Sztálinváros (Stalin-City), or Dunaújváros as it is known today, was a utopian city project. It was the prototype for a new socialist life in post-war Hungary. Today it is an industrial city not so much spinning among the clouds as shrouded in urban fog. Sándor Horváth makes this city the focus of his latest book, Stalinism Reloaded. He offers a kaleidoscopic vision of the city's early development and the various forces that shaped life here.
The urban world and urban design is of particular interest for scholars at present. Projects such as the Second World Urbanity network, run by Steven E. Harris and Daria Bocharnikova, have encouraged us to “shatter a common image of the socialist cityscape as necessarily dull and grey, and offer a revised understanding of its limitations and achievements” (for this quote and the one following, see the project website at http://www.secondworldurbanity.org/about-2/). It now appears reductive to separate out the study of utopian visions from construction, the study of blueprints from lived experience, or the study of plans from praxis. This approach extends on Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), which was the first work to examine through the study of a new socialist city how ordinary people engaged with ideological visions. Keen to shed as much light on the parameters of such projects as on their power, Harris and Bocharnikova argue that we must strive to explore the “conceiving, building, importing, and inhabiting of socialist cities.” The same argument can be found at the heart of Stalinism Reloaded.
Personal journeys pepper Horváth's account, not just incorporating the human story but presenting it as an essential component in the development of this socialist city project. Sztálinváros the idea—the administrative order—is introduced alongside Ilona and Jano, two young people who had a rough start in life and travelled to the city in 1950 in search of new opportunities and work. These “settlers” (2) are shown to bring with them social perspectives and ideas that were to be absorbed into this new, chaotic socialist world. The new, improved template for living that was Sztálinváros could never be as clinical as its architects imagined. As Horváth notes, “[a] city is not created exclusively by administrative orders or by dredging machines and cranes, but also by people's imaginations, their ideas of a new urban community, and the myths that nurture the notion of unity” (15).
Pushing against the more restrictive elements of the Soviet subjectivity school that emerged after Magnetic Mountain, Horváth notes that “the protagonists of this book are not set behind barred windows … but rather in staircases that smell of cooed cabbage” (5). Like Steven Harris in Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Washington DC and Baltimore, 2012), and myself in Living the Revolution: Urban Communes and Soviet Socialism, 1917-1932 (Oxford, 2016), Horváth mines the space between authority and autonomy in order to better understand why things developed the way they did, embracing contradiction and confusion as part of history. Ordinary people are shown to play a role in the development of Sztálinváros, be it through direct demands, social expectations, or even subtle, unconscious, or uncoordinated means. The point is that certain ideas can (sometimes quite unpredictably) meet resistance or gain traction based on the social context in which they are implemented.
Horváth eschews a linear narrative. Instead, he pursues a thematic approach in a deliberate and considered attempt to show how urban identity, space, and policy were formed and reformed in Sztálinváros. Myth is one theme: this new city, with its new ways of doing things, shown to draw together the modernity of urban planning and stories of ancient past settlements, helped to forge a local identity. Districts is another theme: though stylistically uniform, different parts of the city are shown to develop their distinct character, molded by their inhabitants. Spontaneous and unpredictable development, Horváth explains, had a greater impact after 1953, as de-Stalinization suddenly made local and social difference more acceptable—less of an ideological taboo. It was then, Horváth argues, that Stalinism was “reloaded” (75), as other practices and local circumstances had to be integrated into Stalin-City.
The book also looks at how official rhetoric on the rural-urban divide compared to blurred realities on the ground, as well as evolving attitudes to marriage and the family, abortion, divorce, entertainment and bars, hooliganism, and prostitution. In each case Sztálinváros is presented as “a case study of the interplay between government power and social power, and their mutual accommodation” (270). For instance, Horváth insists that the high abortion rate in Sztálinváros was “the product of an unofficial agreement between state policymakers and the local residents” (154). Family and state interests overlapped–local expectations combined with policymakers’ need for stability and their desire to legitimize the modernist principles upon which Sztálinváros was founded.
As such, Horváth captures the manner of Sztálinváros development and the multiple voices that helped shape it along the way. This book is essential reading for those interested in both the idea and everyday experience of the socialist city.
