Historian Malgorzata Fidelis aims to offer “a new perspective on Poland and Eastern Europe during the ‘long sixties,’” which she understands as the period from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s (2). Scholars, she correctly notes, have examined the interactions between the First- and Third worlds, leaving the Second World, and eastern Europe in particular, neglected (3). But, as Fidelis argues, people in the region participated in global cultural and social developments, and “engaged with the political and cultural upheavals of the global sixties” (1). They did so despite the isolation for which that the lands behind “the iron curtain” became known.
Fidelis examines Poland's global interconnections by concentrating on the evolving “subjectivity” (2) of Polish youth (roughly defined as fifteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds). As Fidelis is quick to observe, given the restrictions on travel, “imagining the world played a critical role not only in shaping desires and practices but also in defining the broader relations between the state and the trajectory of the political opposition” (2). Perhaps by drawing attention to those very limitations, the books also put into perspective one reason why attention to eastern Europe in global histories of this period has also been limited. The book is less about how Poles shaped the world during the global sixties, and more about how the global sixties shaped Polish youth, and how young Poles’ cultural exposure to the world enabled them to remain connected to global cultural trends and shape their relationship with the Polish state.
Imagining the World has eight chapters. Fidelis starts by discussing Poland's colorful, cosmopolitan Thaw, which set the stage for the subsequent decade of relative openness. In Chapters 2 and 3, she offers a reading of how experts and young Poles projected the ideas about youth, modernity, and globality in journals, sex education manuals, and youth magazines. Chap. 4 looks at student clubs, Poland's unique spaces of relative cultural freedom and engagement with western culture. Fidelis turns to youth political activism in Chap. 5, analyzing the lead-up to and the protests of March 1968, which led to the state's infamous antisemitic campaign. In Chap. 6, Fidelis examines the counterculture of Polish hippies. Chap. 7 looks at the experiences of rural youth. In Chap. 8, Fidelis examines the Polish state's successful efforts to co-opt 1960s youth culture into the official culture of the 1970s.
Fidelis remains laser-focused on making the argument throughout, exploring with care and in detail the different ways in which young people across Poland and across social strata engaged with global ideas and trends. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources (interviews, several archival collections, and countless periodicals), she tells engaging stories about fascinating people during interesting periods in their lives. Fidelis is really good at interpreting these stories, frequently drawing on sociological surveys and conceptual work. I appreciated how she confronted the numerous contradictions of Polish youth culture, noting, for instance, the simultaneous fascination with the Global South among young Poles and the indulgence in racist attitudes (86). I enjoyed learning about how the synthesis of global and Polish modernities shaped the lives of young people in the countryside. For instance, “for young rural men, the motorcycle meant not only personal independence and imagined proximity to the world but also respectability in the local community” (165). The Gierek regime eventually “domesticated some of the major cultural trends of the global sixties” (204). But this tale about how young Polish men and women of different backgrounds negotiated their encounter with the world makes it easier to see why, when communism collapsed in 1989, Poland's ostensible “return” to the global community seemed culturally somewhat less dramatic from the perspective of many Poles than from those watching in the west.
I was surprised to see that for all the nuanced recognition of fluid overlaps between “socialist” and “Western” modernities, the overarching distinction remained binary, and a discussion of Soviet, various east European, and Polish regional forces that shaped Polish youth's experiences of the “global sixties” seemed sparse. The book did not always draw on relevant literature, particularly of Soviet cultural and political developments, which, after all, shaped the Polish context during that time. Still, the book is an important and original contribution to the fields of Polish, east European, and global histories, and has lots to offer to experts and graduate students alike.
