Unfinished Utopia

Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–56

Katherine A. Lebow

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780801468858
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe de l'Est

Unfinished Utopia is a social and cultural history of Nowa Huta, dubbed Poland's "first socialist city" by Communist propaganda of the 1950s. Work began on the new town, located on the banks of the Vistula River just a few miles from the historic city of Kraków, in 1949. By contrast to its older neighbor, Nowa Huta was intended to model a new kind of socialist modernity and to be peopled with "new men, " themselves both the builders and the beneficiaries of this project of socialist construction. Nowa Huta was the largest and politically most significant of the socialist cities built in East Central Europe after World War II; home to the massive Lenin Steelworks, it epitomized the Stalinist program of forced industrialization that opened the cities to rural migrants and sought fundamentally to transform the structures of Polish society.Focusing on Nowa Huta's construction and steel workers, youth brigade volunteers, housewives, activists, and architects, Katherine Lebow explores their various encounters with the ideology and practice of Stalinist mobilization by seeking out their voices in memoirs, oral history interviews, and archival records, juxtaposing these against both the official and unofficial transcripts of Stalinism. Far from the gray and regimented landscape we imagine Stalinism to have been, the fledgling city was a colorful and anarchic place where the formerly disenfranchised (peasants, youth, women) hastened to assert their leading role in "building socialism"—but rarely in ways that authorities had anticipated.

1

Unplanned City

In 1948, as now, the city of Kraków occupied a special place in the Polish imagination. Kraków, Poland’s capital until 1569, had grown up at the foot of the ancient Wawel Castle, which, along with the delicate twin steeples of St. Mary’s Cathedral, dominated the city’s skyline. It was here that Poland’s monarchs had been crowned and its greatest heroes buried; through the dark years of Polish statelessness (1772–1918), the Wawel had served as a towering reminder of Poland’s past (and, it was hoped, future) glories. Polish children grew up fed on stories of Kraków’s dragon and the clever boy who slew him; of the bugler, high in St. Mary’s tower, shot through the throat by a Tatar archer; of Queen Wanda, who threw herself into the Vistula River rather than marry a German prince. Life in Kraków had traditionally been dominated by merchants, scholars, and churchmen: its intellectual traditions went back to the Middle Ages with the founding of the Jagiellonian University, Copernicus’s alma mater. Little had changed in modern times. Kraków remained relatively untouched by industrialization, and by the turn of the twentieth century, the liberal atmosphere of late-Habsburg rule had made Kraków a bubbling center of Polish cultural, artistic, and student life.

During World War II, Kraków was among the few Polish cities to escape major war damage. The contrast with Warsaw’s smoking ruins could hardly have been greater: the atmosphere prevailing in Kraków during the immediate postwar years struck visitors as unique, not only in Poland but also, perhaps, anywhere on the war-ravaged continent. “Uppercrust life in Krakow has achieved a normality which gives the city a cultural activity and gaiety found nowhere else in the European war zone,” wrote American journalist Irving Brant. The city became Poland’s “salon,” a magnet for artists and intellectuals from all over the country, with new journals and magazines appearing on the scene as early as 1945.1 The city’s independent cosmopolitanism, however, did not sit well with Poland’s new, Communist-dominated government, and tensions quickly flared between the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) and local elites. They came to a head with the national referendum of June 30, 1946, in which Poles were urged by government propaganda to vote “three times yes.” Kraków did not oblige, returning results unfavorable to what the regime saw as a general referendum on its rule.2 This elicited a barrage of official invective against Kraków’s “bastion of reaction,” proposals for the forced resettlement of the city’s “palace dwellers” and “unnecessary people,” and a series of ominous show trials from August to September 1947.3

None of this, however, matched the bombshell that was about to explode on the city and its inhabitants. In February 1949, references began appearing in the press about an enormous new steelworks to be built outside Kraków, some 10 kilometers to the east of the medieval city center. Soon, reports described how a new city for a hundred thousand inhabitants (Kraków’s population at the time was just three hundred thousand) would be built alongside the steelworks to house its workers and their families. It was said that the new town’s proximity to the older city would provide a much-needed antidote to Kraków’s “unhealthy” atmosphere, grafting fresh, proletarian branches onto Kraków’s “rotten wood.” Premier Józef Cyrankiewicz, for instance, proclaimed in July that the new town would bring “winds of change” to the city, “driving out the remains of a musty atmosphere and giving the city a socialist imprint.”4 The new town was to be called Nowa Huta—“new foundry” or “new steelworks.”

For many inhabitants of “old” Kraków, Nowa Huta was (and is) an unwelcome imposition, an act of political violence to their city’s historic makeup and character. Ultimately, Nowa Huta became a sprawling, unwieldy suburb; although it was annexed to Kraków in 1953, many from the older city always considered it foreign and other. In this view, the only “winds of change” Nowa Huta brought were polluting emissions from the steelworks’ smokestacks, blamed by Krakovians for eating away at the city’s old stones and destroying its air quality.5 Given the official rhetoric that accompanied Nowa Huta’s construction, moreover, it seems inevitable that the new town would be perceived not just as a physical assault but also as a spiritual and ideological one. As one Solidarity leader from Nowa Huta later explained, “the aims of the Marxist ideologues were directed at neutralizing conservative Kraków. The neutralizing agent was to be Nowa Huta.”6

To be sure, the propaganda of the day embedded Nowa Huta in a triumphalist rhetoric of class warfare and socialist supremacy. Nowa Huta was to be Poland’s “first socialist city”: following in the footsteps of Soviet new towns like Komsomolsk or Magnitogorsk, it would represent a new kind of civilization, peopled by “new men” forged in the town’s purpose-built, socialist spaces. This was the Nowa Huta the nation saw and heard about in a constant flow of films, newsreels, newspaper features, speeches, stories, novels, poems, and songs—the “great building site of socialism,” the heroic proof of socialism’s superiority over capitalism, evidence of the peace-loving Soviet Union’s “friendship” for its Polish neighbor. This propaganda was inescapable—not least, in Nowa Huta itself. This chapter, however, probes the limits of such propaganda (and the ideology behind it) by asking how those involved in the new town’s planning and construction perceived their participation in what was officially called “building socialism” in Nowa Huta. As we shall see, they attached a very different set of meanings to Nowa Huta, alongside—or even against—the official version trumpeted in the public sphere.

While subsequent chapters will focus on the workers who built and settled in Nowa Huta, here I shall concentrate on the so-called professional intelligentsia—planners, architects, engineers—who perhaps more than anyone else were responsible for turning the propaganda about Nowa Huta into concrete reality. Overwhelmingly members of the hereditary Polish intelligentsia, many had fought against both the Nazis and the Soviets in World War II and felt distance from, if not hostility toward, the country’s new rulers after 1944. And yet they were more often than not enthusiastic—even passionate—about seeing the construction of Poland’s “first socialist city” through to reality. Their experiences can provide insights into how large numbers of non- and even anti-Communist Poles were able to accommodate to the “new reality” of the Stalinist system (lasting roughly 1948–1956). Such Poles chose to work within and alongside a system that they regarded as foreign and even illegitimate in order to realize their own complex agendas.

In the case of Nowa Huta, particular traditions and models rooted in the Polish past were key in shaping how professionals understood the meaning of the new steelworks and model city they were tasked with building. The first part of the chapter will explore some of these legacies, focusing on the period of partition (1772–1918) and the Second Republic (1918–39). Such professionals can be seen as heirs to a pragmatic tradition of Polish nationalism dating back to the second half of the nineteenth century, one that linked Polish national revival to overcoming economic and social underdevelopment. For them, as for many who shared these traditions of thought, the near total breakdown of World War II also offered hopes of finally realizing this program of social and economic transformation. As journalist Edmund Osmańczyk put it in a popular series of articles in 1946, Poles may have lost the war, but with a coordinated effort of “brains and brawn,” they could still “win the peace.” To do so, however, each and every Polish patriot, and especially those with “brains” (i.e., skills and scientific know-how), had to roll up his sleeves and get to work.7 A few years later, Nowa Huta offered a golden opportunity to put this principle into action: as one engineer who was transferred to the Lenin Steelworks in 1954 put it, “I resolved to give myself entirely over to my work—to the steelworks—to the fatherland.”8

Needless to say, Communist power and policy limited the pathways such patriotic efforts could take. In the case of Nowa Huta, there were dramatic differences, for instance, between the plans that Polish economists initially conceived and those that ultimately took shape under pressure from Soviet “advisers” or Warsaw Party officials. This raises the larger question of how visions and plans are translated into reality during the planning process in any political system. As Anne Mosher points out in her study of the nineteenth-century steel town Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, there can be many a slip between cup and lip: “urban visions are seldom smoothly and inexorably translated into urban design and then into urban landscape,” even when “shepherded along by politically or economically powerful” sponsors.9 Planning, in other words, is a far from robust process and is subject to a host of forces that can easily derail the realization of planners’ visions. Nowa Huta proves that Mosher’s observations do not apply only in free markets: when we trace the interactions of planners and politicians, Poles and Soviets, architects and economists, and ultimately, visions, plans, and outcomes in Nowa Huta, it seems that the totality of the process escaped the control of any one party, including the Communist party itself.

The chapter will thus consider not only the competing national, historical, and ideological visions that shaped Nowa Huta, but also the underlying factors that complicated the translation of visions into plans, on the one hand, and plans into realities, on the other. Most significant among these were the pressures generated by Nowa Huta’s enormous size, which exacerbated inefficiencies and contradictions already inherent in the state socialist economy. When Warsaw understood the full costs (financial, administrative, and, ultimately, political) of building this worker’s paradise, it effectively withdrew its sponsorship for all but a stripped-down version of the original urban plan. Stalin’s death in 1953 further eroded Warsaw’s political will to build an urban utopia. Thus, a great deal of what was ultimately built in this planned city was, paradoxically, unplanned, while much of what was planned remained unbuilt—another way in which this chapter addresses the limits of ideology under state socialism.

Practical Romantics

There were Poles, once upon a time, who believed in communism—although what exactly that meant was not a straightforward matter. The writer Tadeusz Konwicki, brought up in a patriotic, middle-class family, had fought in World War II together with many educated Poles of his generation in the Home Army, the underground military force of Poland’s government-in-exile that was opposed to Nazi and Soviet power alike. As a participant in the Warsaw Uprising, he had witnessed his city’s defeat and destruction in the autumn of 1944, during which Warsaw was reduced to rubble by the Wehrmacht as the Poles’ erstwhile Soviet allies looked on. In light of this betrayal, not to mention the many crimes committed against Poles in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland in 1939–41 and the Communists’ subsequent persecution of Home Army veterans once in power, Konwicki’s postwar embrace of a belief system associated with Soviet power seems anything but inevitable. And yet Konwicki was far from the only member of his generation to make this move. Years later, he struggled to explain that communism seemed, at the time, the only alternative to nihilism, to the orgy of death and killing that surrounded him. Besides, Konwicki argued, the end of the war was something unbelievable—

that…moment when we entered into a new life. Sun, blooming orchards, the hope of building something, of doing something; that it would be different, better…. Yes, we were naïve; it was a function of our age, of our very intense wartime experience,…and of our civic upbringing within the conventions of Polish romanticism.10

In 1949, Konwicki joined a volunteer youth brigade bound for Nowa Huta. He soon published a fictionalized work about his time there; its hero “finds the joy of life in collective work” and the book “finishes with the obligatory ‘happy end’: the plan is fulfilled, the project delivered on time.”11 Konwicki had exchanged the conventions of Polish romanticism for the conventions of socialist realism.

Konwicki came of age in a society deeply inflected by those romantic traditions. The Polish Second Republic had imbued in Konwicki and his peers an ethos of military service and sacrifice, itself a legacy of more than a century of Polish statelessness. During this period of partition by Austria, Prussia, and Russia, the descendants of the Polish nobility had fought in repeated doomed uprisings against the partitioning powers, notably in 1794, 1830, 1846, and 1863. Although they had failed disastrously, the uprisings had created an enduring mythology of Poland as the “Christ of nations” and glorified the idea of self-sacrifice on behalf of the fatherland.

Over time, however, some Poles sought to reinterpret the form such sacrifice should take, convinced that spilling Poland’s best blood in armed struggle was self-defeating. In the second half of the nineteenth century, such pragmatists, among them the so-called Warsaw Positivists, argued that Poles should accept their Russian, German, or Austrian rulers in the short run but prepare themselves for a future time when they would again be free. Based on the idea of the nation as an organism, the term “organic work” came to suggest a pragmatic, gradualist approach to strengthening the nation in body and spirit. The agents of such work were to be the intelligentsia—educated Poles with the skills and knowledge needed to uplift the country’s impoverished, largely peasant majority and put the country on the path to modernization and development.12

Implicit in such ideas was a causal link between Poland’s presumed economic backwardness vis-à-vis the West, on the one hand, and its vulnerability to foreign subjugation, on the other. In this regard, progressive Poles of the nineteenth century (and beyond) worried not onl...