Building a World Anew - Crowley_David

Building the World Anew: Design in Stalinist and Post-Stalinist Poland

David Crowley

Journal of Design History, Vol. 7, No. 3. (1994), pp. 187-203.

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David Crowley

Building the World Anew: Design in Stalinist and Post-Stalinist Poland

The Stalinist years (1948-56) in Poland's history have often been regarded by both Polish and foreign observers to have witnessed a cultural nadir. In party jargon they came to be described as a 'period of errors and mistakes'.' Similarly, art and design until Poland's 'paidziernik' (the political 'Thaw' of October 1956) were typically considered, by observers abroad, uniformly poor and corrupted, an unfor-tunate derailment on the modernist journey of the twentieth century. Pierre Restany wrote in Cinzaisc a few years after the 'Thaw':

From the artistic point of view what has been going on in Poland can be compared to what has happened in Italy after the Liberation and in Germany soon after the war. The cultural isolation had produced an overall frustration which they all had to get rid of as soon as possible: make up for the delay in expression-belong to the present at any price.'

But such trenchant views of the malignancy of Stalinist culture failed to account for the differences between different cultural practices; the inconsis- tencies in the application of Stalinism's tenets in cul- ture; and the subtle but significant changes in the political climate of Poland between the late 1940s and the mid-1950s. Various fields of design in these years offer examples of responses to political, cul- tural, and economic strictures that fell neither into slavish emulation of the Soviet model nor witless propaganda.

Design in the First Years of Communist rule

Poland was devastated by the Second World War: one-sixth of her population had died; some of her major cities were destroyed; and her industry was all but ruined. Moreover Stalin effectively partitioned the country, shifting its borders to the west and installing a provisional government 'stacked' with Soviet communist proteges. In December 1948 these Soviet-backed Stalinists achieved complete political domination: as a one-party state following a civil

war; after the liquidation of any real political opposi- tion; and after a rigged election which gave them a spurious legitimacy. In the relative political calm that ensued from 1949 the Communist Party (known as the Polish United Workers' Party) set about remak- ing Poland.' It attempted to gain the support of the population with promises of material wealth and cultural renaissance: 'a new enlightenment' in which 'the entire mass of citizens will live full, joyful, crea- tive, cultural, wealthy and industrious livesf.l

In 1944, the first 'free', albeit Soviet-backed, Polish magazine, Odvodzerzie (RebirthiRebuilding), was published. In the state of ruin in which the 'new' Poland found itself, 'Rebuilding' was more than a metaphor: Poland had been devastated. Architecture and building became a prime site of political struggle and communist attention. The communists turned the reconstruction and the building anew of Warsaw, a city in which one in four buildings were left stand- ing in 1945, into the symbolic centre of their rule [I]. Alfred Doblin, the German novelist and journalist, had sensed an aristocratic spirit in the capital when he visited it in 1924: 'This is an old city with man- sions, patrician homes, slowly and intensively dilapidated . . . The decay of an old, noble world can be traced from the palace and across the old market into all the outbound and distant streets and roads." In the new post-war world the communists, selective in their choice of buildings to be reconstructed, were reluctant to rebuild those buildings symbolic of aris- tocratic Warsaw. The reconstruction of the Royal Palace in the Old Town, for example, did not start until 1971: a late gesture intended to 'buy' popular goodwill.

Each official holiday the state, with great cere-mony, presented to the people a new section of the city built by those same people. One of the earliest stages in the rebuilding of Warsaw, the Trasy Wschbd-Zachbd (East-West Thoroughfares) under the Old Town, was publicly opened with much pomp and circumstance on 22 July 1949. This date,

I i y(A/ KOMITET B U D O W Y C E N T R A L N E O O D O M U Ih\xAI . O N E f PAR' PIX KLASY

1 Savings certificate given to workers in exchange for contributions taken from their wages used to build the Com- munist Party headquarters in Warsaw in the early 1950s

designated as 'National Day', was the fifth anniver- sary of the manifesto, issued by the Soviet-backed Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego (Polish Committee of Liberation), which had proclaimed the creation of the 'People's Republic' as the Red Army crossed the Soviet-German demarcation line of 1939. In this way the communists sought to link their 'achievement' of a socialist state with the concrete achievements in the process of rebuilding W a r ~ a w . ~

The rebuilding of the capital and, in fact, all Poland, in the years immediately following the con- clusion of the war, was also the focus of much modernist interest. It was regarded as a unique opportunity to build a new Warsaw centred on the needs of its population: a new architecture for a new society. During and immediately after the war, trnigrt architects based in the University of Liverpool School of Architecture, and others who had lived through the war in Poland,' produced hundreds of schemes and plans for organizing towns or social housing estates along familiar Modern Movement lines [z]. CIAM members Helena and Szymon Syrkus, for example, produced a plan for Warsaw in 1946 that a writer in The Architectural Review de- scribed as 'an intensely dramatic scheme, a work of plastic imagination, recalling to mind the city vision of Le Corbusier and his follower^'.^ In fact, Le Corb- usier had offered to organize a team of eminent architects to redesign the city as a gesture of 'help and regard for its co~rage ' .~ Although neither of these schemes came to fruition, the Syrkuses were the architects of the Kolo estate in the west of the capital which was built in true modernist fashion:

social housing constructed in long three-storey com- munal terraces from prefabricated elements and reinforced concrete (including some 'brutalist' por- tals made from stamped and rough-cast concrete) in the early 1950s.

It would seem that the immediate post-war years gave not just architects but many different designers a sense of new opportunity, a tabula rasa. Their hopes seemed to be reciprocated by the state when it established the Buiro Nadzoru Estetyki Prod~kcji '~ (BNEPIOffice for the Supervision of Aesthetic Pro- duction) within the Ministry of Culture and Art under the directorship of Wanda Telakowska. This new body appeared supportive of modernist experi- ments in design. BNEP, from its inception in 1947, was charged with five responsibilities:

(i) the appraisal of aesthetic values of the form of pro- ducts;

(ii) the provision of objects and models as examples for production, as well as guidance in the field of aesthetic production;

(iii) the organization of suitably prepared designers (plastyk6w) for working with manufacturing equip- ment;

(iv) the promotion of works of art in the course of fulfilling the needs of economic life;

(v) research at home and abroad."

Without any expression of political aims or reference to the reorganization of labour and industrial pro- duction that the communist-driven government had instituted in the Three Year Plan of 1947,12 BNEP's programme stressed professional values over expli- citly ideological ones. Its concern with the intro-

Dazlid Croroley

GROUND FLOOR

duction of designers into industry, for example, was a theme which would have undoubtedly seemed familiar to members of the Council of Industrial Design in their headquarters in Petty France in London.

The main field of activity for BNEP in its first year of life was the production of models and proto- types. BNEP later claimed that in this period they had commissioned lo,ooo objects in the fields of weaving, lace-making, clothing, glass, ceramics, basket-making, artistic metal-ware, jewellery, small sculpture, toy-making, leather-work, and wood-work.'Wrawing upon the high schools and acade- mies of art, BNEP established a network of designers including, for example, the pre-war Con- structivist, W+adys+aw Strzeminski, who produced abstract designs for a series of fabrics called 'Solar- isation' and -for the decoration of organic-shaped ceramic vessels illustrating his theories of Unism [3];14 and Elenora Plutynska, an internationally renowned tapestry designer, who, as a member of

2 Design for a block of flats by Jerzy Lech, a third year student at the Polish School of Architecture at the University of Liverpool, 1944

1 1

the co-operative of designers, Lad (Harmony), from its foundation in 1926, was a representative of the vigorous arts and crafts tradition in inter-war Poland (see below). BNEP saw very few of the designs it commissioned go into production." Its director saw its primary function as that of reviving the profession of the designer in the immediate post-war period.'"ts role in the first two years of activity, though within a developing communist state and economy, was relatively unaffected by the exigencies of communist ideology. The communists were, at least for the first three years after the war, too concerned with immediate political conflicts to turn their attention to the arts.

Socialist Realism in Architecture

In 1949. against the background of the developing Cold War, a political shift occurred in the state's atti- tude to culture and design. After purging opponents inside and outside the party, the communists

3 Wtadystaw Strzernitiski's design for a vase produced whilst working for BNEP in the late 1940s (collection of OSrodek Wzornictwo Nowoczesnego, Warsaw)

attempted to remodel Poland as a Stalinist state. It was to be put through a crash course of the Soviet experience in just six years. At the Party Congress of that year, Party Secretary Bolestaw Bierut unveiled a series of six-year plans giving priority to the militar- ily strategic: heavy industry, and the production of iron, coal and steel. A 'Six-Year Plan for the Rebuild- ing of Warsaw' was also announced which Bierut presented at the Warsaw Polytechnic in July 1949 and which was published under his authorship the following year." Perceptively described by one British observer as 'a strange robot city of crimped and crenellated fa~ades ' , '~ the new city envisaged in Bierut's plan was to be built in the architectural style of Socialist Realism. In this blueprint for the capital, Bierut led an assault on modernist design:

we have to make up for inherited neglect. In architectural forms we still find the heritage of bourgeois cosmopolitan- ism, whose expression in the field of architecture are colourless, box-like houses, the symbols of dull formalism. Our architects should, to a greater extent, than now, draw on the sound traditions of our national architecture, adapt- ing them to the new goals and new possibilities of building process [ s i c ] , and infusing into them a new socialist spirit.'"

Taking Bierut's lead, and with more than a glance over their shoulders eastwards to the ideological foundry of Socialist Realism, some architects initiated a campaign against Modern Movement architecture. Michat Jassem, in the journal Architek- tura, argued that Functionalism ought to be fought because of its political, anti-social, and cosmopolitan roots which had developed under the corrupting conditions of capitalism. Architectural practice was henceforth reorganized under the auspices of the Union of Architects into Goliath-like state-planning offices. Its council's avowed programme was a critique of Constructivism, a critique which col- lapsed a complex history into a simple term of vilifi- cation: 'a bourgeois movement'. The Union of Architects, at its 1949 congress in Katowice, legis- lated that buildings were to be designed in the name of social content, national cultural heritage, popular taste, and Socialism, or, to use the maxim of the day, 'Socialist in content-and national in form'. What this meant in practice was that many areas of Polish cultural practice, by similar processes of unioniza- tion and purges, were to wrench themselves from their traditional orientation towards the West, and to reorientate themselves towards the East, historically the enemy. The Deputy President, Jakub Berman, later conceded this, saying, 'copying the model of the Soviet Union was obligatory in every sphere1.*"

To meet the criterion of 'national form', pale attempts were made to encode specifically Polish characteristics in architecture. The Palace of Culture in Warsaw 141 was built between 1953 and 1955 as a demonstrative 'gift' from Stalin (opening, somewhat predictably, on 22 July, the 'National Day').21 It was designed by a team of five Soviet architects led by Lev Rudnev, who visited ZamoSC: and Lublin in eastern Poland and Cracow in the south to study medieval and renaissance architecture. Despite this the Palace of Culture and Science in the name of Joseph Stalin bears much closer resemblance to the 'stadtkronen' found at the heart of the Soviet Empire. Its 'socialist form' was expressed in a curious sym- bolic esperanto of parquet floors decorated with red stars; bizarre folk-style metal grilles; allegorical figures symbolizing various 'socialist' values such as knowledge and labour; and stripped neo-classical detailing. The guidebook which accompanied the building's public opening in 1955 celebrated its pro- digious scale: 'Building the Palace used around

4 The Palace of Culture and Science designed by a team of archi- tects led by Lev Rudnev, completed in 1955

32,000 square metres of concrete, 50,000 tonnes of steel, 540 km of pipes of different shapes, 34,000,ooo individual This was a voracious building programme which absorbed badly needed building materials in a city still suffering from the devastating effects of the Second World War. The building's primary function, far beyond its social role, was symbolic. It signified a new Soviet-Polish relation- ship and the primacy of a new Soviet culture in Poland:

This building is a generous expression of the friendship between the nations of the Soviet Union and the Polish nation. An outward symbol of a great transformation of the age in which our generation lives today. It is the symbol of the victory and triumph of the great idea of Socialism, the idea of the great leaders of the people; Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.*'

Another example of Socialist Realism in archi- tecture and planning, unalienable from the political

circumstances from which it was conceived, is the town of Nowa Huta (New Foundry). Nowa Huta was a symbolic project of the first degree for the young Marxist state. A site of conspicuous pro- duction, Nowa Huta was a new town with the function of servicing the iarge steel-works sited nearby. An example of the Stalinist fetish for nineteenth-century models of industrial production, it was a factory such as Marx could have known; so large that it matched, in its first year of operation, pre-war national steel production figures.24 Even though Nowa Huta was a socialist 'triumph' in the face of economic logic, its primary raison d'&tre was political. Located on the edge of Cracow, the histori- cal capital of regal Poland, it was an attempt to 'proletarianize' the city which had offered the greatest political resistance to the communist state. In June 1946 the communists had announced a refer- endum in order to secure popular approval of the 'programme of the left', the rule of the communist- dominated alliance of parties. The faked results appeared to give the communists the support of two- thirds of the population. Opposition to the com- munists was particularly marked in Cracow, where independent members of the Popular Voting Com- mission were able, by chance, to release the actual results. The leader of the Peasant Party, Stanistaw Mikotajczyk, described it in 1948 as 'a freakish turn of events which caused communist propaganda mills thereafter to proclaim Krakow "a reactionary city which must be pun i~hed" ' .~~

The building of Nowa Huta on the edge of Cracow was part of this punishment. The site also took rich farming land away from the relatively affluent peasantry, Poland's own 'Kulaks'.2h The Goliath Nowa Huta was to be a paradigm of the new Poland and the new communist economy which would meet the claim Engels postulated in his introduction to the first Polish edition of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1892, that 'as large scale industry expands in a given country, the demand grows among workers of that country for enlightenment regarding their position as the working class'.27 Architecturally the builders of Nowa Huta, led by architects Tadeusz Ptaszycki and Bolestaw Skrzy- balski, employed the style of Socialist Realism with effect if not purpose. Of the three ceremonial avenues radiating at 45 degrees from the main square, only one leads anywhere: the other two peter

Par1 Implemented

Part planned

w.reh0u.e areas

5 Plan of Nowa Huta showing pro- jected development of town centre, 1958

out into forest and farms 151. The factory entrance is paradoxically masked in a decorative crenellation (known as a 'Polish parapet'), the architectural language of Polish palaces and town halls of the six- teenth century made into that of Socialist Realism 161.

Architecture presents a clear example of a design practice in which the organizational structures and Zhadanovite aesthetic strictures of Socialist Realism were vigorously applied. Yet the experience of archi- tects was not shared by their colleagues in other fields of design. Even during the years 1951 to 1953,

the height of Stalinism, when the party 'scientific- ally' determined that the country was passing through a stage of class struggle, many areas of graphic, product, and industrial design seem to have been exempt from the Stalinization of culture and industry. Czestaw Mitosz's prediction, made in The Captive Mind in 1953, that even interior design would soon be called to arms-'There is no reason why that which passes as formalism in painting and architecture should be tolerated for any time in the applied art~'~~-never came to pass. Poster, interior, and furniture design, in contrast, offer examples of

. 6 Administration building for the steel- works in Nowa Huta designed by Janusz and Marta Ingarden in the early

-.y- *.' 1950s

fields of practice that reveal the diversity of material cultures in Stalinist Poland.

The Polish Poster School

The poster, though state-controlled through censor- ship offices and professional bodies such as the Wydawnictwo Artystyczno-Graficzne (State Pub- lisher of Graphic Art) which was established in 1950, offers an example of a design practice which escaped the strictures of the party's cultural arbiters. A number of Polish poster designers such as Wojciech Zamecznik, Henryk Tomaszewski, and Tadeusz Trepkowski achieved contemporary international renown for the work that they produced from the early 1950s. They were able to practise as modernist designers with the patronage of the state or, at least, indirectly with that of its cultural agencies. As an

example, Tomaszewski's poster for Rene Clair's film La Beautldu diable designed in 1954 (i.e. after Stalin's death though before Khrushchev's 'Secret Speech' a the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow in Febru- ary 1956) and commissioned by Centralna Wynajmu Film (CWF), the central body for the distribution of films, was strikingly simple 171. This design, com- posed of a briskly drawn figure reversed in silhouette and a green devil suggested by loose brush-strokes, paid little heed to aesthetic dogma that called for 'positive types' or imagery that was 'national in form and socialist in content'. In contrast, at the same time other poster designers including Wojciech Fangor and Jan Marcin Szancer bowed to orthodoxy by pro- ducing a host of Socialist Realist images; muscular Stakhanovites exhorting increased production; peas- ant sisters and their proletarian brothers symboliz- ing a new national unity 181; or Polish workers

7 Film poster (La Beaut6 du diable, dir. Rene Clair) designed by Henryk Tomaszewski in 1954 and published by Wydawnictwo Artystyczno-Graficzne (collection of Akademia Sztuk Pieknych, Cracow)

Desig11 ill Stali~list atld Post-Stalinist Polarld 193

clasping hands with their Soviet brother^.^" How can this plurality in an age of apparent cultural totalitar- ianism be explained?

A cogent answer to this would seem to be found in the relatively decentralized control over the commis- sioning of posters. In 1947 Film Polski, the first national post-war organization responsible for the production and distribution of both Polish and foreign films, was established. Film Polski (and later CWF) commissioned up to 600 film posters a year in print-runs of up to loo,ooo copies, yet they tended to rely on a small roster of designers including Henryk Tomaszewski."' These designers produced many striking designs using techniques such as photo- montage that betray their roots in the inter-war avant-garde. The consistent modernism of the Polish film poster would seem to suggest an active aesthetic

nNl IIEWIATY, K S I ~ ~ K I i P R A S V - W A J -1931

8 Poster designed by Witold Chmielewski in 1951 ( 'Weare building a new culture for the fatherland's fortune, for world peace') published by Wydawnictwo Artystyczno-Graficzne (collection of Akademia Sztuk Pieknych, Cracow)

policy on the part of those responsible for employing Tomaszewski. In 1957 Henryk Szemberg, the direc- tor of WAG, presented the readers of Graphis with his explanation for the modernist character of the Polish film and theatre poster in the Stalinist period:

This was primarily due to the attitude taken by the majority of poster artists who defended unflinchingly their own conception of art. In this they received support from personages in the political and cultural fields, who upheld the principles of creative f reed~rn .~ '

This 'creative freedom' was extended by bureau- cratic patrons (WAG, Film Polski, CWF) who offered Tomaszewski and his colleagues greater liberty than they would have enjoyed designing political posters, another field of design in the hands of more zealous apparatchiks. Perhaps paradoxically, it would seem that these designers were their own aesthetic and political 'police'. Relatively free of direct censorship, the main poster publisher, WAG, employed a com- mittee of designers who, in acts of self-censorship, could disqualify a poster from production.

The 'Polish Poster School', as it has now become known, was a professional Clite of designers who had the support of a significant lobby within state culture. They were a privileged technocracy which represented Polish poster design abroad; the Polish state organized a number of travelling exhibitions of film and theatre posters in the late 1940s and 1950s (Charles Rosner, writing in A r t and I~ ldus t ry in 1948, wondered why 'few political posters have come our way').32 Feted internationally, designers like Toma- szewski became a public face of communist culture abroad.

Vernacularism

The poster presents us with an example of a design technocracy made up of both designers and commis- sioning agents who were able to produce designs that resisted the severest of aesthetic strictures. Interior design and the crafts offer further examples of design which, more than ignoring official culture, hijacked it. In 1952, at the height of Stalinism in Poland, the organization which had succeeded BNEP in 1950, the Instytut Wzornictwo Przemysiowe (Institute of Industrial Design), organized the first Og6lnopolska Wystawa Architektury Wnetrz i Sztuki Dekoracyjnej (All-Poland Exhibition of Interi-

ors and Decorative Art) in Warsaw.'"he range of products on display was for the greater part simple and unpretentious. Like many exhibitions of its kind in Europe in the years following the war, the exhibits displayed none of the outlandish decoration nor the puritanical functionalism found at either extreme of pre-war design. The new style of models for domes- tic consumption, exhibited with the state's endorse- ment,'-' was largely derived from the vernacular arts: simple plates decorated with floral motifs; modest chairs made from laminated wood with unconcealed joints 191; and roughly carved wooden toys. Apart from a number of exceptional fabric designs such as Helena Bukowska's 'Warsaw' which depicted clas- sical buildings and serried ranks of workers, most of the objects and designs on show displayed nothing of the ideological storm which was passing through

Poland at that time. Yet the consistency of the decorative style in this exhibition betrays the influ- ence and control of a single design 'lobby'.

The selection committee of the Warsaw exhibition led by Wojciech Jastrzebowski included a number of artists, designers, and architects who had estab- lished their reputations before the war. Most of these figures, including Jastrzebowski, had been members of a design collective called t a d which had been established in Warsaw in 1926." Lad's members, in the inter-war period, were the last advocates of principles of design which had their origins in the Polish Arts and Crafts Movement. From the 1890s Polish architects and designers had regarded peasant art and design as a kind of national repository of inspirational themes. Peasant design was regarded as akin to nature; honest and untainted by the twin corruptions of industrialization and civilization. In the same spirit, tad's members toured rural Poland in the 1930s in search of traditional woven fabric designs and established workshops employing peasants to produce their designs based on vernacu- lar motifs.3h Though not bellicose polemicists, t ad , nevertheless, worked against what they saw as the flaws of the Modern Movement and its most cele- brated protagonist in Poland, Le Corbusier." They rallied against what they saw as the alienism of mod- ernist aesthetics and a disregard for proven and popular tradition. The group's frequently made case during the 1930s for the vernacular roots of an 'authentic' Polish design practice-in fabrics, furni- ture, interiors, ceramics and so on-was little changed by the 195os, when members like Wanda Telakowska, director of the Institute of Industrial Design, argued for a socialist Polish design practice derived from the vernacular. Telakowska, as the title of her 1954 book, TzudrczoSC ludozila zi l nozilytn zilzor- nictzuie (Folk Creativity in New Industrial D e ~ i g n ) , ~ ~ suggests, believed that the vernacular arts could serve as a creative foundation for the design of various domestic goods. Peasant design was demon- strably functional and, in terms of style, it tended to be relatively simple though expressive rather like the 'best' modern art. A number of 'prototypes' commis- sioned by Telakowska's institute, such as Elenora Plutynska's designs for woven textiles produced by the Sok6lka peasant workshop in the BiaQstock

9 Chair designed by Jan Kurzptkowski displayed at the First AlI- Poland Exhibition of Interiors and Decorative Art held in Warsaw region' were On show at the 1952 exhibition of in 1952 decorative art. Their diagonal patterns, a product of

Desigi~ irt Stalirtist and Post-Stalirtist Poland 195

traditional kilim-weaving methods, and expressive figurative motifs exploited 'national' customs of peasant design and manufacture [lo].

Not surprisingly the principles underlying these designs corresponded with state ideology. The ver- nacular was often argued by party ideologues in the 195os, with quite some sleight of hand, to be a true source of working-class culture in Poland, an under- developed country without strong proletarian tradi-

aristocratic, courtly culture. And at the same time its roots can be traced to a form of society founded on the drudgery of the masses, the feudal peasantry.

When aristocratic culture severed itself from its national origins by becoming a source of docile cosmopolitanism and fossil-like formalism, peasant art nourished itself from a perpetually creative, richly national and deeply class- marked social stream. It has reflected, in this way, every change, transformation and investment in the life of the Polish countrvside.'"

tions (at least by the 'standards' of much of the rest of Europe). In May '949 W'odzimierz Sokorskil Despite such claims for the innate vitality of peasant Minister of Culture, in the new journal Polska Sz tuka culture, in the same year the government established Ludozila (Polish Peasant Art), claimed in the sterile the Centre of Industry and Art, which was language of Stalinism: known by the acronym Cepelia (CPLiAICentralna Folk art, as we understand it, is not just a by-product of the Przemysfu Ludowego i Artystycznego). True to its phenomenon of class-society-it, our peasants' own cul- Stalinist origins, this body was responsible for the tural movement, evolved and formed itself in opposition to maintenance, control, and central planning of handi-

10 'Wild Beast', detail of a woven textile designed by Elenora Plutyliska and produced by the Sokotka peasant workshop, Biatystok, early 1950s

craft in Poland involving 128 shops and 292 pro- ducers usually organized as co-operatives. Cepelia itself was subordinate until 1954 to the State Com- mission of Economic Planning. Annually around 60 per cent of Cepelia's output was dedicated to textile production, an area of low technical investment and high demand that Telakowska's institute also devoted much attention to.

In the light of state support for peasant culture, Telakowska's book, TwdrczoSC ludowa w nowym wzor- nictwie, achieved a political balancing act by arguing that in the pre-war period (i.e. the 'capitalist epoch'), the vernacularism of modern Polish design was an intellectual achievement which had rightly secured great international acclaim," but had not penetrated into everyday life. It was, in an authentic expression of party-speak, restricted to 'elite circle^'.^' The Insti- tute's designers had, in contrast, a clearly defined social role in the People's Republic. The design principles expressed in Telakowska's book also

encouraged collective practice in which a textile designer would collaborate with teams of peasants as weaver^."^ She also believed, as we have seen, the peasantry to be a fount of innate creativity. For example, she encouraged Antoni Kenar, a sculptor who established an international reputation in Paris before the Second World War, to return to Zakopane in southern Poland to revive the school of woodcarv- ing there." Young students at the Kenar 'School, almost invariably from agricultural and G6rale (Highlander) families, were encouraged to design woodcut patterns using motifs derived from tradi- tion or nature..The results were no doubt pleasing, for these young boys produced striking, expressive designs [ill. Telakowska sought to use these designs as the basis of machine-produced textiles. Collective practice with teams of peasant weavers and 'raw' talent from the peasant classes in Polish society went beyond meeting Telakowska's and the Institute's ideals about creativity, to match Stalinist

11 Design for printed fabric by a student of the Kenar School in Zakopane, 1958 (private collection)

Desigtt it1 Stalittist atid Post-Stalirtist Polartd

contempt for 'bourgeois individualism'. In these ways Telakowska not only satisfied long- and genuinely held principles as a late Arts and Crafts designer but also a number of the party's ideological aims.

Given party support for peasant culture and the vernacularist's political adroitness, the insinuation of their design theses into official culture was relatively smooth. Figures like Jastrzebowski and Telakowska possessed far from 'politically correct' curricula vitae (Telakowska came from the impoverished nobilityJJ and Jastrzebowski, a rather aristocratic character, had been a senator in the upper house of the Polish parliament in the 1930s and, as an enligre' in the years immediately following World War Two, had illustra- ted George Orwell's anti-Soviet parable, Animal Farm).ii But neither could be accused of deceit or cynical opportunism; their shared design ideology was developed before the establishment of the People's Republic. Nevertheless, these vernacular- ists proved to be an effective lobby who exploited points of correspondence between state ideology and their own concept of 'correct' design practices.

The Death of Socialist Realism

Following Stalin's death in March 1953 Socialist Realism began to be eroded in fits and starts not because, as some writers abroad implied,ih it was intrinsically sterile as an aesthetic and riddled with contradictions, but because the political situation too was shifting in fits and starts. It was finally relin- quished as the official cultural programme in the autumn of 1956 by a new politburo led by a new party leader, Wtadystaw Gomutka, who owed far less allegiance to Moscow.

With regard to design, in the spring of 1956 a new magazine called Projekt (Design) was initiated. Its editor described the rapid decline of Socialist Real- ism from 1956, as a rejection of doctrinaire art and design-as a retreat of the cultural ideologues. This was, in fact, a depoliticization of state-sponsored practice. The Union of Architects' 1956 congress, the harbinger of Socialist Realism in 1949, rejected 'formulae and theory' and agreed to build 'effi-ciently' and 'rationally'. In much the same spirit, Projekt's articles on design concentrated on abs-tractions-'geometry', 'neoplastics', and 'organic structures' became the buzzwords of the day. The

work of many leading artists and designers under- went a radical and swift change in style although even in 1954, after Stalin's death, the poster designer and educationalist, Jozef Mroszczak, was producing archetypal images of heroic proletarians and patriotic peasants. Three years later, in the rela- tive political calm following the close of Stalinism, Projekt described his new depoliticized work as educationalist: 'In Professor Mroszczak's class, students work on graphic art as a decorative elenzetzt in space.I4:

Modernism, albeit of a politically enervated kind, was revived in architectural practice. Post-Stalinist modernism is most clearly identifiable in state-sponsored architectural projects; hotels, highways, and office towers sprang up throughout the country in the International Style [iz].These buildings were nothing to do with social egalitarianism. They were entirely concerned with mirroring the advance of the capitalist West. Rather like Lenin's New Economic Policy of 1921, this was a political aesthetic of 'tech- nomania'. It was a design language which stressed the modernity of form, an apparently neutral func- tionalism which was widely regarded as politically neutral by architects themselves. Designers sought actively to depoliticize design in post-Stalinist Poland, at least in terms of its state propagandist function. This was, in some respects, a self-delusion since such buildings, however much they had left the crass symbolism of state socialism behind, inevitably reflected the aspirations of the successors of the Stalinists.

Similarly, the strategic political significance of the modern consumer goods which the communist state began to produce and import from the late 1950s lay not in any attempt to use design to proletarianize Polish society (as the example of Nowa Huta shows) but in the desire to secure mass political acquie- scence. Designers adopted with enthusiasm all the fashionable designerisms of the 196os, of design systems, notions of ideal product families-all highly compatible with the technocratic ideology of the cen- tralized economy. But the political intention behind the development of consumer aesthetics was to foster mass support-i.e. 'State socialism must be working for us if we have all these modern things to buy'. In the post-Stalinist period the vernacularist designers did not suffer the same kind of oppro-brium meted out to the architects of Socialist Real-

ism. As a largely technocratic lobby rather than a

1 2 PKO bank on the eastern side of Ulica Marszatkowska in Warsaw, designed by the state architectural office led by Janusz Kar- pinski and Jan Klewin between 1960 and 1969

political one, they appeared uncompromised. In fact, in the new economic climate fostered by Nikita Khrushchev in the Kremlin and Wtadystaw Gomutka in Warsaw, the industrial designer became a strategic profession in the development of a con- sumer culture, as Telakowska, still in place as the Director of the Institute of Industrial Design, acknowledged:

The situation of designers in industry has changed. They were asked until now to give only solutions which facili- tated production. The present economic conditions see the beginning of the factories' interest in the aesthetics of pro- duced goods. The managements of various industrial establishments appreciate more and more the fact that the development of their institutions, in a great part, depends on the aesthetic level of their goods and on the work of designer^.^'

Consequently, the growing range of consumer goods, so notable in west Europe from the late 195os, was also found (on a limited scale) in Poland; from sculptural wickerwork chairs designed by Wtadystaw Wotkowski to the 'Alfa', a popular camera designed by Krzysztof Meisner and Olgierd Rutkowski 1131. However, as Hansjakob Stehle in 1965 noted, 'A model dress from the exclusive fashion house "Eva" is quite unobtainable by the great majority of women, and the fine china of "Cepelia", or the modern furniture of "Art" and "Desa", are simply dreams to those 'who can earn their money legally' [14]." In fact, most designs com-

13 'Alfa' camera designed by Krzysztof Meisner and Olgierd Polish Or government agen- Rutkowski in 1958 (collection of OSrodek Wzornictwo Nowoczes-

cies did not go into production (at least on any scale). nego, Warsaw)

Desigi~ irt Stalirtist and Post-Stalirtist Poland 799

14 Fashion spread from Ty i ]a magazine designed by Roman CieSlewicz in 1964. These clothes were not available in Polish shops: CieSlewicz collaged these images from contemporary French fashion magazines

They were often made as prototypes for display in the many exhibitions of consumer durables and fur- nishing that were held in Poland and abroad in the 1960s.'~ This was a kind of ornamental design intended to reflect the modernity of taste and industry in the People's Republic. Just as Socialist Realism in architecture had been an attempt to secure symbolic continuity with the past (and not necessarily a Polish one at that), the kind of Modern- ism in all fields in design supported by the state from the late 1950s was an attempt to secure continuity with a technocratic future.

Conclusion: The View East

The picture of Socialist Realist culture that we have consumed in the 'West' has frequently been a sim- plistic one. East and West seemed neatly to polarize

aesthetically as well as politically in the 1950s The arbiters of taste in New York, Boston, and elsewhere cast modernist abstract art (and Abstract Expression- ism in particular) and architecture as synonymous with freedom and individualism; and state ideo- logues in Moscow proclaimed the tendentious art of Socialist Realism to be the expression of historical and political truth. These mutually reinforcing con- structs were, as a number of historians have noted,51 the product of intense political conflict operated at, largely, an ideological level, i.e. the Cold War. Serge Guilbaut has mapped a complex cartography of political/aesthetic ideologies across either side of the Iron Curtain in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist period^.'^ In this study he has traced the ways in which interrelated cultural tensions between abs- traction and realism, and commitment and artistic independence were affected, within the Parisian artis- tic avant-garde, by the sense of an European culture 'between' Moscow and Washington, by the continued influence of the left and by the legacy of modernist ideology. In many ways, the reception of much Polish art and design in Western Europe in the 1950 and 1960s was focused by similar prejudices and enthu- siasms.

It is clear that there was much political empathy on the part of those on the left in Western Europe towards the young communist states of Eastern- Central Europe. The Communist Party of Great Britain, for example, produced a series of posters on the theme of the 'transformation of a weak country into a country of strength and wealth' by the Six- Year Plan for 1950-5. Many artists and designers, still driven by pre-war Modern Movement aims of social amelioration and cultural enrichment through art and design and dismayed, rightly or wrongly, by the mass culture that they saw crossing the Atlantic, were prepared to extend much support to their col- leagues in Eastern Europe. Far from seeing culture and design under communism as corrupt and debased, they were genuinely enthused with the notion that designers could practise for the social good without constraint from the market. Following the 'renewal' of Soviet communism after the Twen- tieth Party Congress in Moscow (and, to a certain extent, despite the repression of the Hungarian Ris- ing in November 1956), this sense of the potential of the socialist half of Europe was boosted. Qualms about the stylistic formulae of Socialist Realist

culture were suppressed in a search for quality amongst the work of hacks and opportunists. In the late 1950s and early 1960s as Moscow's satellite states of Eastern Europe began to 'modernize', some designers appeared to go beyond this point of reserve: Tomas Maldonado, director of the Hoch- schule fiir Gestaltung in Ulm, at the second ICSID (International Council of Societies of Industrial Design) Congress in 1960 is reported to have claimed that the only opportunities to keep a check on the usefulness and pertinency of design in the future would be found in the socialist half of E ~ r o p e . ~ ~

Of any field of the Polish arts in the post-war period, poster design has been the most widely and generously praised abroad. As a phenomenon, the Polish Poster School was as much the product of the journals which reported it into existence as the designers that constituted it. Critics in the leading European graphics journals such as Gebrauclls-grapllik and Graphis regularly reproduced posters by Polish designers accompanied with glowing com-mentaries on these works and their designers. The attention that these magazines gave to the Polish poster of the 1950s was, implicitly and explicitly, an expression of contempt for commercial graphic design. Charles Rohanyi, for example, compared the Polish film poster with its equivalent produced in the West in Graphis in 1956:

The thinking man . . . may very well wonder whether it is really necessary for a film poster always to present film stars in daring neck-lines or sexy postures and whether the only alternative to this is the dramatic scene featuring the juicy uppercut or the cocked revolver.54

The Poles seemed, as far as this and other writers were concerned, to have found that alternative, a truly popular form of contemporary design which exploited graphic techniques derived from the most 'difficult' of sources, modernist art. In fact Gebrauchsgraphik asserted that the Polish poster was a 'work of art in its own right'."" This was design that was unsullied by commerce, and even the technical limitations imposed by the poor production stan-dards of the Polish printing industry were claimed as a disadvantage that inspired ~reativity."~

The work of Wanda Telakowska at the Institute of Industrial Design also found champions in the other half of Europe. The English writer, illustrator, and artist, Pearl Binder, who had expressed strong social-

ist principles in the 1930s as a founder member of the Artists International, an alliance of politically committed left-wing artists, photographers, and graphic designers,'' visited a number of centres of design and workshop manufacture as well as Telakowska's Institute in 1959, three years after the 'Thaw'. Convinced of the continued support for socialism in Poland, Binder recorded in her travel diary her impressions of Telakowska's work. The uniting of peasant and artist was warmly welcomed by Binder, not least because 'they never see a busi- nessman or entrepreneurl. 'Vhe textile, clothing, and interior designs that she saw were 'very modern' and yet true to the 'springs of art1-the vernacular traditions that had been maintained by the peasants that Telakowska worked with. This was 'modern design that Picasso would have gladly admired'. In one fascinating aside Binder recorded:

I tell her she can really change the world, for once the Russians get onto her idea it will sweep right through and why shouldn't they? She told me that Khrushchev has realised that Socialist Realism has gone all wrong and given orders that within six months all new Soviet furni- ture for flats must be small and simple and modelled on Scandinavian lines and that he hated the Warsaw Palace of Culture.

Here Binder offers evidence and support for the pro- gramme of renewal through design proposed by the post-Stalinists.

Such warm receptions to these two diverse fields of design in the People's Republic suggest that both before the watershed year of 1956 and in the years after design was not practised behind an 'iron cur- tain' that made it invisible or necessarily isolated. Even during the height of the Cold War Polish designers, despite the edicts issued by their political masters, were clearly concerned with issues sur-rounding the nature of modernity and the develop- ment of popular and socially useful designs like many other designers in the rest of the world. The political complexity of the situation in which Polish designers worked meant that their responses to those circumstances were neither anile nor nai've. Their work gives the lie to the myth of an age of total cultural sterility and false historicism.

DAVID C R O W L E Y

University of Brighton

Notes

I would like to thank Lou Taylor of the University of Brighton for her advice, knowledge, and enthusiasm whilst researching this paper. 1 Reporting the meeting of the Ogolnopolska Narada

Architektow (All Poland Council of Architects) in Warsaw, T. Barucki wrote in P r z e g l ~ d K ~ i l t ~ l r a l r i y , no. 15, March 1956, p. Ij: 'It is a fact that the development of town planning and architecture in the 1949-195 j period was fundamentally mistaken. The highest archi- tectural authorities, amongst others, contributed to this by their uncritical advocation of weak models of Soviet architecture-now criticized in the USSR-as well as mistaken theoretical principles.'

2 P. Restany, 'Notes de voyage', Cirnaisc, January 1961, p p 78-80.

3 The Communist Party was known from 1948 as the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (Polish United Workers' Party). Before this date post-war political life had been dominated by members of the Polska Partia Robotnicza (PPRIPolish Workers' Party). Leading members of the PPR held most of the important port- folios in the Gol~ernment of National Unity. There is much continuity between the two parties and for the sake of clarity I have chosen simply to describe them as the communists.

4 R. Werfel (an editor of various party papers in the post- war period), quoted in T. Toranska, O i ~ i ,Collins Harvill, 1987, p. 120.

5 A. Doblin, l o l i r r ~ c ~ yto Polaiid (first published in Berlin in ~ g r g ) ,I. B. Taurus, 1991, p. 11.

6 On this date in 1946 the Poniatowski Bridge was reopened and re-presented to the Varsarvians; in 1951 the recently reconstructed Bank Square was renamed as Dzierzynski Square; in 19j2 the state opened Con- stitution Square, a new addition to Ulica Marszatkowska.

7 See S. Jankowski, 'Warsaw: destruction, secret town planning, 1939-44, and postwar reconstruction', in J. M. Diefendorf (ed.), Rcblilldiiig Eliropc's B c ~ t i l h ~ d Cities, Macmillan, 1990, pp. 77-93; S. Sienicki, T h e Polisil Sciiool o f Arcilitectlrrc 1942-1935, Charles Birchall & Sons, 1945, p, iv; and C. Reilly, 'Hints from the Poles', Tile Arcliitectlrral R c i ~ i c i ~ ' , September 1946, p , 30.

8 H. A. Meek, 'Retreat from Moscow', TIE, A r c l ~ ~ t c c t l l r a l Rezlicic', March l9j3, p. 145.

9 Toranska, op, cit., p. 306. 10 BNEP was reorganized as the Instytut Wzornictwo

Przemystowe (Institute of Industrial Design) in 1950. 11 Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki, S p r a i c v d z a i ~ i e z d z i a i a l -

1io:ci za rok 1948, Warsaw, 1948, p. 41. 12 This legislation sought initially to 'to raise the standard

of living of the working population above the pre-war

level', shifting, after one year, to investment in heavy industry. See Z. Landau & J. Tomaszewski, T h e P o l i s l ~ Ecoi lomy i n tile T z c l e i l t ~ ~ t l lCentllr!y, Croom Helm, 1985, p p 194-206.

3 Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki, op. cit., 1948, p. 41. Accounts detailing these commissions (confirming their scale and nature) are kept in the 04rodek Wzornictwo Nowoczesnego (Archive of Modern Design) of the Muzeum Narodowego, Warsaw.

14 Strzeminski was a leading Constructivist artist and theorist in pre-Second World War Poland. He deve- loped his theory of Unism in response to what he saw as the flaws of Productivism in the mid-lyzos. A com- plex theory of historical form in art, his paintings from this period are characterized by monochrome planes of paint on canvas and waving, rhythmic lines. See W. - .

Strzeminski, Tcoria zclidzeilla, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 19 58.

1,-Figures for the numbers of designs which went into production are scant. Furthermore, those sources which do exist must be subject to some suspicion. The Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki (Ministry of Culture and Art), under which BNEP functioned, produced year- books (see note 11)designed to spotlight state achieve- ment-a field of fertile propaganda. Measurement of the success or failure of those few goods which went into production is just as difficult to ascertain particu- larly since all markets in post-war Poland were extremely indigent.

16 W. Telakowska, 'Thirteen years of Polish industrial design', c. 1958 (unpublished lecture).

17 Crediting Bierut as the 'author' of this plan not only indicates the significance which the communists placed in the rebuilding of the capital; it also offers an illustra- tion of the sub-Stalinist cult of personality which Bierut tried to foster. See B. Bierut, T h e S i x - Y e a r Plan for t h e Recor~s truc t io i lof W a r s a i o , Ksigika i Wiedza, 1 ~ 5 1 , and B. Bierut, 'Zbudujemy now? Warszawc: stolice panstwa socjalistycznego', Sto l lca , 17 July 1949, p p 3- -/ .

18 Meek, op. cit., p. 49. 19 Bierut, op, cit., p. 379 20 J. Berman quoted in Toranska, op. cit., p. 320 21 For more detail on the building and the symbolism of

the Palace of Culture, see: M. Zakrzewski, 'Patac Kultury i Nauki w Warszaavie: konstrukcja i forma', in M. Bielska-tach, Sztlrka i T e c l l i ~ i k a ,PAN, pp. 265-74; Wojciech Wtodarczyk, Socreal i zm, Wydawnictwo Lite- rackie, 1991; E. Goldztamt, Arch1 tektl ira z c s p d i i z c i r i id i i~ ic j sk ich I p r o b l e n ~ y dziedzict i i la, Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1956, pp. 471-510.

22 J. Jacoby & Z. Wdowinski, P a i a c K u l t u r y i N a u k i inl. Jdze fa Stallria, Sport i Turystyka, ~ y j j , unpaginated.

23 Bierut quoted in Jacoby & Wdowinski, op. cit. 24 B. Malisz, Polarid B u ~ l d s N?ZL] T o i t ' i l ~ , Polonia, 1962

p. 77. 25 See S. Mikotajczyk, T h e Patterri o f Soaiet Dortiirlatiori,

Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1948, p. 183. 26 It should be stressed that this term of vilification was

rarely employed by Polish communists at this time. As Norman Davies notes, they avoided such explicitly 'soviet' language in order to maintain the 'Democratic Front', an illusionary alliance with various political parties in the late 1940s. See N. Davies, G o d ' s Play- groli i id, vol. 11, Clarendon Press, 1981, p 569.

27 K. Marx & F. Engels, The, Coiilril~iiiist M a i i i f e s t o , Penguin, 1967 edn, p. 72.

28 C. Mitosz, Tile Capt i z1eMli ld , Penguin, 1985 edn, p. 68. 29 See the catalogue to the exhibition Forill i TreSC ill

plakacic, poiskiitl r944-1gjj held at the Muzeum Plakatu w Wilanowie in 1987

30 H. Szemberg, 'Polish posters 1957'~ G r a p i l ~ s ,no. 13,

1957, P P 398-9. 31 Ibid., p. 399. 32 C. Rosner, 'Posters for art exhibitions and films', A r t

atid I i id~is t r ! / , no. 47, 1948, p. 50. 33 Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki i Zwiazek Polskich

Artystow Plastykow, I O g d l i ~ o p o l s k a Wystaicla Arc i i i tek- tlrr!/ W i y t r z i S z t ~ i k i Dc,korac!/jiiej, May-July 1952, Zacheta Gallery, Warsaw.

34 Furthermore, like architecture the decorative arts were controlled by a union, the Zwiazku Polskich Artystow Plastykow (Association of Polish Plastic Artists), which by maintaining 'professional' standards policed this area of cultural production.

35 See my N a t ~ o i l a l S t y l c arid Nat ior i - s ta te , Manchester Univers~ty Press, 1992, pp. 103-6.

36 D. Wroblewska, 'From tapestry to woven object', Prolck t , vol. 2, 1980, pp. 60-1.

37 A. K. Olszewski, 'Les Influences de Le Corbusier sur l'architecture Polonaise', Polis11 A r t S t l ~ d i ~ s ,v01. VII, 1986, p. 91.

38 W. Telakowska, Tit~drcioSC l u d o i t ~ a it1i i o i ~ ~ y i i lic~zorll ict ic~ic, Wydawnictwo Sztuka, 1954. See also W. Telakowska, Wzorrlicti t~o: M o j a Mi foSC, Biblioteka Wzornictwo, IWP, Warsaw, 1990

39 W. Sokorski, '0 wtaiciwy stosunek do sztuki ludow- wej', Polska S z t u k a Ludoit 'a, May 1949, vol. 111, no. 5, p. 131.

40 The Polish display at the Paris international exposition in 1925 was a great success securing more medals and prizes than any other foreign display. See my Natiorial

S t y l c a n d Nat io i i - s ta te , Manchester University Press,

41 Telakowska, op. cit., 1954, p. 5. 42 A. Wojciechowski, 'Metody pracy zespolowej w pol-

skim przemyile artystycznym', Polska S z t u k a L~idoic'a, no. 4-5, 1952, p p 203-11.

43 H. Kenarowa, O d Z a k o y i a i i s k ~ c j S i k d y Prze ir iys i~ i d o S z k d y Keiic,ra, Wyd. Lit., 1978.

44 This is not as grandiose as it might appear. Poland's nobility was in the period of the Republic of Nobles before the partitions of the country, proportionately the largest in Europe: the nobility accounted for approxi- mately one in ten of the population.

45 See G. Orwell, Z i l ' ~ c r i ~ c ! /folic'ark, translated by T. Jelenska, Wydawnictwo ~wiatowego Zwigiku Polakow (London), 1947

46 Restany, op. cit., 1961, p. 80. 47 Projek t , vol. j , no. 7, 1957, p. 11 (my emphasis). 48 Telakowska, 'Thirteen years of Polish industrial

design', op. cit., 1958. 49 H. Stehle, Tl ic lridcpeildeiit S a t c l l ~ t c , Pall Mall Press,

1965, p. 4. 50 A complete list of exhibitions of industriallproduct

design in Poland from 1960 to 1983 can be found in W z o v 1 1 1 c t i ~ ~ 0 Z L ~40- ICCIUP r ~ e l r l y ~ i ~ i l ~ c ~ P R L , catalogue of an exhibition held in Olsztyn, 1984

51 See C. Lindlev, A r t 1 1 1 tile Cold W a r , New Amsterdam Books, 1990; I. Golomstock, Totali tariaii A r t , Collins Harvill, 1990.

52 See S. Guilbaut, 'Postwar painting games: the rough and the slick', in S. Guilbaut (ed.), Rccoilstructiilg Modevriisrii, MIT Press, 1990, pp. 30-79.

53 This is reported by Andrzej Pawtowski in a lecture given to the meeting of the Polish and Soviet Unions of Plastic Artists in Moscow in 1972 which is published in A. Pawtowski, lrlicjacje: O sit i ice, yrojektoic'ailili i ksz ta iceniu yrojektarltdzi,, Biblioteka Wzornictwo, IWP, Warsaw, 1989, p. 28.

54 C. Rohanyi, 'Polish film and theatre posters', Graplz i s , January 1956, p. 61

jj Author not acknowledged, 'New Polish film posters', G e b r a u c l ~ s g r a y l l ~ k ,August 1970, p. 6.

56 J. Lenica, 'Poster art in post-war Poland', G r a p i i ~ s ,no. 24, 1948, p. 358.

57 See L. Morris & R. Radford, The, S t o r y o f tile A I A 1933-1953, catalogue for an exhibition at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art, 1983.

58 All the following quotes are from P. Binder's unpub- lished travel diary, 'Poland', 1959 in her family archive.

Drslgii I I I Staliriist aiid Post-Stalirlist Poiarld