“Talking about the memory of the post-socialist transformation in present-day Poland is anything but safe ground – rather, it resembles walking over a minefield.” Borrowing this introductory observation from FLORIAN PETERS (Berlin), the international conference in Warsaw showed that both historiography and commemoration of post-socialist developments are contested not only in Poland but across Central and Eastern Europe. The event brought together over 100 scholars debating the battlefield of post-socialist memory. The programme included paper presentations, four keynote speeches, a roundtable talk, a film screening and vivid post-session discussions.
The event constituted the ninth edition of the “Genealogies of Memory” project, facilitating academic exchange between Central and East European memory scholars. In her opening speech, MAŁGORZATA PAKIER (Warsaw) emphasized how memory studies are known for combining various disciplines. This became apparent during the conference. The presented research on post-1989 transformations drew on historical, sociological, economic and anthropological perspectives, thus creating an interdisciplinary framework to answer the question posed by conference convenors VERONIKA PEHE (Prague) and JOANNA WAWRZYNIAK (Warsaw): how do we remember the transformations from the communist planned economies to the capitalist free market?
Pehe and Wawrzyniak stressed that the conference sought to explore global, national, regional and vernacular perspectives on memory sedimentation regarding post-1989 transformations. They hoped for establishing a vocabulary that would help go beyond the vision of 1989 as a radical turning point. Instead, the goal was to focus on the prolonged aftermath of the revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe – “the long 1989”, as JAMES MARK (Exeter) referred to it during the round table. The remodelling of the economic sphere was rarely discussed in the academic world, Pehe stated, just as aspects of economy were rarely considered in memory studies. Hence, a multifaceted reflection ought to intertwine both disciplines and to question, analyse and historicise myths connected to the immense changes after the fall of communism. In this regard, several issues were consistently disputed throughout the conference.
The use of specific language was a crucial factor within the debates. ADAM MROZOWICKI (Wrocław) commented that scholars must be careful when using vocabulary that sometimes refers to different readings and concepts. Differentiating between terms such as communism, state socialism, authoritarian socialism or the like is important in order to formulate distinct statements. Florian Peters introduced the economic term “shock therapy” that is commonly used to describe the sudden liberalisation and large-scale privatisation of the market in post-socialist countries. However, as JILL MASSINO (Charlotte) clarified that privatisation progressed very slowly in Romania, while THOMAS LINDENBERGER (Dresden) added that in the former GDR “the effects of privatisation came much faster and much more violently than anywhere else in the post-communist region” (all this while the term itself was not applied officially at the time), the universality of the meaning behind “shock therapy” was also undermined. Meanwhile, JOHANNA BOCKMAN (Fairfax, Virginia) in her talk about different attributions of the Washington consensus spoke about the global “post-socialist condition” that appeared after 1989. In response, GAZELA PUDAR DRAŠKO (Belgrade) made a striking point that a clear definition of post-socialism itself is still missing.
Furthermore, RIGELS HALILI (Warsaw) differentiated between the memory of communism as a political system and memory on communism as perceived in culture and society, having Aleida Assmann’s communicative and cultural memory as a groundwork. In addition, Joanna Wawrzyniak explained the vernacular memory that is socially framed by language, interaction or occupation, which is based on ideas of sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. It moreover gives researchers a bottom-up access to values and emotions of transformation processes. However, terminology originating from memory studies was seldomly applied in the presentations. As the discussion about appropriate terminology for dealing with post-socialist transformations continued until the end of the conference, it proved the need for further investigation and academic engagement in the matter.
The same applied to the multi-dimensionality of research and analysis. A global understanding of the post-socialist transformation in Central and Eastern Europe was discussed solely within the roundtable talk with James Mark, TOBIAS RUPPRECHT (Exeter) and BOGDAN IACOB (Exeter), who recently published their monograph 1989. A Global History of Eastern Europe. Their portrayal of dense historical entanglements between different regions of the world before the fall of communism aroused great interest from the audience. The authors emphasised that 1989 is only portrayed from the perspective of national liberation, going along with the Europeanisation of Eastern Europe in academic research. Instead, they encouraged scholars to put transformation in an international and post-colonial context.
Nevertheless, most of the other speakers relied on national perspectives, often performing as experts on their home country. This resulted in having the post-Warsaw Pact states as a focal point – mainly Poland, Czechia and Germany. Whereas there was no talk about the situation in the Baltic States, the specific case of Serbia as a former republic of Yugoslavia was explained, while Georgia and Ukraine were the only former Soviet Union states discussed in the conference. ANDRZEJ PABISIAK (Cracow) indicated the necessity of making distinctions between Central and Eastern European post-socialist states and e.g. post-Soviet countries, implying that post-socialist realities are not universal. So did OLGA GONTARSKA (Warsaw) when examining the Ukrainian film Wild field (2018) that pictures an “unknown and unstable […] everyday life”. She interpreted the film as an image of extended transformation experiences specific to some post-Soviet republics. During her talk, she never utilised the term post-socialism. The papers showed that most of the post-socialist/-Soviet countries were still in the process of coming to terms with the past themselves, making it more difficult to already include a reasonable global perspective on the developments.
Interviews and analysis of autobiographical narrations were often-presented research methods. Several panellists investigated the attributions and commemorations of post-socialist transformations by focusing on individual experiences amongst particular social groups. It confirmed that both social and occupational environment and generational belonging shaped the way people remembered the 1990s. While analysing the cohort born between 1980-1990 in Poland, KATARZYNA WANIEK (Łódź) argued that the economic discourse spread to all sections of social life. People that were born to the liberal market and democracy felt immense pressure to succeed. As a consequence, many were both “zealous propagator[s] of allegedly universal attitudes of neoliberalism and victim[s] of this subtle mode of power”.
The most noticeable notion, which was evident in various interview datasets but also frequently debated throughout the conference, was the correlation of social stratification, economical improvements and modes of remembrance. Veronika Pehe discussed the ways successful Czech respondents from the liberal elite remember the 1990s. Since they were able to succeed during evolving capitalism, they were also capable of historicising the decade, knowingly dismissing that not everyone was as lucky. Pehe spoke of a “double image of the 1990s – between euphoria and criticism” that is significant until today. Joanna Wawrzyniak focused on workers’ experiences from privatised enterprises in Poland. Her respondents confirmed that they regarded themselves as “a lost generation” – a view which led to a post-socialist nostalgia that Wawrzyniak explained as an emotional reaction to modernisation processes, helping to reconstruct one’s “lost” identity. This examination went hand in hand with Jill Massino’s conclusion for post-socialist Romania where high expectations of liberal democracy and economic change remained unfulfilled. Increasing unemployment and precarity as well as skyrocketing inflation made the population blame the state for its miserable situation.
As a result, the 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe were shaped by societies’ disappointment and frustration, clouding the perception of life under communism which started to be seen as “the good old days”. This communist nostalgia was also discussed by SABINE STACH (Warsaw) when analysing the ways of narrating transformation in (post-)communist walking tours and by BARTŁOMIEJ KRZYSZTAN (Warsaw) who interpreted the flea market in Tbilisi as a representation of the failed, inefficient implementation of capitalism as well as of upcoming sentimentality towards life under Soviet occupation. MYKOLA MAKHORTYKH (Bern) came to similar results, when analysing the nostalgic use of the hashtag #90ые on Instagram in Russia.
The contrasting experiences of post-socialist transformation and contested modes of memory in relation to these political, economic and social changes were common threads throughout the conference. In order to explain the disparity of expectations and experiences of the transformation taking place in the 1990s in East Germany, Thomas Lindenberger referred to Willy Brandt’s mythical statement that Germany would grow back together in a very natural manner. He presented a photo of a beautifully grown green tree representing the unrivalled ideal, contrasting it with a picture of a tree with two branches unevenly spreading in two totally different directions – a symbol of the actual reality. This clash of ideal and reality immensely correlates with the remembrance of (post-)socialist times in other Eastern European countries.
Such dichotomies of memory were also explored during the panel called ‘Key narratives’. FLORIAN PETERS discussed two opposing myths within the public memory in Poland: one praising the establishment of parliamentary democracy and self-liberation from socialist rule as a universal success story, contrasted with the critique of the Round Table agreements as a dubious deal made above the head of ordinary Poles. MURIEL BLAIVE (Prague) revealed that the euphoria of the first years after the fall of communism overshadowed the shady compromises the new government had made with the former communists in Czechia. These non-transparent transformation processes, however, have over time evoked conspiracy theories and the population’s distrust in democracy. WOLF-RÜDIGER KNOLL (Berlin) characterized the collective memory of the East-German Treuhandanstalt as being torn between a neo-patriotic success story and a capitalist nightmare.
Later on, MARIUSZ JASTRZĄB (Warsaw) claimed that even the ‘winners’ of the systemic transformation embedded their corporate histories in the narration of the 1990s as a period of crisis and decline. Both MARTIN SCHULZE WESSEL (München) and Adam Mrozowicki utilised the term “disenchantment” in order to describe the Central and Eastern European populations’ comprehensive feeling of disappointment. By citing Max Weber’s famous term from The Spirit of Capitalism, they referred to the emergence of a modernised, bureaucratic, secularised, rationalised Western society as an analogy of the transformation processes happening in Central and Eastern Europe.
Blaming and mistrusting governments was addressed as a consequence of the populations’ unfulfilled expectations. Today, these contested memories and histories provide a platform for appropriating the post-1989 developments for political reasons. Already the conference convenors Pehe and Wawrzyniak assumed that examining the modes of commemoration and historiography of the transformation might help understand the emerging nationalism in Europe – or even work as a counter-concept. Bogdan Iacob stressed that frustrations of post-socialist citizens were frequently used as tropes by strong left- and right-wing parties in current Eastern Europe. TILL HILMAR (Yale) explained that the morally charged economic failure after 1989 led to a lacking collective narrative in East Germany, which enabled right-wing groups to provide the missing links. Thomas Lindenberger added that the populist party ‘Alternative for Germany’ was even “revitalizing and exploiting the expectations and hopes held by East Germans for nearly 30 years”. While Mykola Makhortykh mentioned the Kremlin’s strategy to instrumentalise the 1990s as “tragic years” in order to emphasise the danger of any sort of transformation, Martin Schulze Wessel detected a close relationship between neoliberalism and increasing nationalism in general.
Altogether, instead of setting the focus on the wide-reaching economic transition in former state socialist countries alone, the talks evolved around the interdependent political, social and economic changes that shaped life in the 1990s. This approach resulted in a conference that finally dealt in a more in-depth manner with changing narratives, tensions and opposing understandings of post-socialist transformations over the past 30 years since the revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe took place. Accordingly, there was scholarly consent about the existing dissent within memory sedimentation of the transformation processes. The conference therefore constituted an inspiring starting point, opening new debates and questions, and demonstrated the need for further interdisciplinary research. For understanding the discontinuity of public, collective and private memory and its interrelatedness with historiography, it might be useful to further explore these processes by the means of memory studies.
Conference overview:
Introduction: Rafał Rogulski (Director of the ENRS) and Małgorzata Pakier (Head of the Academic Department at the ENRS); Opening remarks: Veronika Pehe and Joanna Wawrzyniak (conference convenors)
Keynote lecture
Chair: Veronika Pehe
Johanna Bockman (Fairfax, Virginia): The Other Washington Consensus: Remembering Socialism in Washington, DC
Roundtable discussion
Chair: Joanna Wawrzyniak
From Socialist Internationalism to Capitalist Globalisation and Beyond with James Mark, Bogdan Iacob and Tobias Rupprecht (Exeter)
Panel 1. Key Narratives
Chair and discussant: James Mark
Florian Peters (Berlin), Shock Therapy Mythologies: Contested Memories of Poland's Balcerowicz Plan
Muriel Blaive (Prague), Velvet Revolution, Economic Reforms, and Lustration: A Trilogy Imposed by Circumstances or by Political Rivalry? Essay in Counterfactual History
Wolf-Rüdiger Knoll (Berlin), A “Bad Bank” of Transformation: The Role of the “Treuhandanstalt” in the Collective Memory of East Germans after Reunification
Panel 2. Social memory: contested or consensual?
Chair and discussant: Saygun Gökarıksel
Rigels Halili (Warsaw), Post-communist Transformation, Social Memory and Blaming of the “Other” – the Case of Albania
Jill Massino (Charlotte), Pluralism or Plutocracy? Popular Expectations and Perspectives of Economic Change in Post-socialist Romania
Andrzej Pabisiak (Cracow), Thirty Years After: The Collective Memory of Transition in Poland based on Research on Polish Sejm Transcripts
Panel 3. Memory and Agency
Chair and discussant: Oldřich Tůma
Veronika Pehe (Prague), "Let's Start a Business": The Memory of Entrepreneurship and the Czech Student Generation of 1989
Gazela Pudar Draško (Belgrade), Post-Socialist Transformation in Serbia: Critical Perspective of Intellectuals
Katarzyna Waniek (Łódz), Biographical experiences of transformation in the cohort born 1980-1990. A case analysis
Keynote lecture
Chair: Muriel Blaive
Thomas Lindenberger (Dresden): Transformation through Unification = Unification through Transformation? Regimes of Truth and the Discontent of Memories in the German Transformation Regime
Panel 4. Cultural Memory and Economy
Chair and discussant: Ksenia Robbe (Leiden)
Alex Condrache (London, Ontario), That is how Billionaires Smoke: The Nouveau Riche of the Transition in Romanian Post-Communist Cinema
Olga Gontarska (Warsaw), Cinema without an Audience: Experience of Transformation Depicted in Ukrainian films
Saygun Gökarıksel (Istanbul), “The Great Betrayal”: 1989 and the “Secrets” of Poland’s New Capitalism
Film screening and discussion: Dług [Debt], dir. Krzysztof Krazue (1999)
Commentators: Veronika Pehe, Mateusz Werner (Warsaw)
Keynote lecture
Chair: Małgorzata Pakier
Adam Mrozowicki (Wrocław): Coping with System Change: the ‘Grand History’ of Transformation and Biographical Experiences of Polish Workers
Panel 5. Memory and Labour
Chair and discussant: Florian Peters
Till Hilmar (Yale), Drawing Moral Lessons from Economic Transformations: Economic Memory, Deservingness and Social Relations in post-1989 (East) Germany and the Czech Republic
Joanna Wawrzyniak (Warsaw), Karolina Mikołajewska-Zając (Warsaw), Nostalgia and Moral Economy in Post-socialist Industry: Poland
Mariusz Jastrząb (Warsaw), How Did We Survive? Official Corporate Histories from the Period of Systemic Change
Keynote lecture
Chair: Rafał Rogulski
Martin Schulze Wessel (Munich): Universalism and Particularism in Czech(oslovak) Politics after 1989
Panel 6. Current Echoes of the Transformation
Chair and discussant: Bogdan Iacob
Sabine Stach (Warsaw), Guiding through Memory: A Case Study on (Post)Communism Tours
Bartłomiej Krzysztan (Warsaw), Capitalizing Socialism in Postcolonial Georgia. Post-socialist Economic Reality and Structure of Memory on Peripheral Flea Market
Mykola Makhortykh (Bern), We Were Hungry, but we also Were Free: (Counter)Narratives of the Russia’s first post-Soviet Decade on Instagram