New Perspectives on East European Labor History: An Introduction

In the last three decades, the analytical categories of class and labor often appeared as having lost their luster for many social scientists and historians. This is especially true for scholars working on Eastern Europe, where after the fall of state socialist regimes the language of class was frequently presented as exhausted and burdened by political misuse. The instrumentalization of class was a protracted one, practiced first and foremost by the state socialist elites and subsequently by the postsocialist authorities. The communist party-states conceived of workers almost exclusively as a politically united and combative historical actor endowed with pregiven purpose. The communists ruled in the name of the working classes, and it was of the utmost importance for the official historiographies to follow the teleological assumptions of steady growth of the labor movement and the relentless march toward socialism. On the other hand, postsocialist political elites were keen to portray workers as victims of totalitarian states or, alternatively, as accomplices in the preservation of the communist rule. The dominant historiographical framings after 1989 were willing to recognize workers' struggles only if they could offer credence to the master narratives of national resistance to communism. Otherwise, the working class was deemed an outdated concept, a subject of the party-state, holding little analytical value at the dawn of unbridled consumerism, individualization, and politics based on national identity.¹ Such perspectives rarely attributed agency to workers, while fetishizing a yet to be constituted middle class that David Ost terms "a vague concept signaling the prosperity and stability promised, but far from realized, by the postcommunist project."²

The intellectual climate started to change at the turn of the twenty-first century. The first highly visible traces of historians reconsidering the role of labor in modern East European history came in 2005 with the publication of an edited volume and a special journal issue. The former, titled Arbeiter im Staatssozialismus: Ideologischer Anspruch und Soziale Wirklichkeit (Workers in State Socialism: Ideological Claim and Social Reality), contains chapters in German and English.³ The latter is an issue of the journal International Labor and Working Class History dedicated to labor in post–World War II Central and Eastern Europe and edited by the late Mark Pittaway.⁴ Despite gathering an impressive number of case studies, the editors of Arbeiter im Staatssozialismus were cautious in their appraisal of the possibility of separating the lived experience of different layers of workers from the official propaganda. For Pittaway and a cohort of like-minded pioneering researchers who published their first works on the (gendered) socialist proletariat in the late 1990s and early 2000s, such as Padraic Kenney, Malgorzata Fidelis, and Eszter Z. Tóth, it was exactly the relationship between the socialist state and industrial labor that was decisive for altering the view of state socialism in Eastern Europe as a static system ruled over by monolithic parties.⁵ Inspired by the theoretical postulates of Alltagsgeschichte (everyday history),⁶ this cohort of authors unpacked the ideological construct of the socialist working class by examining negotiations in everyday situations and concrete locations.

As Susan Zimmermann points out, this wave of research at the turn of the century, which managed to revive interest in Eastern European labor, focused almost exclusively on the period between the end of World War II and "the turn" in 1989. One of the reasons for this was the authors' understanding of state socialism as a "quintessentially labor-oriented social formation."⁷ For communist parties the industrial proletariat was not just the most important political constituency, in the sense of Western electoral democracy, but the bearer of new social relations and the agent of revolutionary transformation. The existence of a settled, skilled working class was therefore much more than a simple by-product of industrialization and urbanization processes. The creation of the modern proletariat was one of the main goals of economic development and a key prerequisite of socialism. The initial studies were thus interested in the shaping of the socialist working class as a specific...