Unfinished utopia : Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish society, 1949-56 / Katherine Lebow.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lebow, Katherine, 1970-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Communism and culture--Poland--Krakow--History.

Communism and culture.

Work-life balance--Poland--Krakow--History--20th century.

Work-life balance.

Nowa Huta (Kraków, Poland)--History--20th century.

Nowa Huta (Kraków, Poland).

Nowa Huta (Kraków, Poland)--Social life and customs--20th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (250 p.)

Other Title:

Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish society, 1949-56

Place of Publication:

Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Unfinished Utopia is a social and cultural history of Nowa Huta, dubbed Poland's "first socialist city" by Communist propaganda of the 1950's. Work began on the new town, located on the banks of the Vistula River just a few miles from the historic city of Kraków, in 1949. By contrast to its older neighbor, Nowa Huta was intended to model a new kind of socialist modernity and to be peopled with "new men," themselves both the builders and the beneficiaries of this project of socialist construction. Nowa Huta was the largest and politically most significant of the socialist cities built in East Central Europe after World War II; home to the massive Lenin Steelworks, it epitomized the Stalinist program of forced industrialization that opened the cities to rural migrants and sought fundamentally to transform the structures of Polish society. Focusing on Nowa Huta's construction and steel workers, youth brigade volunteers, housewives, activists, and architects, Katherine Lebow explores their various encounters with the ideology and practice of Stalinist mobilization by seeking out their voices in memoirs, oral history interviews, and archival records, juxtaposing these against both the official and unofficial transcripts of Stalinism. Far from the gray and regimented landscape we imagine Stalinism to have been, the fledgling city was a colorful and anarchic place where the formerly disenfranchised (peasants, youth, women) hastened to assert their leading role in "building socialism"-but rarely in ways that authorities had anticipated.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Unplanned City

2. New Men

3. The Poor Worker Breaks His Legs

4. Women of Steel

5. The Enlightenment of Kasza

6. Spaces of Solidarity, 1956-89

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780801468865

0801468868

OCLC:

857077253