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.Footnote ¹ I had not yet read The Good Soldier Švejk,Footnote ² but a Hungarian sociologist told me was that I would never understand communist Eastern Europe without reading Švejk. I did, and he was right.

My early years as a sociologist investigating socialist Hungary inevitably colour my current encounter with the social, economic and cultural history of Eastern Europe and prompt pin-pricks of concern. This is not because I claim the epistemological primacy of personal experience, rather I am concerned about historiographical fashion on the one hand and interdisciplinary blindness on the other. The books here under review offer a return of focus to the processes of labour, industrialisation and urbanisation rather than their consumption or cultural representation, which has been the concern of much recent scholarship on the socialist history of the region. But they share a general reluctance to engage with the academic literature produced about the region at the time. Economic, social and cultural life in socialist Eastern Europe was not terra incognita in 1989, but beyond the occasional reference to works of social anthropology, historians have tended to treat it as such.

Socialist Eastern Europe disappeared more than a quarter of a century ago and time is pressing: those with memories of the fifties and early sixties are dying out. Miroslav Vaněk and Pavel Mücke's oral history, which includes early post-socialism but deals mostly with the socialist period, is therefore a timely addition to both Czech and regional histories. Many historians, such as Eszter Bartha, Gail Kligman, Katherine Verdery, James Mark and myself have used oral history as a research tool for investigating particular issues, industrial relations in Hungary and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), collectivisation in Romania, memories of rape and communist middle class in Hungary, collectivisation and decollectivisation in Hungary and the GDR,Footnote ³ but this book stands alone as a general oral history of a whole society. Therein lie both its strengths and its weaknesses: its scope is wide-ranging, based mainly on 300 oral history interviews with individuals professionally active in the last twenty years of socialism (born roughly 1935–55) carried out between 2006 and 2013; yet it is somewhat arbitrary in the way it structures its contents. Seven substantive chapters address civil and political rights; the family; friends and others (including relations with foreigners); education; employment and unemployment; the meaning of free time and ‘us and them’. But beneath these headings, the authors stray quite widely (the chapter on the family includes whether or not to talk politics in front of the children (60–2) and theft of socialist property because ‘a man who isn't stealing from the state is stealing from his family’ (63), while other issues appear under more than one heading; and there is little sense of how all these dimensions hang together. One central feature of everyday life under socialism, the second economy, eludes their taxonomy but intrudes nevertheless. The section on leisure refers to time spent ‘tending allotment gardens’ (146), the section on the family refers to women working in agriculture after normal working hours (54), the chapter on employment includes reference to ‘working the second shift in order to make ends meet’, (127) ‘moonlighting jobs’ (129, 152 and 156) and also the black market economy around the Tuzex shops (123–4),Footnote ⁴ while the final chapter has subsections on clientelism and bribes and favours.

In their conclusion the authors stress the petty bourgeois and middle-class values that were preserved in Czech society despite the ‘modernising project aiming to create a “new socialist person”’ (203). Evidence of the preservation of such values in attitudes to the family, education and outsiders is instructive, but here the authors perhaps downplay the novelty of relations at the workplace and regime attempts to create a ‘socialist person’, certainly when compared with Sandrine Kott's study. Moreover the focus on middle-class values contrasts somewhat with the ‘workerist’ and envious attitudes identified recently by Kevin McDermott and Klára Pinerová.Footnote ⁵ The chapter on the family includes some perceptive comments on marriage and housing, the shortage of the latter being reasons for the former, and the chapter on education reminds us of long-standing class-based restrictions on access to education in socialist Czechoslovakia which prompted a sense of guilt on the part of some beneficiaries (107). But the greatest strength of the book lies in its presentation of everyday coping with authority and the regime and its implicit rejection of a specifically Czech narrative that sees the socialist era in an unambiguously negative light (170). The authors focus on Czech traditions and Ladislav Holý’s The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation,Footnote ⁶ which sees Švejk-like characteristics as central to Czech national identity. But Czech national identity emerged in the nineteenth century from an engagement with Austro–Hungarian authoritarianism, and while Švejk-like characteristics might indeed be part of a Czech national tradition, they are also components of a wider response to authority, variants of the ‘weapons of the weak’ against oppressive power (‘foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage’) which James Scott derived from research on the other side of the globe and indeed described as ‘Schweikian’.Footnote ⁷ An alternative perspective on responses to authority which focuses more on the ability to express awkward autonomous identity is the German literature on agency (Eigen-Sinn). But this is an analogous phenomenon. Thomas Lindenberger's depiction of a community (Abschnittsbevollmächtiger; ABV) policeman holding his compulsory meetings with his informants in a pub, so that the meeting can quickly transmogrify into a booze-up is quintessentially Švejkian.Footnote ⁸

In Vaněk and Mücke's study, ordinary people who did not embrace the ideology of the authoritarian regime coped by ignoring it so far as possible, paying lip-service where necessary and deriving whatever material benefits from it that might come their way. This process of ignoring consisted of getting on with life and retreating from ideology. ‘You had to learn avoidance. . . . But then it was not so terrible that you couldn't survive. So we just lived’ (20). ‘Personally, I don't feel the times affected me much. It's true I called them the dark times, but we all just lived through them’ (43). ‘[R]eal life back then was exactly as it is today (170). Ideology could be avoided too by embracing the consumer culture that emerged in the post-Stalin decades, the historical moment of which in Hungary has been identified by György PéteriFootnote ⁹ and the ensuing elite debate about its cultural merits presented by Tamas Dombos and Lena Pellandini-Simany;Footnote ¹⁰ or by simply immersing oneself in TV dramas so lovingly described by Paulina Bren in The Greengrocer and his TV.Footnote ¹¹

If ideology could not be avoided, lip service was paid to it. ‘If you did what you were expected to and played by the rules. You could be content, and no one pestered you’ (23). ‘[The kids] knew that there was a double life: that you must say one thing at home and another outside’ (60). ‘Well we did have all those dumb political training sessions, seminars on atheism, writing meaningless papers. But I never had the feeling that it was really serious. Here, in our small town, I felt it was more like some kind of a Švejk-like farce’ (104). ‘I understand those who gave in to the pressure [to join the party] . . . You wanted to get a lot for your family . . . You were simply held hostage to the state’ (174). ‘We don't even hold any Party meetings here – we just make up some minutes now and then’ (178).

None of the interviewees addressed deriving material benefit (the private appropriation of collective property) at the elite level, they focused rather on the middle and lower levels. ‘When the regime won't give you what you need, then you have to take it because it belongs to you, doesn't it? . . . So the people more or less accepted that view, some gladly because they were thieves by nature; others reluctantly, but they were forced by circumstances’ (64). ‘We made some things here that you normally could not get, so of course we made them ourselves. . . . As for the use of those tools, of the shop area, and the materials, that's just the way it was back then’ (67).

The edited volume by Włodzimierz Borodziej, Stanislav Holubec and Joachim von Puttkamer covers a wider canvas than socialism and early post-socialism in its investigation of space and time under modernisation. As far as the socialist period is concerned, the aspect of modernisation that comes under the spotlight, in the second part of the book, is the ‘ruralisation’ of urbanisation, which is addressed in diverse ways by six historians examining five countries of the region. The breadth and diversity of approach in this volume, together with its inclusion of a range of scholars from the region, are impressive; but the ‘ruralisation’ of urbanisation is a slippery topic and not convincingly identified.

The ‘ruralisation of urbanisation’ is an idea that von Puttkamer associates with Andrei Simić’s The Peasant Urbanites Footnote ¹² and Sándor Horváth links, in his contribution, to Moshe Lewin via Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain.Footnote ¹³ It appears to refer to the persistence of traces of peasant life in the urban environment, and for the most part, there is no attempt to associate the phenomenon with specific characteristics of a socialist pattern of urbanisation other than speed. Apocryphal stories of coal or pigs being kept in the bath, a combination of bourgeois snobbery and genuine uncertainty when transposed to an unfamiliar world, doubtless contain a grain of truth, but they are as common in tales of Western as Eastern urbanisation. Kotkin notes that ‘everywhere one looked in Magnitogorsk, not just in the village-like settlements, there were plots and livestock. By 1938 the city claimed more than ten thousand cows, goats, and pigs’ and that ‘in 1939 there were 2,500 hectares under cultivation in the city’.Footnote ¹⁴ But equally, Friedrich Engels, in his description of nineteenth-century Manchester in The Condition of the Working Class in England, refers to, ‘the multitude of pigs walking about in all the alleys, rooting into the offal heaps, or kept imprisoned in small pens’.Footnote ¹⁵ Lewin's term appears to be more of a political one than one of social theory, an attempt to explain the onset of Stalinist autocracy by the familiar Marxist trope of blaming peasant backwardness.Footnote ¹⁶ Furthermore, despite his admirable engagement with a work of contemporary anthropology, von Puttkamer appears to misread the contemporary account so as to support the ‘ruralisation’ theory. He claims that in Simić’s view peasant urbanites, ‘introduced a notion of ruralism to the urban sphere that smacked more of backwardness than of proletarian poverty’ (24). Yet Simić concludes to the contrary that, ‘[d]uring the progress of this study it became increasingly evident that it would be difficult to sharply contrast the life styles of new urbanites with those of the older, more established residents of the city. Many observed differences were simply idiosyncratic, and it was not possible to effectively oppose the two groups in any absolute cultural terms.’Footnote ¹⁷ Socialist urbanisation has specificities, some of them associated with the persistence of rural elements. But it is probably more fruitful to seek particularly socialist remnants of peasant life in urban settings by analysing why subsequent generations of urbanites or suburbanites continued to keep pigs, rather than concentrating on the first generation's encounter with an unfamiliar landscape. Martin Jemelka hints at what this might be in his rather oblique discussion of ‘iron-tilling’ villages in the Ostrava industrial agglomeration in his contribution to the volume, but he has to note that they have received little scholarly attention (90).

Setting asides these reservations about the theoretical robustness of socialist ruralisation of the countryside, which in any case its contributors refer to only tangentially, the book illuminates various aspects of Central and Eastern European urbanisation. Gábor Gyáni alludes to the ethnic dimension of urbanisation when arguing, in a gentle, partial rebuttal of Péter Hanák's ‘feudal remnants’ thesis (a position also adopted by Iván T. Berend)Footnote ¹⁸ that, ‘the Hungarian peasantry made Budapest Hungarian [rather than German]’ (69), a process which socialism completed (53). Martin Jemelka tells us relatively little about the socialist era but lots about industrialisation and urbanisation, including ethnic diversity, in a new industrial region. Błażej Brzostek reminds us of urban disdain for incomers who ‘keep potatoes in the bath’ in Warsaw (99) and continue ‘Gypsy customs’ such as not wearing shirts in summer in Bucharest (100); while, in addition to references to the emergence of a ‘tawdry’ mass culture because newcomers do not know how to behave in the theatre (155) and migrants maintaining ‘rural habits’ and livestock even in central Belgrade (152), Ivana Dobrivojević develops ‘ruralisation’ more as imperfect urbanisation and municipal neglect in the difficult early years of Yugoslav industrialisation especially when Soviet support dramatically vanished.

Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast provides a comparative analysis of socialist steel towns: Nowa Huta (Poland), Eisenhüttenstadt (GDR) and Ostrava-Poruba (Czechoslovakia), the latter being the area also covered by Jemelka. The biggest differences that she identifies relate to the levels of industrialisation in the regions chosen for these new ventures. In the GDR and Czechoslovakia (but slightly less so in the latter), it was a matter of bringing members of an existing working class into new trades (127), and, in the German case in particular, bringing women into the work force (129). In Poland a totally new working class had to be created, which included more systematic attempts to turn the Roma into an industrial proletariat (128).Footnote ¹⁹ Not surprisingly, once the new towns and cities were completed, there were more commuting worker-peasants in the Polish labour force than in those of Czechoslovakia or the GDR (131); and, equally unsurprisingly given the strength of Catholicism in Poland, it was only in Nowa Huta that the population could enforce the desire for the creation of a Church in the new socialist town. Her brief account inevitably lacks the depth and subjective dimension of Kate Lebow's monograph on Nowa Huta,Footnote ²⁰ but the comparative dimension provides important context.

Sándor Horváth addresses ‘ruralisation’ head-on in his study of Sztálinváros (now Dunaújváros), Hungary's variant of the steel town, and Budapest; and, importantly, he contrasts events with the discourses that surrounded them. Areas of both towns are identified as ‘village-like’ in official discourse, yet an analysis of the estates of deceased persons in these areas suggests that ‘where material culture was concerned, the difference between rural and urban cultures were not as marked as one might infer from official discourse’ (165). He also notes that the crime rate was no higher in Sztálinváros than in nearby, ancient and conservative, Székesfehérvár, despite official concern about social control in the lawless new socialist towns. Lebow refers to a ‘moral panic’ over similar concerns in Nowa Huta.Footnote ²¹ Horváth finally concludes that concerns about ruralisation were manifest, ‘not at the peak of migration, but at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of the so-called modernist social reform of de-Stalinisation’ (180).

Recent historiography has given us quite a nuanced picture of everyday life in towns and enterprises under Stalinism in Central and Eastern Europe. The extreme living conditions associated with heroic socialist construction projects such as Nowa Huta and Sztálinváros are considered by LebowFootnote ²² and, less extensively, Horváth.Footnote ²³ Kenney began the task of exploring different working-class traditions in early industrialisation,Footnote ²⁴ and Pittaway has continued the theme of diverse working class experience of Stalinism in his exhaustive study of three very different industrial regions under Stalinist planning.Footnote ²⁵ We know about socialist labour competition; we know of tensions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ workers, between men and women and we know of some short-lived gains for women and Roma during the era when the ideology was taken extremely seriously.Footnote ²⁶ The literature on collectivisation also tends to focus on the early years and rarely goes beyond its official completion in around 1962.Footnote ²⁷ Sandrine Kott's book addresses the Stalin era too, noting its Stakhanovite heroes (88–98) and the resilience of workers in the face of Stalinist attempts to impose centrally determined norms (232–4), but it has two additional great strengths, which more than make up for the long hiatus between its original appearance in French in 2001 and the publication of this English translation: first, it analyses the much longer post-Stalin era, and, second, it focuses on production and labour and specifically on how workers identified with the less intrusive, more monochrome regimes that followed Stalinism.

Despite the unpopularity of the Party in work places (52), despite the Party's failure to win over youth (182) and despite, or because of, its gradual abandonment from the mid-1960s onwards of a strong workerist ideology (28 and 83),Footnote ²⁸ the GDR regime created a society where the production community was central (9) and the brigade ‘collective’ became an ambiguous part of everyday life and social identity (99). To quote her at length:

Eszter Bartha has stressed the community-building aspect of production brigades in Hungary and her collection of life-history data from her GDR enterprise suggests similar success in this respect.Footnote ²⁹ She also observes, as does Kott, what can be seen as a residue of workerist ideology in the fact that management rather than the workers was regularly blamed for labour unrest.Footnote ³⁰ Later socialism's genuine, but ambiguous, workplace communities also acted as an informal network for private interests (228), and were of particular importance for women: ‘private arrangements of this type [informal permission to leave early to pick up children] were legion in East German enterprises: they were based on the solidarity of the collective . . . women's brigades seem to have developed a livelier social life than men. Collective outings, including Sundays, along with their families, were common. Colleagues regularly brought in cakes and coffee to celebrate birthdays or other occasions’ (209). And the community was cemented by gifts and rituals with similarly ambiguous content (211–49). Gifts from the enterprise were appreciated, however derisory their content, to the extent that people grumbled if they were reduced (223); official rituals, such as May Day, succeeded to the extent that they were transformed into work group parties (248). The workplace communities of the production brigades offered a locus in which workers expressed Eigen-Sinn, yet the regime contained self-expression within permissible boundaries (7–8). Tatjana Thelen has noted that Western analysts find the combination of instrumental reciprocal exchange and true friendship that is reflected in such relationships difficult to comprehend.Footnote ³¹ It certainly does not conform to the world of homo oeconomicus. But multi-dimensional relationships of self-interest and affection were as central to the ‘first economy’, as Kott describes, as they were to the ‘second economy’, where activity such as housebuilding was carried out on the basis of ‘balanced reciprocity’ within ‘reciprocal exchange of labour’ between friends and neighbours.Footnote ³²

Aleksandra Sznajder Lee's book is a work of political economy rather than contemporary history and is the only one under review devoted entirely to the post-socialist years. It is brisk and analytical in its approach, but uses terms like ‘rent-seeking’ which can frighten those with no background in economics. It tells the story of the next stage in lives of some of the socialist steel mills whose heroic origins Jajeśniak-Quast and Horváth describe, as socialism's ‘flagship enterprises’ become subsidiaries of (mostly the same) transnational companies. The steel mills of Nowa Huta, Eisenhüttenstadt and Ostrava-Paruba all came under the wing of Arcelor-Mittal, as did the bulk of the Romania steel industry, while Slovakia's single huge mill went to US Steel. Although this is a fascinating sectoral study of the ‘dependent market economies’ (1) of Central and Eastern Europe and how ‘a transnational capitalist system, dominated by foreign capital, emerged in the region’ (177), there is little scope in it for an examination of everyday life. We get hints of a new class in formation and the power and values of the top enterprise managers, state or private, who could effectively ignore government policy and pressures for radical economic change for years, until EU membership and the cold shower of its competition policy with its restrictions on state support made sale to a foreign investor the only viable option. But it is the interplay of institutional entities that lies at the centre of this book: companies, trades unions, governments with their preference to avoid political risks, international corporations, financial and manufacturing, the EU bureaucracy and, crucially, the state and its capacity to penetrate civil society, influenced considerably by socialist legacies (which only a historian can explain).

Although it is structured around an institutional theory which relates state capacity, trade union strength and external pressures (both political and financial), the book's strength lies in its empirical detail. ‘Rent-seeking’ and ‘weak state capacity’ do not remain abstractions: they are described in exhaustive detail for all four countries. In the case of the Romanian Sidex company, for example, the management could insist on postponing privatisation until ‘successful restructuring’, and then establish and profit from a private company, headed by a Social Democracy of Romania MP, to handle the restructuring. As a consequence, the Romanian government kept the enterprises afloat without the required restructuring through interest-free loans, tax and social security arrears and tolerating similar arrears in the payment of bills to state-owned utilities (89–92). A similar condoning of circulating debts and non-payment of tax in return for political favours was a feature, on a much more modest level, in a Slovak village included in my own work on this period.Footnote ³³ What Sznajder Lee does not provide (because it is not part of her remit) is the worker response to these privatisations, something to complement Eszter Bartha's comparison of Hungarian and GDR worker reactions to privatisation in their countries. It would have been interesting to know, for example, whether the profound alienation towards foreign ownership experienced in Hungary (but not the GDR where the new owner was [west] German) was shared in Poland, Romania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.Footnote ³⁴ Nor does she explore the changing influence of socialist legacies as David Ost does in his study of Solidarity and the successful displacement of justified working-class anger from class to nationalism and the subsequent development of an illiberal political culture in Poland.Footnote ³⁵

Just as few of Bartha's GDR and Hungarian workers wanted the socialist world back (some Hungarians did remain attracted to Kádár's ‘goulash socialism’),Footnote ³⁶ few of those interviewed as part of Vaněk and Mücke's oral history project expressed a strong desire for a return to socialism (4). But profound reservations were expressed about the post-socialist world.

In particular, privatisation and sale of state property was viewed critically:

So too was the modern work place in comparison with the workplace collectivity described by Kott, as the following extracts from longer quotations indicate:

Socialist Eastern Europe was different. The absence of competition and the profit motive underpinning economic relations resulted in inefficiency, low productivity and shortages of goods and income which could only be addressed by the second economy; the continued importance of small-scale farming (‘ruralisation’) was one of many manifestations of this deficiency. But it did mean, as Kott describes, that relations throughout economy and society, in both the first and second economy, were multi-faceted and could be simultaneously instrumental and solidaristic. People coped with a system in which few enthusiastically believed using Švejkian tactics, as Vaněk and Mücke's oral history interviews make clear, yet these tactics helped create genuine work-place communities, the loss of which many now regret.

If these books address primarily social rather than cultural dimensions of the socialist history of Eastern Europe, none of them adopts a strong perspective on the political economy of ‘actually existing socialism’. Borodziej et al adhere to modernisation theory, Vaněk and Mücke confine themselves to their data, Sznajder Lee is clear that post-socialism is a version of capitalism, but takes no view on what came before, while Kott flirts with the concepts of ‘welfare dictatorship’ and Eigen-Sinn without developing either idea systematically. Elsewhere Bartha uses ‘welfare dictatorship’ but is adamant that it be restricted to the post-Stalin era when the policy focus switched from creating an ideologically charged workers’ state to keeping workers satisfied by consumption,Footnote ³⁷ while Lebow favours Katherine Verdery's What was Socialism and What Comes Next for theoretical inspiration,Footnote ³⁸ who in turn develops her vision from the economics of János Kornai, her own notion of ‘paternalistic redistribution’, and a concept of bureaucratic factionalism developed from ideas of Jadwiga Staniszkis.Footnote ³⁹ Verdery's position has much to recommend it, but there is a case to be made for adding to Kornai's economics of shortage sociologist Iván Szelényi's political economy. His Polányi-derived concepts of ‘rational redistribution’ and the ‘teleological redistributors’ provide a convincing non-market mechanism for the production and reproduction of socialist social inequalities, as he demonstrated in his empirical works on urbanisation and regional development.Footnote ⁴⁰ Verdery and Szelényi too have no qualms about using the ‘actors’ definition’ ‘socialist’. Politicians in Eastern Europe were attempting to create socialism by means of national economies based on the public ownership of almost all economic resources because they were the heirs to the Third International and consciously rejected the revisionist, Second International, social-democrat proposition that controlling capitalism through parliamentary and trade union pressure was sufficient. The market had to be suppressed, not controlled. The differentia specie of these societies, including economic failure and ambivalent, partial social success, derived from this ambition.

Finally, returning to the sociological concerns with which this review began, as already noted in relation to Vaněk and Mücke, but also true of Kott, these books make only passing reference to the second economy. This is a major concern, for, as Hungary's labour economists and sociologists referred to above (together with many others) convincingly demonstrated, the second economy permeated all aspects of everyday life in Eastern Europe: it was the necessary concomitant of first economy failure.Footnote ⁴¹ The class position of Eastern European workers, for example, could only be understood in relation to both first and second economy.Footnote ⁴² It is concerning if this blindness to the centrality of the second economy is the result of historians relying overly on traditional, archival sources, where it is less likely to figure because it lies outside the written record. It will come through in oral history while there is a generation alive to interview, but that generation is passing. In this respect historians would do well not to ignore the sociological and other academic work of the era. Sociological research too includes voices from the past (individual voices in qualitative research, aggregated voices in survey research), and, if the research was designed well (and much Hungarian research was), they are reliable voices. It would be a shame if something as fundamental to everyday life in Eastern Europe as the second economy disappeared from the historical record because historians failed a cross-disciplinary challenge and ignored a potentially fruitful source of knowledge about the past.