Opportunities of Urban Space

The urban centres of Eastern Europe have long traditions of testing cultural boundaries. When such centres fell on the borders of states and empires, they often drew from different cultural and political contexts to become sites of cultural experimentation.Footnote ⁵ In The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv, Wiliam J. Risch investigates how Soviet socialist culture operated in a quintessential borderland city: Lviv. A nineteenth century Habsburg city, Lviv became integrated into the interwar Polish state after the First World War before being invaded and annexed by the Soviets in 1939. Legacies of Polish and Habsburg rule tied the city to central Europe through architectural landscape, the Greek Catholic Church and an idea of civilisation that ‘came from Vienna’ (3). Throughout the Soviet era, Risch persuasively argues, Lvivians creatively combined both Soviet and Western influences with a Galician Ukrainian nationhood understood ‘in terms of common ethnicity, language, and culture’ (6). Risch draws from archival, literary and visual sources, as well as close to 140 interviews he conducted with residents of Lviv, to produce an incredibly detailed and insightful analysis of Lviv's cultural landscape. While empirically based, Risch actively engages with two theoretical constructs. First, he adapts Bourdieu's concept of habitus, defined as everyday ‘small acts of resistance . . . that happened in the production and consumption of popular culture and high culture’ (6) in order to analyse the complex interaction between the Soviet state and Lvivians. Second, he addresses the role of exogenous influences such as cross-border contact with Poland, transnational popular culture and countercultural lifestyles.

Risch's narrative centres on cultural activity, using the political turning points of Khruschev's Thaw and Gorbachev's Perestroika as conduits for more open cultural expression. The Thaw and the end of Stalinism in 1956 allowed for a major boost to Ukrainian national culture and literature. Lvivian intellectuals unearthed in their libraries forgotten texts of Western-oriented interwar poets and also created new dissident literary works that would become the intellectual foundations of later opposition movements. In the early 1960s, for example, two brothers and dissidents, Mykhailo and Bohdan Horyn, advocated Ukraine's separation from the Soviet Union in their underground publications. At the same time, for many young people cultural liberalisation during and after the Thaw fuelled the desire to escape politics. While, Risch argues, dissident literature formed an important part of Lviv's cultural scene, the majority of Lvivians preferred to manifest their identities in less confrontational ways. In the 1970s and 1980s Lviv's streets were filled with a colourful crowd of ‘bikers, hippies, and aspiring artists, writers, and rock musicians’ (104). Coffee houses, bars and cafes became spaces where ‘free of institutional constraints, people could more or less be themselves’ (105). Such findings show how new forms of sociability and self-definition crossed the socialist-capitalist divide.

Some of the most insightful parts of the book are those in which the author takes the reader to private spaces, homes and student dormitories, where young people conducted lively intellectual conversations as well as made fun of the Soviet system and principles of Marxism they were taught in lectures. As a university town Lviv brought together people from the countryside and the city, who participated both in official culture and youth organisations and in private spaces, where they collectively performed Ukrainian folk songs, told heroic stories of interwar and wartime history and celebrated Greek Catholic holidays. ‘Such company’, Risch explains, ‘carved out social spaces that became alternatives to those of the public sphere, while not becoming completely separate from that sphere’ (192).

Although it is tempting to see nationalism as a potent force shaping local identity and countering communism, Risch demonstrates that global countercultural movements such as ‘hippies, bikers, and by the early 1980s punks’ were equally influential. They formed an ‘important part of daily life’ in Lviv by promoting ‘alternative modes of behavior’ (221). Risch stresses the general significance of the younger generations in periodically reinventing and reinvigorating urban identity in Lviv. In this respect the author enriches recent scholarship, including works such as as Katherine Lebow's Unfinished Utopia, which explores the centrality of youth cultures to shaping and negotiating ‘socialist’ cities.Footnote ⁶ As in many other places at the time, youth in Eastern Europe was at the forefront of defining post-war modernity and testing boundaries of acceptable social behaviour.

Given its proximity to the Polish border, transnational interactions contributed to Lviv's distinct flavour. Lvivians were uniquely positioned to glimpse outside the Soviet Union by watching Polish television and hosting Polish jazz bands. Indeed, the city served as an inspiring ‘window to the West’. Visitors to Lviv from other parts of the Soviet Union were struck by the city's cosmopolitanism and Western orientation. Risch encourages the reader to draw links between this culture and Lviv's political importance as a centre of opposition to Soviet rule in the 1980s.

It may come as a surprise, therefore, to read in the book's conclusion that political elites in Moscow, not local movements, were the main driving force behind political opposition and the eventual disintegration of the Soviet Union. The upsurge of dissident movements and the articulation of anti-Soviet identities in Lviv, Risch contends, would not have been possible ‘without Gorbachev's actions from above’ (252). Such arguments echo the recent historiographical trend, most famously expressed by Stephen Kotkin and Jan T. Gross in Uncivil Society, to attribute the collapse of the Soviet enterprise primarily to political elites.Footnote ⁷ In Risch's account, Lvivians contributed to the diversity and ‘compromises’ within the Soviet polity, rather than to the system's demise. For a book that paints such a rich and compelling picture of everyday life and local agency, the ultimate insistence on the primacy of state power seems contradictory. Risch's book, nevertheless, sets a new direction for exploring the complex relationship between local subjectivities and Soviet centre.

Television and Modernity

Alongside cosmopolitan urban culture, technology and the mass media posed new challenges for defining and implementing socialist modernity. Heather Gumbert's book Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic takes us into the living rooms of East Germans to examine the role of television as ‘a technology, an institution, and a medium (or mediator) of social relations and cultural knowledge’ (1–2). For Gumbert, like for Risch, culture is the key to understanding change in socialist societies. Television was not simply an instrument of state ideological propaganda but also a meeting point for diverse and conflicting visions of socialism put forward by ‘television producers, audiences, technicians, and regulators’ (2). Ultimately, the political meaning of television did not come from its function to spread specific ideological messages. Rather, it was embedded in its capacity as an unpredictable and potentially disruptive technology and a social institution.

The book centres on the formative years of East German television from the early 1950s to the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. Some of the strongest insights in the book come from Gumbert's analysis of the competition between East and West, which she frames as warfare of technology and media. Technological issues became political issues as the two ideological camps sought to establish control over transmission airwaves understood as a ‘territory to be conquered and occupied in the ideological contest between two opposing worldviews’ (11). It was in the early days of the Cold War that East German leaders made a critical decision to orientate the nation's television signal in a way that enabled reception by West Germans. In this way, they established ‘competition for the pan-German audience’ (35). Television became not so much a tool for political repudiation of the West as a constructive device to create convinced socialist citizens ‘with well-developed socialist personalities’ (13).

As Gumbert argues, East German programming was adjusted to expectations on both sides of the border. By the late 1950s a combination of politics and entertainment dominated television content. Popular shows depicted current events in the attractive form of adventures, melodramas about socialist conversion and crime thrillers (such as the series Blue Light). Gumbert shows how the coverage of political events on television, including criminal thrillers on cross border crimes or reports on detaining East German citizens in West Germany, prepared the ground for the building of the Berlin Wall. In other words, television helped create and disseminate ‘narratives that familiarized and normalized East German events’ (104).

Gumbert also challenges some of the ingrained stereotypes about the superiority of West German television and its appeal to East Germans. She demonstrates that West Germans watched selected East German programming, and that East German television, in its attempt to attract both audiences, increasingly incorporated Western production and Western-style mass culture into its programmes. Live entertainment and musical requests, for example, became a part of programming that also presented socialist values and personalities.

In contrast to Risch, who views transnational popular culture as an important mode of self-expression but not necessarily a source of political empowerment, Gumbert presents a more nuanced picture. Achieving stability and political conformity through television was undoubtedly the state's goal, she argues, but the actual effects of the medium were more unpredictable and contingent on diverse responses from the audience. Ultimately, television ‘often undermined states’ ability to define the social world of their nations’ (10).

Gumbert is especially effective in illuminating tensions and debates within the party-state structures that were not purely ideological but also related to practical concerns such as the shortage of East German and Eastern Bloc production. Although she identifies ‘audiences’ as critical to shaping the content and meaning of television, the book tends to focus on political elites. More voices from the viewers could have been included, in particular to support Gumbert's claims on how the television mediated different German ‘identities’ that formed in the post-war years. By turning to modern technology and cultural production, Gumbert's book, nevertheless, opens new possibilities to explore diverse agencies within socialist societies that formed as a result of transnational interaction.

Materiality in the Socialist and Post-Socialist World

A similar complex interplay between the official socialist policies and individual and collective identities is at the heart of Krisztina Fehérváry's excellent study of the middle class in socialist and post-socialist Hungary. Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary centres on the material aesthetics of the lived space to explore ‘the interpenetration of politics and materialities’ (2). One of the many strengths of this study is an innovative approach to material culture and consumption that is highly contextualised and nuanced. Recent scholarship has established consumption as an important area of socialist state activity.Footnote ⁸ Fehérváry builds on these arguments to show how consumers mitigated official ideas in their daily lives. While doing so, she offers new ways to conceptualise consumption outside of the Western capitalist experience.

The book starts by confronting the most ingrained assumptions about the Eastern Bloc as a place of omnipresent greyness. The description of the material world – the lack of colour in this case – represents ‘enforced poverty and the fatigue of daily provisioning, of unsmiling salesclerks, scarce goods, and the lack of colorful advertising and commerce’. By contrast, as Fehérváry explains, popular narratives in Eastern and Western Europe have depicted the West as colourful, expressing ‘the pleasures and possibilities of capitalist consumption, of the freedom to express one's identity through style’ (1). In this way, Fehérváry establishes materiality as inherently intertwined with politics and with the potential to legitimise or undermine a particular social and political organisation.

Like Risch Fehérváry is interested in the urban socialist space. She explores Sztálinváros, or the City of Stalin, which was built in 1951 and later renamed Dunaújváros. In contrast to Lviv, where identities were in constant dialogue with a rich pre-communist history, Dunaújváros was a new, planned city that was to bring to Hungary an ‘ideal social order and socialist modernity’ (3). The middle class in Dunaújváros was composed of professionals, managers and skilled workers, who emerged in the course of the city's construction and expansion. This stratum, however, was not a distinct product of the socialist system. Rather, as Fehérváry insists, it was part of the global middle classes. Like elsewhere in post-war Europe, the socialist middle classes defined themselves not by their class origin or relationship to production, but ‘by professional position and education, income and consumption patterns, attendance at cultural events, and style of dress’ (24).

Fehérváry relies on ethnographical research. We follow the author around the transformed socialist city of the early 2000s, visiting private homes, beauty salons, shops and businesses. Moving between the past and the present, listening to narratives and memories of life under socialism, Fehérváry demonstrates that materiality was the centrepiece of socialist modernity, with the goal of ‘lift[ing] people out of poverty and backwardness to full membership in a modern, socialist society’ (5). To this effect, rather than adjusting her narrative to political breakthroughs, Fehérváry conceptualises post-1945 Hungarian history as a succession of ‘aesthetic regimes’ (3). The materiality of the household, in particular, became a strong source of self-identification for Hungarians. The country was, to some extent, unique in the Eastern Bloc in its drive for economic experimentation, especially after 1968, when the Kádár regime allowed for limited privatisation, joint ventures (or subcontracting) with Western companies and the domestic second economy. The experience of this mixed economic system informed notions of modernity and materiality. Households exemplified the unclear boundary between leisure and labour, as many people engaged in do-it-yourself furnishings, renovating their living space with the help of family and friends, growing food around the weekend houses or building houses.

The book offers a fresh and innovative perspective on consumption, which is so often renounced as a tool to enforce conformity and discipline in free-market societies. Fehérváry shows that consumer practices can have a constructive and humanising effect on society, depending on the specific context. ‘To posit consumer goods as simply status symbols or the products of advertisers’ manipulations’, Fehérváry argues, ‘is to dismiss the important ways in which such goods can ease or increase labor burdens, prolong the life of goods and people, transport people or maim them, provide people with pleasures or poison them’ (7). In socialist Hungary, the materiality of the household acquired a moralising quality as it facilitated the forming of social bonds and a second economy that helped families survive. As such, materiality shaped the ways in which people related to each other and to the state.

As they enhanced their modern standing through material surroundings, socialist citizens also came to identify flawed materiality as a failure of the socialist ‘good life’. Fehérváry provides a brilliant analysis of the Hungarian discourse of the ‘normal’, in which the West was a constant point of reference and the standard for ‘normality’. It is through materiality that we can understand how Hungarians and other East Europeans came to understand political rights and associate them with liberal democracy. Western design and material goods, as Fehérváry contends, ‘were not just evidence of a better production system, but . . . served as icons of a more humane political and economic system, a place where living a “normal” life was possible’ (137).

The chance to exercise political rights came after 1989 with Hungary's transition to the liberal democratic system. Rather than tying her analysis to the collapse of the socialist system, Fehérváry explores continuities and ruptures in the post-socialist era. As Hungary became the highest recipient of foreign investment in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, lived space provided increased opportunities for aesthetic choice and the expression of individualism. At the same time, however, materiality became less of an equalising and bonding force, and instead created new social divisions determined by one's successful adjustment to the free market economy. While stressing the legacy of socialism, Fehérváry positions Hungary within the framework of the global shift to neoliberal politics and corporate power that the fall of socialism ‘fortified’ by discrediting socialist ideology and opening new markets in eastern Europe (21). Yet locals still interpreted post-socialist changes as a legacy of socialism rather than as a result of a global turn to the neoliberal economic model. The family household – now often featuring American kitchens and luxury bathrooms – became spaces of refuge from both socialism and post-socialism, ‘a place of secession from this “not normal” Hungary’ (234).

The former socialist states deeply felt the dehumanising effects of new economic policies. In the process, people confronted new capitalist understandings of consumption, which were at odds with the concepts of consumption and modernity that they had cultivated and imagined under socialism. ‘While state socialist regimes were known for their inability to produce abundant consumer goods and high standards of living’, the author explains, ‘it was nonetheless under these very regimes that mass consumer society and modern consumer subjectivities emerged – and with them an attentiveness to the qualities of material goods and environments that were equated with human value’ (238). Analytically rich and theoretically sophisticated, Politics in Color and Concrete captures the complexity of the transition from socialism to post-socialism and the intersection of politics and material culture.

Socialist Competition

Just as ‘consumption’ had different meanings in different political contexts, the idea of ‘competition’ was not necessarily a distinct product of capitalism. Competition in Socialist Society, edited by Katalin Miklóssy and Melanie Ilic, examines socialist modernity through the prism of broadly conceived ‘competition’. The authors explore many areas of activity from economic competition and advertising to beauty contests, song festivals and sports. Most of the essays focus on the Soviet Union, but the volume also includes chapters on Poland, Romania, East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The result is a fascinating and highly diverse picture of how competition worked in different socialist environments, both as a state-endorsed project and as a subjective practice from below.

Unlike most edited collections that tend to feature a variety of topics and approaches, often uneven in quality, this thoughtful book offers a coherent argument and a consistent empirical strength. The editors identify patterns through the essays and use them to formulate new arguments and to develop broader theoretical implications of competition in socialist societies. The carefully crafted ‘Introduction’ and ‘Concluding Remarks’ not only summarise the book's ideas, but present original theoretical and analytical frameworks.

The book conceptualises Eastern European history in fresh ways, integrating the Bloc's cultural and political diversity and highlighting important connections between Eastern European countries and across the Iron Curtain. One important claim that emerges from the collection is that there was a gradual and progressive trend from 1956 onwards towards embracing Western forms of competition, much of it, ironically, in an effort to revitalise socialism. While clearly situating their research within the framework of multiple modernities, most authors see competition in socialist societies as operating in a constant interplay with Western models. This point is powerfully articulated by Miklóssy in the closing section of the book, which she writes: ‘hence by the 1980s, the communist system in reality did not oppose capitalism but took advantage of it, and the communist elites were even ready to modify their own institutions for that purpose’ (185).

The book also dismantles the myth that there was no place for competition in societies that were theoretically based on cooperation and egalitarianism. Indeed, the volume makes a strong point of disassociating the concept of competition from the exclusively capitalist environment. Early communist ideas of competition related primarily to the realm of industrial production, in which workers were encouraged to compete on the basis of ability and their contribution to building socialism. Following the post-war socialist expansion into Eastern Europe and especially after the ‘diversification’ of the system in 1956, leaders turned to new forms of competition to respond to new challenges, many of them grounded in the aspirations of the global consumer society. Competition ceased to be a mode of encouragement and became a legitimising tool for the communist regimes. One of the main strengths of the volume is the way it exposes the extent of experimentation in Eastern European countries, where leaders and societies often disposed of Soviet models. Instead, they selectively borrowed Western concepts or drew from their own local and national traditions to form distinct versions of socialist modernity.

Several essays look at how state actors conceptualised, debated and employed the notion of competition. Jutta Scherrer takes on the famous Soviet slogan from the late 1950s ‘To Catch up and Overtake the West’, attributed to Nikita Khrushchev, as a departure point to trace the history of the Soviet obsession to compete with the West. As Scherrer argues, in the 1920s and 1930s the American capitalist model, considered to embody the highest capitalist development, was already essential to building the socialist system. The Soviets hoped to adopt and redefine the key features of American development in their quest to remake society through industrial organisation and technology. Competition among actors within state structures is the subject of Aappo Kähönen's and Dieter Segert's respective essays on Soviet and East German reforms in the 1960s. Kähönen provides a detailed analysis of the internal power play when the Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin attempted to implement economic reforms aimed at solving tensions between central planning and enterprise autonomy. Both authors demonstrate how state policies were a product of internal competition among actors and interests within party-state structures. The search for viable economic solutions, Segert argues, dominated the early 1960s in East Germany as Marxist ‘revisionist’ intellectuals argued for a more robust economic competition with the West as key to socialist victory.

While competition for power and resources among state actors often hampered reforms, (for example, most of the ‘revisionist’ ideas were not implemented in East Germany until the Gorbachev era), it could stimulate economic success on the local level. Such was the case of ‘the millionaire kolkhoz’ that is the subject of Antti Sarasmo's essay on the Kirov fishing kolkhoz in Soviet Estonia. This enterprise, effectively run by local managers, generated a considerable amount of wealth and boosted the ‘good life’ for its 7,000 employees. According to the author, the Kirov kolkhoz operated within the socialist competition system through clever manoeuvring to win resources and privileges. This fascinating article builds on the recent trend, including in, for example Mary Neuburger's Balkan Smoke,Footnote ⁹ of analysing economic success stories from socialist countries, challenging the overwhelming image of socialist economic insufficiency and failure. Yet such success stories remain exceptional.

Competition was an important element of building international relationships. The post-Stalinist era enabled Eastern European players to develop their own economic strategies and networks. Mila Oiva examines marketing practices employed by the Polish Association of Clothing Industries in their successful export of Polish-made clothes to the Soviet Union. The essay does more than establish competition as an important practice in Polish foreign trade, supported by handbooks and courses on ‘socialist’ marketing techniques. It points to the cultural dimension of economic activity, in which Polish fashion designers and managers took advantage of their closer ties to the West to ‘sell’ a particular image of Poland to Soviet clients as Western, luxurious and fashionable. Such utilisation of the ‘imagined West’ for economic purposes was not always successful. As Elena Dragomir shows, the Romanian plan to open the country to Western tourism in an effort to acquire hard currency ran into structural problems. The Intercontinental Hotel built in Bucharest in 1971 – which was explicitly designed for foreign visitors –eventually failed to attract Westerners because of both the low standard of service and the increasing political isolation of Romania.

The last three articles concentrate on mass media and popular culture as important areas of competition. Katalin Miklóssy explores song contests and interactive television in Hungary. Like Gumbert, Miklossy points to the increasing reliance of socialist television on popular entertainment ‘in order to reply to the Western challenge and cultural infiltration’ (109). But the turn towards Western-style mass culture was more than a quest for legitimacy. Miklóssy points to the significance of opportunities for profit making and personal enrichment as Hungarian artists began travelling to the West to give concerts and performances. Socialist leaders made efforts to create alternative forms of popular entertainment, but, as Pia Koivunen suggests in her essay on world youth festivals, such attempts eventually failed, in part, due to the imperial ambitions of the Soviets. Cultural contests and sports’ matches, which the government organised during youth festivals, celebrated Soviet superiority rather than the international youth movement, friendship or solidarity. Soviet participants were disproportionally represented among those who won awards and accolades, and as such undermined the credibility of festivals both within and outside the Eastern Bloc.

Socialist popular culture, as Rikka Palonkorpi suggests, was most successful when it departed from strictly socialist models. In her fascinating essay on the success story of the Krtek (The Little Mole) animated films created by Zdeněk Miller in Czechoslovakia, Palonkorpi traces the creation, distribution and international career of The Little Mole on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The series, in a way, were created ‘outside’ the communist system as Miller drew from Czech films from the 1930s and carefully avoided political messages (the Mole, for example, did not use words but rather gesture and sound).

In the last article, Melanie Ilic discusses how female beauty contests became a way to break down ‘barriers between East and West during the final days of the Cold War’ (159). Beauty contests, which had not been part of Soviet official culture, became widespread in the Soviet Union starting in 1987, and reflected the increasing commodification and sexualisation of women within global entertainment. The new trend, as Ilic suggests, was deeply politicised, as support for beauty contests became associated with support for political liberalisation. Although Ilic does not elaborate on this issue, the essay suggests important links between politics and sexuality. Beauty contests were symbolic of the new conceptualisation of ‘freedom’, which included the objectification of women in contrast to supposedly ‘not normal’ communist policies of gender equality. Like Fehérváry, Ilic points to important connections between the communist and post-communist eras. Both authors suggest that those connections are best understood when situated in the larger framework of global developments such as the consolidation of the middles classes or the expansion of entertainment industry.

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As we approach the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, scholars have eradicated the myth of the monolithic socialist state disconnected from the rest of the world. Socialist societies, we now know, created and accommodated modern forms of cultural expression, consumption and entertainment. The four books discussed here present not only new findings but also raise new questions and reveal productive tensions within the new approaches. Most significantly, they establish the concept of ‘socialist modernity’ as a profitable means of examining Eastern European societies. With this foundation, historians can begin to wrestle with questions concerning the concept of modernity as an analytical device and as a historical practice. It is clear that a socialist modernity existed, but how do we define it? Was it understood differently across Eastern Europe? And most significantly, how do we use this new framework without it simply becoming a replacement for the old paradigms centred on state dictatorship?

Finally, these studies invite scholars to think about the relationships between socialist societies and the rest of the world. The evolution of the socialist system was, to a large extent, a product of transnational interaction. In the future studies of post-war Europe will need to take into account the broad cultural trends that transcended Cold War divisions. The state was not the only point of reference in the rapidly globalising world of the second half of the twentieth century.