Kladno : A Showcase of Socialism ?

Catherine Perron (1) , Zdena Vajdová (2)

1 CERI - Centre de recherches internationales (Sciences Po, CNRS)
2 Academy of sciences, Prague

After their accession to power in the different Central and East European countries in 1944-1948, the Communist parties engineered a wide social project. The new elites launched voluntary policies in different sectors of social life, one of them being the urban policy, which was used as a way to promote a new society and a new type of man (the “homo sovieticus”). They intended not only to embody the communist regime in an architectural manner, but also to model society according to their ideology, promoting both the needs of the population (mainly the workers), a new, more egalitarian and socialistic style of life, and a certain functional rationality. In all East European countries, cities built during the 1950s and 1960s substantiate these attempts. They are usually closely linked to the industrialization efforts of the new regime and to the battle for energetic independence, feature an important working-class population, and were erected as symbols of the regime’s political, economic and social ambitions. Kladno in Bohemia is an example of such a city. In this paper, the authors analyze, beyond the “privileged city” myth, the kind of power practice entailed by these policies implementation and study the effects of this legacy in 1989 at the time of the regime fall.

Mots clés: Kladno; homo sovieticus; architecture; socialist cities

Domaines: Histoire; Sociologie; Géographie

Catherine Perron, Zdena Vajdová. Kladno : A Showcase of Socialism ?: Cahiers du CEFRES N° 30, Le communisme à partir des sociétés - Communism from the viewpoint of societies. Cahiers du CEFRES, 2006, Communism from the viewpoint of societies, 30, pp.8. ⟨halshs-01160414⟩