Creating and Domesticating Hungary’s Socialist Industrial Landscape: From Dunapentele to Sztálinváros, 1950-1958

Pittaway, Mark (2005). Creating and Domesticating Hungary’s Socialist Industrial Landscape: From Dunapentele to Sztálinváros, 1950-1958. Historical Archaeology, 39(3) pp. 75–93.

URL: http://www.sha.org/publications/ha-sha/2005.cfm#fa...

Abstract

Eastern Europe’s socialist new cities have been seen as embodying “politicized landscapes”; in other words, landscapes created by socialist dictatorships according to their own ideological purposes. The region’s socialist new cities were indeed identified as distinctively socialist landscapes, but the processes by which they came to be understood as such by the citizens of socialist states were far more complex than top-down accounts allow. The reactions of both builders and residents of the Hungarian new city of Sztélinvéros (Stalin City) to the urban form are examined in order to show how the city came to be seen as a distinctively socialist industrial landscape. Employing an approach based on a dialogue between the methods of historical archaeology and social history is employed, demonstrating that an examination of popular responses to material culture can reveal much about state socialism in Eastern Europe and its nature.

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