Past and Present Intertwined in Post-Socialist Hungary

Luca Szollosi

For former socialist countries like Hungary, the year 1989 brought about many changes and the promise of the “good Western life”. Drawing on primarily Krisztina Fehérváry’s ethnographic analysis of former socialist model town Dunaújváros, this essay investigates the impacts of the end of the socialist era and the subsequent transition to a market economy in Hungary on urban landscapes and identities, with a focus on how people related to their domestic spaces. In an attempt to challenge the conventional, often antithetical notions surrounding the regime change, my goal is to offer a glimpse of how Hungarian people came to realise their new status in the world economy by re-socialising and appropriating their homes in line with shifting socioeconomic trends; their expectations and ideals, and how they responded to the reality of the transition. In doing so, my larger aim is to give a sense of how the anthropology of the post-socialist built environment can help in understanding how people materially mediate their internalised conceptions of their changing status in the world.

Introduction

The socialist state transformed landscapes through the construction of a built environment that both reflected and materialized its ideology in order to help fulfil its utopian project of creating a new, modern, socialist society. Hungary, having been under Soviet control for over forty years itself, was also a part of this ambitious civilising mission, resulting in radical changes in Hungarian urban spaces as well. The year 1989 marks a turning point in history, with the raising of the Iron Curtain ending the long-standing ideological, metaphorical and physical divide between East and West during the Cold War, the fall of state socialism and the beginning of fundamental changes in the world system. For formerly socialist countries like Hungary, the events of ’89 and the early 1990s had brought about the promise of change for the better and the opportunity to finally live the “good Western life” within reach. Drawing on ethnographic analysis, primarily relying on Krisztina Fehérváry’s work done on former socialist model town Dunaújváros, the aim of this essay is to investigate the impacts of the end of the socialist era and the transition to market economy in Hungary on urban landscapes and identities, with a particular focus on relating to domestic spaces.

By combining a historical approach with a material culture theoretical framework, I will discuss how residents of a town that could be considered a physical remnant of socialism came to realise their new status in the world economy by re-socialising and appropriating their domestic spaces to fit the new state of existence and standards. I will first unravel the effects of the civilising and modernising mission of the socialist state and the materialisation of Marxist ideology from the 1950s until 1989 in architecture, with reference to the project of creating a New Man. Further, I shed light on the discrepancies between the state’s intentions that structured the material conditions created and how people actually came to conceptualise them. Having looked at how residents themselves thought about their homes and what they associated them with, I argue that the material preferences of subjects incorporated into the neoliberal political economy were pre-existing before the regime change – that is, people’s aspirations for a “normal”, modern life post-1989 had been fostered since, and emerged out the promises of state socialism. Upon the transition to a democratic and capitalist politico-economic system, people had aspirations for a type of ‘normalcy’ stemming from idealised models of a historically specific Euro-American, modern material world. At the same time, these aspirations were also deeply rooted within a century-old nationalist historical struggle for the ascent of an autonomous nation-state with a strong, democratic bourgeoisie stratum and a justified European identity. I unpack the post-socialist transition as a gradual process characterised by uncertainty and show how the fluidity of certain mentalities, imageries and predispositions manifested in people’s engagement with their material world. Yet in doing so, I reveal the consistency in people’s aspirations and insistence on ‘living normally’. Overall, my intention is to emphasise how the anthropology of post-socialist built environment and can help in understanding how people materially mediate their internalised conceptions of their changing status in the world. I hope to demonstrate that the change in Hungary cannot be thought of as merely a binary one-way linear progression into the future away from the past, because the narratives of socialist past has potent implications for how it will unfold.

1989 – A break from the past, or a bridge between past and future?

1989 has been regarded as a turning point in history, as it is the year marking the “regime change” in Hungary and most other Eastern European countries previously under Soviet control. In other words, it marked fall of state socialism and the beginning of the transition to and market economy and a democratic political system. The significance of that year echoes in current Hungarian government discourse, characterised as the triumph of justice and freedom over decades of oppression, and the fulfilment of the desire for an autonomous, sovereign nation. Hungarian historical consciousness is fuelled by a conceptualisation of their history as a constant struggle for autonomy and maintaining national integrity against oppressive powers (Benziger 2000), and at last the country was given the opportunity to develop in a ‘normal’, Western and democratic way (Nyyssönen 1999). I suggest that whilst the perception of the events of 1989 as the continuation and achievement of these goals that had been fostered for decades, is idealistic and sentimental, this way of thinking about 1989 – as a huge step in a long-continued process - can be useful in understanding how people conceptualised this historical, economic, and social transition (Palonen 2011).

Many have critiqued the ongoing tendency to describe the tensions of the Cold War between East and West, socialism and capitalism in terms of metaphorical binary distinctions such as totalitarianism vs. democracy, oppression vs. freedom, public vs. private, state vs. people, lies vs. truth, bad vs. good etc., so as to sharply reproduce and reinforce the divide that had been drawn geospatially and ideologically (Yurchak 2006). Such antithetical conceptualisation, however, not only removes the agency and subjectivity of the subjects of socialist regimes (Holbraad 2014), but it also assumes the independency of the oppositional ideologies from each other, obscuring their historical and political entanglement and interactions with one another (Fehérváry 2013). Moreover, since the collapse of state socialism:

   “…the spatial Cold War divide has been reconstructed as a temporal one, with the region’s (communist) past being opposed to a (capitalist) postsocialist future. This view has obscured continuities within the region as well as connections across this geopolitical divide. Rather than understand “postsocialism” as a phenomenon unique to the former socialist states, it should be seen as part of a wider shift to neoliberal policies and rising corporate power that were fortified ideologically by the fall of socialism and economically by the opening of formerly socialist consumer and labor markets.” (Fehérváry 2013:21)

Bunce and Csanádi (1993) also emphasise that this transition cannot be thought of in isolation from other, external historico-political phenomena, and propose that a crucial feature of the period following 1989 is fluidity. The notion of fluidity suggests that whilst the “regime change” was admittedly a series of dramatic events, it was nevertheless not fully unanticipated and did not represent a complete breach from the past; it was characterised by the interactions between the pressures for swift and radical transformation and the fact that the residues of state socialism cannot be undone overnight. The tension between the promise of the Western “good life” finally brought within reach, accelerating the need for large-scale and swift social and economic change versus the burdens of state socialist past such as massive foreign debt, the centralisation and state monopoly of goods production and distribution preventing economic competition and the poor quality and deterioration of infrastructure and built environment, etc. resulted in many contradictions and an overall state of uncertainty. Indeed, however excitedly people greeted the regime change, they were quickly disappointed with the new system as they realised that immediate improvements would not happen as they envisioned. In fact, the majority of the population only experienced the negative effects the regime change, such as mass unemployment, increased prices, the decline of welfare institutions – essentially, the withering of a significant safety net and a dramatic widening of the gaps between social strata and increased social disparities resulting in status anxiety and general existential insecurities (Berend 2009). This was largely due to the fact that the sudden political turn was not immediately followed by economic and social transformations of the same pace. Because the consequences of the last decades following a vastly divergent politico-economic trajectory became so pronounced, the socialist past could not have been considered to be entirely over, yet the present and future were uncertain and incomplete as they were “not yet materialized” (Bunce & Csanádi., 1993:252). It is at this point that I turn to discuss what was in fact, materialised.

Ideology Concretised

A fundamental aspect of the Soviet revolutionary agenda was the creation of a modern, utopian socialist society, for which a key task was the transformation of its subject into Socialist New Men and Women (Kharkhordin 1999). The power of material conditions in influencing and determining people’s behaviour and subjectivity is an idea shared by both social scientists and Marxist historical materialists.  The Soviet state recognised the possibility of reinforcing, transforming or creating particular social beings and moral values through their interactions with their dwellings. Therefore, architecture became a crucial medium and the material basis for the socio-psychological transformation in which the socialist ideology could be concretised (Humphrey 2005).

As demonstrated by Krisztina Fehérváry (2013), this was particularly potent in the case of Dunaújváros (originally named Sztálinváros – ‘City of Stalin’), a planned city in Hungary, specifically designed to be a socialist model town in 1951. Dunaújváros was home to a steel factory, reflecting the state’s age-old objective of becoming an industrial superpower, as well as being emblematic of the Soviet state’s intention of transforming the material environment to also construct a new socialist identity. To achieve the socialist state’s civilising mission of fashioning its subject to “turn agricultural workers and a downtrodden urban working class into a modern, civilized workforce” (2013:67), the entire layout of the city and the style of buildings were to reflect the totality of socialist ideology. The different spheres of life, production/labour and consumption/residential life as organised around the lifestyle of the working class were segmented into separate niches. Notably, dwellings had been purposefully designed with no gardens to make private food production impossible, and green areas were only to be used for recreational purposes (Pittaway 2005). Among the most robust additions to the urban landscape were the massive, grey, five to ten-story residential blocks of flats made of concrete panels from the late ‘50s, with standardised apartment sizes and floor plans. Therefore, the entire urban landscape was intended to embody and nourish the notion of collectivity and egalitarianism.

And yet, arising from several causal factors, the socialist urban landscape failed to produce the citizens as intended. One reason can be attributed to the simple fact that has been widely emphasised among social scientists that “human beings are rarely transformed by material forms according to the intentions of architects or designers” (Fehérváry 2013:13), and as much as buildings are useful for stabilising certain social institutions and behaviours, they do so imperfectly – they “don’t just sit there imposing themselves. They are forever objects of (re)interpretation, narration and representation” (Gieryn 2002:35). Socialist built forms undoubtedly:

“…did continue actively to contribute to the conceptual worlds of Soviet people. But the process was not straightforward, for the structures and surfaces of the infrastructure acted not as templates for generating the designated idea but like reflectors that deflected it and made it swerve aside.” (Humphrey 2005:40)

In the case of Dunaújváros and Hungary, this manifested in the clash between the expectations and reality of socialist life, from both the state and society’s part. The elimination of virtually all forms of private property apart from smaller personal objects and the home, if allocated one, resulted in the concentration of one’ entire ‘private sphere’ within the household, with the home representing an inalienable right to have. Consequently, by the 1970s, such a sharp and materially visible distinction between public and private led to Hungarian society being “characterised by a deepening ideological divide between the public of the state and the “private” of family and individual interests” (Fehérváry 2013:110), instead of being concerned with the collective, the original objective of state socialism. In addition, the material base of architecture arguably did influence people’s behaviour, but the response generated was counter to the original objectives– instead of embracing the collectivist project of the built environment, the monotonous uniformity and impersonality of it caused people to strive to “transform the interiors of apartments into heterotopic private spaces utterly distinct from the building that surrounded them” (ibid. p.16) and re-appropriate their homes aesthetically to identify themselves, as well as conceal the indicators of the presence of an oppressive authority (Miller 1988).

However, it is important to address the fact that the socialist state had in fact, a paradoxical yet quite significant role in catalysing and furthering these individual ventures. As the legitimacy of socialism’s success depended on the state-controlled mass production of goods, part of the state’s agenda in creating a new utopian society was to cultivate citizens with high demands for products, and to encourage subjects to engage with such state-produced goods so as to reproduce and perpetuate the system and indulge in the intended lifestyle of an ideal modern socialist subject. The promotion of consumerism was therefore an inherent part of legitimising socialist propaganda, and the state fashioned its citizens to appropriate modern commodities and fostered high expectations for specific modern material worlds. The reason this project backfired and did not yield the ideological predicted results is because although the discourse around these promoted material worlds was that they would enable everyone to appropriate these commodities in a way that would help them transform themselves into members of a modern socialist society, the state was never able to fulfil its promises of the ‘good life’. As explained by Fehérváry

   “…many products simply failed to fulfil their promised function because they were produced out of inappropriate materials or were so poorly designed that they created intense aggravation.[…]While in official discourse quantity was prioritized over quality by the aim of providing equitably for all, in practice the sacrifice of quality (which did not always result in satisfactory quality) was understood as reflecting the state’s judgement of the quality of the people, who were supposed to be grateful for the substandard goods “thrown” at them.” (ibid. 2013:127)

The lifestyle the state was so eager to promote and the high expectations they fostered was something they could not live up to, as neither the quality nor the variety of products satisfied the expectations of citizens. The poor quality of goods and the lack of options point to another systemic issue, arising yet again from ideological concerns, namely that the mass production of uniform goods better expressed the socialist state’s goal for collectivity and efficiency. However, egalitarianism and classlessness never actually came into fruition, partly because housing allocation itself was contingent upon one’s profession, creating a new form of social stratification, and the promotion of this particular consumerism only resulted in social distinctions between groups based on tastes in materialities – instead, people perceived this standardisation of material products as the standardisation of the people consuming them, homogenising the needs and demands of individuals (Fehérváry 2009). An important phenomenon arising from this was a form of resistance, particularly among the intelligentsia, white-collar workers and educated professionals who associated themselves with the historic bourgeois middle-class citizens of the country. To emphasise their distinctive status, they aligned themselves with materialities that were as far from the socialist aesthetic as possible and organised their private spheres in ways that reflected their ‘true identities’ (Fehérváry 2011).

Because the state was the sole source of production and distribution, it was the only body of power that could be held accountable for failing to provide – this resulted in the increasing disappointment and discontent with a state already perceived as oppressive. As the disillusioning quality of material conditions became indicators of neglect and authority, this caused citizens to be even more entitled to invest in their private, domestic spaces in an attempt to distance themselves from what the state represented.

The Promises of Neoliberalism for the Bourgeois-Citizenry and the Transition to Market Economy

Amidst the context of nourished expectations of a “modern good life”, the socialist era came to an end in 1989, and Hungary could finally begin to settle into what was perceived as the ‘normal’ world order in its transition to a democratic market economy, after an over 40-year-long forced detour. Yet, although state socialism no longer existed, the expectations and preferences it had created – either as an intended or unintented response – continued to contribute to and influence people’s conceptualisation of theirs and their country’s new status in the world.

   “…a European standard became the measure of an idealized identity not only in the project of reuniting with Europe in the present, but for many, to reconnect Hungary with its own presocialist, bourgeois-democratic historical trajectory – one that communist rule has distorted.” (Fehérváry 2013:44)

Because the goods and built environment produced by the socialist state were so politically charged, a visceral initial response to the collapse of state socialism was to undo as much of it as possible by promptly eliminating all symbols and reminders of the oppressive Soviet regime from public spaces (statues, street names, etc.), as a means to  ‘de-communise’ urban landscapes. The symbolic erasure of the old regime along with the renovation of historic landmarks and buildings emphasising the pre-socialist history of a region was something that was characteristic of post-socialist cities attempting to construct their new, post-socialist identities and legitimise their new position in the world economy (Young & Kaczmarek 2008). Hungary’s longing for its European identity to be recognised dictated that “the country must strive to become what it would or should have been if its history had followed a “normal” course” (Fehérváry 2013:45) – therefore, it was not only that the country wanted or had to integrate into Europe, it was that it was the normal, customary thing to do all along. This “normalising discourse” thus also became central to individuals’ perception of what the new standard is – and accordingly, people as individuals also began to re-socialise their own private spaces.

If anywhere, these aspirations were even more pronounced in the case of Dunaújváros, which, having emerged out of state socialism with no pre-socialist history to evoke, stood as a physical remnant and index of Soviet oppression. According to Fehérváry (2013), the residents were aware of this, being under “the double burden of trying to incorporate the city into a Hungarian landscape that was itself being incorporated into a European one” (2013:2), so they felt responsible for contributing to the de-stigmatisation of their city by transforming their domestic spaces as well.

Especially because socialist buildings became even more disliked and metaphorically loaded, individuals’ ventures were highly motivated by the desire to move away from the distinctive material culture of state socialism and instead construct material worlds that would better reflect a more “dignified, European standard of living” (ibid, p.41). Some of the changes introduced by neoliberal capitalism, such as the privatisation of property, enabled people to buy their apartments and make larger modifications (like tearing down a wall, or adding one, changing the entrance door, etc.) and customise their living spaces with ceramic tiles and Western-style furniture, etc. But apart from these alterations within the residential buildings, changes in the urban landscape on the whole became visible. The intelligentsia’s aspirations during the socialist regime to somehow revive the historic bourgeois-citizenry continued to influence how people thought of the ideal modern society. As mentioned earlier, a corollary of the regime change was an increase in social stratification and dramatic changes in the social fabric of Hungary, and it certainly acted as an impetus for the well-educated middle class that began to be distinguished during the 1970s to further their goal of living according to their conceptualisation of the ‘normal’. These continued ventures materialised in the form of new neighbourhoods and the emergence of new housing forms. Hungarian historian Iván Berend argued that the deepening social disparities led to “growing socio-spatial segregation” (2009:209) and the rapid urbanisation and industrialisation characteristic of the socialist era began to slow down during the transition, and a period of suburbanisation and the construction of detached houses in the agglomeration areas of cities began to take place. Indeed, these suburban areas outside the city served as the ultimate spaces for the middle class to create private ‘spheres of normalcy’. The pinnacle of this was the detached family house with a garden, which was markedly different in both styles, shapes and materials from socialist buildings, and stood as the most direct way of resisting the collectivism of the past, as well as the most crucial indicator of a dignified, respectable middle-class life (Fehérváry 2011).

Citizens consciously attempted to create domestic environments that were of European standard that incorporated as many elements of an idealised Western material world into their homes as possible, in order to symbolically and materially justify their worthiness and competitiveness in a capitalist, globalised world order.  However, as mentioned earlier, the regime change did not yield the immediate and satisfying results people had hoped for, and they quickly realised that the new system was also failing to live up to their expectations. Fehérváry (2013) reasons that the shock of the unfulfilled promises of both regimes interlocked and accelerated citizens’ desires to distance themselves from the ‘abnormality’ of their country’s state and reinforced the urge to:

“…focus time and energy on creating spheres of normalcy in spaces within control. This furthered the inclination fostered during the socialist period to invest emotionally and financially in the domestic private sphere and remain detached from civic life.” (ibid. p.234.)

Therefore, what the idea of a detached family house represents is not only a means to reject and overwrite the past socialist aesthetic. Arguably it crystallised as the material base finally providing people of the middle class the chance to realise themselves in the new socio-economic order. But because the new order of post-socialist neoliberalism in Hungary was also disillusioning and fed into the discourse of the ‘abnormal’, arguably these spaces could also be thought of as “islands or fortified castles that shut out this new order when it failed to conform to expectations for normalcy” (2013:234).

Conclusion

The post-socialist transition to market economy in Hungary is characterised by great uncertainty and plasticity. In understanding it, it is not enough to know how things ought to be from now on, but also to remember how things had been before. As dramatic and radical the events of 1989 were, the narratives of socialism had not been entirely erased all at once. In fact they played an integral role in shaping post-socialist identities. European integration and catching up with the West was a crucial defining feature of the social and economic transformations in the 1990s, but this was supplemented by existing local and national aspirations, some fostered since state socialism, some even earlier. The political discourse for material culture the socialist state had created generated affective responses and an aesthetic opposing the one promoted by socialist propaganda. This aesthetic materialised aspirations to revive the historical Hungarian bourgeois-citizenry – the educated middle class that was indicative of Hungary’s justified position in the European Union as a democratic, autonomous nation-state with modern, progressive citizens. The distinctions cultivated by the state in material qualities and the people aligned with them during socialism, as well as the resistance it generated, continued to influence people’s consumer culture after the fall of state socialism. Because state socialism imprinted its ideology on Hungary’s urban landscape, an essential task of the new regime and the citizens was to transform their built environment so that it was representative of the new order and the new standards that finally enabled the country to follow a ‘normal’ developmental path. However, what people had hoped to be ‘normal’ was not experienced as such, and the confusion and insecurity that evolved caused people to find refuge from the uncertainty and abnormality of Hungary’s public sphere in their private spheres. With external circumstances being unstable, the response is investing in the home, and creating spheres of normalcy inside - a practice that is familiar from the socialist past.

List of figures

Figure 1. – Fortepan/Vizsnyicai Erzsébet
Figure 2. – Árpád Végh, 2017., https://epiteszforum.hu/weiner-a-mintaepitesz
Figure 3. – from Fehérváry, K., 2011. The Materiality of the New Family House in Hungary: Postsocialist Fad or Middle‐class Ideal?. City & Society, 23(1), p.22

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