“Kultura i Społeczeństwo” has just published an important issue on post-war peoples’ histories. In the issue, along very interesting articles by Magda Szcześniak, Agnieszka Mrozik, Agata Zborowska, Łukasz Bertram, Marta Gospodarczyk and other authors, you will also find my essay on Pavel Kolář’s Post-Stalinism (Warsaw, Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar 2022), published in Polish this year.
I titled this piece “The Pendulum of Utopia” because I argue that the main value of Kolář’s work lies in thinking of post-Stalinism as an era that tried to redesign communist utopia as a relatively open, possibly diverse and non-definitive project – one that would allow communists to simultaneously dissociate themselves from Stalinism and save the revolutionary horizon from collapse.
Enjoy your reading!