Imagining the World from Behind the Iron Curtain: Youth and the Global Sixties in Poland

The colorful cover of Malgorzata Fidelis's Imagining the World from Behind the Iron Curtain: Youth and the Global Sixties in Poland entices the reader into a fascinating world of Polish youth of the long 1960s. The photo depicts two young women dressed in fashionable clothing holding flowers and posing in front of the Pałac Kultury (Palace of Culture) in Warsaw. They look joyous and optimistic, suggesting that Polish youth was forward looking, ready to embrace the changes of the modern world. It also offers a hint that the years of existing socialism were not necessarily only gray and oppressive. These years offered space for growth, at least to the young. The colors yellow, pink, red, and blue imposed onto the black-and-white photo of the young women imply that, in contrast to common perceptions, life and culture behind the Iron Curtain were not solely marked by isolation and suppression. The first pages of the book make this link more explicit as Fidelis explains that young people were “active participants in global conversations, including nonconformist lifestyles, experimentation with consumer products and technology, counterculture, and leftist politics” (p. 2). The Iron Curtain never became a sufficient obstacle for global conversations, and through its youth culture, Poland reexperienced at least a taste of transnational dialogue in the global 1960s.The book is based on the premise that youth culture is a fertile ground for the exploration of global connections. Fidelis portrays young people as conscious even if selective participants in both Western and global cultures. As the author shows, the processes that allowed young people to imagine themselves as participants of the world also provided them with the possibility of breaking away from the confines of their locality—either a city, a village, or a nation—which they often perceived as an impediment to their growth, self-expression, and social engagement. “Imaging the world played a critical role not only in shaping desires and practices but also in defining the broader relations between the state and society and the trajectory of the political opposition” (p. 2). As a result, this excellent book takes readers beyond the traditional confines of a national history while showing how a look at youth culture can cut across national-centered narratives. Impressive sources—records of the Communist Party and state institutions, contemporary sociological research, sex manuals, and youth periodicals—offer a fascinating and rich portrait of young people's lives in both urban and rural areas.The book is organized into eight chapters that take the reader chronologically and thematically through various aspects of young people's engagement in a variety of cultural as well as social and political issues. The time span of the book is the conceptual framework of the global 1960s, from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s. Fidelis begins her study with post-Stalinism and 1954 as the moment that saw the emergence of pluralistic expression through artistic activities, critical journalism, and cross-cultural encounters. The World Festival of Youth and Students of 1955 is the key moment of this change. Fidelis examines the negotiations that youth engaged in with regard to how “the Polish road to communism” should look like in these early years. The book continues through the post-thaw youth culture, described by Fidelis as “a turbulent engagement with postwar modernity” and 1968 as an attempt by Polish youth to “position themselves and others on a global map of oppression and liberation, in defiance of Cold War divisions” (pp. 60, 124). The last chapter delves into the 1970 counterculture of the hippies in the context of consumer socialism and the increasingly nationalist discourse of the state. Even though, as Fidelis shows, in the 1970s many aspects of youth culture came to be integrated into the official model of “consumer culture,” young people still found ways to participate in global culture.The book weaves into its narratives multiple fascinating problems, one being the place of the global south in the mental geography of young Poles. Through that focus, Fidelis explores the tension between the state's more uniform vision of the national state and young people's openness and modern outlook. As the book shows, the global south made it into youth's mental and cultural horizons mostly because under the policy of détente, Eastern Europe nurtured relationships with newly decolonized nations in Africa and Asia. “Spread through the pages of youth magazines, it appeared in the form of news items, recipes for African dishes, adventure short stories, reportage, and color photographs of exotic places and people.” The state discourse on internationalism and youth interests intersected. And “yet the dominant discourse positioned Poles as agents of modernization from whom postcolonial peoples were supposed to learn” (p. 8).Another fascinating aspect of the book is the question of apolitics. As Fidelis states, at the threshold of the 1960s, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, many saw apolitics as the defining feature of the young generation's participation in the world. Deemphasizing political agendas was also part of a new way of conceptualizing youth. This idea was, for example, promoted by youth magazines that aimed to produce multiple understandings of the self while creating platforms that allowed young people to distance themselves from politics (which stood in sharp contrast to the earlier politically engaged generations of Związek Młodzieży Polskiej, Union of Polish Youth, ZMP). For state officials, this distance—and a shift from political engagement to personal growth and consumption—could be interpreted as an effective antidote to youth radicalism. However, that began to change in the late 1960s when Polish students were becoming an integral part of the global events of 1968 and global leftist politics. Youth periodicals are clearly one of the most fascinating sources through which to explore this issue; youth magazines were becoming a site of negotiations between what was expected from socialist youth and how that youth responded to those expectations while finding space for themselves.Imagining the World is a must-read for anyone interested in Polish as well as Cold War history and its global implications. It invites us to rethink the post-1945 years by placing youth at the center. It uses an approach that transcends national boundaries and sees rich connections across borders. Its analysis shows clearly that citizens of socialist Poland were subjects and agents who participated in the process of imagining and shaping their own lives. Finally, it poses a number of fascinating questions on such topics as socialist modernity, the overlap between the West and the global world, and the depth and selectivity with which the Western/global world infiltrated Poland. Fidelis offers a fascinating and rich account that cannot pass unnoticed.