Following on from academic interest into socialist internationalism, the convenors of this conference sought to assess the history of those practising solidarity, and the contours of voluntarism in state-socialist societies on a societal, local, or enterprise level. How was voluntarism integrated into socialist infrastructure? Were these simply fronts for propaganda dissemination fuelled by coerced ‘volunteers’, or were there sites of genuine enthusiasm? If so, what were the motivations of those involved? Can socialist solidarity be distinguished from ‘traditional’ voluntary associations from the pre-socialist period? And what was the impact on political legitimacy? Four main themes were returned to periodically through the two days: the motivations of participants; the impact on political legitimacy; the extent of the socialist specificities to solidarity; and considering gender to interrogate whether all could volunteer equally.

Perhaps the primary question of the conference was motives: what drove people to engage? Did volunteering and voluntarism become compulsory duties, or was there sincere and inspired passion? SIOBHAN HEARNE (Manchester) examined blood donation practices in the Stalin-era USSR, and suggested that this form of domestic solidarity was a patriotic ‘duty’ and primarily a transaction between the state and blood donors: donors could expect paid leave and monetary compensation. In the 1950s, a Free Donor Movement saw a 900 per cent increase in non-renumerated blood donation from 1958-1962, and impassioned donors called on their comrades to donate and help, for example, injured miners get back to the mines. Nevertheless, this was not uniform; in Estonia, the vast majority of donors continued to take compensation, which for one donation could be a third of the average monthly wage. Hearne additionally emphasises the fringe benefits, such as leave from work or priority access to healthcare facilities, and the moral recognition – both of which continued to incentivise workers. Certainly, moral recognition should not be dismissed; as CIPRIAN NIȚU (Timișoara) would note in his presentation, engaging in voluntary work could offer a means of showing requisite loyalty without joining the socialist party.

JELENA ĐUREINOVIĆ’s (Vienna) paper on Yugoslav veterans’ efforts to support anti-colonial liberation movements, meanwhile, emphasised the personal affinity they felt with fighters, just as they had fought as partisans during the Second World War. Studying the Yugoslav socio-political organisations (groups with voluntary membership and semi-autonomous functioning between state control and independence), Đureinović argues that partisans disproportionately made up initiatives to support liberation movements, acting both through the veterans’ socio-political organisation and on the board of other movements. When in 1969 a Fund for Helping Victims of Aggression and Colonial Domination sought to coordinate the assistance of socio-political organisations, former partisans made up almost the entirety of the board, and repeatedly emphasised their deep personal identification with the causes they supported.

The question of motivations applies also to a state, rather than individual, level: was this genuine ideology, or simple pragmatism? Should we be cynical about these actions and trace geopolitical outcomes, or can we accept the passion of socialist citizens for solidarity with their fellow human? Conference proceedings suggested there can be multiple answers, and always context-specific – as illustrated by the debate between HELEN YAFFE (Glasgow) and DORA TOT (Florence). Yaffe emphasised the solidarity that roots the Cuban ‘tradition’ of medical internationalism. As of 2018, over 400,000 of the 11 million Cuban population have served overseas – in medical brigades, building sustainable healthcare services – or trained foreign students and treated foreign patients in Cuba (an exhibition on ‘The Children of Chernobyl in Cuba - Otroci Černobila na Kubi’, covering the free healthcare Cuba offered to 26,000 children impacted by the 1986 explosion, opened in Ljubljana on the day of the conference). Yaffe encouraged us not be cynical about the socialist roots of this practice, a duty of proletarian internationalism where Martí meets Marx – after all, she argued, what was the pragmatic gain in supporting Global South states with little soft power, refusing payment, and not announcing aid? On the other side, Tot skilfully laid out the Yugoslav race to provide humanitarian aid to Algeria, as the health system collapsed amidst an exodus of pieds noirs and the country issued an international plea for help. The rapid, improvised and ad hoc Yugoslav response earnt Yugoslavia praise from Algerian press and politicians, which Tot argued was the operation’s primary aim. She underlined that aid was delivered by the Yugoslav Red Cross and not through the unrecognised Algerian Red Crescent, because every donation had to be recorded and publicised. Tot argued that above all, responses to the Algerian War were characterised by socialist competition, not socialist collaboration. Commenting on the two pieces, GEORGE BODIE (London) suggested that both could be true. States are not, after all, a totalised or monolithic object. Some within the state structure prioritise propaganda; others are more idealistic. The lesson is to try and account for both in different areas.

Connected to propaganda is the idea of legitimacy and stabilisation – whether solidarity projects could raise legitimacy, or produce unexpected elements. HENRIKE RUDOLPH (Göttingen), looking at volunteering in China’s United Front Framework, argued that voluntary manual labour was seen as a consciousness-building activity, moulding and aligning the spirit in servitude in a Confucian-like process. Rudolph also demonstrated the counter-revolutionary power of the United Front, either in bringing volunteers out on the streets in counter-protest, or in curating the legacy of model workers. The first glorification campaign of Mao-era model worker Lei Feng was launched in 1963, but declining enthusiasm for civil engagement has led to its revival in recent years (newspaper mentions spike in 1989 and 2012), as Xi Jinping pushes for a remoralisation of Chinese society.

KATHRIN MEISSNER’s (Berlin) study of one small Berlin locality’s grassroots greening initiative demonstrates how voluntarism could be co-opted by state structures. The neighbourhood around Oderberger Strasse, whose heterogeneous makeup included a younger generation that lacked identification with socialist narratives and ideals, created a proactive, voluntary cooperative group to push for green space and a playground. Volunteers related their concern to socialist initiatives and state programmes. After political decision-makers decided to accept the campaign, the state leadership used the citizen-initiated project and publicly staged it as a project of ‘successfully-lived socialism’. In other words, the state promoted the initiative once it happened, using it to contribute rather than detract from stability.

And yet, not all solidarity resulted in or stemmed from support for the state. The aforementioned presentation by Hearne noted that Soviet dissidents often gave blood to use their day off from work for human rights activism. In the GDR, George Bodie argued (in a line developing since his doctoral dissertation and now part of his book project) that internationalism was not a legitimacy-building project. Trade union members were, he underlined, being asked to pay for the project, and many complained. Meanwhile, Ciprian Nițu argued that participation in Romanian civil organisations was strictly controlled by the state. He studied mountaineering associations, depicting their volunteer activities as undertaken without compulsion and amounted to a sub-culture. Though not open resistance, these groups demonstrate individuals’ discursive agency in creating a space with freer relations and more human introspection, including through self-reflection and the sharing of poetry.

At the end of the conference, one of the central questions remained to be defined: what is ‘socialist’ solidarity? How do volunteering practices differ to non-socialist societies? In a longue durée view of voluntary firefighting associations, ANA KLADNIK (Graz) reflected on similarities between recent flooding in Slovenia and socialist practices. The volunteer firefighters that responded to the floods had their roots in establishments from the late 1860s; both socialists and post-socialist politicians have considered firefighting as part of the Slovene national identity, and sought to use the associations to strengthen national consciousness and generate political profit. Meanwhile, the 1970s practice of voluntary self-improved contributions to supplement municipal infrastructure and social welfare, imposed by a municipal referendum and popular because it avoided manual volunteer work, were reintroduced after the 2023 floods. The newly established ‘solidarity contribution’ for the reconstruction of Slovenia brought criticism in the context of a decreased welfare state in the post-socialist context. The criticism centred on the idea that true solidarity should have solved the root cause through structural changes, and not be charity to make up for the lack of preventative measures.

KATHY DODWORTH (Edinburgh) offered an interesting intervention on how structures established during socialism could remain, but be hollowed out in ideological substance and thus transformed. Community Health Workers (CHW) were drawn from left-wing projects that believed healthcare interventions should be constructed with, for, and by the people, rather than being top-down institutions. However, as socialist state investments waned, Dodworth argues, so did citizens’ notions of solidarity and duty. In the 2000s, CHWs were seen as a cost-effective way to fill gaps, resulting in the burden of community health being placed on communities themselves through undervalued CHW labour. Ultimately, she argued, voluntarism works with the state, not instead of the state.

PAVLE ANTONJEVIĆ (Belgrade) similarly looked at the shifting ideological substance behind the Red Cross in Yugoslavia, and its structural implications. Comparing the pre-socialist and contemporary Red Cross socialist organisations to that during socialism, he contrasted the professional non-political organisation of the former to the mass social organisation of the latter. Socialism replaced an emphasis on philanthropy with socialist humanism; charity, with solidarity; assistance to vulnerable victims, by an emphasis on a systematic overcoming of vulnerability itself. Other comments included Yaffe's argument that socialist voluntarism intended to end the commodification of labour, and therefore was socialist in its aims. Rudolf also argued we should consider such practices in the way contemporaries termed them: the espoused aim was socialism.

Finally, the question of gender ran like a thread through the conference, a specific application of the general question: could everybody volunteer and meaningfully contribute? Or were hierarchies caused by voluntary practices themselves? Papers such as that by SEVERYAN DYANOKOV (New York) emphasised how many women doctors were involved in medical internationalism. Kladnik detailed 1970s programs to get more women involved in firefighting. Notably, CLAUDIA MARTÍNEZ HERNÁNDEZ (Vienna) presented on Cuban female labourers sent to plug labour shortages in Eastern Europe. Most had little or no working experience, so Cuba could capitalise on the free training their citizens would receive abroad. Women felt empowered by doing manual labour abroad, and yet Cuban-based feminist socialists such as Monika Krause criticised the fate of Cuban women who were facing challenges to relationships, parenthood, and reproductive rights. On the individual, human level, Hernández argued, this was not a success story.

The conference represents the latest installation in a growing theme on the practice of socialist internationalism, already explored at a previous conference organised by Bodie (Comparing Cultures of Solidarity: Socialist Internationalism and Solidarity across the Eastern Bloc and Beyond, Cambridge, June 2022) and being built on into the future. The intersection of intellectual, political, and social themes in this area of research prompted a lively, interdisciplinary and reflective conference which opened up as many questions as it solved. It points to the value of further micro-historical research on the implementation of macro-historical concepts, as well as the nuanced and multiple answers that always emerge from trying to pin down the motivation of one person compared to another.

Conference overview:

Panel 1: Blurring Lines Between State and Civil Society

Siobhán Hearne (Manchester), Socialist Solidarities and the Soviet Red Cross in the Post-Stalin USSR

Henrike Rudolph (Göttingen), Voluntarism in China’s United Front Framework since 1949

Jelena Đureinović (Vienna), The Anti-Colonial Movement: Practices and Socio-Political Ecosystems of International Solidarity in Yugoslavia

Panel 2: Non-Ideological Volunteering?

Ana Kladnik (Graz), Solidarity Contested? Women in Volunteer Fire Departments in Central Europe after 1945

Pavle Antonijević (Belgrade), The Socialist Concept of Solidarity: the Case of the Red Cross in Yugoslavia during the 1960s and 1970s

Ciprian Nitu (Timișoara), Mountaineering as Liberty and Solidarity: Mountain Volunteering Associations and Movements in Socialist Romania

Panel 3: Socialist Humanitarianism and Medical Internationalism

Severyan Dyanokov (New York), Socialist Humanitarianism: the Soviet Red Cross in India in the 1960s

Helen Yaffe (Glasgow), Cuban Medical Internationalism

Dora Tot (Florence), Between Propaganda and Solidarity: Yugoslav Humanitarian Assistance to the Algerian National Liberation Front (1958-1962)

Panel 4: Municipal and Community Voluntarism

Kathrin Meissner (Berlin), With or Without you? Looking for Solidarity within Everyday Voluntarism in Solving Local Housing Problems in GDR Socialism

Maja Kaninska (Ljubljana), The Jewish Municipality of Belgrade, Joint Activities in Socialist Yugoslavia

Kathy Dodworth (Edinburgh), Community Health: From Socialist Utopia to Neoliberal Governmentality

Panel 5: Mobilising Socialist Citizens: Trade Unions and Cooperatives

Carolyn Taratko (Potsdam), Voluntary Self-Mobilisation in the Cooperative movement in Ghana, 1957–1966

George Bodie (London), Arisen from Ruins: Exploring the Roots of the GDR’s International Solidarity Movement

Elena Kiesel (Erfurt), “Der Mengel hat uns geeint” – Voluntarinees and Solidarity in the GDR’s Neuererbewegung as Reflected in Interviews with Contemporaries

Claudia Martinez Hernández (Vienna), Cuban Female Labourers in Eastern Europe