The present edited volume is a collection of the results of a conference dedicated to patterns of public spheres in Soviet-type societies that was held in 2002 at Berlin’s Marc Bloch Center, a Franco-German institute for Social Research co-financed by the French and German governments that has shown a considerable engagement in social science research on Central and East European topics in the past years. After an overview article on public spheres in Soviet and post-Soviet societies by Germen sociologist Ingrid Oswald and her colleague from St. Petersburg, Viktor Voronkov, the volume contains twelve case studies written mainly by young (doctoral and post-doctoral) researchers from various East and West-European countries and the US. Their empirical contributions – seven of which are written in German and five in English – are framed by an introductory and a concluding chapter by the editors, which are available in both languages.
The contributions treat a variety of cases taken from the Soviet Union (on communist Moscow’s self-staging through city planning by Monica Rüthers; the city’s most important culture and recreation park by Katharina Kucher; the phenomena of expressing self-critique under Stalin by Lorenz Erren; and on public spaces in Soviet communal apartments by Ekaterina Gerasimova) and Central Europe (articles on art in Czechoslovakia and the GDR by Dieter Segert and Juliana Raupp; the East German Evangelical church’s institutionalisation in the public sphere by Michael Haspell; Catholic versus communist mass mobilization (efforts) by Izabelle Main; national narratives, self-images and the socialist public sphere by José M. Faraldo; female secret service collaborators’ perception of the Catholic counter culture in Hungary by Árpád von Klimó; and on the memory of 1956 in Hungary by Heino Nyyssönen), as well as a contribution dealing with the dynamics of communist propaganda in post-war China by Lorenz Bichler.
The common focus of all of the collection’s contributions is the crucial question of identifying spheres and spaces of publicity and liberty (however limited), even in seemingly totalitarian, i.e., relatively closed, one-party and non-pluralist societies such as socialist Central and Eastern Europe and communist China. To what degree can spheres of publicity actually be discerned in these societies, and how can they be analyzed? The editors’ point of departure is the claim that political processes and actors alone cannot explain social change, even though the political sphere is, of course, extremely important, especially in super-politicized societies such as communist ones. Instead, it is claimed that the dynamics of state-public interactions and the ongoing processes of redefining (mostly implicit) rules and boundaries of political legitimacy is of crucial importance, not only for explaining the respective countries’ social and political development under communist rule, but also their paths of transformation up to the present.
However, the authors concentrate not only on clearly discernable autonomous spheres such as counter cultures (dissident and religious environments, etc.), but rather on what the editors call “majority spaces,” i.e., places and spheres of mass mobilization, either of official, political or of seemingly unpolitical nature; in other words: any location where gatherings were allowed, including state-created public spaces. Thus, instead of focusing only on either ideological or anti-regime spheres and discourses, the volume is able to present a plurality of public spaces that do not always coincide with the common (Western) notions of public and private. The latter are therefore deemed unsuited for the analysis of strongly politicized, but nonetheless never fully closed, unified and state-controlled societies such as the ones treated here.
In this context, a number of theoretical, methodological and terminological issues and problems are raised by the volume’s authors. First of all, the common definition of the terms “publicity,” “public” and “private” are largely perceived as Western categories, and are questioned with regard to the analysis of Soviet-type societies, as well as a narrow concept of culture. Whereas Habermas’ well-known notion of publicity is widely rejected as being too normative and incompatible with societies lacking an old and stable market tradition, Clifford Geertz’s conception of thick description, in line with a broad notion of culture (understood as frameworks and patterns of perception and interpretation, as mental maps governing social behaviour and interaction) is fruitfully adopted and applied by more than one of the contributions. A good example is Monica Rüthers’ study of the changes and dynamics of the dominant communication models with regard to city planning and public places in Moscow between 1917 and 1964. In her article, Rüthers not only gives thick descriptions of various public spaces but also discerns three distinguished spheres of publicity (the official, the everyday, and the intimate, private spheres), as well as their implications on people’s inner and outer being-in-the-world. Phenomena such as the well-known role models of private person (friendly) and official citizen (unfriendly) based on split personalities are also observed by other authors in the volume. In this context, Ingrid Oswald and Viktor Voronkov point at the limitations of communication research faced by social scientists in post-Soviet societies wherever qualitative approaches are used (especially open interview questions), since respondents either do not want to communicate personal information, or do not expect researchers to understand them unless they are part of their personal social networks (Pp. 44-45).
In her contribution, Ekaterina Gerasimova explicitly highlights the constructed nature and thereby the context-dependent meaning of the terms private and public themselves, giving way to a more open approach to phenomena of public spaces in Soviet-type societies. Her study of everyday life in Soviet communal apartments, besides other interesting findings, discerns different degrees of publicity as a result of a mixing of traditionally private and public spaces. Additionally, she is able to show the development of specific logics and value systems within these “forced communities” – for example, the inhabitants of Soviet kommunalki developed a rather well-defined sense of personal territory and belongings. As a result, in a place where individual property was practically nonexistent and where people thus should have been expected to be particularly close to the communist ideals of sharing their everyday lives and property, the worth of personal property paradoxically grew quite unproportionally (P. 175).
Here, as in other contributions, the well-known phenomena of double or even triple standards, models and spheres of communication (official-political, inofficial-unpolitical and private) become visible once more. As a general conclusion, several case studies observe the fact that the larger the distance between official and private discourse, the lower the official discourse’s legitimacy. This is why, as a rule, discerning patterns of interaction at the crossroads of public and private realms, as well as the rules governing the unofficial ones (especially during the times of Stalin and Khrushchev) proves to be particularly informing and particularly interesting. Even though the generally unfree life in most Soviet-type societies was perceived by many of its citizens as relatively free in the absence of any suitable point of comparison (P. 52), many of the ersatz-public spheres described by the authors of this volume prove to function as mediums of inner change with considerable impact on large parts of the respective societies as a whole in the long-term perspective.
Moreover, a whole number of synchronic developments can be identified in all Soviet-type societies (P. 15). On the basis of the contributions’ generally very high empirical and theoretical quality, the editors speak out legitimately against considering public space and dictatorship as contradictions, and in contrast promote a more differentiated view with regard to the categories and methods of historical and social science research on totalitarian societies. By developing more dynamic models and frameworks of analysis than the traditional normative ones and by putting public spheres into larger national and historical contexts, the inner logics and mechanisms of interaction and communication in Soviet-type societies become more clearly visible, along with their enduring effects and implications on the region’s actual modes of transition and democratization.
To sum up, going beyond traditional notions of public spheres, the present volume’s dynamic concept of culture and publicity sheds light on further dimensions of the issue. It impressively demonstrates the limits of rule and control in public spheres and the changing tectonics of fragmented public spaces over time. In doing so, it raises more questions than answers – which can be considered an indication of good research. Among the most important questions cited by the editors themselves on the basis of the case studies presented here is the question of whether we are dealing with another specific “structural transformation of the public sphere” (in Habermasian terminology) or whether the Soviet form of public sphere appears as a new and unique type of phenomenon (P. 427). These contributions therefore help pave the way for a new wave of inspiring structuralist, as well as constructivist research.