Socialist Citizens
Like their Soviet predecessors, the showcase industrial cities of Eastern Europe were meant to not only produce steel, concrete, and other vital supplies, they also were to produce new men and women, templates for the socialist citizens of the future. One youth brigade in Bulgaria chose as its motto “We build Dimitrovgrad, and the town builds us.” But the lived reality proved far more complex.
Some workers did move to Nowa Huta and the other showcase cities out of genuine enthusiasm for the socialist project and the new people’s democracies. And some found the experience of helping build and launch new factories and cities intoxicating, something they would look back on fondly. But many workers joined the construction efforts and took jobs at the new plants not out of any particular ideological identification but from necessity.
As in the Soviet Union, the recruitment of construction and industrial workforces was intimately connected to miserable conditions in the countryside, the result of increased taxes, dictated crop sales, collectivization, long-standing poverty, and the impact of years of war. Many rural Hungarians who moved to Sztálinváros were hostile to the communist government because of policies they saw as attacks on their home villages and way of life. The lack of any church in Sztálinváros added to their alienation. For at least some, Sztálinváros came to be seen not as a beacon to a brighter future but as a symbol of everything that was wrong with the socialist state. Experienced industrial workers who came to the pioneer Hungarian city had a more positive view, appreciating the better housing and higher wages available than elsewhere, but nonetheless they often resented the autocratic management in the plant, the intensity of the labor, and the ongoing shortages of food and other goods.44
Poland, with the tacit approval of the Soviet Union, did not attempt to collectivize agriculture, so there was no direct link between forced displacement and worker recruitment for Nowa Huta. Nonetheless, the bulk of the construction force and city population came from the countryside, mostly people under the age of thirty. Even in the steel mill, where many jobs required industrial skills, in 1954, 47 percent of the workers came from peasant backgrounds. Many were landless peasants from the immediate area. “Looking into the future,” historian Katherine Lebow wrote, “they saw a life of relentless drudgery and cultural marginalization and found the prospect intolerable.” More pushed out of their old life than drawn to a vision of a new one, they hoped that Nowa Huta would provide an opportunity to gain skills and money, escape the boredom of rural life, and achieve a brighter individual future. As later remembered by trade unionists, the attraction was not any pride in the idea of working in the country’s leading industrial establishment but the desire to enjoy the superior wages, housing, and privileges offered in Nowa Huta once it got past its start-up difficulties.45
For many newcomers, Nowa Huta, especially in the early years, proved a disappointment, with its challenging living and working conditions, including high rates of industrial accidents. Many simply left, creating a serious problem of labor turnover (also the case in other showcase cities). Rather than Nowa Huta forging socialist men and women out of peasant stock, the opposite seemed to be happening, as what the communists saw as ills of rural backwardness infected the city. Same-sex barracks, a very large cohort of young men but far fewer women, and the paucity of entertainment, recreation, or religious opportunities led to boredom and rowdiness. Alcoholism became epidemic, despite drastic efforts by authorities to control it. With it came a great deal of brawling and sexual assault, lumped by communist officials into the category of “hooliganism.” With civil and familial authority thin and religious authority absent, sexual freedom (and venereal disease) flourished, to the dismay of government officials. And when former villagers did adopt a kind of modernity, it was not necessarily the kind authorities wanted. Some young men became bikiniarstwo (“Bikini boys,” named after the bomb site, not the bathing suit), who adopted dress and hairstyles modeled after American youth culture.
Similar problems arose elsewhere. In Dimitrovgrad, former peasants took over public parks and courtyards to plant vegetables and raised goats, chickens, and rabbits in the cellars of apartment blocks, until communist authorities finally managed, during the 1960s, to stop the urban farming. In Sztálinváros, young factory workers from urban backgrounds brawled with construction workers from the countryside.46
Communist authorities wrung their hands over the behavior and attitudes of the working class they were creating and intensified efforts to inculcate socialist urbanity. In private and sometimes even in public, they acknowledged that the leap to socialist personhood was not taking place as planned. But as long as misbehavior remained outside the political realm, they took no drastic action.
Serious political trouble first occurred in Sztálinváros, not as a reaction to conditions specific to the steel mill but as part of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Sztálinváros became a center of revolutionary action, with a workers’ council challenging government authority. After troops fired on a demonstration, killing eight, workers fought back, forcing the soldiers to retreat and seizing the local radio station. Later, when the Soviet army arrived to pacify the city, workers joined defecting Hungarian soldiers and officers to defend what its citizens had renamed Dunapetele, the name of the village that had preceded the steelworks. The factory and city that in their very appellation were to be testaments to Soviet-Hungarian friendship turned into the opposite. Ironically, workers finally seemed to embrace an identity linked to the showcase project when they declared that they would defend from Soviet troops what they themselves had built, a form of nationalist expression the planners of Sztálinváros had not anticipated. After 1956, an effort by the new communist leadership, installed by the Soviets, to woo worker support through improved wages and social benefits ultimately shifted opinion in what was once again called Sztálinváros, as a local socialist patriotism developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a sense of shared class experience and pride.47
Trouble came later in Nowa Huta, following a different course. Steelworkers helped lead a challenge to the ruling powers, at first not over work issues but in assertion of their Catholicism. Like Magnitogorsk and Sztálinváros, Nowa Huta was designed without any church, forcing residents to worship in nearby villages. Requests from the Kraków diocese to build a church in the city were repeatedly turned down until the fall of 1956, when, in response to widespread protests, the Polish Communist Party brought back as its first secretary the once-imprisoned Władysław Gomułka. Attempting to improve relations with the Church, Gomułka gave the OK. A year later a site was chosen and a cross erected there. Then authorities began stalling, and in 1960 reassigned the site to a school, ordering the cross removed. But the crew sent to take it down was blocked, first by a group of neighborhood women and then by a crowd swelled by workers finishing their shift at the mill. The defenders of the cross sang both “The Internationale” and hymns, a sign of their multiple allegiances. The day ended with a full-scale battle between four thousand residents and militia troops, who used water cannons, tear gas, and bullets, while the crowd threw stones, vandalized stores, and torched a building. Nearly five hundred people were arrested, some given substantial prison terms. The authorities, belatedly realizing the explosive symbolism, let the cross remain.
Within a few years, Catholic leaders resumed their campaign for a church, with the backing of the new archbishop, Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II. In 1965 the government gave approval for a church near a new housing development. It took an extended campaign to raise money for the building and erect it (with no cooperation from the government), culminating in the consecration of what was called the Lord’s Ark by the then-cardinal Wojtyła in May 1977, with seventy thousand people in attendance.48
The defense of the cross and building the church helped forge a culture of resistance and networks of mobilization that soon would be used for a more profound challenge to the establishment. But the politics of Nowa Huta
were by no means simple. In 1968, when student protests broke out across Poland, authorities had to move vigorously to keep secondary and technical school students in Nowa Huta from joining demonstrations in Kraków. At the same time, workers from the steel mill were bussed into the nearby city, where they beat up students from Jagiellonian University, perhaps reflecting class and cultural antagonisms as much as political differences (as in the hard-hat demonstrations in the United States two years later, when construction workers beat up student antiwar protesters). As late as 1980, about a quarter of the workers in the mill belonged to the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party.
By then, intellectual and worker opponents of the Polish regime had become increasingly vocal and well organized. In Nowa Huta, in April 1979, a group drawing on Catholic social teaching, the Christian Community of Working People, formed just months before Pope John Paul II spoke at a monastery on the outskirts of the city, after being denied government permission to visit the Lord’s Ark. “The cross cannot be separated from man’s work,” he declared. “Christ cannot be separated from man’s work. This has been confirmed at Nowa Huta.”49
Both national and local developments undermined steelworker support for the regime. Price hikes in 1970 and 1976 led to widespread worker protests across the country, while in Nowa Huta the construction of a large steel mill in Katowice and a growing environmental movement criticizing pollution by the Lenin Steelworks raised fears about the future.50 When in July 1980 yet another price hike led to new wave of strikes, workers in Nowa Huta joined in, winning concessions from management. The following month, they began forming units of the independent Solidarity trade union, founded at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. The Nowa Huta steelworkers had long had a union, but it had little authority; workers wanting something often went straight to the party, the real power in the shop. When an alternative appeared, workers flocked to it.
By the fall of 1980, with 90 percent of the workforce signed up, the steel mill unit became the largest workplace Solidarity branch in the country, second in importance only to Gdańsk. In a measure of their new confidence to assert their own values, workers began bringing crosses, consecrated at the Lord’s Ark church, into the mill (along with Solidarity banners), reversing the flow of culture creation from civic society to the workplace rather than the other way around as communist planners had envisioned. Nowa Huta Solidarity activists also joined in creating the “Network,” linking together the largest industrial workplaces in Poland, acknowledging their vanguard role.51
The declaration of martial law on December 13, 1981, began a prolonged “state of war” in Nowa Huta (and elsewhere) between Solidarity, now driven underground, and the government. Workers occupied the Lenin Steelworks for three days before militia units with tanks regained control. By the next year, workers had begun building a clandestine Solidarity structure in the mill. The size and resources of the showcase enterprise facilitated organizing. Solidarity activists used mill supplies and printing presses to produce underground newspapers and propaganda in large quantities, for circulation both within and without the complex. Mill technicians helped set up and maintain a clandestine radio network that served the southern part of the country. Supplies lifted from the factory were distributed to Solidarity activists elsewhere. Overseas backers sent aid to the Nowa Huta unionists, who eventually obtained a computer before the mill itself had one.
With so many workers toiling and living together, norms and networks of resistance spread inside and outside the plant, as Nowa Huta became one of the most militant centers of opposition to the government. In 1982, regular protest marches began, first led by workers but over time increasingly consisting of youths. Often the protesters assembled in churches before setting out for the center of the city, inevitably to be confronted by police and militia. In the regular running battles, at least three protesters were killed. Solidarity was less successful in its efforts to hold protest strikes in the mill itself.
In 1988, Nowa Huta helped push the country to a radical resolution of what had become a permanent economic and political crisis. Once again, price hikes led to protest. On April 26, workers at the Lenin Steelworks, still the largest industrial enterprise in the country, launched a sit-down strike demanding an increase in wages and the legalization of Solidarity. Taking control of the complex, workers’ spouses and children, sympathetic priests, and outside Solidarity leaders came into the plant to support the protest. On May 4, soldiers took back control of the mill and arrested the strike leaders. But by then, the strike had sparked strikes elsewhere, most importantly at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. In an effort to end the protests, the government reached out to Lech Walesa, who had helped launch Solidarity, ultimately leading to the “Round Table” negotiations with the group, the legalization of independent unions, and, in 1989, open elections for the national senate. The massive victory by Solidarity candidates brought an end to communist rule in Poland and hastened the end of communist control in all of Eastern Europe.52
The rise and ultimate victory of Solidarity demonstrated—too late—to Polish authorities the dangers of factory giantism and industrial urbanism. Nowa Huta, intended, among other things, to create a politicized working class largely out of children of the peasantry, succeeded, but in a way its planners had not anticipated. By the account of Solidarity unionists, Nowa Huta workers came to have a shared pride in working in the plant not because of its role in creating a socialist Poland but because of its role in fighting it.53 As Goodyear, GM, Ford, GE, and other American corporations had learned decades earlier, large assemblages of workers who work together, live together, pray together, drink together, and die together can turn the largest, most important factories from models of efficiency into weapons of labor power.
The aftermath of victory proved ironic for Polish workers. Giant fortresses of industry, built to lead the transition to socialism, stood little chance of surviving intact the transition back to capitalism. Most of the outsized Polish industrial complexes suffered from underinvestment, low productivity, and overstaffing, lacking advanced machinery found in the West. As government subsidies were lessened, captive markets lost, and privatization begun, they could not compete. What had been the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk underwent repeated reorganizations, layoffs, and privatization, until its workforce, 17,000 in 1980 when it gave birth to Solidarity, shrank to fewer than 2,000 in 2014.54
In Nowa Huta, one Solidarity unionist, soon after the first noncommunist government took power, estimated that a mill in the West with the same output as the Lenin Steelworks would have 7,000 workers, not 30,000, a measure of more modern equipment, more intense work, and no obligation to keep aging, ill, or alcoholic workers. With production in Nowa Huta plummeting, in 1991 the government, after negotiating with various unions (Solidarity, at that point, represented only about a third of the workforce), began a program of deintegration, spinning off various support functions, like the internal railroad network and slag recycling, and some finishing operations to twenty new enterprises, which together employed about 60 percent of the old workforce. The original company focused only on basic steel operations. To reduce pollution, large parts of the plant were simply shut down, including two blast furnaces, the open-hearth furnace, the sintering plant, and some coke ovens. The broad social mandate for the mill was reduced, too; over the years it had taken on many functions for the workforce and the city, including running a farm, canteen, medical center, vacation facilities, and a football club. These, too, were spun off or downsized.
In 2001 the Nowa Huta steelworks (by then renamed for Polish engineer Tadeusz Sendzimir) were merged with the other major steel mills in the country. Following privatization and a later merger, it became part of the largest steel company in the world, ArcelorMittal. The new owner invested some money in modernization, with an advanced hot rolling mill opening in 2007. But in 2015 only 3,300 employees remained on the payroll, with another 12,000 workers at separate companies linked to the mill. Wages, once considerably ab
ove the norm, now were comparable to those at other area businesses. The great heroic days of socialist construction and the fight for faith and freedom were over. The mill had become ordinary, like many others across Europe and the United States, employing a modest-sized workforce, providing only a small percentage of the output of its parent company, and facing the challenge of a worldwide glut of steelmaking capacity—the result of many countries, especially China, still seeing steelmaking as a prerequisite to national greatness and modernity.55
Global Giantism
During the era when American companies moved to smaller, dispersed factories and the Soviet Union stuck to the giant factory model, spreading it to Eastern Europe, very large factories continued to be built and acclaimed in other parts of the world, too. Some giant factories operated in Western Europe, most notably in Germany. There also were some very large factories in the developing world.
Today, the largest automobile factory in the world is in Wolfsburg, Germany, where 72,000 workers at a 1,600-acre industrial complex turn out 830,000 Volkswagens a year. With nearly 600,000 employees worldwide, including 270,000 in Germany, the Wolfsburg workforce represents only 12 percent of the company total.56 Still, no other company in Europe or North America concentrates so many workers at one site.
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