Nowa Huta, a Polish steelwork city that emerged in the late 1940s in “the rye fields and orchards outside Kraków”(2), was an attempt to achieve the Socialist dream of creating a place where people could enjoy a modern, egalitarian, and more fulfilling life. In her excellent microhistory of Nowa Huta, Katherine Lebow shows that rather than being “a grey and regimented landscape” (4), Socialism in Poland was full of surprises. The Communist authorities and city planners wanted Nowa Huta to become a lesson in Socialist practices that would in turn deliver a new Socialist man. But in Lebow's interpretation, the process of building Socialism was based on chance and constant negotiations between ideology and the city's inhabitants. The new man that emerged as a result of these practices was not too reliable. In 1981, Nowa Huta underground activists organized one of the largest anti-regime strikes: the Socialist lessons that the inhabitants of Nowa Huta had received turned out to be formative. They translated “civic inclusion” into the right to voice dissent against Communism.

The book begins with a journey through the world of the city planners: it juxtaposes romantic visions with the political and economic factors that complicated their realization. The plan was to build a gigantic Nowa Huta as a showcase for Socialist productivity and class struggle, but the pressure from Warsaw to build cheaper was irresistible. Even though the romantic vision of Nowa Huta was compromised, the utopian dream of creating a new man persisted. The people who were drawn to Nowa Huta were mostly young, of rural origins, and often illiterate. These people, from whom the new man was supposed to emerge, saw the city as an opportunity for social and material advancement. The city promised normalcy, and more importantly, it offered a sense of participation in “the civic endeavor.”

For readers familiar with Polish cinematography, this was portrayed by the slightly naive worker with a big heart, Mateusz Birkut—the hero of Andrzej Wajda's acclaimed movie Man of Marble (1976)—for whom the participation in a Socialist project began a life-altering adventure. Not surprisingly, his enthusiasm clashed with authorities' cynical abuses of the system. Regardless of the fact that, as Lebow shows, Birkut's real-life protagonist was not as idealistic as Wajda chose to portray him, workers, who constituted a moral community reinforced by Socialist labor competitions, grew increasingly alienated from the authorities.

The landscape of Nowa Huta would not be complete without a glimpse into how categories of class and gender played out in these processes. To this end, Lebow analyzes the integration of women and Roma into the workforce. She supports what we already know from Małgorzata Fidelis's work (Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland, [Cambridge University Press, 2010]), which is that Socialism ultimately failed to deliver on its promises of gender equality. Nowa Huta, which in the late 1940s was avant-garde in terms of gender equity, eventually reversed course. By the late 1950s, it had the lowest rate of female employment. Similarly, despite early rhetoric of equality, Roma remained the subject of social mistrust. Gender and ethnicity—measurements that were to showcase progress—ultimately revealed the scope of failure.

The book ends with a reflection on generational change. The support that Nowa Huta showed for the anti-regime Solidarity movement—a phenomenon that many perceived as evidence of Socialism gone awry—Lebow interprets as an indication that Socialism proved to be a valuable experience. Nurtured by civic and socialist involvement, citizens of Nowa Huta acted out in their own defense. This was also a moment when women reappeared on the public scene, this time identifying themselves more as mothers and daughters and less as workers—roles that the state pushed them to accept.

The book is based on extensive research: memoirs, oral history interviews, and archival records. Each chapter provides the reader with fascinating material that ultimately illuminates the problems at the heart of the most recent discussions in Polish historiography. This includes the nature of Polish Stalinism, which Lebow sees as much more than mere ideology, but rather as a set of practices that individuals creatively appropriated. They adapted to the circumstances, but they also adapted the circumstances to their own needs. This leads to the recent debate about whether the postwar social and political changes in Poland should not be considered from the point of view of social revolution rather than the cruelty of an alien regime imposed by force. The order that emerged during Communism was oppressive, but it also opened important new venues for social change.