Coping with the Unwanted Past in Planned Socialist Towns: Visaginas, Tychy, and Nowa Huta

The article examines three cases of planned socialist towns: Visaginas in Lithuania and Tychy and Nowa Huta in Poland. The planned socialist towns, products of the socialist urban planning, were known as the workers‟ towns in the workers‟ state and as the outposts of socialism. After the fall of their respective socialist regimes, however, it became necessary to redefine the identities of these towns in order to cope with the socialist past. While the issue of socialist heritage has been researched by scholars, this research addresses an existing gap in the theory – how socialist heritage is presently used in those planned socialist towns that have little other symbolic recourse available. This paper examines the content of various institutionally produced materials, such as websites, tourism brochures, photo albums, and guided tours. The research reveals different strategies used in planned socialist towns to redefine their identities: i) active forgetting of the socialist past; ii) commercialization of the socialist past via tourism; iii) ironic imitation of the West, vis-à-vis de–ideologized images of “green and young” towns; and iv) bifurcation of consciousness into private remembrance and public forgetting of the past. The article presents the findings of the research project, „Transformations of the Socialist Urban Utopias‟, funded by CERGE-EI (Centre for Economic Research and Graduate Education – Economics Institute) Foundation, Prague, Czech Republic

The challenges of renewed independence: The Baltic states since 1991

This article offers a comparative assessment of how successfully Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have coped with the challenges of renewed independence since 1991, focusing on various aspects of political, economic, and social development. In the post-communist context the Baltic states have clearly outpaced other former Soviet republics and also performed reasonably well in comparison to the countries of Eastern Europe. The convergence of the Baltic experience, which began already in the early 20th century, has continued in the recent past as well, as the three states have adopted a number of similar approaches in domestic politics, the search for security, and economic policy. They also face a number of similar unsolved problems, including considerable political alienation, tensions in relations with Russia, socioeconomic disparity, and demographic challenges. The most important difference in the issues confronting the Baltic states today continues to be the large non-Baltic, mainly Russian presence in Estonia and Latvia, a result of Soviet-era policies. How to effect the meaningful integration of a multiethnic society remains a continuing challenge in these two countries. In contrast, population shifts under Soviet rule never became massive in Lithuania, and ethnic relations are a minor issue there today