Socialist Escapes: Breaking Away from Ideology and Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 ed. by Cathleen M. Giustino, Catherine J. Plum, and Alexander Vari (review)

Since the collapse of communism, scholars have fruitfully explored issues related to the consumption of goods and popular culture under socialism. Yet with a few notable exceptions, very little has been written about the relationship among leisure, ideology, and consent during the waning years of communism in Eastern Europe. As such Socialist Escapes fills a major gap in the literature on the history of the everyday in the socialist bloc. As the authors of this edited volume suggest, leisure pursuits provided East Europeans with opportunities for escape from both the everyday and from socialist ideology. Over time, they argue, such escapes posed a challenge to the communist authorities as they allowed people to construct meanings and carve out spaces that were relatively autonomous from official demands and ideologies.

The collection begins with an introduction by Alexander Vari and concludes with a reflection by Cathleen M. Giustino on the complex nature of leisure under socialism. Together the two essays provide thoughtful bookends to the analytically rich and tightly conceived individual articles. In the first chapter, David G. Tompkins compares music festivals in East Germany with those in Poland, arguing that in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), music festivals offered a break from the socialist quotidian but not from socialist ideology. Music festivals in Poland, by contrast, offered a break both from the everyday and from communist ideology. Turning to Czechoslovakia, Cathleen M. Giustino explores the gaps between official aims and actual visitor experiences at castle museums before 1960. When authorities began to prioritize recreation, Patrice M. Dabrowski similarly notes in her piece on camping and other forms of leisure in Poland’s Bieszczady Mountains, shortages and other issues plagued their efforts. Instead of providing opportunities to woo citizens, such tensions between the promised benefits and the reality of “actually existing socialism” further eroded support for the regime.

Several of the authors focus on ways in which officials gave in to popular desires. In Bulgaria, observes Mary Neuburger, authorities tolerated the use of tobacco and alcohol during vacations—activities that provided the population with a means of escaping the pressures of the modernizing socialist state. And, as Mark Keck-Szajbel shows in his study of hitchhiking (or autostop) in Poland, authorities decided to lend official support to what was already a popular practice. Such support was part and parcel of their efforts to control the leisure pursuits of the population and, at the same time, to build a mobile industrialized society by providing access to automobility in an economy plagued by shortages.

The last section focuses on the latter years of the socialist bloc. Alexander Vari looks at nightlife in Budapest in the 1970s and 1980s, arguing that it consisted of three basic types: luxury hotels and nightclubs built to attract foreign visitors; controlled leisure spaces, such as the Ifipark entertainment complex, which was designed to instill Hungarian youth with proper socialist values; and nonconformist youth culture, such as punk rock bands like Beatrice and Coitus Punk Group (CPG). By the mid-1980s, the last form of leisure was clearly more popular than the other two. In a complementary study, Caroline Fricke focuses on motorcycle fans at the Bergring races in East Germany, where authorities sought to control the races by excluding youths who were considered to be threatening, such as so-called Blueser and heavy metal fans. Such youths responded by establishing their own parallel leisure spaces, including campsites where they could drink and socialize unobserved by authority figures. Finally, in a fascinating exploration of soccer stadiums in Romania, Florin Poenaru argues that the stadium was a site where the regime could display and construct, as Poenaru puts it, “the imaginary unity, grandeur, and omnipotence of the regime” (241). Yet stadiums were also the sites where opposition to that image...