Synopsis project: "Communist Nostalgia in Poland" |
This paper is the
work of students, not an authoritative scientific account.
It is an exercise, in which the students were to choose a group of people or an
organization in East / Central Europe and imagine that they were planning to do
anthropological fieldwork in that group/organization. The paper is an exercise
in creating a synopsis (research plan) for this fieldwork. The paper is NOT: (a)
a finished synopsis, which has been approved by our institute, and it is NOT (b)
the intention that this fieldwork will ever be carried out. All synopses are
based on publically available documents (mostly from the Internet), and (in some
cases) on one or two emails received from members of the group/organization (the
latter information has been used with the permission of the author).
<< Due to Danish privacy regulations, names and emails of participants have been deleted. >>
This project is about "Communist Nostalgia In Poland", with a focus on the situation of ex State farms workers.
Poland is dealing now with a process of transformation. The whole country makes an enormous effort to bring the changes, and the more difficult situation is in rural area. In the postcommunist era despite major investments were made to upgrade Poland's rural infrastructure, the situation of ex State farm societies is still problematic. After the collapse of communism in1989, all State farms were closed down, and people who worked there became unemployed. The group of ex State farm workers is the one who lost the most in the time of transformation. They don't have jobs and they can't find any, because they are unqualified, poor educated and unaccustomed to deal with competition. Most of them don't have any property as well. So there are a lot of reasons for them to feel frustrated, useless and nostalgic for communism period.
Marta is a student at Warsaw University, and during years 2000/2002 she participated in a university course about present situation of ex State farm workers. This course included a fieldwork in ex State farms areas, that is why she got competence in the subject. So her assumptions of communism nostalgia among ex State farm workers are based on a practical approach.
The place of this research will be a small village in the North West of Poland, it is called Smiechow. The research will start in summer 2003, and it will last for six months.
According to the fact that the situation of ex State farm workers is problematic for the whole country, this research is relevant because it will give information about the attitude of this society towards the "new world", that came with transformation.
Statement of the problem
By examining what ex State farm workers think about communism period, the target of this project is to find out how these memories affect the present life of this society.
After World War II the Soviet government tried to force the Polish one to eliminate private farming according to the communist ideology of collectivization, but the concept was not applied everywhere.
After the war there was a great change in the countryside, many of the people who had worked there died during the war or moved away to the towns and cities or to the newly gained area in the West of Poland, that had been part of pre-war Germany. It was relatively easy for the State to take over the former German farms and create State farms, settling here Poles from other parts of Poland.
Actually this is the main area where State Farms were located, because this land was like unowned so it's here that the process of collectivization was stronger. Elsewhere, for example in Eastern Poland, the application of the Soviet system in commune agriculture was not applied with much success and most farmers continued to hold their lands because they were too attached to them.
So where the State farm model was applied was where the former owners of the land had left Poland or where agriculture was poor and the idea of a state farm was an immediate economic benefit. To make the problem clear it is necessary to define what a State farm was. The idea of it was that there was no private owner of the farm. The State kept control of it. It means that there were people representing authorities and simple workers. The State farm workers had no private ownership, for their hard work they were given benefits by the State.
The essence of State farm model - called Stalinist collectivization - was that:
- The peasants were subjected by the State to oppressive compulsory deliveries
- Incomes of workers were low and based on the 'labour day unit' rather than a wage
- There was minimal diversification out of agriculture (there was an intensive use of the
land, which in a long run lead to barrenness).
This model was not productive so in 1956 the decollectivization began and Poland abandoned mass collectivization. But, because private farming was not encouraged, what emerged was something very different from the Western norm:
1. Large but inefficient state farms
2. Private farms which were still in their late 1940s structure (they were like islands of
private ownership in a sea of social institutions, they couldn't buy land or equipment
because of the opposition to private farming)
For these reasons agriculture in Poland was not proficient and it lost stature as an occupation and as a lifestyle in competition with expanded urban industrial opportunities.
After the collapse of the communist regime, all the State farms were closed down. Unemployment was the immediate effect and the problem still persists.
State farms were not just an economic institution but also a cultural one, which supported a certain type of personality of a "hopeless proletarian" (Palska). Having been provided with some income, housing and job, and perhaps some entertainment, the workers were slowly devoid of any initiative or responsibility, and an enormous reliance on the state and its institutions was generated. So they are convinced even now that if the state shut down the workplace, it's supposed to provide for the unemployed people and their family.
One of the typical features of the working-conditions on State farms was the ramified system of social-security services which supplemented the low wages of the unqualified farm workers: free housing, free gardening plots, free medical attention, child care, facilities for rearing animals for home use, various allowances in kind, reductions and conveniences etc. There was also a whole group of informal conveniences and semi-legal and quite illegal practices (the exploitation of 'State property i.e. nobodies property', thefts, swindles etc.).
The average of family members for each State farm worker was among the highest in number in the country. For the State farm workers and their families the farm was not only a working place, it was also a living environment. The employer provided many of the services and facilities which are essential in everyday life. It was truly the "total care of a collective enterprise".
When the state farms were abolished in the early nineties all this suddenly came to an end and the farm workers, unaccustomed to independence and responsibility, were left to themselves, helpless, unable to find their way in the new reality. This is why they may have strong pro-communism feelings.
Today the former State farm settlements are enclaves of poverty, unemployment and many other phenomena leading to the prolongation of unemployment and the permanence of poverty: poor education, big families, low children's educational aspiration, lack of perspectives for young people, relative isolation, alcoholism.
E. Tarkowska in her article "In Search Of Underclass In Poland" (Polish Sociological Review 1'1999) claims that the word underclass can be used as an interpretation of the present post communist Polish poverty. She also says that the category of workers of former State farms is the one that better embody the Polish underclass, and she tries to describe the State farm society: " State farms were organized on the estates of the pre-war landowners. They were situated far away from the villages and small towns and relatively isolated. They usually employed migrants (especially in Northern Poland where the accumulation of various social problems is particularly acute today); these communities were disintegrated, interpersonal relations were typically distrustful, hostile and conflict-ridden. State farms labourers were often recruited through negative selection. They were poorly educated, had low works ethics (they often abandoned work), and were not strongly attached to their place of residence".
-What do ex State farm workers of Smiechow think about communism period in Poland?
The research assumes that most of those people feel strong nostalgia for communism (theory of nostalgia), and it tries to explain what exactly they miss, what was good and what made them unhappy during this time.
-How does memory of this time affect their present life?
The present situation of those people is complicated. Most of them are unemployed and frustrated. They live from a day-by-day life in a great poverty, thinking that there is no better future for them. So to ease the pain of the present they are focusing on their past.
What is interesting for this project is how the memory of the past influences them today, whether it makes them passive or active, happier or more frustrated. Is thinking about 'the old good times' a painkiller?
-How do young generations deal with the past?
In the place of the research there are young generations, too. Some of them go to school, some maybe work, but there are also those living from social service. Fear of being unemployed touches everyone. Sharing the present situation with parents makes youth easily influenced by the memory of the past that they can not remember from their own experienced (theory of collective memory). This is how myth of 'the good old times' is being created.
The place of the research is a small village. The fieldwork will be long enough to get to know the people. That is why it will last for six months. This period will allow to get closer to the everyday life problems. The methods used during the fieldwork will be open interviews as well as participant observations. Before starting the practical work it is necessary to focus on a few theories that might be helpful:
Theory of nostalgia:
An article of Kimberly K. Smith 'Mere Nostalgia: Notes on a Progressive Paratheory' and an article G. Bellelli and M.A.C. Amatulli 'Nostalgia, Immigration, and Collective Memory'.
Here there are: an exact meaning of the word, a history of definition of nostalgia, a current use of this feeling (especially by the politicians; in their political programs they compare present situation with the ideal view of the past); some theorists identify sense of homelessness or 'apartness' as the conceptual core of nostalgia.
Some studies on nostalgia show the evolution of the concept from a medical term to part of the literary and everyday domain. The word nostalgia was coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, a young medical student who read a dissertation entitled Dissertatio medica de nostalgia at the University of Basel. The word, of Greek origin, comes from the combination of two other words: nostos (return) and algos (grief), which together mean sadness emerging from desire to go back home. Hence they describe the feeling of "absence".
At first the word had a specific medical connotation because it indicated a real illness, it was a sort of psychosomatic condition affecting mainly the soldiers who were away from home. In the course of time the word nostalgia has lost its medical connotation to designate a passion or feeling. In the twentieth century, nostalgia became the topic of musicians, painters, writers, and poets. It soon acquired various and contrasting forms: sometimes it is a nostalgia caused by the absence of familiar things- native language, village, and relatives- sometimes it is caused by the absence of the past, which has already ended. Thus, it seems that the recalling, which is typical of nostalgia, may be oriented not only spatially, but also toward a particular time, to which one cannot return.
The project will focus on the links between nostalgia, separation and loss and their effects. The assumptions are made that for the members of the society under examination, a feeling of nostalgia may be either a happy or a sad experience. Like all the other complex emotions, nostalgia can be traced back to a fundamental mode like happiness, by remembering 'good old times'. But it can also belong to the negative subgroup of emotions, which called "distress emotions". When the past event can be considered as the "loss" of something loved, absence, nostalgia is also a "loss emotion". In other words, it is the emotion that includes sadness, mourning, anger and so on.
Considered nostalgia as an affective memory, we can say it allows people to escape from the constraints of society and represent a past society as and an attractive place.
Theory of collective memory:
The main source is a book by Paul Connerton 'How Societies Remember'. Individual memory depends on 'a collective memory' or ' social frameworks for memory'. And it is also said that the present social order is legitimated by the images of the past.
The nostalgia appears strictly linked to a social order as well as the collective memory. One can individuate two different kinds of collective memory: the recalling of events not personally experienced and have been collectively elaborated by one's own generation and the recalling of a past that has not been directly experienced though its meaning has been shared.
Especially for the young generation recalling the past, dramatically different from the present time, can has a significant meaning. We note that our experience of the present very largely depends upon our knowledge of the past. We experience our present world in a context, which is casually connected with past events and objects. And we will experience our present differently in accordance with the different pasts to which we are able to connect that present (Connerton 1989).
Concerning social memory in particular, we may note that images of the past commonly legitimate a present social order. It is an implicit rule that participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory. The effect is seen perhaps most obviously when communication across generations is impeded by different sets of memories. This is happening among old and young people in community that we are going to explore. They have different memories of the past, many of them didn't share the experiences of communism period, and their knowledge about this time is shaped by old generation.
According to Connerton's theory we can speak about recollection working in two distinct areas of social activity: in commemorative ceremonies and in bodily practices. By bodily practises we understand specific behaviours, norms, styles of clothing. To explain a meaning of commemorative ceremonies it is necessary to quote the author: "In the world religions, but also in the rites of many preliterate peoples and in the number of modern political rituals too, there exist a variety of ceremonies which share certain common features: they do not simply imply continuity with the past by virtue of their high degree of formality and fixity; rather, they have as one of their defining features the explicit claim to be commemorating such a continuity".
Connerton's opinion is that commemorative ceremonies and bodily practices are by no means the constituents of communal memory; for the production of informally told narrative histories is both basic activity for our everyday characterisation of human actions and a feature of all social memory.
The research requires examining both commemorative ceremonies ( for example 1st of May, Women's Day, Children's Day) and bodily practices ( norms in behaviour, style of wearing; family relations, housekeeping ), to see how they connect the past and the present life of this society.
Once arrived in the fieldwork a member of the project group (Giorgia) will go to the Social Assistance Office that will provide her with data about families that receive economic help from the State, and the other one (Marta) will begin by interviewing the members of these families. Giorgia can also use data from the Employment Office of the district town as statistical data on changes of unemployment indicators in the village in order to make some statistical tables about the economic situation of the families in Smiechow.
They both will look for a District Family Help Centre to get information on main problems in families like alcoholism and problems with health and child care, and Marta will interview them.
Marta and Giorgia will divide the tasks into two: Giorgia will take care of "Institutional Analysis" because she doesn't speak Polish (She will dedicate herself to the examination of individual and groups of people dealing with poverty) and Marta will deal with families and individual histories and interviews. Together then they will make participant observation to look at people's behaviour and attitude with a particular attention to the way in which they evocate communism period and they refer to it. They can make some comparison with the way in which they talk about capitalism.
They will also focus on gender and age to see if there are particular differences between male's attitudes and female's ones toward communism period. It is necessary to keep in mind that households are "matriarchal" in the sense that women rather than men are responsible for the day-to-day survival of their families.
Considering the age of interviewers, the project will focus on people older than 40. But it will also include interviews with young generations to find out if they have a kind of "myth" of communism and if they would like it to come back even if they don't have known it.
The societies of ex State farms workers, especially those closed in small villages, are considered to be a big problem in Poland. In years of transformation many changes affected the daily life of those people. These changes require different style of living from this to which they got used to under communism. The new system, the capitalism, brought a free market, free media and competition. That means that working class has no privilege anymore. But for the vast majority of them it's too much. They can not find their place in the "new world", they feel frustrated, dispossessed, and useless. What makes the matter worse is that their children, young generations, are influenced by this situation. One can call it a pass through generations feeling. This is how special conditions for great nostalgia after communism are created.
The target of the work is improving knowledge and understanding of the situation of ex State farms workers. By doing it, the project will bring the matter under public discussion and the research may lead to more effective policies to favour employment and to start programs of job trainings. Remembering the past should be seen as a way to express valid desires and concerns about the present.