10.15. Socialist and Post-Socialist Memories: Labor, Land, and Everyday Life

"For the first time in post-war Poland, working people will act on their own behalf on this day, fighting for their rights". This sentence opens the appeal of the All-Poland Alliance of Trade Unions (OPZZ) before May Day in 1990. Meanwhile on May Day itself in Berlin, for the first time since 1946, trade unionists, politicians and residents from both sides of the city met at the Brandenburg Gate, where a joint rally organised by both East and West German trade unions took place. As the state socialist authorities withdrew from organising the ritual, the top-down ordained spectacles of their 'self-staging' came to an end (Kubik, 1989; Kunert, 2021; Mach, 1992). With that, the transformation of May Day rituals began – from a state ceremony into a site of negotiation of different visions of the past and political identities, whose axis is designated by both state socialist legacies and post-1990 transformational politics. In this paper, I compare the forms of May Day rituals in Warsaw and Berlin between 1990 and 2019, focusing on their organisational structures, scripts, spatial logic of performances, and long dureé of state socialist legacies. The analysis follows the events organised by trade union confederations that were successors to, or maintained continuity with, the state socialist organisations – OPZZ and the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) – situating them alongside alternative practices of social movements, political parties and state representatives. Drawing on archival query, press review and interviews with organisers, I argue that these performances provide a lens which focuses the process of identity (re)construction, staging of societal and labour conflicts, as well as framing the experiences of the transformation. Moreover, the comparative approach allows identification of common patterns of post-socialist ritual transformation, as well as their contextual manifestations.

In 1991, a land reform was carried out in the Republic of Armenia. As a result, a transition was made from state to private ownership, and the planned economy formed during the decades of the USSR gave way to a market economy. The proposed presentation will examine the anthropological aspects of the land reform, which in many cases shaped the outcomes of the reform. The presentation is based on the methodology of ethnographic research. It uses field ethnographic materials recorded by the author in around 350 rural settlements of the Republic of Armenia (in-depth individual interviews, focus-group interviews). Our studies show that agrarian reforms in different villages often took unexpected turns. The Soviet Union had already completed the transition from private to state ownership in the 1930s. One might assume that during seven decades the memories of the period when land was privately owned would have disappeared in the villages. However, land privatization showed the opposite and proved that memory—including the memory of the land—does not vanish but becomes latent. In many villages villagers demanded not simply to divide the land, but to be given back the orchards founded by their parents, because the Soviet Union had taken them away unjustly. Very often this led to serious clashes and conflicts among villagers, friends, and relatives. Sometimes letters were even written to the leadership of the republic. In the report we will examine—using concrete examples—the questions related to the role and importance of memory. We will also attempt to analyze how memory was able to “preserve and transmit” those realities that held significant importance for the family; in other words, how the “memory of the land” managed to survive in the Soviet Union even when that land had long since become state-owned and collective.

“The manor house stood on a hill behind a brick wall in which a freshly patched hole from a cannonball was visible. And the manor house was no longer actually a manor house, but a new school (…).” (Broniewska 1946: 5), we read in a post-war school textbook. It illustrates the transformative tendencies characteristic of the early stages of the socialist revolution in Poland. However, nationalised manor houses and palaces were most often assigned to the newly established State Farms (Państwowe Gospodarstwa Rolne, PGR), which were organised along the lines of Soviet sovkhozes and based on state land ownership (Kalm 2018). On a symbolic level, State Farms testified to the ongoing class revolution, in which palaces and manor houses – annexed for schools, kindergartens, workers’ housing, and cultural centres – came to serve workers from peasant families. In my presentation, I will focus on the social memory of childhood in State Farms, understood as spaces for the democratisation of social relations. Drawing on biographical interviews conducted with former PGR workers, I will explore both what constituted the experience of childhood in these environments – particularly in palaces adapted for State Farm use – and how these individuals narrativise their childhood memories. I will pay special attention to various forms of spontaneous practices involving children that challenged both old and new hierarchies. I understand the practices, following the Michel de Certeau’s, as activities that are “multiform, resistance, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude the discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised.” (de Certeau 1988: 96). This paper draws on oral history methodologies (Bornat and Thompson 2017) and the insights offered by new childhood studies (Spyrou 2018).

This study argues that in late socialist Romania, labor was not only an economic mandate but a core technology for molding and policing identity—especially for Romani communities. State ideology cast “useful work” as the measure of personhood and belonging, and redefined anyone outside factory or cooperative assignments as a “parasite.” The state deployed corrective measures including sedentarization, compulsory employment, and forcible relocation. In this system, Roma were positioned as the exemplary problem to be solved by work: traditional trades were reclassified as “non-labor,” mobility was reframed as deviance, and Romani women faced the triple burden of low-status jobs, reproductive oversight, and ethnic stigma. Factories, schools, and neighborhood committees collaborated in a network of everyday oversight on behalf of and with the state. The archives record this world not as neutral observation but as scripts for action with public trials, quotas, and “reeducation” through work. The archive recording these practices does not simply preserve them; it helps fabricate them. Case files, quotas, and scripted interventions fix Roma identity to state-made dualities—industrious/idle, modern/traditional—and thereby frame what can later be remembered and passed on as social fact. Reading these materials both with and against their grain shows how labor’s lexicon naturalized coercion and embedded ethnic stigma into the documentary record, even as fragmentary counter-voice expose its many fractures. Labor’s role in identity formation is inseparable from the conditions of memory and democracy: the same procedures that trained bodies into work also trained the categories through which Roma lives are recollected—and too often, misremembered.