Reassessing Communism

"This edited collection, which reads like a multi-authored monograph, crowns the efforts of 13 contributors; the contributors are cultural and social historians, philosophers, and literary scholars, Reassessing Communism is a welcome contribution to the field of communism studies and an important voice against contemporary tendencies in Poland that try to reduce the four decades of People's Poland to ideology-driven cliches, one-sided narratives, and non-reflective and anti-intellectual historicism."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00085006.2022.2101733—Mikołaj Kunicki, Canadian Slavonic Papers

"Much of interest is proposed in this extensive volume, which draws attention to notions of continuing intellectual and perhaps practical importance."
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/slavic-review/article/reassessing-communism-concepts-culture-and-society-in-poland-19441989-ed-katarzyna-chmielewska-agnieszka-mrozik-and-grzegorz-wolowiec-central-european-university-press-budapest-2021-vii-418-pp-notes-bibliography-index-10500-hard-bound/9C9053ADD6E79CD9243A118AF5303A49—Anthony Kemp-Welch, Slavic Review

"I have been waiting for years for someone to write this book. Reassessing Communism represents a long-overdue corrective to the one-dimensional approach that has characterized so much historical scholarship on the communist period in Polish history. Breaking away from the image, seen mainly through the lens of political power, as a land only of 'totalitarian' oppression and misgovernance, contributions to this volume show that the Polish People's Republic was also a place in which people pursued diverse goals and sincerely attempted to build a better world for themselves. After all, the communist vision of a better social order necessitated more than mere submission: it also required public compliance, even assent. Reassessing the communist era from this perspective also allows us to critically examine the anticommunist opposition and break away from the unproblematized mythologies that have dominated public memory for too long."—Brian Porter-Szűcs

"Reassessing Communism: Concepts, Culture and Society in Poland, 1944–1989 brings new and important reflections and interpretations of communism in Poland. The book is intended as a polemic with the dominant historical and popular narratives in which communism appears in terms of strangeness: as an aberration or a 'black hole' in Polish history. The authors consistently and convincingly deconstruct this type of narrative. Instead, they propose a picture of communism that cannot be easily subordinated to established patterns, national-centric stereotypes, or totalitarian theories. The authors' approach to communism as a multidimensional 'revolutionary project' is a new and needed perspective in the current state of research on the history of postwar Poland."—Małgorzata Fidelis