In 1955, an enormous statue of Stalin was unveiled in Prague. Measuring over 100 feet, the granite monument dominated the city’s skyline. But a year later, following Khrushchev’s “secret speech,” Stalin went from hero to villain. Six years later, Prague’s Stalin was obliterated with 1600 pounds of explosives. Paulina Bren will talk about what came next, about the vast plinth that thereafter remained empty, about the period of history known as late communism. While much has been written about the 1950s and 1960s, the 1970s and 1980s remain largely uncharted territory for historians. How can we begin to understand late communism as a distinct era? What, if anything, was normal about this period of so-called “normalization”? Paulina Bren’s lecture will focus on the post-1968 experience in the Eastern Bloc, with an emphasis on media and material consumption, their influence on everyday life, and the shaping of a new ‘communist culture’ in the aftermath of the Prague Spring.

Paulina Bren is the author of The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Cornell UP, 2010), which won the Council for European Studies 2012 Book Prize, the Austrian Studies Association 2012 Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2011 Vucinich Book Award. In 2013, it was translated into Czech and published by Academia Press (Prague). Dr. Bren is also the co-editor of Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe (Oxford UP, 2012), in addition to having written many articles on the culture of politics and everyday life in Eastern Europe. The recipient of various fellowships, most recently from the National Endowment for Humanities, she teaches in the multidisciplinary programs at Vassar College.

Part of the CREES-sponsored series, Buying and Selling, States and Markets, which focuses on various aspects of economies in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. How did socialist regimes theorize money, consumption, wages, and pricing? How did markets during state socialism actually work, and what is their legacy in contemporary times? What are the social roles of commodities and economic transactions today?