Overview

Year 1966 analyzes the breakthrough moment in the culture of the Polish People’s Republic when revolutionary social and cultural changes slowed down in the mid-1960s, leading to a turn toward the idea of a nation as a field of ideological dispute between different social actors. The book explores the question of what happened in Polish culture at that time: how social ties were defined, where sources of legitimization of power for the new order were sought beyond the slogans of the revolution (equality, advancement, or prosperity), how historical politics participated in this process, the fate of the great emancipation projects of the 1950s such as emancipation of women or equality for ethnic minorities, and how the meanings of the related narratives changed. It also shows how all important actors (the diverse power camp, the emerging opposition, the Church) participated in this process, adapted their own narratives, and built a new understanding of society, social ties, history, and collective identity, with effects that would weigh heavily on the democratic transformations of the 1990s. This volume is intended for researchers interested in the history and culture of Poland, communist Central and Eastern Europe, memory studies, cultural and literary history, social history, and sociology.

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9781032726038

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Katarzyna Chmielewska is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN). She is co-founder of the Center for Cultural and Literary Studies of Communism at IBL PAN and editor of the series Communism: Ideas – Discourses – Practices. Tomasz Żukowski is Professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Forgetting Polish Violence Against the Jews: The Great Whitewash (2025) and the co-author of The Holocaust Bystander in Polish Culture, 1942–2015: The Story of Innocence (2021) and Philo-Semitic Violence (2021).

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