Inappropriate object: Warsaw and the Stalin‐era Palace of Culture after the Smolensk disaster (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article is about the shifting relationship between the city of Warsaw and the Palace of Culture and Science – a gigantic Stalinist skyscraper which dominates the city centre – in the aftermath of the 10 April 2010 plane crash that killed the Polish president and 95 others (mostly very senior military and political figures) in the woods outside Smolensk in western Russia. The crash's victims had been on their way to a ceremony commemorating the 70th anniversary of a massacre in the Katyń forest, near Smolensk, during which thousands of Polish army officers were shot on the orders of Stalin. Despite its status as Warsaw's most obvious material relic of Russia's historical domination over Poland, the Palace of Culture has in the last two decades been gradually reappropriated into the city's own landscape and everyday life. In fact, since the fall of communism, the Palace has eclipsed the city's traditional emblems and monuments to become regarded as the most identifiable marker, or ‘symbol’, of the contemporary city. Further, the Palace has consolidated the tangible and powerful impact it exerts on the city's architecture and urban layout, on its political, bureaucratic, ‘cultural’, commercial and educational life, and on the bodies and minds of its citizens. The very word ‘palace’ is normally understood in Warsaw to refer to the Palace of Culture. For a time after Smolensk, however, the word acquired a new association with the Presidential Palace, where crowds gathered to lay flowers, light candles and stand vigil. The markedly muted presence in Warsaw of the Palace of Culture during the mourning period after Smolensk demonstrated that the happy interaction between post‐socialist Warsaw and the rehabilitated Palace does not extend into every domain. The topography of mourning in Warsaw in the days after 10 April seemed to highlight the abject dimension of the Palace's uncanny presence in the city. This article explores why, how and for how long the Palace withdrew and was withdrawn from the life of the Warsaw after Smolensk.     

After Utopia: Leftist imaginaries and activist politics in the postsocialist world

ABSTRACT

In this introduction to special issue ‘After Utopia: Leftist Imaginaries and Activist Politics in the Postsocialist World’, we explore the theoretical implications for thinking about activism as a form of historically situated practice in the former socialist world. Building on insights from the papers included in this issue, which draw on ethnographic research in Ukraine, Armenia, Bosnia and along the Balkan refugee route, our introduction considers both the fragility and resilience of leftist imaginaries in the aftermath of lost utopian dreams of socialism and the betrayed promises of post 1989 democratic transformation. We do so in four moves, (i) by offering a reframing of postsocialism as a problem-space of historical and political consciousness; (ii) by interrogating the figure of the activist in its self-conscious and ethnographically embedded guises; (iii) by heeding Sherry Ortner’s call to think beyond ‘dark anthropology’ and finally, (iv) by considering what it might mean to imagine, and model, political alternatives in both activist and scholarly work.