Experiencing, Remembering, and Forgetting Social Advancement in (Post)Socialist Societies

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel seeks to integrate interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives on social mobility in (post)socialist states, focusing on this idea as a discursive framing for ideological aspirations of socialist states, a transformative socio-economic process and a lived experience of large population groups. The focus of the panel is directed at the ways in which social advancement has shaped collective imaginations and historical memory up to the present day.
The promotion of "workers and peasants" to society's leading strata was a central socialist promise. Its prospects shaped attitudes of those expected to benefit, fostering loyalty while influencing aspirations and perceptions of the future. However, failure to provide expected material and symbolic improvements generated tensions between ideological commitments and lived experiences.
The promise of social upward mobility under socialism also shaped the transformation period and post-socialist states until today. On the one hand, those societal groups who once embodied the socialist promise of social advancement were often left without a clear path to integration after the collapse of socialism. On the other hand, in post-socialist societies, social advancement rarely comes to the forefront of the public debate, while state memory politics downplay progressive aspects of the socialist past and depict it as a repressive and regressive condition.
Our panel presents four case studies from Poland, Ukraine, and Slovakia across different time periods. Together, our papers demonstrate how the promise of social advancement was implemented, shaped collective imaginaries, and is still politically instrumentalized.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Andrew S. Tompkins, German Historical Institute Warsaw (Poland)

Papers

• 'A Life Path So Beautifully Called ‘Social Advancement': Social Upward Mobility in the First Decades of the Polish People’s Republic - Laura Clarissa Loew, Justus Liebig U Giessen (Germany)

• Lost in Transition(s)?: Survival Strategies and Self-Support of Former Polish State Farm Laborers in the 1990s: A Case Study from Southern Poland - Joanna Rozmus, U of Vienna (Austria) / NRU Higher School of Economics (Russia)

• Post-Socialist Economic Transformation as a Story of Loss: A Case Study of Two Engineering Plants in Slovakia - Lenka Kratka, Inst of Contemporary History CAS (Czech Republic)

• 'Why deny what really happened?': De-Commemoration of the Soviet Past in Ukraine’s Urban Space - Anna Ivanova, Justus Liebig U Giessen (Germany)

Discussant

• Agata Zysiak, U of Vienna (Austria)