Anthony Kemp-Welch, University of East Anglia:
"Katherine Lebow has redirected the study of Stalinism in scholarly debates. Unlike practitioners of traditional sovietology—now morphing into victimologyfor popular consumption—she seeks out the complexities and ambiguities of Stalinism in eastern Europe... This book will appeal to a wide readership across many disciplines. The range is extensive: urban geography, political mobilization, social structure, gender, youth culture, and film studies. It crosses boundaries within Poland and beyond."
Uilleam Blacker:
"With its monumental architecture and bold layout, Nowa Huta appears to be the quintessence of Communist urban planning. Yet, as Katherine Lebow's rich yet concise study demonstrates, underneath the regimented spaces and ubiquitous concrete lie more complex and nuanced stories.... [Unfinished Utopia] also provides important general insights into the intricate processes by which modernist urban spaces, despite their aspiration to control, become powerful sites of negotiation and resistance."
Steven E. Harris:
"In this richly researched book, Lebow explores how Poland's socialistregime and the residents of Nowa Huta built the city and forged a new way oflife.... It is remarkable that Lebow is able to tell the story of Nowa Huta anddevelop these provocative arguments in such a short book."
Malgorzata Fidelis, University of Illinois at Chicago, author of Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland:
"Nowa Huta was a steelwork and an urban center designed for rural migrants who were to become new men and women in the socialist environment. This is a story of Polish communism as seen from the vantage point of ordinary people who participated in the Stalinist industrial drive. In a compelling and lucid way, Katherine Lebow describes a community that from the very beginning developed a sense of its own identity, not necessarily in agreement with the Communist regime's vision. Rather, the people of Nowa Huta combined rural traditions, the legacy of war and displacement, and their own interpretations of what it meant to construct socialism into a unique system of values. Ironically, as Lebow aptly argues, these values eventually contributed to the dismantling of the Communist project."
Norman M. Naimark, Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies, Stanford University:
"Katherine Lebow's fascinating, impressively researched, and compact study of Nowa Huta, the famous Polish Stalinist project, evokes all the idealism, hard work, accomplishments, failures, and foolhardiness that went into building the mammoth steel mill and the new socialist city that grew up next to it. She focuses on the complicated social history and everyday life of the workers themselves—gypsies, women, shock workers, and hipsters among them—who populated the new city, and demonstrates the crucial role of Nowa Huta’s labor force in the development of worker protest and the emergence of Solidarity."
Eva Plach:
"Unfinished Utopia is an extremely interesting and beautifully executed book.... This book will appeal to a very wide audience. It will of course interest historians of the Polish postwar first and foremost, but beyond that it will appeal to Eastern Europeanists and, notably, to historians of the Western European postwar as well. The book succeeds on many levels: as Polish history, as a history of postwar European recovery, as a history of Stalinism and of Communist identity formation, and, lastly, as a history of twentieth-century political and social transformations."
Anna Muller:
"Each chapter provides the reader with fascinating material that ultimately illuminates the problems at the heart of the most recent discussions in Polish historiography. This includes the nature of Polish Stalinism, which Lebow sees as much more than mere ideology, but rather as a set of practices that individuals creatively appropriated."
