The Polish City Where Communism Died

by Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The left-wing American journalist Lincoln Steffens, after a three-week visit to the new Soviet state in March 1919, famously proclaimed, “I have seen the future and it works.”

However, on my recent visit to the model Polish Communist city of Nowa Huta, created after the Second World War, I can confidently declare that I have seen the city where, in eastern Europe, Communism died.

Funded by the Soviet Union, Nowa Huta, located some six miles east of Krakow, was meant to become the antithesis of the former royal capital, with its medieval and bourgeois past.

It would be designed in the style known as socialist realism, and its architecture would become one of which the new proletarian Poland would be proud. It would provide a showcase to the world. 

Construction was part of the six-year plan, from1950 to1955, which stated that the condition for “building the foundation of socialism” was primarily the rapid industrialisation of the country.

Therefore, metallurgy and machine industry were to be expanded, which in turn allowed the development of the armaments industry, essential in case of war.

Work on the city began in 1949. Built in the shape of a semi-circle, alongside the stupendous steel works where its citizens would work, it was the pride of the new Communist Poland.

In time, the socialist town centre was surrounded by more estates which reflected the country’s evolving socialist architecture. 

The steel mill, named for Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, accounted for about half of the nation’s iron and steel output, and the dormitory suburb grew to house more than 200,000 people.

It began operations in 1954 and in its heyday in the 1970s the plant employed almost 40,000 people and annually produced almost seven million tons of steel. The city lived in the shadow of the plant.

In the 1980s, it was one of the most important centres of anticommunist resistance, with numerous strikes and street demonstrations taking place in Nowa Huta under the auspices of the Solidarnosc trade union movement.

The steelworks would be scaled back after the fall of Communism, and in 2005 it was sold to the multinational company ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel producer. Today it employs just 3,000 people.

A short streetcar ride from Krakow takes a visitor to Nowa Huta’s Plac Centralny. From 1973 to 1989 an enormous statue of Lenin, erected to commemorate the centenary of his birth, towered over it. 

It was often vandalized, even including an attempt to blow it up in 1979, and it was finally dismantled and sold to a Swedish buyer following the end of Communist rule in Poland.

But, to heap irony upon irony, the square over which Lenin once ideologically presided was renamed for the late U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 2004. 

The Poles have not forgotten that when the Communist government declared martial law and outlawed Solidarnosc in October 1982, Reagan responded with a speech to the American people that ended with the words “Let Poland be Poland.”

Streets formerly named after Lenin and the Cuban Revolution have also been renamed, to honor Pope John Paul II and the Polish general Wladyslaw Anders, among others.

On Al. Jana Pawla II, the former Kino Swiatowid cinema, another exemplar of the socialist style, today houses the Museum of Poland Under the Communist Regime, opened in 2008. 

Its main originators and creators were Krystyna Zachwatowicz, chair of the Programme Board, and the film director Andrzej Wajda.

At the entrance is a sculpture called “Stalin’s Boots,” a replica of the boots from a 26-foot-tall statue of Stalin that was torn down during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Dedicated to Polish history between 1944 and 1989, the museum recounts the story of everyday life in the former Polish People’s Republic. 

The “Nuclear Threat: Shelters of Nowa Huta” exhibit is fascinating, as a visitor learns about the intricate plans the city, and the rest of Poland, had for dealing with a potential nuclear attack during the Cold War years.

The Communist authorities heightened these fears of nuclear war as it allowed them to justify the actions of the secret police and other repressive organs of the state.

Due north of the Ronald Reagan Plac Centralny, on Os. Sloneczne, off the wide Al. Roz, sits the small but very informative Museum of Nowa Huta, created in 2005.  

The museum is located on the ground floor of a four-story apartment building. Rotating exhibits explore the area’s history and contemporary development. 

The utopian dream of the “new Man in the new City” never worked, and it turned out to be not the future, but rather the past, in a Poland now energetically pursuing the capitalist dream.