Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–56
Katherine A. Lebow
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.
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About Katherine A. Lebow
Reviews for Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–56
Eva Plach
The Journal of Modern History
Each chapter provides the reader with fascinating material that ultimately illuminates the problems at the heart of the most recent discussions in Polish historiography. This includes the nature of Polish Stalinism, which Lebow sees as much more than mere ideology, but rather as a set of practices that individuals creatively appropriated.
Anna Muller
Austrian History Yearbook
In this richly researched book, Lebow explores how Poland's socialistregime and the residents of Nowa Huta built the city and forged a new way oflife.... It is remarkable that Lebow is able to tell the story of Nowa Huta anddevelop these provocative arguments in such a short book.
Steven E. Harris
East Central Europe
Katherine Lebow has redirected the study of Stalinism in scholarly debates. Unlike practitioners of traditional sovietology—now morphing into victimologyfor popular consumption—she seeks out the complexities and ambiguities of Stalinism in eastern Europe... This book will appeal to a wide readership across many disciplines. The range is extensive: urban geography, political mobilization, social structure, gender, youth culture, and film studies. It crosses boundaries within Poland and beyond.
Anthony Kemp-Welch, University of East Anglia
Slavic Review
With its monumental architecture and bold layout, Nowa Huta appears to be the quintessence of Communist urban planning. Yet, as Katherine Lebow's rich yet concise study demonstrates, underneath the regimented spaces and ubiquitous concrete lie more complex and nuanced stories.... [Unfinished Utopia] also provides important general insights into the intricate processes by which modernist urban spaces, despite their aspiration to control, become powerful sites of negotiation and resistance.
Uilleam Blacker
Times Literary Supplement