These two extracts from Adam Ważyk’s poems touch upon the same social process that started in 1945 – a massive and unprecedented peasant migration to the cities in the first postwar decade. It was influenced not only by post-Yalta border changes or postwar reconstruction and later industrialisation, but also by shifts in defining public actors and political subjects. People were supposed to enter downtown – it is important to note that the terminology here means the working classes moving from their shaggy huts or cheap tenement houses to representative spaces, from backstreets and yards to squares and promenades. In the same way as Anatoly Lunacharsky wished for the soviet people’s right to possess columns (Friedrich, Reference Friedrich and Bartetzky2005: 170), Polish citizens were also inspired by a Warsaw slogan from the early 1950s to claim their right to the city: ‘The socialist capital – a city of each citizen: worker, peasant and working intellectual’ (Crowley, Reference Crowley and Kordjak2016: 30). However, it very soon occurred that imagined ‘people’ did not exactly fit to expectations – instead, ‘living savagely’ and becoming rather ‘groats’ than a desired socialist proletariat. Although the processes described were widely discussed by sociologists such as Gustave Le Bon and Max Weber or writers like Victor Hugo, I focus on the Central European, in particular Polish context and its postwar urbanisation (Pobłocki, Reference Pobłocki2010; Sumorok, Reference Sumorok2010; Lebow, Reference Lebow2013; Brzostek, Reference Brzostek, Borodziej, Holubec and von Puttkamer2014).
This article deals with the postwar confrontation of the city and countryside, a confrontation of the rural and the urban, of the majority of Polish society with a hegemonic rest, of expectations and disappointments. I draw attention to a moment of mass migration to the cities and the postwar reconstruction heading towards state-socialism to focus on intellectuals’ discourses and changes in the social imaginary concerning peasants as new social and political subjects. ‘Social imaginary’ is the way in which people grasp things that allows for the realisation of a society through a common comprehension of the world (Taylor, Reference Taylor2004, Reference Taylor2007). It is a set of expectation horizons, ideal types and knowledge about our relation to the world and other groups. The imaginary is a map of social spaces. It also specifies what can generally be conceived in a given historical period – it defines a repertoire of collective actions that are at the disposal of a given group or class. Through postwar press, literature, official speeches and even academic writings, I trace what kind of discourses on urban newcomers were produced by a hegemonic rest, an intelligentsia.
In the years 1946–85 nearly 40 per cent of Polish population, that is, six million people, fled from rural areas to cities in search for jobs, either to live there or commute, but also to become a part of the urban landscape at an unprecedented scale in the region’s history (Pohoski, Reference Pohoski1963; Kolankiewicz, Reference Kolankiewicz, Lane and Kolankiewicz1973: 93). The urban population grew to 17.2 million by 1970 (Szpak, Reference Szpak, Klusáková and Teulières2008: 215). A testing ground for these processes was the Polish city of Łódź, the fastest-growing industrial centre of the interwar Second Republic. In 1945, with Warsaw destroyed, Łódź was the largest Polish city, relatively well preserved and gaining the status of unofficial capital. The proletarian city, deprived of its Jewish and German populations, faced an intensive migration: at first of mixed social strata – from Warsaw intellectuals to borderlands poor; later, of peasant labourers, mostly women from rural areas of central Poland. While, as a whole, Central Europe was on the move, intensity of movement in particular of rural migrants in a search for factory employment makes Łódź a perfect lens to observe a country-wide cultural clash and intelligentsia reaction.
The latter became the subject of both journalistic and academic inquiries framed additionally by political efforts to reshape the social imaginary through the state’s ‘socialist modernization’. Along with the scale of migration, there was another unprecedented aspect: peasants were becoming citizens, recognised political subjects, later even privileged representatives of the People’s Republic. The postwar press and political speeches encouraged them to be a part of the modernisation project. Almost immediately, counter-narratives followed and lamented the newcomers’ ‘improper’ uses of the city. The term ‘ruralisation of the city’ was coined to describe the misuses of urban spaces, a moral decline and even the negative influence of peasants on the urban working class.
Nowadays, the term ‘ruralisation’ can be employed with two meanings: in urban studies to indicate the reverse processes to urbanisation, either the decrease of cities or bringing rural aspects to the urban landscape; and in the social sciences, it concerns the process of carrying over ‘traditional peasant values and lifestyle’ – however defined – to urban spaces that follow large waves of migration (Kubicki, Reference Kubicki2011: 30), and the ruralisation of urban culture (Kopczyńska-Jaworska, Reference Kopczyńska-Jaworska1999: 53). The latter became an early research theme in Polish social sciences (for example, Radlińska, Reference Radlińska1948; Kamiński, Reference Kamiński and Rosset1962: 267; Nowakowski, Reference Nowakowski1957; Markiewicz, Reference Markiewicz1962) and also a kind of Eastern European specialty in the postwar period when top-down rapid industrialisation preceded urbanisation. Andrzej Sadowski summarises uses of the term in the context of Polish literature: ‘ruralisation is a set of complex consequences of rural citizens’ movement to the cities’, but he also underlines in the very core part of the definition that this movement is caused by ‘civilization and cultural lag of the rural world’ (Sadowski, Reference Sadowski1994: 13). This lag is exactly the moment when the hidden agenda of the term is revealed. Ruralisation was not only a neutral term to describe rural influence over an urban environment, but became a tool of discipline by the hegemonic intelligentsia. From these discourses, we can learn less about rural migrants and more about the intellectuals’ censure. The question about what was actually happening in postwar Łódź is less important than how it was described, and how it shaped public discourses and the social imaginary.
This article references newspapers, political speeches, and contemporary scholarship to trace how peasant newcomers were seen and described, as well as what role they played in postwar discourses. On the one hand, it contributes to the long history of tensions between the uneducated rural poorFootnote 3 and the cosmopolitan urban intellectual (Walicki, Reference Walicki2006; Jedlicki, Reference Jedlicki2000). On the other, it offers an insight into a unique moment when the scale of migration, the demographic situation and political background, shaped rather unique circumstances defining this process. Peasant voices could be traced thanks to many postwar efforts to give audience to the working classesFootnote 4 and were therefore treated as a counter-discourse; however, this article focuses on a hegemonic force shaping both public discourse and the social imaginary and that role was effectively guarded by the intelligentsia. Even with working-class children graduating from universities and taking positions in academia, an elitist intelligentsia approach was preserved and reproduced (Zysiak, Reference Zysiak2016).
From the oldtown’s throat, free spaces burst forth
City and countryside relations went through intensive and deep changes during the Second World War. This era in Polish history is often referred to as a period of social revolution (Fleming, Reference Fleming2010; Kersten, Reference Kersten1991; Zaremba, Reference Zaremba2012) and postwar migration is a part of it. The great movement was caused firstly by the loss of interwar Poland’s eastern lands, the so-called Kresy annexed by the Soviet Union. This land constituted nearly half of interwar Poland’s territory and forced 1.1 million people to move west, to what is now central Poland and the former domain of Germany (Ciesielski and Borodziej, Reference Ciesielski and Włodzimierz1999; Kochanowicz, Reference Kochanowicz, Ther and Siljak2001; Ther and Siljak, Reference Ther and Siljak2001). Even without such a profound shift in borders, the war losses resulted in enormous gaps in social structure, especially in cities where many groups of prewar urban dwellers were killed, died in, or emigrated from. Poland suffered tremendous social and economic losses during the Second World War, estimated as the most devastating in all of Eastern Europe: over 16 per cent of the prewar Polish population lost their lives during the war, including 90 per cent of the Jewish population (Gross, Reference Gross2007; Seton-Watson, Reference Seton-Watson1961: 232–4; Lane, Reference Lane, Lane and Kolankiewicz1973: 14). Additionally, people who were forced to seek shelter in rural areas during the war – perceived as safer and better supplied during turbulent times – were coming back to cities. And that was just the beginning, as half of Poles moved from one place to another at least once in the first postwar decade (Kersten, Reference Kersten1986: 718; Kerston, Reference Kersten1991, 163–4; Brzostek, Reference Brzostek and Kordjak2016: 19). The migration did not diminish after the immediate postwar years – during the Six-Year Plan almost 700,000 people, that is, 6.5 per cent of population, moved from rural to urban areas (Pohoski, Reference Pohoski1963: 53–5).
An enormous gap in the social structure appeared after the war. The base of the urban population, the entrepreneurs, bourgeoisie, tradesmen mainly of Jewish or German origin, was gone and the nobility was declassed (Gross, Reference Gross1990; Leder, Reference Leder2014). Poland itself became the most homogeneous (in terms of religion, language and ethnicity) state in its history (Porter-Szücs, Reference Porter-Szücs2014: 198; Lane, Reference Lane, Lane and Kolankiewicz1973: 12) with an 86 per cent Polish majority in 1946 (GUS, 1947: XVI). Poland was mainly a country of ‘widows and orphans’. Female inhabitants accounted for 56.7 per cent of the urban population – their preponderance reached even 142 per 100 males in the largest cities. In 1950, one in two women aged 29–49 was single (Jarska, Reference Jarska2014: 56). This allowed the establishment of a new social structure, based on the spectacular upward mobility of the lowest classes, mainly women from the rural areas of borderland Kresy.
In depopulated Łódź, however, mainly Polish workers, who were politicised during the interwar years,Footnote 5 remained. Łódź was not part of the so-called ‘regained territories’ from the Third Reich – Łódź’s German and Jewish minority grew from the 1820s under the Russian Empire.Footnote 6 Łódź interwar society was multi-ethnic, with 30 per cent of Jews, 9 per cent of Germans and a majority of Poles, who also constituted a majority of the working class. Among owners of the largest factories, Germans were a majority. The cities lost most of their Jewish and German citizens (Olejnik, Reference Olejnik and Żelazko2008). After the 1945, only 30 per cent of Łódź’s former citizens remained: fewer than 250,000 inhabitants, down from 672,000 in 1939, and if considering the Łódź metropolitan area, the number would be 300,000 compared to the prewar population of 800,000 (Rosset, Reference Rosset1962: 28). A majority of people in postwar Poland experienced displacement as well as destruction of local communities and social bonds (Kersten, Reference Kersten1991; Gross, Reference Gross, Naimark and Gibianskii1997; Zaremba, Reference Zaremba2012). However, some social groups managed to maintain local networks, in particular Łódź workers with a strong interwar ethos (Kenney, Reference Kenney2012) or rural migrants who moved to the city due to a snowball effect, but the latter concerns mainly the 1950s and 1960s. Peasant identity also brought new senses of subjectivity (Sadowski, Reference Sadowski1994: 44).
Between 1945–6, the urban population of Łódź reached almost half a million; in 1948 alone, over 200,000 people settled there (Rosset, Reference Rosset1962: 28–33), commented on with rising enthusiasm in the local press, which nicknamed Łódź the ‘workers’ Eldorado’ (Sumorok, Reference Sumorok2010: 91). In the early postwar years it became a magnet for thousands of people, as well as for administrations moving from Lublin, artistic groups and intellectual circles from ruined Warsaw, overcrowded Cracow and to some extent from Vilna and Lviv, which remained under Soviet rule. However, after 1947 a core of immigrants came from nearby rural areas, that is postwar central Poland – many of them were women hired for the first time.Footnote 7 The city served as the de facto capital of Poland and was bigger than Warsaw in population (Żelazko, Reference Żelazko2008: 26). As a textile giant, Łódź served perfectly as a symbol for the new times, a symbol of historical justice for a proletarian neglected city, a reborn metropolis after years of capitalistic negligence. Łódź gained ten higher education institutions, and dozens of trade schools, high schools and training courses were available. In comparison, for a brief time before the war only one branch of the independent Free Polish University operated (K. Baranowski, Reference Baranowski1977), but even the number of high schools and professional training institutions lagged behind other, much smaller, Polish cities (Pleszkun-Olejniczakowa, Reference Pleszkun-Olejniczakowa2015).
From 1948, the intellectual circles of Łódź citizens were returning to rebuild Warsaw, the true capital (Bołtuc-Staszewska, Reference Bołtuc-Staszewska1964), but rural migration continued. It was strengthened not only by the tributes being paid to the working classes in public discourse, but also by a long-lasting assumption among rural communities that work in a factory was better, easier and much more profitable than on a farm. Yet, from 1950, the local government lost most of its functions, as power was centralised, and political reforms intensified with the introduction of the Six-Year-Plan (1950–5). In 1951, obligatory registration of residents was introduced in order to defer a further influx of rural migrants.Footnote 8 However, in the 1950s, Łódź remained mainly an industrial centre, most of the prewar factories were working and 134,500 citizens of the Łódź population worked in industry. As early research shows, peasant workers did not feel an urge to integrate with the community of factory workers, and their particularly strong family ties and neighbourhood bonds often reconstructed new urban environments (Kopczyńska-Jaworska, Reference Kopczyńska-Jaworska1991). On the other hand, most of the textile workers also lived in close neighborhoods and worked in crews integrated during interwar class struggles or even the revolution of 1905Footnote 9 (Kenney, Reference Kenney2012; Marzec, Reference Marzec2017).
To understand this tension, it is worth underlining once again that Poland was a rural country – in its demography and culture. It is estimated that in 1939 approximately 75 per cent of the population was essentially rural, and the majority of rural inhabitants remained largely independent from nearby towns (Wasilewski, Reference Wasilewski2011: 359; Rothschild, Reference Rothschild2017: 35–45). During the war the urban population decreased (mainly because of losses in Jewish population), but by the 1960s urbanisation had already reached 50 per cent of the Polish population. The increase in city populations accounted for almost the entire Polish demographic growth (Sadowski, Reference Sadowski1994; Szpak, Reference Szpak, Steven and Klusáková2007). Additional groups of city dwellers were created by administrative modifications, mainly the changing of cities’ boundaries. Andrzej Chumiński writes about a shift from ruralisation to proletarianisation of the working classes in Poland as late as the end of the 1970s. Even if urban migration was not by then as strong as in the 1950s, the rural impact was stronger than the urban during the thirty years of the People’s Republic of Poland (Chumiński, Reference Chumiński and Chumiński2010). More than half of Łódź citizens were born outside the city, and 70 per cent were born in rural areas by 1970 (Kopczyńska-Jaworska, Reference Kopczyńska-Jaworska1991).
Postwar urbanisation was a transnational and global trend, however in mostly rural eastern Europe it took a specific form. State socialism introduced industrialisation before urbanisation (Poland reached a 50 per cent urbanisation rate as late as in 1965),Footnote 10 which caused more rapid and fierce cultural clashes than when both processes developed in parallel (Konrád and Szelényi, Reference Konrád, Szelényi and Harloe1977). Still, Łódź differed from other eastern European cites due to its nineteenth-century industrial development, working class and large size. Like many other industrial cities and capitals, it varied profoundly from the rest of ‘urban’ spaces in this part of Europe, which were constituted mainly by sleepy townships of an almost rural character (miasteczko). With a very limited presence of bourgeoisies or working classes, some of them would have had difficulty in meeting most of the components of what being urban can mean. Immigration to smaller towns or non-industrial larger cities – even as important for their own regions as, for example, Tirana in the case of Albania (Çaro, Reference Çaro2013) – did not result in powerful clashes between the rural and the urban as in Poland and Romania (Brzostek, Reference Brzostek, Borodziej, Holubec and von Puttkamer2014: 99; Roberts, Reference Roberts1951). In opposition to those cases, population of Czechoslovakia and Hungary was more urban (Rothschild, Reference Rothschild2017). Therefore, the ruralisation argument could be used most efficiently in the places most developed, often industrialised, providing an intensive urban experience of modernity. Places such as Łódź.
People will enter the downtown
What seems to be crucial for a case discussed here is a political context of new reality and symbolical recognition of the working classes. One of the most important elements of the new modernisation press and political narrative was gaining historical justice for the workers’ city, neglected by capitalism, cared for by socialists, as local press announced. Despite the argument that state socialism manipulated workers and peasants and seduced them with visions of a new society, levelling policies or a bare promise of upward mobility to the ‘new intelligentsia’, it is estimated that 24–35 per cent of the postwar Polish population experienced upward mobility (Słomczyński, Reference Słomczyński, Wesołowski and Maciej1973: 122). It is obvious that during the Stalinization period (1948–55) paths of political empowerment did not go through democratic elections or open public debate, but were rather introduced by national reforms on the one hand, and, on the other, by changing the public language, the rhetoric of subjectification in political speeches or simply a presence in public discourse. The working classes became recognised and even celebrated citizens.
The postwar period was a time of working classes in the plural. Nonetheless, the presence of urban factory workers were limited to just a few industrial centres and also difficult to oversee for the newly established government (prewar work ethos, militant culture, critical attitudes towards new government, etc.) (Kenney, Reference Kenney2012). A list of challenges such as illiteracy, building schools, hospitals, culture centres, the improvement of living conditions for thousands of workers (Spychalski and Rosset, Reference Spychalski and Rosset1966), providing social security with crèches, a full employment policy and worthy pensions for workers (but not for farmers, which were introduced much later) are crucial achievements, too often forgotten now (Fik, Reference Fik1996). The construction of a socialist welfare state cannot be diminished, as Brian Porter-Szűcs sums up:
Workers and peasants were publicly honored, and they experienced real improvements in their lives. Education and health care spread to the small towns and villages, and jobs were readily available for the first time in anyone’s memory. (Porter-Szücs, Reference Porter-Szücs2014: 223)
From the preamble of the PRL constitution from 1952, which called for ‘a republic of working people’ and ‘realized the liberation ideas of Polish working classes’ (Marszałek-Kawa, Reference Marszałek-Kawa2017) to the overwhelming presence of working classes in public discourse – the socialist citizenship was built.
Press articles and political speeches underlined the role and importance of the working class during the gentle revolution (1945–7) and with greater emphasis during the Stalinisation period (1948–55/6) (Piskała and Zysiak, Reference Piskała and Zysiak2018: 174). Discourse practices did not have to be too sophisticated – subjects were constructed through the use of language, by denomination. There fore, simple usages of words like peasants (chłopi) and workers (robotnicy) or underlying people’s (ludowy) character of modernisation, were part of the establishment of a new social imaginary. The postwar newspapers, distributed widely on shop floors or at rural cultural centres, give many examples of such practices. For example, in a few articles about working-class heritage and sacrifices in the recent war, peasants were protagonists in tandem with workers – heroes and heroines of the war effort:
Workers clenched fists, but in the hope that entered their hearts, the sounds of the giant Red Army’s offensive, in which the Polish worker and peasant were marching arm in arm in uniforms with the white eagle on caps, introduced the great days of Red Łódź. (Łódź, Kurier Popularny, 1946)
Political discourse was even blunter about the role of the working class: on 19th December 1947, the Minister of Agriculture and agricultural reforms Jan Dąb-Kocioł, at the 1st National Convention of Farm Workers in Szczecin, stated:
We have the most pioneering political system. In this system, unfortunately, we have a pre-war man, who often had not changed and would not grasp today’s reality. Since the political system is pioneering, it requires pioneers [applause]. We must pay particular attention to that, to the working class people, we must change, modernize, train and socialize them. (After: Szpak, Reference Szpak, Steven and Klusáková2007: 414)
However, this inclusion meant adaptation as well – a need for socialisation in the urban way of life was soon almost as equally important as the recognition itself. The ‘modernisation’ of working-class people did not focus solely on their political views – those were almost guaranteed by their structural position in society. In the 1950s, one of the textile factories introduced a special course to teach rural female incomers, who were freshly transformed into workers, how to spend money wisely or which food to buy in an urban environment (Pobłocki, Reference Pobłocki2010: 161). As this might have been viewed as a rather temporary solution for lost newcomers in an alien landscape, the project of the new socialist citizen had much greater ambitions. An entire educational system was being reformed. Additionally, an impressive campaign in the press encouraged working-class children to enroll at universities.Footnote 11 Consider this article from a communist party daily published in Łódź:
The city does everything to enable the development of higher education institutions, and to make education available for young workers, peasants and intellectuals. The establishment of preparatory courses give a real opportunity for young workers and peasants to get higher education. Not only the municipalities should support them, but also all social institutions and cooperatives (Łódź stolica świata pracy, Głos Robotniczy, 1947).
During the early postwar years a variety of solutions was implemented, such as an initial year, preparatory courses,Footnote 12 the special quota of registration indexes reserved for the disposition of the Ministry of Education, and some preferences for children of working-class origin. Encouraging examples were given to prove how easy this upward mobility might be:
One day a poster announcing the preparatory course at the university appeared in the village. Pokusa [surname, in Polish: ‘enticement’] enrolled as the first one. He was accepted after passing an exam. Now he is one of the best pupils. All you need is a good will – he explains (Dzielni w pracy i nauce, Dziennik Łódzki, 1951).
The socialist citizenship was not limited to urban areas, but infrastructure and services, including obviously higher education, were quicker and available earlier there. How this was experienced by people themselves is a topic of its own, but it can be briefly described as paradoxical modernisation, and a sense of advancement was constituted partly on a contrast with the interwar period (Kaźmierska, Reference Kaźmierska2014; Nesterowicz, Reference Nesterowicz2016; Zysiak, Reference Zysiak2016). To sum up this section, the construction of a socialist citizenship was in progress and peasants became pioneers building state socialism. One of the results was the inclusion of workers and peasants as central social and political subjects.
Lives savagely, daily and against sages
However, the emancipatory movement to include newcomers was mainly present on posters, political speeches and in newspapers, as discussed above. At the same time, a strong counter-discourse appeared and a resistance was being built against rural migrants. A kind of hostility towards newcomers can be found on the margins of postwar public discourse. This critique was produced mainly by the intelligentsia, also progressive and leftist intellectuals moving to Łódź, and can be found in memoirs and autobiographies, but it also often reveals itself in the press as well: as pedagogical attempts to ‘civilise’ migrants. Yet another line of antagonism could be drawn between the peasant and ‘old’ workers, as already researched (Brzostek, Reference Brzostek2002; Słabek, Reference Słabek2004; Jarska, Reference Jarska2015).
The intelligentsia’s hostility towards the migrating ‘masses’ was especially visible in Warsaw, where migration levels were high and the relatively coherent intellectual environment was ready to protect its identity and urban heritage. Therefore, ‘Warsaw [was] invaded by the sticks’ and newcomers were pejoratively compared to gypsies or people who didn’t know how to adapt to an urban environment, ‘kept potatoes in bathtubs’, and were diagnosed as the source of almost all of Warsaw’s problems (Brzostek, Reference Brzostek, Borodziej, Holubec and von Puttkamer2014: 99). While Warsaw intellectual circles had opinions of a rather conservative group with its ethos inspired by nobility and its anti-urban sentiments, Łódź was rather a liberal, even leftist stronghold and served as a ‘magnet for leftist intellectuals’ after the war (Connelly, Reference Connelly2000: 103). One might assume that this industrial city should be profoundly different with its weak interwar elites, industrial character and deep wartime changes in both social and ethnic structure. However, at the same time, the political profile and often a personal involvement in the socialist project prompted much higher expectations that postwar Łódź intellectuals had from the imagined ‘people’ – an idealised subject of revolution and utopian modernisation projects.
Peasants migrating to cities entered a liminal position in discourse representations. They neither became an urban, progressive proletariat as desired by the progressive intellectuals, nor could they continue to be seen as cheerful peasants living simple lives close to nature. And this figure was a popular one: with the generation before the so-called chłopomania, fascination with rural life spread among the intelligentsia, in particular Cracow artistic circles, and as recently as 1924, the popular novel Peasants – describing an idealised wealthy village’s life – won Wladyslaw Reymont the Noble Prize in literature.Footnote 13 David Crowley summed up the early postwar years: ‘despite the rhetoric of turning peasants into proletarians, it looked as if the village had come and occupied the city. This was not the romantic image of the village populated with happy peasants favored but a landscape of desperation.’ (Crowley, Reference Crowley and Kordjak2016: 33). As a result, multiple arguments against newcomers were raised in the postwar press. Those intellectuals’ polemics can be divided into three main themes:
I. Inappropriate uses of the city
In this argument, newcomers somehow misused the city. They were criticised for not knowing how to use urban spaces properly – both public and private. A hidden assumption behind it was that such a set of proper uses actually exists. It was especially problematic taking into consideration a specificity of Polish interwar urban culture, weak bourgeoisies and an almost non-existent proletariat, which were a social base for the modern city in the so-called West. It occurred that even if modern and urban lifestyles were doubtfully present on the streets of interwar Polish cities,Footnote 14 an imagined reference point about a proper urban behaviour was easily defined and served as the basis for a critique of newcomers. This kind of paternalistic discourse pointed out what migrants were doing wrong and how a desired, cultural city dweller should act.
The catalogue of inappropriate practices included a wide range of behaviours in public: rural women wearing a traditional headscarf (indicating their marital status); chaotic traffic on pavements; eating in the street; and even loud behaviour was seen as a ‘village’ thing (especially in cinemas, theatres or other public spaces) (Brzostek, Reference Brzostek, Borodziej, Holubec and von Puttkamer2014: 110; Szpak, Reference Szpak, Klusáková and Teulières2008: 243). Kurier Popularny, in a 1947 article titled, ‘You can go mad’ (‘Można oszaleć’), even criticised the amount of noise in Łódź, claiming that the main sources of noise, together with traffic and production, was yet another problem: ‘Finally, something needs to be done with these crowds, which gather already around 5 a.m. in front of certain stores. They behave so loud, that one cannot find any greater noise, greater quarrels and shouts, even at a market place. This is all truly irritating.’ There was also a special term for a person being too loud in a cinema: kinocham, which might be translated as a ‘cinema-boor’ (Pobłocki, Reference Pobłocki2010: 203). Poblocki gives examples of such behaviour continuing to be commented on in the late 1950s and 1960s.
Newspapers demanded better organisation or education about urban traffic, accusing migrants of not knowing how to walk in public, even calling for migrants to learn about the city’s history, like in the article ‘Do you know your city?’ (‘Czy znacie swoje miasto’, Ekspress Ilustrowany, 1947). Some of these ‘wrongdoings’ were probably nothing more than urban prejudices demonising strangers, and some probably did happen from time to time, while some were documented and described by researchers in years ahead.
One can have in mind an involvement of scholars in the intelligentsia on the one hand, and on the other, a knowledge production context, which includes both internalising the ‘progressive’ policies of the state and responding to certain political needs. Academics had a role in stabilising and legitimising anti-peasant discourses. As D. Crowley notes about social scientists dealing with rural migrants: ‘much of this sociology eschewed observation in favor of judgement’ (Crowley, Reference Crowley and Kordjak2016: 33). For example, as early as the 1930s, rural migrants were described by H. Radlińska, a pioneer of social pedagogy:
City newcomers going about their own businesses concentrate only on themselves. They do not seek for other possibilities to learn more about the city – about the factories, laboratories, schools, etc. They do not know that the secret of city power does not lie in blatant things. They do not have any idea that the traffic is totally different in each quarter and is changeable in time and that those who are hanging around shops are mainly visitors. Not much, or rather nothing, influences newcomers. What attracts them most are the products of entertainment industry – cinemas, cafés, drinking dens. Museums, libraries, day-rooms, clubs are still inaccessible and remain unknown. (Radlińska, Reference Radlińska1948; after Szpak, Reference Szpak, Steven and Klusáková2007: 243).
When this piece was published, Radlińska was already living in Łódź, where she moved, as many Warsaw intellectuals did, in 1945. This attitude of scholars did not change much in the late 1940s and 1950s, even if political reality did change and tried to include working classes as main political subjects of socialist modernisation. For example, fieldnotes and comments on esthetic choices of rural workers reveal visible intelligentsia distinction (for a set of examples, see: Jarosz, Reference Jarosz2010: 77–78).
Not only studying, but even a simple use of urban infrastructure demanded some ‘culture’. Many accusations about improper city usage concerned even private spaces, such as flats. The Housing Construction Institute researched housing habits of Warsaw urban dwellers in the early 1950s and pointed out a tendency rooted in rural custom ‘for distinguishing between the “black room” (the space of communal living) and the “white” one (reserved for ceremonial occasions). Often several people slept in the same bed’ (Brzostek, Reference Brzostek and Kordjak2016: 26). The situation in Łódź was not dissimilar. These findings were later quoted in the press and served as a catalyst for more extreme urban legends, among which keeping animals in basements or preparing pickles in bathtubs seem most widespread and part of common knowledge among contemporary Łódź’s dwellers. This situation was not exceptional for Łódź or Warsaw, as similar accounts can be found concerning the newly built Nowa Huta:
Where the new blocks were inhabited by the families of rural origins, there were frequent problems due to incompetent use of a contemporary flat by the immigrants. It was often the case that the fittings in a flat were devastated (such as water supply and drainage, or gas heaters in bathrooms) due to incorrect use of the equipment (such as drawing water from the radiator), or using the bathroom as a place to keep animals. (Pobłocki, Reference Pobłocki2011: 32).
Similarly, in the late 1920s, Moscow also ‘suffered’ from rural habits introduced in some districts, such as laundry in bathtubs, husking sunflower seeds – behaviours publicly criticised and that stigmatised the newcomers (Colton, Reference Colton1998). Therefore, peasant migrants could be easily blamed for any problems in infrastructure by being accused of devastating the urban spaces in which they inhabited.
In response, the idea of ‘kulturnost’ was coined (Brzostek, Reference Brzostek, Borodziej, Holubec and von Puttkamer2014; Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick1999). In the Polish context a similar construct of ‘cultural men’ (człowiek kulturalny) served as a reference point and resonated more than an attempt to build the socialist new intelligentsia (Zysiak, Reference Zysiak2016). A ‘cultural man’ was a urban dweller by definition. The aforementioned attempts to encourage the working-class youths to enroll at universities was largely a failure. Classism was an intergenerational issue – if the ‘true Varsovians’ complained about a ‘Gypsy’ who had taken control of the capital, their children attending schools and universities were apparently not much different – even in a working-class and migrant-based city of Łódź. One graduate from working-class youth recalls his experience as a freshmen at the University of Łódź: ‘[in dormitories] The rest of students harassed us as much as they can, for example they hinder access to bathrooms, prevent us from using an iron, calling us “boors” (chamy) or “rabble”’ (Szczepański, Reference Szczepański1962: 166). This reflects attitudes to lower social groups expressed by many in the educated classes in the 1950s in a sociological research report; voices like this rarely entered public discourse and could not shape the intelligentsia-dominated production of social imaginary.
II. Moral degradation
Inadequate behaviour or usage of private spaces was seen as lack of knowledge, backwardness or primitivism. This second group of arguments against newcomers reached even farther: peasant migrants were seen to spread a moral degradation. On the one hand, it might seem paradoxical considering a widespread notion of a close community and attachment to Catholicism in rural areas (Kopczyńska-Jaworska, Reference Kopczyńska-Jaworska1991; Kamiński, Reference Kamiński and Rosset1962; Spychalski and Rosset, Reference Spychalski and Rosset1966), but on the other, it was argued that village people were much more liberal in their sexual behaviour, this ‘confirmed’ in social research (Wiślicz, Reference Wiślicz and Szenderowicz2018). This argument was enforced by a gender ratio among female workers, a majority of the active workforce in textile industry.Footnote 15 In contrast to conservative rural communities, the urban environment was seen as harbouring seductive pockets of sin, which were especially dangerous for young women (Fidelis, Reference Fidelis2010: 124; Jarska, Reference Jarska2015).
Anti-urban sentiments framing the city as a demoralising nest of sin (Jedlicki, Reference Jedlicki2000) also fed into this narrative. Such fears were also fuelled by recent memories of peasants trading on the black market during the war (Kochanowski, Reference Kochanowski2015); seen in postwar years as immoral, especially in the press: ‘This is still a Łódź’s disease – the black markets, speculation, degenerated forms of free trade inherited from “isolated” occupational economy’ (Centralne miasto Polski, Kurier Popularny, 1946). In general, just after the war, a tolerance for most kinds of variant behaviour was higher. This tolerance was caused by the urgent and serious problems most people had to deal with, as well as by some more general loosening of social rules, or even temporary demoralisation (Zaremba, Reference Zaremba2012). Later years brought these issues into the spotlight of social criticism once more.
One writer and Warsaw intellectual, himself settled in Łódź in 1945, decried this ‘absolute isolation in Sodom’, having postwar Łódź in mind (Woroszylski, Reference Woroszylski and Bołtuc-Staszewska1964: 136). Furthermore, workers’ hostels designed to resolve problems in accommodation were called ‘pockets of demoralization’. Workers’ hostels were supposed to be a temporary solution to solve housing deficits and were overpopulated with young repatriates and rural migrants (Słabek, Reference Słabek2004: 64–5). Hostels became also objects of social research, which resulted in diagnosing newcomers with social anomy, alienation and lack of assimilation to new environments (Nowakowski, Reference Nowakowski1961, Reference Nowakowski1957; Jarosińska, Reference Jarosińska1964). Despite obligatory gender segregation, young girls and their new way of living became criticised for being ‘unrefined love affairs’ or ‘immersing themselves into pleasures of metropolitan life’ and later for having spurious children, as Kacper Pobłocki highlights through research of the weekly Odgłosy in the 1950s (Pobłocki, Reference Pobłocki2010: 156). Małgorzata Fidelis shows that postwar authorities were much more interested in a control over morality and the sex lives of women than of men (Fidelis, Reference Fidelis2010).
Both conservative and leftist intellectuals were not satisfied with how ‘the people’ actually behaved. They did not fit into the imagined working class: the proletarian youth were hanging out on the streets, crime rates were high, drinking in gateways was popular, playing cards and hazards were a daily experience for many and – what worried party members in particular – membership in youth movements was very low among the ex-rural youths (Kenney, Reference Kenney2012: 85).
In a way, communist intellectuals disregarded the postwar proletariat, mainly composed of rural newcomers who simply enjoyed the pleasures of metropolitan life and did not respect education, morals or work in the way the new socialist men were expected to. Crowley notes that proletarian youth represented all that Stalinist intellectuals hated about capitalism. Therefore, the idealistic vision of culture and a cultured way of life was presented as the antithesis to capitalism – culture should overcome commerce. The term ‘hooliganism’ was often used in opposition to the ‘cultural men’ (Kotarbiński, Reference Kotarbiński1956) and was probably the most common description for any diagnosed wrongdoings of newcomers (Pobłocki, Reference Pobłocki2010; Fidelis, Reference Fidelis2010). Hooligans served in the press as an evil force responsible for many urban problems – and they were an easy excuse for the local government when some problems were not solved. In a similar vein to Ekspress Ilustrowany’s question ‘Do you know your city?’, Brzostek points out that a true ‘Varsovian’, in contrast to the newcomers, was supposed to have an intimate relation with the city, which would result in decent behaviour, respecting public property and social norms. Thus, a true urban dweller would not be a ‘hooligan’ and would treat his/her dearest city properly.
III. Peasantisation – the erosion of the prewar work ethos
Finally, the last group of arguments was related to labour relations and to more sophisticated discourses on the practical challenges of building state-socialism. With a labour shortage, more and more rural migrants took jobs in the textile industry in Łódź and Poland in general; more journalists underlined a ‘lack of factory artisans’ and feared the disintegration of urban communities (Pobłocki, 2010: 157). Peasant workers were not only ‘terrible urbanite material’ or ‘sodomites’ as described in some critical accounts (Pobłocki, Reference Pobłocki2010: 156), but also supposedly made for bad workers. They were described as not caring about their occupation – neither the quality of their work nor the factory as such, or even a solidarity between co-workers (Jarosińska, Reference Jarosińska1964). In the early 1960s other sociologists described small-town factory workers of peasant origins by criticising them for stealing tools and materials, as well as their strong focus on material goods, even unnecessary consumption just for showing-off before their rural relatives (Markiewicz, Reference Markiewicz1962: 151).
What is interesting, however, is that a prejudice against peasants in factories remained even in the 1980s; for example, those who moved earlier to the city – even if that meant only a few years difference – tended to identify themselves as proper urban dwellers, even if born in rural areas (Kaźmierska, Reference Kaźmierska2014). Actually, peasant-workers made the most effective workforce (Słabek, Reference Słabek2009: 203–4).
The project of a new socialist/soviet human required education, and peasant migrants were supposed to socialise to the new ways of living – not only urban, but socialist ones. Language – in particular dialects and accents – played an important role in building distinction and was also an obvious indicator of one’s social origin (Jarosz, Reference Jarosz2010: 72–4). On these bases, the working classes were often seen as the main recipients of newspeak (Conboy, Reference Conboy2010). What followed was an argument about the totalitarian preferences of the masses or the seduction of naïve plebs by the authoritarian state (Palska, Reference Palska1994). One should keep in mind that the language used was also the only one that offered these people any kind of emancipatory narrative and its form actually developed much earlier with the first socialist pamphlets in the late nineteenth century.
Paradoxically, peasant workers were accused of not having a proper work ethos and, at the same time, for having too much engagement in work – working too hard and levelling up expectations towards production rates (Jarska, Reference Jarska2015: 124). Once again, the concept of a new socialist (wo)man was employed to highlight the contrast of peasant workers who blindly believed in visions offered by the Communist Party. Peasant workers were accused of autosovietisation, which also meant that they supported the new regime instead of their fellow workers (Chumiński, Reference Chumiński2006). When the latter were striking or criticising postwar reforms for implementing a capitalist work regime or unachievable norms of production, the peasant workers were seen as supporting amoral familism, stealing tools and being strikebreakers (Jarosz, Reference Jarosz2010: 84; Brzostek, Reference Brzostek2002: 72–9). The critique of a peasant worker easily shifted: sometimes they were lacking in craftsmanship and were easier to control; other times, they were seen as an efficient workforce blindly supporting those in power.
Nowadays the term peasantisation is used mostly in reference to ex-colonies and in urban studies concerning the so-called Third World; and it is understood as a reversed process of proletarianisation (Hoffman, Reference Hoffman and Pallot1998: 113). However, the term was used before in discussions on the working class transition in Soviet Russia (another term used in this connection is indigenisation, which refers to the rise of multicultural structures in the Russian working class (Liber, Reference Liber1992: 69). Peasantisation, in contrast to the initially optimistic assumptions of Marx and Lenin about peasants moving to the cities, referred to rather negative aspects of this process, such as alienation, anomie, and identity crisis:
According to this argument, the Russian peasant worker was uprooted, bewildered, and prone to anarchic violence (buntarstvo) in the tradition of Pugachev. A uniquely Russian configuration of peasant unrest and industrial dislocation is thus seen as a source of worker militancy (Johnson, Reference Johnson1976: 252).
Moshe Lewin’s argument about the peasant nature of Russia also shares this perspective – revolutionary modernisation’s failure was caused by how its particularly rural character was formed (Lewin, Reference Lewin1975) – and the proclaimed ‘crisis of proletarian identity’ was another conclusion (Liber, Reference Liber1992: 76). The critique of newcomers in Poland took a similar shape, but contemporary scholars used the term ruralisation of urban culture, and with a wider meaning (Markiewicz, Reference Markiewicz1962; Pohoski, Reference Pohoski1963; Sadowski, Reference Sadowski1981).
All in all, these three sets of arguments show how the distance between old urban and new ex-rural dwellers was built and gives an insight into the constellation of the postwar social imaginary. A movement of inclusion was paradoxical from this perspective: it proclaimed a new social order that never was and could not be put into practice. Rural newcomers were presented as a homogenous mass of external force that was invading the cities. Both conservative intellectuals as well as progressive ones, urban interwar workers and even rural immigrants themselves, and, finally, both academic authors and journalists – all reproduced a discourse of critique of the rural migrant to the cities, a paradoxical construct of the other. For female workers, again a majority of Łódź workforce, class origin intersected with gender (Brzostek, Reference Brzostek2002: 79–88; Fidelis, Reference Fidelis2010), but at the same time the latter was not so often openly commented on, or even included in critical discourses on peasant newcomers.Footnote 16
For now, only groats with a lot of spoil
To sum up, after the first wave of migration (1945–7), which was caused directly by the Second World War, the socialist modernisation project encouraged or – as some may argue – forced a migration from villages to cities (1948–53). The social structure of postwar urban dwellers changed rapidly, evoking various reactions aiming either at inclusion (under particular conditions) or building distance with these new-rising political subjects. A key term for the processes described was ruralisation.
During the postwar period, the term ruralisation was still rarely used and, if it was, often in a colloquial manner. The social structure of Łódź workers was visibly changing: the crowd on the streets was visibly taking its place and people did enter the downtown. The three themes discussed in this article are deeply entangled with the concept of ruralisation later used objectively to describe the postwar processes. The postwar confrontation between the city and the countryside, a confrontation of the rural and the urban, reveals the internal problems of the socialist modernisation project and its conflicting logics of imperfect inclusion and disappointment – both of progressive intellectuals inventing a working-class utopia and migrating peasants who were supposed to be a part of it.
Kacper Poblocki suggests that: ‘Poles did not regard themselves as the righteous owners of cities because of their peasant (and more specifically serf) background … mentally they are still wedded to the agricultural world; this is why cities seem distant and alienating to them’ (Pobłocki, Reference Pobłocki2010: 158). He reverses David Harvey’s thesis about identity urbanisation. While Poles were moving to the cities from villages, they actually were enthusiastic about an urban lifestyle, even if they were not able to socialise into it too quickly. What was more important than the level of practices was the emergence of a definition of what the proper use of the city is. As a result, the new urban dwellers became a kind of ‘exotic’ element in the cityscape. Therefore, the consequences of the ruralisation argument shaped urban identity in the decades to come; and it is crucial to reframe the process of urban ruralisation not only as a sociological phenomenon, but as also influenced by the discursive tools of hegemony.
Acknowledgments
The work on this article was part of a research project at the University of Warsaw, Poland, financed by the Polish National Science Centre, research grant Fuga 5, contracted as UMO-2016/20/S/HS6/00567. Some sources were taken from a research project ‘Four Discourses of Modernity – Modernism of Periphery on the Example of Lodz (19th–20th Centuries)’, granted by the Polish National Science Center, contracted as UMO-2011/03/B/HS6/01874.
