Communism's Public Sphere

In recent decades, scholars of post-1945 Poland and Eastern Europe have focused increasingly on culture and society rather than political elites and party-state structures. We now know that communist regimes were not all-powerful, and that individuals and groups found opportunities to assert their agency and influence the system. Scholars such as Paulina Bren, Patrick Patterson, Małgorzata Mazurek, Katherine Lebow, and others have demonstrated convincingly that consumerism—that quintessential element of modern Western societies—was a part of state socialism too, and that people behind the Iron Curtain aspired just as much to material comforts, leisure, and pleasure as their counterparts in the West. Kyrill Kunahovych's new book, Communism's Public Sphere, takes our understanding of the intersection between consumption and socialist citizenship to another level. The author shows that consumption was not merely an instrument in the hands of the communist regimes to seek legitimacy or stabilize society after a political crisis (as in post-Prague Spring Czechoslovakia), but an integral part of the communist system. To be a socialist citizen meant being an active consumer, particularly a consumer of culture and the arts. Indeed, under state socialism, the cultural sphere—from theater and literature to rock music and youth subcultures—developed into a dynamic public sphere where pluralism and political dialogue between citizens and the state could emerge and thrive.Kunakhovich offers an original approach to analyzing the cultural sphere under state socialism. He examines two cities that, on the surface, seem to have little in common: Kraków in Poland and Leipzig in East Germany. Rather than employing a traditional comparative analysis, he uses the two cities to illuminate how local dynamics worked to shape the transnational public sphere within the Eastern bloc. Transnationalism is, in fact, central to Kunakhovich's microhistorical analysis as he demonstrates the porousness of cultural borders, not only within the socialist bloc, but also between the East and the West.The book begins at the end of World War II, when the two cities found themselves under the rule of emerging Soviet-supported communist governments. Kunakhovich traces the pivotal role of culture as a politicized space expected to shape the new socialist men and women at all levels. Challenging the trope of “Sovietization,” Kunakhovich unravels the local dynamics of establishing cultural institutions in both cities. He turns to local officials in charge of cultural policy—Bolesław Drobner in Kraków and Rudolf Hartig in Leipzig—as “primary agents of the cultural revolution,” who built on local tradition rather than Soviet models (p. 38). Instead of eliminating prewar cultural institutions, they transformed them from within by establishing party-state control over cultural production. Yet this was a nation-centered project from the beginning. At no point in postwar history, including the heyday of Stalinism in the early 1950s, was Soviet cultural production dominant in either Kraków or Leipzig. On the contrary, theaters and concert halls served to reassert national tradition through staging predominantly national repertoire. In theaters, Soviet plays made up roughly ten percent of all production during the early 1950s (p. 37). The early postwar era set the stage for the central role of culture in the years to come. The politicization of cultural spaces through censorship and policy imposed from above transformed them into prime locations for contesting politics. Artists, writers, and audiences found new ways to voice their ideas, changing theaters, clubs, and concert halls into a forum for public opinion that the state could not ignore.The most significant turning point in solidifying the cultural sphere as a public space for civic activism came during the Thaw in the mid-1950s. Kunakhovich uses the term “National Communism” to denote the period between the late 1950s and the late 1960s, illuminating the search for a new form of state socialism after destalinization. The term allows the author to conceptualize the efforts of communist regimes in Poland and the GDR to create a distinct socialist community in their countries, anchored in their respective national identities. This required granting a greater voice to society. The safest place to do so, once again, was the cultural space, which now exploded into a full-blown public sphere with citizens as subjects and partners in creating National Communism. Although the process took a different shape in Poland than in East Germany (where the nation-building endeavor always had to reckon with the existence of the other German nation in West Germany), the outcomes were similar: culture served as a safe terrain to share one's opinion while in the eyes of the regimes, people became individuals rather than “classes or masses.” As Kunakhovich writes, “The public was no longer raw material to be shaped, but rather a partner to be consulted” (p. 101).Some of the strongest chapters in the book are those that deal with the 1960s as a time of dynamism and experimentation in East Central Europe. This approach challenges traditional Polish (and to some extent, Eastern European) historiography, where the 1970s are typically associated with “liberalization” and “consumerism,” often juxtaposed with the supposedly austere and isolating 1960s. Kunakhovich shows that the civic empowerment that occurred in the wake of the Thaw lasted through the next decade and became intertwined with consumer empowerment. For example, sociological surveys, in which respondents were asked about their cultural tastes and leisure preferences, became a means for the state to detect public opinions on political matters. In this sense, cultural consumption functioned as a form of self-expression.As a result of public pressure, Western films and TV shows became the norm in Poland and East Germany during that time. Similarly, both states creatively embraced rock ’n roll, typically by nationalizing this new genre and incorporating it into the official youth culture. Although this process was fraught with tensions, the communist regimes in both countries engaged with the public unlike any time before or after. As Kunakhovich explains, “This did not mean that the public got whatever it wanted, but rather that it influenced whatever it got” (p. 156).Unsurprisingly, the cultural sphere eventually became the target of state backlash. When youth rebellions erupted—first in Leipzig in 1965, and then in Kraków in 1968—the party-states in Poland and the GDR blamed the cultural freedoms that had allegedly spiraled out of control. For Kunakhovich, the political dissent of the 1970s and 1980s resulted directly from the shrinking public sphere—the limits of the dialogue between the state and the public that communist leaders imposed to keep the public in check. Artists and intellectuals began seeking self-expression outside of state-supported structures. In Poland, they created a “parallel polis,” while in the GDR, they conducted their activities in West Germany as voluntary or forced exiles. At the same time, the state sought to depoliticize culture, for example, by redirecting resources from cultural institutions and the arts towards material consumption. By the 1980s, cultural spaces had ceased to function as a public sphere. As Kunakhovich argues, the legalization of the Solidarity labor union in Poland in August 1980 was not a concession to society but a strategy to make Solidarity part of the state's project. The regimes in both Poland and the GDR shifted towards absorbing oppositional movements rather than suppressing them. In a way, the collapse of the communist enterprise resulted from the breakdown of the public sphere—the mutual engagement between state and society.Communism's Public Sphere provides one of the most powerful and nuanced analyses of the workings of state socialism that I have encountered in the past decade or so. Each chapter provides a fresh reinterpretation of the existing narratives about communism in Poland and East Germany. This book would work well for both graduate and advanced undergraduate courses. Moreover, its engaging narrative and vivid exploration of popular culture within a non-capitalist context make it appealing to a wider audience. It would have been interesting to see a more extensive discussion of the socially diverse audiences that participated in the public sphere, extending beyond the urban elites. For example, incorporating perspectives from rural migrants could have offered additional insights into how various individuals understood and engaged with the public sphere. This is not a criticism but an affirmation that the book opens new questions and avenues for rethinking the relationship between politics and culture, individual subjectivity, and state power. This is relevant not only to state socialism but also to other authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes that claim to govern on behalf of “the people.”

Ancient history · Cold war · Communism · Economic history · Political science · Politics · Public sphere · Sociology · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · European history and politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies

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