Nowa Huta: Generations of Change in a Model Socialist Town (Pitt Russian East European) by Kinga Pozniak

Author:Kinga Pozniak [Pozniak, Kinga]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822980247
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: 2014-11-06T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Socialism’s Builders and Destroyers

Memories of Socialism among Nowa Huta Residents

A 1987 Polish movie titled Papieros od prezydenta (A cigarette from the president) depicts a clash of values between two generations of Nowa Huta residents. The father, who in his youth worked on the construction of Nowa Huta’s steelworks in the early 1950s, recalls a visit to the construction site by then–Polish president Bolesław Bierut. Touring the construction site, the president talked with workers and gave them cigarettes. The father kept his cigarette for years as a memento of that day. In the movie, he recalls the hard work he and his contemporaries put into building Nowa Huta: they worked hard for everything they have, he says, starting with their first own fork and spoon. Now, the younger generation has a better life and access to opportunities that were undreamed of in those days.

The father’s memories are juxtaposed with the voice of his son, a thirty-four-year old teacher frustrated with the socialist system. The son complains that the government does not appreciate people’s work. He has been waiting for an apartment for five years now, and in the meantime his life has been put on hold, as he cannot marry and start a family. The only real option for his generation, the son claims, is to emigrate to the West.

The movie was made in the late 1980s, but the generational dynamic depicted in it continues to both reflect and shape popular perceptions of Nowa Huta’s residents. The oldest residents are popularly associated with “building socialism” and are thus seen as being nostalgic for the old days, whereas their children are associated with resistance to the socialist government. In this chapter I interrogate these popular associations: I ask how the socialist period is remembered by the eighty-year old residents who literally built the town with their own hands and by their middle-aged children who participated in Solidarity strikes in the 1980s. In the course of my fieldwork I talked with members of both generations about their lives in Nowa Huta: their work, their families, and the events in the town’s history in which they took part or that they found important. In their accounts, people invoke both national events and their local manifestations, including postwar rebuilding, the relative prosperity of the 1970s, the decade of strikes in the 1980s, the collapse of the socialist government in 1989, and the subsequent political and economic changes that ensued. When telling their stories, Nowa Huta residents selectively draw on elements of both national and local narratives, in effect alternately reinforcing and challenging hegemonic discourses on the past. Their narratives reveal how present conditions affect how people remember the past and, conversely, how people’s experiences of a different political and economic system influence their perceptions of present-day conditions.

Generations of Memory in Nowa Huta

The focus of this chapter is on people who lived a substantial portion of their lives during the socialist period and had significant life experiences during this time.1 This historical generation consists of multiple cohorts and can encompass people ranging in age from their forties to their nineties.

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