Room: Marietta-Blau-Saal, Main Building of the University of Vienna
Street address: Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien

This event is organized by the Department of Contemporary History in cooperation with RECET, the research platform „Transformations and Eastern Europe“, the research group New Cold War Studies and the department of Development Studies.

Poland’s post-socialist transformation started way before the fall of communism. While the Berlin Wall was still standing untouched until late 1989, grassroots capitalism was already in full blow, and radical austerity seriously under way in Poland. But how did the home of the unprecedented Solidarność movement turn into the pioneer of neoliberal shock therapy in Eastern Europe?

In his new book, Von Solidarność zur Schocktherapie. Wie der Kapitalismus nach Polen kam, Florian Peters traces the sweeping changes in economic imaginaries and practices that occurred during the last decade of Polish state socialism, and explains why the Balcerowicz Plan did not come out of the blue. Based on a wide array of archival documents, censored as well as uncensored press, and contemporary sociological research, the book complements the story of reform debates among politicians and experts with a focus on ordinary Poles engaging with the economy. It sheds light on small private entrepreneurs, who set out to create new markets in the middle of the dreary 1980s, on opposition-minded union activists, who started to adopt market-oriented self-understandings in the underground, and on communist functionaries, who discovered the charms of private property… In this way, the book brings out the two faces of economic transformation in Poland: both the swift appropriation of capitalism from below, and the protracted and disenchanting discussions about how to privatise state-owned industry.

Florian Peters is a historian specialising in the contemporary history of Poland and East Central Europe. He received his Ph.D. in 2014 from Humboldt University Berlin for a thesis devoted to politics of memory in late socialist Poland. He has worked as a Postdoc researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History Munich–Berlin and at European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder). Currently, he is a member of the Collaborative Research Centre (Sonderforschungsbereich) „Structural Change of Property“ at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany.