676776

research-article2016
JUHXXX10.1177/0096144216676776Journal of Urban HistoryReview Essay

Review Essay
Journal of Urban History
2016, Vol. 42(6) 1153­–1157
Cities of Socialism: Migration, © The Author(s) 2016
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Change in Eastern Europe
and the Soviet Union after
World War II
Steven E. Harris (2013). Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin.
Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. 416 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, $60
(hardcover).

Katherine Lebow (2013). Unfinished Utopia: Nova Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949-1956. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press. 249 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, $45 (hardcover).

Gregor Thum (2011). Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wroclaw during the Century of Expulsions. Translated
by Tom Lampert and Allison Brown. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 552 pp., illustrations,
notes, bibliography, index, $37.50 (paper).

Reviewed by: Olga Sezneva, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands and European University
at St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg, Russia
DOI: 10.1177/0096144216676776

Keywords
urban planning under socialism, socialist housing, new towns, migration/forced migration, post–
World War II Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union

The interest in the making of socialist man and woman—or, put differently, in subject-forma-
tion—by the Soviet political regime has now sustained its central position in the interdisciplinary
literature on socialism for several decades. It inspired at least two generations of researchers.
Explored earlier through the prisms of culture, consumption, gender, and everyday life, the ques-
tion of Soviet subjectivity has recently extended to urban form, planning, design, and construc-
tion. The vision of Soviet power as something monolithic, coherent, and well-informed gave way
to an understanding that state policies were often improvisations and that even the self-appointed
revolutionaries did not quite know what socialism was.1
Three recent books can be read along these same lines: Gregor Thum’s Uprooted: How Breslau
Became Wroclaw During the Century of Expulsions, Katherine Lebow’s Unfinished Utopia: Nova
Huta, Stalinism and Polish Society, 1949-1956, and Steven E. Harris’s Communism on Tomorrow
Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin. There are differences, of course, in the way
the authors approach the subject. If Thum places the primary emphasis on the changing national
identity of a place and its residents, Lebow’s emphasis is on labor. After all, Nova Huta was an
urban center next to steelworks and one of the locations for the workers’ mobilization in the 1980s.
Harris anchors his interest in Soviet subjectivity in housing, the evolving notion of “home,” and
its realization under Khrushchev’s reforms. What unites the three books is a creative use of diverse
sources from state archives to personal memories, from which we learn about the uprooting and
relocating people for purposes of nation building, class friction among subsets of the population
in a classless society of equals, and innovation in the design and construction of housing, meant to
restore the “normality” of family life. These studies will undoubtedly enrich any course syllabus
in urban and Soviet history as fine examples of methodological honesty and reflexivity.

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1154 Journal of Urban History 42(6)

Uprooted is an English translation of the German-language original first published in 2003. In

more than four hundred pages excluding notes and references, the book meticulously recon-
structs the remaking of German Breslau into Polish Wrocław after the city was transferred to
Poland in 1945. One would expect that territorial gains in the West came as a positive develop-
ment in the nation that had been repeatedly split between two larger political entities, Germany
and Russia. Yet the annexation of Silesia together with the cities along the Baltic coast came at
the cost of losing Kresy, Wilno, and Lwów in the East—areas which, Thum argues, traditionally
had deeper significance for Polish national identity. The pro-communist Polish government had
to cover up for the glaring loss in the East. (This may explain why so many artifacts were trans-
ferred to Wrocław from Lwów and installed there as pieces of street furniture.) That, together
with the legacies of Hitler’s racial policies, led to ethnic redistribution in the region and moti-
vated Breslau’s rapid Polonization.
The course that changes took resulted in a peculiar outcome: while the urban landscape of
Wrocław seemingly returned to the pre-war look of Breslau, the city’s demographic makeup had
irrevocably changed. Following the decision of the Potsdam conference, all Germans were exiled
and replaced with ethnic Poles. Thum plays on this paradox in which a place comes back while
its people do not, and poses a genuinely interesting question: “How could any place survive the
loss of local knowledge . . . , of traditions expunged from one day to the next?” (p. 1) This is by
no means a rhetorical question and as the narrative unfolds, this puzzle takes on a new formula-
tion. The emphasis shifts from the place to the humans. How could vengeful looting vandals,
haunted by a sense of impermanence, turn into respectable citizens, eventually accepting the city
and making it their home? Thum makes it clear that the recovery of the historical architecture and
the medieval “feel” of the city were tightly connected to the city’s becoming Polish. The book
depicts this process step by step, in an impressively detailed way (at times, testing the reader’s
patience), from the first days of repossession marked by looting to the recent period of political
transformation associated with historical recovery. At first, rebuilding the historic center was a
collective practice through which Polish migrants acquired their roots in Wrocław. Symbolically
charged sites like cemeteries, monuments, and memorials were eradicated in the effort to rid the
city of its German identity. Fifty years later, bringing to the surface previously suppressed layers
of history functions became a matter of local identity and pride, as much as politics. The decen-
tralization of political and public life in Poland opened up fissures in local histories, and in
Wrocław, spurred a public debate about the rightfulness of territorial repossessions and their
meaning as a historical past for the local community.
In spite of its intense focus on one city, the story that the book tells is epic. This sense is
achieved not so much through the incredible detailing of the narrative and diversity of sources,
and not only through the narrative’s sweep across time, as the broad perspective and the diverse
scale of political institutions, from a neighborhood in the city to international arenas of political
decision making and back again to the city. This epic sense comes at a cost. It is possible to be
more apprehensive than enthusiastic about the amount of material presented in the book, which
achieves its extraordinary factual precision at the price of delivering more general points, offer-
ing broader comparisons and drawing useful conceptualizations. For example, to reveal the
inconsistency in popular history written about Breslau in the postwar period by Polish academ-
ics, Thum dives, in the chapter “Mythologizing History,” into the Polish Piast history of the tenth
century and produces his own historiography of the bishopric. He takes a similar approach to the
Prussian dominance in the region in the eighteenth century. However interesting, these historical
accounts feel more like a diversion from the examination of history and identity politics in
Wrocław and do not serve readers interested in urban space.
Thum’s bibliography includes many notable theoretical works, and he himself outlines fivefields
to which his book is a contribution. However, empirical parts of the book underutilize the theoretical
and generalizing potentials of these fields. Although a chapter title on “imagined tradition” invokes

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Review Essay 1155

the famous notion of “invented tradition,” Thum does not pause to reflect on his alteration of
Hobsbawm’s celebrated phrase or explain his motive for substituting “invented” for “imagined.” In
the end, why do two apparently similar phenomena—“mythologizing history” and “imagining tradi-
tion”—warrant two separate and lengthy chapters? A repeated reading led me to conclude that the
difference is in the object of analysis: one chapter deals with the new historiography and another with
urban space. The latter was a canvas and an expression of the former. Wrocław was indeed a striking
case of nation building, but was not it also a great example of the imperial expansion of the Soviet
Union echoed in the transformation of Prussian Königsberg into Russian Kaliningrad? That said,
Uprooted still stands as the first and a tremendously rich account of German expulsions and the
remaking of postwar cities in East Central Europe.Some guidance from the author would help the
reader to see a bigger picture and not wonder whether two extensive descriptions were warranted.
Themes of uprooting and emplacement in postwar Poland continue in Unfinished Utopia:
Nova Huta, Stalinism and Polish Society, 1949-1956, by Katherine Lebow, a historian of modern
Europe and a Holocaust researcher. Southeast of Wrocław, on the Vistula River, just a few kilo-
meters from Kraków, the new Communist government of Poland embarked on another project of
city building: the construction of Nova Huta. Today, appearing more as a “suburb” to Kraków,
Nova Huta initially was positioned as its opponent, an “antidote” to its “unhealthy” atmosphere
of intellectual refinement. As if opposing the lore of Kraków’s history and excellence in architec-
ture, the new city was built as an industrial town of the future, the satellite to the massive Lenin
Steelworks. The speed of growth was one of its most fascinating features. Founded in 1949, Nova
Huta became home to 100,000 people already by 1960, owing its rapid growth to migration from
the countryside. Not articulated in the book in exactly this way, inhabiting Nova Huta represented
a process of self-becoming, which, ironically, was that of unbecoming: unbecoming “rural.” For
some Novohuchians, especially of the first generation, this self-building remained unfinished.
“Workers’ hotels” with their low comfort of communal living could not offer the space appropri-
ate for cultivating an urban class, and even when women’s dresses complied with urban fashions,
cuts into their shins left by rubber boots betrayed their wearers’ social origins.
For the most part, Lebow confirms what we already know about the “system” and its teleol-
ogy, the centralized decision making and the policies. Moving people and making them stay was
messy and unpredictable, publicly celebrated achievements of collective labor concealed internal
conflicts and competition, and the officially favored working class was pushed out of Kraków’s
public spaces by the culturally more refined elite. Whatever the regime attempted was counter-
acted by spontaneous movements on the ground: a particular idea of domesticity provoked squat-
ting in newly built apartments by young couples, the mobilization of youth through volunteer
brigades bred gangs (the difficult to control junacy), and the Leninist model of cultural enlighten-
ment produced outlandish and Western-oriented youth cultures. In short, modeling socialist life
on the new ground opened up the fissures of the regime.
The narrative of Unfinished Utopia , which has been awarded numerous book prizes, includ-
ing 2014 Barbara Jelavich Book Prize and 2013 Aquila Polonica, moves through three stages or
argumentation: the origins, the execution, and the aftermath. The structure is in service of estab-
lishing a historical continuity, which valorizes endogenous factors and vernacular ideologies in
shaping the project of Nova Huta. According to Lebow, despite its appearance in history as an
imposed Soviet initiative, Nova Huta had its impetus in the plans of Polish military and economic
experts even before the Soviet occupation. Turn-of-the-twentieth-century intellectuals and
nationalists positioned the state as an institution best fit to lead the modernization of independent
Poland. The interwar construction of the port city of Gdynia and development of the industrial
triangle “COP” in Central Poland prepared visions, managerial cadres, and the trust among popu-
lations to support the Lenin Steelworks. The same attention to continuity and social organization
motivated Lebow to link the paradoxes of the socialist industry building on the ground to the rise
of the oppositional Solidarity movement.

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1156 Journal of Urban History 42(6)

The detour to the Second Polish Republic and to the nineteenth-century underscores the
autonomy and autochtony of Poland’s route to industrial development without fully divorcing it
from Stalinism’s external impositions. However, the reader may be disappointed not to find a
more extensive discussion of the mechanisms by which influences of the Second Republic (in the
figure of Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski or of the Warsaw Positivists of the early twentieth century)
could reverberate through half a century and influence politics even after a regime change. A
single section of the book cannot satisfy such interest, nor can a short discussion of urban plan-
ning and architecture in Nova Huta satisfy one’s curiosity about the actual building process and
its physical outcomes. Just one example of where the account could be richer: one chapter brings
up the fascinating story of Tadeusz Ptaszycki, who successfully supervised the reconstruction of
Wrocław, won a closed competition to develop Nova Huta, and assembled an ambitious team of
creative talents, many of whom would not be approved by the regime. One would expect that
something innovative would come out of the cooperation of such talents. Yet, the way Lebow
describes Nova Huta’s architecture makes it appear like nothing better than “regularity, converg-
ing perspectives and the semi-octangonal shape” common to all modern socialist cities
(p. 33).2Socialist regimes could not fulfill promises that they made to their constituencies, a mis-
match that turned out to be crucial in socialist politics. Steven Harris’s political and social history
of the khrushchevka apartment complicates and nuances our understanding of the reforms of the
1960s by showing their broader origins in the Soviet understanding of citizenship rights, social
sense of worth, forms of cooperation, property organization, and more. A focus on the everyday
and the “mass” contrasts with Thum’s emphasis on military leaders, cultural elites, and decisions
made by individual politicians, “who might, under the same circumstances, have made quite dif-
ferent decisions” (Thum, p. xvi). Communism on Tomorrow Street is not only a refreshing, meth-
odologically sophisticated account of an infamous urban form with a bad reputation. It is also an
interpretatively sensitive and conceptually innovative study of mass housing as an international
form. It underscores the connection between Soviet mass housing and the worldwide effort to
solve the “housing question,” thus challenging the conventional view of prefabricated building
blocks as idiosyncratically Soviet.
Moving to a separate apartment, Harris aptly observes, was “the way most ordinary people
experienced and shaped Khruschev’s thaw” (p. 1). Massive as it was, Khrushchev’s housing
program was the first Soviet reform campaign that did not require, or result in, a widespread
destruction of human life. Quite the opposite, it involved people trying new things and shaping
their meaning. Architects and planners debated, criticized, and devised new apartment plans
based on the principles of individual family occupancy. Inhabitants of the new apartments voiced
their opinions on suitability of furniture designs at exhibitions. Urban dwellers complained to
their district deputies and city officials and tested new lines of communication with various levels
of state representation. The state and the society were choosing a different set of political and
social means to engender change, although Harris is adamant in insisting that the change itself
did not represent a break with Communist and revolutionary ideals. It revived and restated them
in a new form.
Some of the most memorable pages involve a discussion of how and why apartments in the
new housing became so small. Small size was the solution to communalization, more specifi-
cally, its prevention. The way to keep an apartment separate was to introduce “a norm of the
minimum dwelling space.” Foldable and sectional furniture so favored today by residents of cit-
ies with expensive real estate has its origins here. It was introduced to make small apartments
usable. Because such furniture was a novelty for urbanites of the USSR, pamphlets, exhibitions,
magazine publications, and TV programming taught how to comfortably arrange the tiny sepa-
rate apartment and construct a tasteful domestic interior. According to Harris, the problem with
Khrushchev’s program was not its purposes or methods of execution. It was its failure to meet
expectations that the program itself spurred. What was promised was impossible to find or

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Review Essay 1157

purchase. Still, this particular failure is not to be confused with market failure, where shortages
lead to illegal production, distribution, or acquisition. The problem in this case was political: the
regime “produced post-Stalinist subjects who persistently came back to remind it that much
remained to be done” (p. 306).
Not unlike the previous two books, Communism on Tomorrow Street gets into the interstices
left by chaotic implementations of state policies. More so than the other two books, however, it
uncovers the precise mechanisms by which statistics were manipulated and reporting gave reality
to projections and models. Generous illustrations, which include section plans, tables, and pho-
tographs, help readers to accept the main point of the book: the khrushchevka gave millions and
millions of Soviet urbanites a stake in Soviet socialism (p. 307).
The three books reviewed here are all fine contributions to the field of urban history, and the
excellence of the research that informed them is a testimonial to the growing interest and exper-
tise in the studies of Eastern European and Russian cities. I personally am looking forward,
however, to the time when preoccupation with the “Soviet man” withers away, opening possibili-
ties for new research agendas and new questions to be asked with this historical material.

Notes
1. Stephen Kotkin, “The Search for the Socialist City,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 24 (1996): 231-61.
2. For more on some of these points, see the discussion of Unfinished Utopia on the Second World
Urbanity blog (e.g., Kimberly Zarecor on SWU, September 23, 2014).

Author Biography
Olga Sezneva is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and professor of
urban studies at European University at St. Petersburg, Russia. Her research focus is on architecture and the
built environment, mobility, and social change in Eastern Europe and Russia. Her work on the repopulation
and rebuilding of the former German Königsberg has appeared in a number of books, including Practicing
Culture (ed. Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett), and journals, including International Journal of Urban
History and Environment and Planning D.

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