Counterintuitive Communism: Unexpected Outcomes of State Socialist Policies

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel challenges conventional narratives of state socialism as a system of repression and failure by exploring the unintended spaces of emancipation it produced. Rather than focusing solely on control and coercion, we examine how socialist policies—often designed to engineer new social relations—unexpectedly fostered progressive, feminist, and even liberatory possibilities.

What happens when authoritarian regimes inadvertently create pockets of autonomy, solidarity, or cultural experimentation? How did state-imposed structures give rise to resistance, irony, and creative reinterpretations of ideology? And where does the utopian strain of Marxism fit into this story—not as an afterthought, but as an integral, if paradoxical, feature of the system itself?

This panel takes a counterintuitive approach: rather than viewing unexpected outcomes as mere accidents or contradictions, we consider them as byproducts of a system that, in attempting to reshape society, sometimes opened cracks where new forms of belonging, self-expression, and even relative freedom could emerge. By revisiting these moments, we offer a more nuanced understanding of socialist states—not just as sites of repression, but also as landscapes of unintended transformation.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Veronica E. Aplenc, U of Pennsylvania

Papers

• Unintended Solidarity and Resistance in Prisons and Their Legacy After 1989 - Klara Pinerova, TU Dresden (Germany)

• Reeducating Class Enemies for God: Forging Religious Resistance to Communism in Romanian Prisons (1948-1964) - Ionut Florin Biliuta, U of Medicine, Pharmacy, Science, and Technology (Romania)

• The Socialist City as a Development Model for the EU Era - Kimberly Elman Zarecor, Iowa State U

Discussant

• Veronica E. Aplenc, U of Pennsylvania