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Urban and Industrial Everyday Life under Socialism and Post-Socialism

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WłodzimierzBorodziej, StanislavHolubec, Joachimvon Puttkamer, eds., Mastery and Lost Illusions: Space and Time in the Modernization of Eastern and Central Europe (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2014). 257 pp. £37.99. ISBN 978-3-11-036420-0.
SandrineKott, Communism Day-to-Day: State Enterprises in East German Society (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014). 346 pp. $90.00. ISBN 978-0-472-11871-7.
AleksandraSznajder Lee, Transnational Capitalism in East Central Europe's Heavy Industry: From Flagship Enterprises to Subsidiaries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016). 302 pp. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-472-11987-5.

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2017

NIGEL SWAIN
NIGEL SWAIN*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Liverpool 9 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7WZ, UK; swainnj@liverpool.ac.uk
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Extract

The above quotations from two of the books under review here took me back to the early 1970s and my first weeks in Hungary. As a graduate student in sociology, struggling to get to grips with my surroundings, I distinctly remember thinking that what was needed was an anthropology for large-scale industrial society to explain their foreignness and remoteness. Everything in the metropolis of Budapest followed a different logic, and in the academic division of labour, anthropologists are those with the skills to interpret the meanings of societies which operate according to a logic different to that of industrialised West. But in those days anthropologists still tended to focus on pre-industrial societies outside Europe. I had not yet read The Good Soldier Švejk, but a Hungarian sociologist told me was that I would never understand communist Eastern Europe without reading Švejk. I did, and he was right.

Type
Review Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , August 2017 , pp. 561 - 572
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

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17 Simić, Peasant Urbanites, 129–30.

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20 Lebow, Unfinished.

21 Ibid., 121.

22 Ibid.

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27 See, for example, Iordachi, Constantin and Bauerkämper, Arnd, eds., The Collectivization of Agriculture in Communist Eastern Europe: Comparison and Entanglements (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Iordachi, Constantin and Dobrincu, Dorin, eds., Transforming Peasants, Property and Power: The Collectivization of Agriculture in Romania, 1949–1962 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Kligman and Verdery, Peasants under Siege. For Hungary, Zsuzsanna Varga has written more extensively on the later period, see, for example, her contribution to Iordachi and Bauerkämper, eds., Collectivisation of Agriculture, ‘The Impact of 1956 on the Relationship between the Kádár Regime and the Peasantry, 1956–66’, Hungarian Studies Review, 39, 1–2 (2007), 155–76, and ‘Why is Success a Crime? Trials of Managers of Agricultural Cooperatives in the Hungary of the 1970’s’, Hungarian Studies Review, 40, 2 (2013), 149–76.

28 See also in this respect Bartha, Alienating Labour, 18 and 70.

29 Bartha, Alienating Labour, 137–41 and 182–5.

30 Kott, 143. Bartha, Alienating Labour, 76, 78 and 85.

31 Thelen, Tatjana, ‘Shortage, Fuzzy Property and Other Dead Ends in the Anthropological Analysis of (Post)Socialism’, Critique of Anthropology, 31, 1 (2011), 52–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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33 Swain, Nigel, Green Barons, Force-of-Circumstance Entrepreneurs, Impotent Mayors: Rural Change in the Early Years of Post-Socialist Capitalist Democracy (Budapest: Central European University Press)Google Scholar, 346–8.

34 Bartha, Alienating Labour, 275–95.

35 Ost, David, The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

36 Bartha, Alienating Labour, 276.

37 Bartha, Alienating Labour, 6.

38 Lebow, Unfinished, 40.

39 Verdery, What was Socialism, 19–37.

40 See Konrád, George and Szelényi, Iván, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power: A Sociological Study of the Role of the Intelligentsia in Socialism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979)Google Scholar, 21 and 48 for the first concept, 46 for the second. For empirical work on housing, see, for example, Szelényi, Iván, ‘Social inequalities in State Redistributive Societies’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 19, 1–2 (1979), 63–87 Google Scholar, and on regional development, see Szelényi, Iván, ‘Urban Development and Regional Management in Eastern Europe’, Theory and Society, 10, 2 (1981), 169–205 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 See for example Gábor, I. R., ‘The Second (Secondary) Economy’, Acta Oeconomica, 22, 3–4 (1979), 291–311 Google Scholar; Gábor, I. and Galasi, P., ‘The Labour Market in Hungary since 1968’, in Hare, Paul, Radice, Hugo and Swain, Nigel, eds., Hungary: A Decade of Economic Reform, (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981)Google Scholar, 41–53 and contributions to Hann, C.M., ed., Market Economy and Civil Society in Hungary (London: Frank Cass, 1990)Google Scholar.

42 I attempted to combine the contribution of the first and second economy to class position in Swain, Nigel, Hungary the Rise and Fall of Feasible Socialism (London: Verso, 1992)Google Scholar, 179–83.