The thirteen authors of this collective work undertook to articulate matter-of-fact critiques of the dominant narrative about communism in Poland while offering new analyses of the concept, and also examining the manifestations of anticommunism. Approaching communist ideas and practices, programs and their implementations, as an inseparable whole, they examine the issues of emancipation, upward social mobility, and changes in the cultural canon.
The authors refuse to treat communism in Poland in simplistic categories of totalitarianism, absolute evil and Soviet colonization, and similarly refuse to equate communism and fascism. Nor do they adopt the neoliberal view of communism as a project doomed to failure. While wholly exempt from nostalgia, these essays show that beyond oppression and bad governance, communism was also a regime in which people pursued a variety of goals and sincerely attempted to build a better world for themselves.
The book is interdisciplinary and applies the tools of social history, intellectual history, political philosophy, anthropology, literature, cultural studies, and gender studies to provide a nuanced view of the communist regimes in east-central Europe.
- Cover
- Front matter
- Contents
- List of Acronyms
- Introduction:
Communism Studies in Central and Eastern Europe: A New Approach
- Part One: Critiques of the Dominant
Narrative
- CHAPTER ONE
The Red and the Brown:
On the Nationalist Legitimation
of Communism in Poland Once Again
- CHAPTER TWO
Communist (Auto)biographies:
Teresa Tora≈ska’s Them:
Stalin’s Polish Puppets
and the Contemporary Paradigms
of Understanding the Past
- Part Two:
New Analyses
of Communism
- CHAPTER THREE
Legitimation of Communism:
To Build and to Demolish
- CHAPTER FOUR
Eroticism and Power
- CHAPTER FIVE
“’Cause a Girl Is People”:
Projects and Policies of Women’s
Emancipation in Postwar Poland
- CHAPTER SIX
An Adventure in the Steelworks
and in Mariensztat:
Family and Emancipation of Women
in 1950s Polish Cinema
- CHAPTER SEVEN
The “Adolescent Sphinx”:
(Post-)Thaw Novels for Girls
- CHAPTER EIGHT
“Here I Stand, I Cannot Do Otherwise”:
Around An Open Letter to the Party and
the Notion of Revisionism
in Discourse About the Political
Opposition in 1960s Poland
- CHAPTER NINE
Socialist Education Ideals and Models
of Patriotism:
Some of the Problems of Polish
Pedagogics and the Education
Policy of the People’s Republic
of Poland in the 1970s
- Part Three : New Analyses
of Anti-Communism
- CHAPTER TEN
The Waning of Communism in the
People’s Republic of Poland:
The Case of Discourse on Intelligentsia
- CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Thought of Stanisław Brzozowski
in Polish Academic Writing and
Journalism in the Years 1945–1974:
Currents, Parallels, Polemics
- CHAPTER TWELVE
Around Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Miazga,
Kazimierz Brandys’ Nierzeczywisto√ć,
and Polish Leftist Thought
of the Late 1960s and Early 1970s
- CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Scheming as a Business:
“Communism” in the Language
of the 1980s Opposition;
The Example of The Little Conspirator
- List of contributors
- Back cover
Text
Audio
Adobe DRM
Login to your account