title.

DK4727.N69P68 2014

943.8'62—dc23                                                                 2014036089

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8024-7 (electronic)

This book is dedicated to those who built, and those who are building, Nowa Huta

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1. Memory and Change in Nowa Huta’s Cityscape

Chapter 2. From Lenin to Mittal: Work, Memory, and Change in Nowa Huta’s Steelworks

Chapter 3. Between a Model Socialist Town and a Bastion of Resistance: Representations of the Past in Museums and Commemorations

Chapter 4. Socialism’s Builders and Destroyers: Memories of Socialism among Nowa Huta Residents

Chapter 5. My Grandpa Built This Town: Memory and Identity among Nowa Huta’s Younger Generation

CONCLUSION

NOTES

REFERENCES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book owes its existence to the time, interest, and generosity of many people on two continents. First of all, this research would not have been possible without the residents of Nowa Huta who graciously shared with me their time and stories. While every Nowa Huta resident I met contributed to shaping this project, a few deserve special mention.

During my stay in Nowa Huta I worked closely with three institutions: the OKN Cultural Center (Ośrodek Kultury im. C. K. Norwida), the Nowa Huta Museum (Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa Oddział Dzieje Nowej Huty), and the Museum of PRL (Muzeum PRL-u). I am grateful to the managers of these organizations—Anna Wiszniewska, Wiesława Wykurz, and Beata Waśko at the OKN Cultural Center; Paweł Jagło at the Museum of Nowa Huta; and Jadwiga Emilewicz at the Museum of PRL—for giving me an institutional home base and for facilitating access to both people and research materials.

My life in Nowa Huta became so much more than just a research project thanks to Agata Dudkiewicz, Kasia Danecka-Zapała, Gosia Hajto, Joanna Kornas-Chmielarz, Barbara Cygan, Agnieszka Smagowicz, Wiktoria Fedorowicz, Marta Kurek-Stokowska, Kasia Nawrot, and Bożenka Gurgul. I benefited enormously from the many conversations with Danuta Szymońska and Krystyna Lenczowska, and I am extremely grateful for all their help in procuring materials and contacts. I also want to thank Paweł Derlatka for all the chats in his café.

In the course of my stay in Poland I was able to reconnect with some family members and to discover new family connections. I thank my grandpa for giving me a home in Kraków; Wujek Jasiu and Ciocia Marysia for the many delicious dinners; Ciocia Lidka, Ola, Gosia, and Marta for the fun-filled evenings; and Ciocia Danusia and Teresa Grzybowska for being my substitute moms.

The Department of Anthropology at the University of Western Ontario was a wonderful place to grow. The intellectual fingerprints of Kim Clark, Marta Dyczok, Randa Farah, Dan Jorgensen, Adriana Premat, and Andrew Walsh are all over these pages, and much of this book was written with their voices in my head. I especially thank Kim Clark for all of her guidance along the way and for all of her advice on academia and on life. Jenn Long was my partner-in-crime throughout all of graduate school.

Different parts of the book’s argument have previously appeared in the journals City and Society, Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, and Economic Anthropology. A number of photos reproduced in this book belong to the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków, and I am greatly indebted to the museum and its director, Michał Niezabitowski, for allowing me to use this archival material. A special thank you to Paweł Jagło for helping to facilitate this process. The maps in this book were created by Anna Lovisa, whom I thank for lending me her graphic design skills.

At the University of Pittsburgh Press, I thank Peter Kracht for his enthusiasm and guidance in bringing this project to fruition, and Alex Wolfe for managing the logistics of it. Two anonymous reviewers provided feedback which helped me sharpen my arguments. I also want to thank members of the Recovering Forgotten History workshop, and especially Marek Wierzbicki, for their comments on the manuscript.

And finally, the most heartfelt thank you goes to my two favorite boys. My son, Jamie, accompanied me on his first trip to Nowa Huta even before he was born. I am grateful to him for turning my life upside down and teaching me what is truly important. My husband, J. J., supported me through every stage of this project and patiently put up with a Skype-based marriage during my fieldwork trips. I thank him for his understanding, for seeing the big picture, and most of all for the life and family that we are building together.

INTRODUCTION

For much of the second half of the twentieth century, the global geopolitical landscape was shaped by two political-economic systems, socialism and capitalism. The two were seen as mutually exclusive and fundamentally incompatible with one another and thus divided the world into two opposing camps. In 1989, this arrangement came to an end as socialist governments across East-Central Europe collapsed one by one.¹ Eastern European socialism is now largely relegated to history.² And yet the legacy of socialist institutions, values, and social formations continues to inform present-day politics, economic programs, and people’s lives. How the socialist past is remembered has real consequences for all domains of life, including such diverse areas as work, urban development, education, and religion. This book uses the lens of memory to examine the social life of socialism (Berdahl 2010) in Poland. It asks how the socialist past is remembered in the context of present-day political and economic conditions, and what people’s reflections about the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL)³ can tell us about the political, economic, and social changes that have taken place over the past quarter of a century.

In recent years, socialism has become an object of significant historical curiosity, memory making and contestation (Berdahl 2010, 123) across the region. There is a growing memory industry dedicated to socialism: this includes museums, archives, movies, popular and scholarly literature, and even communist tours, a relatively new form of heritage tourism that has recently emerged in that part of the continent. Let us begin our trip down Poland’s socialist memory lane by going on such a tour.

Crazy Guides is a tour company offering communist tours around Nowa Huta, a district of the Polish city of Kraków. Nowa Huta was initially built after World War II as a model socialist town,⁴ and to this day many people continue to associate it with socialism. The tours target primarily foreign tourists, and their price, at forty-three euros per person, is steep by Polish standards. Piotrek, a tour guide in his late twenties, picks us up from our hotel in a little black Trabant, and we squeeze inside. Trabants are East German cars that were popular on Polish roads from the 1960s to 1980s but are now almost extinct. Riding in such a car is bound to be an adventure, for they shake and rattle as if they were perpetually on the verge of breaking down.⁵ Later on, the guide will pull over on an empty side road on the outskirts of Nowa Huta and allow us to try driving the Trabant for ourselves so that we may experience the thrill of driving a typical communist car that has no power steering.

For now, we arrive in the heart of Nowa Huta. Our first stop is Stylowa (literally, Stylish), Nowa Huta’s oldest remaining restaurant, built in 1956. Typical communist restaurant, the guide tells us, and indeed, the décor seems to reflect the taste of decades past: pillars, marble floors, red tablecloths, clouds of cigarette smoke hanging over our heads. We sit at a table that has not been cleared of dirty plates. Piotrek asks the waitress to clear the table and take our orders, but when she disappears without doing either, he finally does it himself and goes searching for someone who can relieve him of dirty plates and bring us drinks.

Over beer, he tells us about Nowa Huta’s socialist history, beginning with the town’s construction in the late 1940s and early 1950s and ending with stories of martial law, shortages, strikes, and repression in the 1980s. His account incorporates some personal recollections; for example, he tells us of the time during the tumultuous 1980s when his father, who was a member of Solidarity (the political opposition), did not come home for two days. The entire family was worried sick that he had been arrested, until he finally returned, proudly bearing a sewing machine. It turned out that he had waited in line for two days to buy it and did not want to leave for fear of losing his spot.

After the history lesson we drive around town, stopping at several important sites, many of which commemorate local resistance to the socialist government. Another mandatory spot along the tour is a meal at a milk bar, the socialist-era equivalent of a fast-food joint. Milk bars were government-subsidized institutions intended to provide quick and cheap meals for workers away from home. Although they are now a disappearing phenomenon, every town still has a few remaining. Once we fuel up on pierogi and cabbage rolls, the guide takes us to an authentic communist apartment in Nowa Huta.⁶ The apartment is furnished with objects that every Polish person over the age of thirty will remember having in their childhood home, such as the heavy wall unit meblościanka, a meat grinder, and paintings of Pope John Paul II. The walls of the apartment are lined with propaganda posters that promote building socialism together and pictures of Lenin. Piotrek turns on a black-and-white television set and puts on a movie entitled Kierunek Nowa Huta (Destination Nowa Huta), a socialist-era propaganda classic made in the early 1950s that depicts the town’s construction. As we watch, we are treated to some vodka and pickles—a typical communist-era treat.

So what have we learned about socialism from this brief foray into the country’s past with Crazy Guides? Vodka and pickles, dilapidated cars, empty shelves, propaganda, strikes, and persecutions—while all of these undoubtedly have their place in Poland’s postwar history, taken together they depict this history principally in terms of repression, resistance, and inefficiency. Is this just socialism for western tourists, or is it how real Polish people remember it as well? What about the country’s youngest generations, too young to have any firsthand memories of the socialist period: Do they also associate socialism with Trabants, shortages, and posters of Lenin? Has Nowa Huta become a socialist theme park, frozen in time? These are the questions that led me to explore memories of socialism in Nowa Huta. Socialism became the dominant ideology governing political, economic, and social life in Poland after World War II, when the country was brought under the Soviet Union’s orbit of control. Across the region, every Soviet Bloc state implemented socialist principles in a somewhat different way; what most of them had in common, however, was the rule of one political party (which, in theory, was supposed to govern in the name of the people), state ownership of the means of production, centralized economic planning, and the domination of Marxist-Leninist ideology in the public sphere (Verdery 1996). This system, with all of its variations from place to place and over time, lasted in East-Central Europe for almost five decades.

The collapse of socialist governments across the region in 1989 ushered in major political, economic, and social changes. While each country followed a somewhat different path, the two key changes that were common across the region were the creation of a democratic, multiparty political system and a capitalist market.⁷ Because democratic reforms came hand-in-hand with capitalist ones, capitalism and democracy came to be perceived as two sides of the same coin. This conceptual association in turn informed which structures, institutions, and formations could be maintained from the past and which ones had to be discarded and replaced with new arrangements.

Following the socialist government’s collapse, Poland adopted an economic reform program known as shock therapy. Its key tenets included the privatization of state-owned enterprises, the freeing of prices, the withdrawal of state subsidies, and free trade (Mandel and Humphrey 2002; Shields 2012b). These principles were advocated by international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and largely emulated the model of the United States and Britain—countries whose economies were, at the time, being reconfigured by neoliberalization processes.⁸ Poland, therefore, adopted capitalist reforms at the very time that capitalism was entering the neoliberal phase. The new economic and political solutions were shaped by neoliberal principles, ideologies, and discourses⁹ that were being formulated at the time by western states and institutions that served as Poland’s advisers, donors, and role models. These principles include individualism, flexibility, competition, private property, and mobility of capital (Ferguson 2010; Harvey 1989, 2005; Ong 2006).¹⁰ The reforms were often framed in terms of the country’s desire to return to Europe, a goal that was achieved in 2004 when Poland entered the European Union (EU). Since the EU is the principal conduit through which the neoliberal economic and social model is being institutionalized in Europe (Wahl 2004, 38), Poland’s entrance into EU structures provided a further impetus for the country to accept economic arrangements and modes of governing based on neoliberal principles.

Much has changed in Poland over the past quarter of a century; the country is now hailed as a success story of the postsocialist transformation.¹¹ And yet the past continues to enter into current politics, economic debates, and social issues, concerning everything from the retirement system to road construction for the 2012 European Football Championship. This mutually constitutive relationship between the past and the present is the focus of this book.

The Politics of Memory in Postsocialist Poland

Major political, economic, and social upheavals and transformations are prime occasions when issues of memory come into play (e.g., Cole 2001; Jorgensen 1990; Passerini 1984). This, too, was the case in East-Central Europe. Following the collapse of socialist governments in 1989, former socialist states attempted to forge an entirely new political, economic, and social order. However, implementing major—and often painful—reforms required a good measure of popular consent (Hardy 2009). This was accomplished in part through a particular kind of remembering and forgetting.

Across the region, different states adopted different ways of dealing with their socialist-era pasts. In Poland, the postsocialist period has been characterized by two different, and seemingly contradictory, trends. On the one hand, rapid political and economic changes occupied both the ruling elites and ordinary people with present concerns and questions about the future. As a result, some have prescribed leaving the past in the past and instead focusing on the present and future. On the other hand, those who wanted to break with the legacy of the socialist era and to build an entirely new political, economic, and social order pushed for an active reconsideration of the past that would effectively do away with socialist-era institutions, practices, and people.

Over the past two decades, these two tendencies played out with varying intensities, depending in part on the political and economic climate at any given time. In the period immediately following the collapse of the socialist government, steps were taken to eliminate certain aspects of the socialist legacy in order to mark the arrival of a new political, economic, and social order. Many of these efforts concentrated on the symbolic domain, such as changing street names or toppling monuments to socialist-era heroes and erecting new ones. However, despite these symbolic changes, Poland’s first postsocialist government was focused primarily on overcoming past differences and building a new system (Śpiewak 2005). Not surprisingly, the idea of looking to the future was also readily embraced by the former socialist party, which was eager to reinvent itself in the changed political climate. In fact, only a few years later, that party’s leader won the country’s presidential election with the slogan let’s choose the future.

In 1997, the past returned to politics with the return to power of the right-wing post-Solidarity party AWS (Akcja Wyborcza Solidarność, or Solidarity Voters’ Action). That year, a law on lustration was passed. Although the term lustration traditionally refers to purification ceremonies, in East-Central Europe it came to refer to the process of screening the past of influential public figures, in order to prevent people associated with the socialist-era secret police from participating in public life. In Poland, the law required high-profile public figures (including elected officials, lawyers, judges, university professors, school principals, and journalists) to declare any history they had of collaborating with the socialist-era security police (SB). In 1999, the government created an Institute of National Memory (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, or IPN), a state-funded agency whose goal is to preserve, manage, and disclose the material of state security agencies between 1944 and 1989, relating to both Nazi and communist-era crimes.¹² Although over the years IPN has been plagued by numerous controversies, it is nonetheless a powerful agent in producting and disseminating ideas about the past.

A few years passed, and the year 2004 marked what several historians identify as a turning point in the politics of history in Poland (Koczanowicz 2008; Nijakowski 2008). In that year, a major corruption scandal in the government was revealed and subsequently blamed on the remnants of the former socialist regime (Koczanowicz 2008). The political party in power at the time (incidentally, the Alliance of the Democratic Left, a party that grew out of the socialist-era governing party) was swept out in the 2005 elections and succeeded by the socially conservative party Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość), whose election program was explicitly based around an active politics of history and what its members termed decommunization. The lustration process intensified, leading to bitter public debates that quickly became polarized along political axes. Several more high-profile scandals followed, throwing into question the past of prominent public figures. Media attention to these events became tabloid-like, a fact that eventually dampened many people’s enthusiasm for dealing with the past and led to increased calls for the government to start dealing with more pressing issues in the present. Law and Justice ended up losing the subsequent 2007 election, and since then memory debates have somewhat calmed down. Nonetheless, the past remains a sensitive and often political issue. Different political parties are associated with different politics of memory; in fact, memory is one of the tools through which parties differentiate themselves from each other.¹³

Although different political parties deploy the past differently in their programs, for the most part they draw from the same repertoire of representations. These representations are produced by key opinion-forming institutions, including the media, schools, museums, and research institutions such as the Institute of National Memory or the Karta Center. They tend to focus on certain topics, including restrictions on people’s rights and liberties (for example, censorship or surveillance on the part of the state security police), political resistance (for example, strikes, demonstrations, and underground activism), and inefficiencies (for example, endemic shortages or empty shelves). From this we can observe that the socialist past tends to be depicted and perceived through the keywords of repression, resistance, and inefficiency.¹⁴ These keywords provide tools for people to think with and talk about the past, although they can also constrain what can be talked about and how. To be sure, Poland’s socialist-era history undeniably consists of experiences of repression, resistance, and inefficiency. However, it also consists of other experiences that are not as readily highlighted in dominant accounts of the past. These include near-universal employment, education, and literacy; postwar rebuilding; and industrialization. Although these factors could well be considered accomplishments of the socialist period, they are often undermined, explained away, or dismissed as small compensation for greater evils such as censorship and political repression (Majmurek and Szumlewicz 2010). Economic and political arrangements associated with the socialist state, such as a well-developed public sector or the separation between state and church, are generally presented as radical and communist, even though these same arrangements may also exist in contemporary western capitalist democracies (Majmurek and Szumlewicz 2010).

I should clarify here that the narrative of repression, resistance, and inefficiency is not imposed on the population by force, and alternative views on the past are certainly not banned or persecuted. Poland is a democratic country with freedom of thought and speech enshrined in the constitution, and there is no government-run censorship office that screens all publicly disseminated messages, of the sort that existed during the socialist period.¹⁵ However, for the most part, alternative accounts do not achieve widespread resonance and tend to get co-opted into the dominant narrative without significantly disrupting it.¹⁶ This should not come as a surprise; after all, it is the victors who get to write history (Burke 1989). In Poland, these victors are people who were members of the political opposition in the 1980s, who likely had negative experiences of the socialist political and economic arrangements. Following the collapse of the socialist government, these people subsequently assumed influential political, economic, and intellectual positions as politicians, CEOs, owners of media outlets, directors of museums and research centers, and so on. It is not that these political and economic elites are manipulating the population or imposing a certain version of history by force. However, people who run these institutions have considerable power to shape public opinion. Furthermore, the narratives produced by various opinion-making institutions often inform and reinforce each other; for example, research institutions often organize commemorative events for school groups and produce educational materials for classroom use. And ultimately, the reason why the narrative of repression, resistance, and inefficiency has become so widespread is because it resonates with the experiences of a large portion of Poland’s population.

However, all of this does not mean that everyone shares one uniform and static interpretation of the past. In fact, even state-owned or state-funded institutions do not always speak with the same voice. The state, after all, is not one monolithic entity; rather, it is made up of numerous institutions, networks, and people, who operate at different scales and pursue sometimes different agendas. The state can include both national- and municipal-level politicians; the national minister of education as well as teachers who are charged with implementing the educational curriculum; the head of a state-funded institution such as the Institute of National Memory but also historians who work at a local museum. All of these individuals may draw from a shared repertoire of keywords, but they can invoke them differently to construct different meanings.

Furthermore, it is important to remember that no state exists in an enclosed bubble, separate from other global political, economic, and social processes. In Poland, representations of the past produced at the national level both inform and are informed by discourses produced by European Union (EU) institutions. Memory is an important component in the project of European integration, since it is seen as a means of forging a shared identity among EU member states (e.g., Shore 2000; Killingsworth 2010). In fact, European Parliament’s 2009 resolution on European conscience and totalitarianism states that Europe will not be united unless it is able to form a common view of its history.¹⁷ In order to achieve this integration, the EU funds educational and commemorative initiatives dealing with topics that have previously divided the continent, such as World War II or socialism. For the most part, the message conveyed through these projects is that socialism represents a dark stain on the continent’s history and that Europe must build a shared future based on leaving behind that legacy.¹⁸ On the one hand, these representations of the past set the tone for the representations produced at the national level in EU member states (although this does not mean that they cannot be contested). On the other hand, representations produced at the national level also inform these large representations; for example, many of the EU’s commemorative projects relating to the socialist legacy are spearheaded by former socialist states, Poland among them.

In sum, the keywords of repression, resistance, and inefficiency provide a framework through which the socialist past is often discussed and perceived in Poland. However, as we will see throughout this work, there is considerable room for maneuvers within this framework. Keywords can be stretched so that their meaning can change over time. They can also be challenged altogether, and new alternative concepts can be introduced.

As we have seen, the past is political. Furthermore, it is also religious. In Poland, the Catholic Church was an important agent of resistance to the socialist government in the 1980s, as a result of which it gained a tremendous amount of public authority. Following the socialist government’s collapse, the church emerged as a major political and social force, backed by the country’s two largest political parties. In particular, the church has a strong connection to Poland’s nationalist and conservative party Law and Justice. Civic Platform, Poland’s governing party since 2007 and still at the time of this writing in 2014, depicts itself as more secular; nonetheless, it is made up of many socially conservative and religious politicians and in general does not challenge the church’s influence on public life. Thus, the church enjoys a powerful platform for disseminating a narrative on the past that depicts the socialist state as a repressive force and highlights its own role as an agent of resistance. In these representations, Catholicism, nationalism, and anticommunism go hand in hand. Since most Poles identify as Catholic (to a greater or lesser degree), this narrative has considerable influence on contemporary Polish national identity.

Above I have sketched out the contours of the politics of memory in postsocialist Poland. In this book I look at how debates about the socialist past are worked out in one concrete locality: Nowa Huta.

Nowa Huta

Because of its unique location in the Polish history and imagination, Nowa Huta presents a particular set of opportunities and challenges for a study that seeks to explore the role of memory at a time of political, economic, and social change. Nowa Huta was originally built by Poland’s postwar socialist government as a model socialist town and thus occupied a strategic role in the national imagination. However, because of its association with socialism, Nowa Huta was widely contested in popular opinion (as opposed to official state-produced representations). Over time, the district became a site of resistance to the socialist government. At present, Nowa Huta continues to occupy an ambiguous place in the national imagination—a place that is currently being negotiated in local representations.

This work is not only set in Nowa Huta—it is also about Nowa Huta. Anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues that a site such as a town or a village offers a particular configuration in time and space of the processes that affect the nation. It is a ‘conjuncture,’ an empirical moment in which those processes merge concretely within the daily existence of specific historical actors (1988, 184–85). And indeed, much can be