Post-peasant Memories: Populist or Communist Nostalgia

Abstract

This article is part of the special cluster titled Social practices of remembering and forgetting of the communist past in Central and Eastern Europe, guest edited by Malgorzata Glowacka-Grajper

In this article, I argue against the primary perception of communist nostalgia as either longing for social security or the “dark ages” of anti-communist narratives. I suggest we look deeper into people’s everyday economic practices and ideas under communism, and their transmission and/or re-invention by contemporary populism, to understand the present-day role of nostalgia. Using material gathered mostly in Slovakia, I argue for a fuller understanding of the ambivalent role that communist modernization played in developing the specific model of livelihood strategies, ideas, and practices I call post-peasant. This people’s economy is widely remembered as an unintended consequence of communist modernization, not as an integral product of it. This economic model is further mobilized by skilled populist politicians. It is not the memory of socialism, but an understanding of a “people’s economy” and politics developed under socialism and transmitted across regimes, one I characterize as “post-peasant,” that people are actually nostalgic about.