Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T22:02:25.876Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Urban and Industrial Everyday Life under Socialism and Post-Socialism

Review products

WłodzimierzBorodziej, StanislavHolubec, Joachimvon Puttkamer, eds., Mastery and Lost Illusions: Space and Time in the Modernization of Eastern and Central Europe (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2014). 257 pp. £37.99. ISBN 978-3-11-036420-0.
SandrineKott, Communism Day-to-Day: State Enterprises in East German Society (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014). 346 pp. $90.00. ISBN 978-0-472-11871-7.
AleksandraSznajder Lee, Transnational Capitalism in East Central Europe's Heavy Industry: From Flagship Enterprises to Subsidiaries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016). 302 pp. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-472-11987-5.

Show more reviewed productsShow more reviewed products

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2017

NIGEL SWAIN
NIGEL SWAIN*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Liverpool 9 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7WZ, UK; [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The above quotations from two of the books under review here took me back to the early 1970s and my first weeks in Hungary. As a graduate student in sociology, struggling to get to grips with my surroundings, I distinctly remember thinking that what was needed was an anthropology for large-scale industrial society to explain their foreignness and remoteness. Everything in the metropolis of Budapest followed a different logic, and in the academic division of labour, anthropologists are those with the skills to interpret the meanings of societies which operate according to a logic different to that of industrialised West. But in those days anthropologists still tended to focus on pre-industrial societies outside Europe. I had not yet read The Good Soldier Švejk, but a Hungarian sociologist told me was that I would never understand communist Eastern Europe without reading Švejk. I did, and he was right.

Type
Review Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , August 2017 , pp. 561 - 572
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Verdery, Katherine, What was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 5.

2 Hašek, Jaroslav, The Good Soldier Švejk and his Fortunes in the World War (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1974)Google Scholar.

3 Bartha, Eszter, Alienating Labour: Workers on the Road from Socialism to Capitalism in East Germany and Hungary (New York: Berghahn, 2013)Google Scholar; Kligman, Gail and Verdery, Katherine, Peasants under Siege: the Collectivisation of Romanian Agriculture, 1949–1962 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mark, James, ‘Remembering Rape: Divided Social Memory and the Red Army in Hungary 1944–1945’, Past and Present, 188, 1 (2005), 133–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Swain, Nigel ‘From Kolkhoz to Holding Company: A Hungarian Agricultural Producer Co-operative in Transition’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 13, 2 (2000), 142–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘The Local Experience of the Oder border region 1945–60 – a Polish and German village compared’, in Schultz, Helga, ed., Bevölkerungstransfer und Systemwandel (Berlin: Arno Spitz GmbH, 1998), 145–62Google Scholar.

4 See also Bren, Paulina, ‘Tuzex and the Hustler: Living it Up in Czechoslovakia’, in Bren, Paulina and Neuburger, Mary, eds., Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 27–48 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Mc Dermott, Kevin and Pinerová, Klára, ‘The Rehabilitation Process in Czechoslovakia’, in Mc Dermott, Kevin and Stibbe, Matthew, eds., De-Stalinising Eastern Europe: The Rehabilitation of Stalin's Victims after 1953 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 124–5.

6 Holy, Ladislav, The Little Czech Nation and the Great Czech Nation: National Identify and the Post-Communist Transformation of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Scott, James, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, xvi.

8 Lindenberger, Thomas, ‘The Fragmented Society: ‘Social Activism’ and Authority in GDR State Socialism’, Zeitgeschichte, 32, 1 (2010), 12 Google Scholar.

9 Péteri, György, ‘Contested Socialisms: The Conflict Between Critical Sociology and Reform Economics in Communist Hungary’, Social History, 41, 3 (2016), 249–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Tamas Dombos and Lena Pellandini-Simany, ‘Kids, Cars, or Cashews? Debating and Remembering Consumption in Socialist Hungary’, in Neuburger and Bren, eds., Communism Unwrapped, 325–50.

11 Bren, Paulina, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

12 Simić, Andrei, The Peasant Urbanites: A Study of Rural-Urban Mobility in Serbia (London: Seminar Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

13 Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilisation (London: University of California Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

14 Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 137.

15 Engels, Frederick, The Condition of the Working Class in England (London: The Electric Book Company, 2001)Google Scholar, 116.

16 Lewin, Moshe, ‘Society, State, and Ideology during the First Five-Year Plan’, in Lewin, Moshe, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 220–1Google Scholar. The classic criticism of Marx's views of the peasantry is Mitrany, David, Marx Against the Peasant: A Study in Social Dogmatism (New York: Collier Books, 1961)Google Scholar.

17 Simić, Peasant Urbanites, 129–30.

18 Berend, Ivan T., Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press), 27–8Google Scholar; 32–7.

19 See also Lebow, Katherine, Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949-56 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 108–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Lebow, Unfinished.

21 Ibid., 121.

22 Ibid.

23 In addition to his contribution to the work discussed here, see Horváth, Sándor, ‘Everyday Life in the First Hungarian Socialist City’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 68, (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 24–46.

24 Kenney, Padraic, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

25 Pittaway, Mark, The Workers’ State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944–1958 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

26 For Roma, see Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 108–12 and Donert, Celia, The Rights of the Roma: State Socialism and the ‘Gypsy Question’ in Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For women, see Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 97–123, and Fidelis, Malgorzata, ‘Equality through Protection: The Politics of Women's Employment in Postwar Poland, 1945–1956’, Slavic Review, 63, 2 (2004), 301–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 See, for example, Iordachi, Constantin and Bauerkämper, Arnd, eds., The Collectivization of Agriculture in Communist Eastern Europe: Comparison and Entanglements (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Iordachi, Constantin and Dobrincu, Dorin, eds., Transforming Peasants, Property and Power: The Collectivization of Agriculture in Romania, 1949–1962 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Kligman and Verdery, Peasants under Siege. For Hungary, Zsuzsanna Varga has written more extensively on the later period, see, for example, her contribution to Iordachi and Bauerkämper, eds., Collectivisation of Agriculture, ‘The Impact of 1956 on the Relationship between the Kádár Regime and the Peasantry, 1956–66’, Hungarian Studies Review, 39, 1–2 (2007), 155–76, and ‘Why is Success a Crime? Trials of Managers of Agricultural Cooperatives in the Hungary of the 1970’s’, Hungarian Studies Review, 40, 2 (2013), 149–76.

28 See also in this respect Bartha, Alienating Labour, 18 and 70.

29 Bartha, Alienating Labour, 137–41 and 182–5.

30 Kott, 143. Bartha, Alienating Labour, 76, 78 and 85.

31 Thelen, Tatjana, ‘Shortage, Fuzzy Property and Other Dead Ends in the Anthropological Analysis of (Post)Socialism’, Critique of Anthropology, 31, 1 (2011), 52–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Sik, Endre, ‘Reciprocal Labour Exchange in Hungary’, in Pahl, R.E., ed., On Work: Historical, Comparative and Theoretical Perspectives (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 527–47Google Scholar; Hann, C. M., Tázlár: A Village in Hungary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, 144.

33 Swain, Nigel, Green Barons, Force-of-Circumstance Entrepreneurs, Impotent Mayors: Rural Change in the Early Years of Post-Socialist Capitalist Democracy (Budapest: Central European University Press)Google Scholar, 346–8.

34 Bartha, Alienating Labour, 275–95.

35 Ost, David, The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

36 Bartha, Alienating Labour, 276.

37 Bartha, Alienating Labour, 6.

38 Lebow, Unfinished, 40.

39 Verdery, What was Socialism, 19–37.

40 See Konrád, George and Szelényi, Iván, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power: A Sociological Study of the Role of the Intelligentsia in Socialism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979)Google Scholar, 21 and 48 for the first concept, 46 for the second. For empirical work on housing, see, for example, Szelényi, Iván, ‘Social inequalities in State Redistributive Societies’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 19, 1–2 (1979), 63–87 Google Scholar, and on regional development, see Szelényi, Iván, ‘Urban Development and Regional Management in Eastern Europe’, Theory and Society, 10, 2 (1981), 169–205 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 See for example Gábor, I. R., ‘The Second (Secondary) Economy’, Acta Oeconomica, 22, 3–4 (1979), 291–311 Google Scholar; Gábor, I. and Galasi, P., ‘The Labour Market in Hungary since 1968’, in Hare, Paul, Radice, Hugo and Swain, Nigel, eds., Hungary: A Decade of Economic Reform, (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981)Google Scholar, 41–53 and contributions to Hann, C.M., ed., Market Economy and Civil Society in Hungary (London: Frank Cass, 1990)Google Scholar.

42 I attempted to combine the contribution of the first and second economy to class position in Swain, Nigel, Hungary the Rise and Fall of Feasible Socialism (London: Verso, 1992)Google Scholar, 179–83.