By Karina Povsteva (MA graduate, Slavic Languages and Literatures)
Laura Clarissa Loew is a PhD student at the Department of Central Eastern European History at Justus Liebig University in Gießen (Germany), and the 2025 recipient of the Fisher Fellow Award. The Fisher Fellow Award offers support to junior scholars to attend the Summer Research Lab at the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois in the spirit of scholarly advancement and collaboration. During her stay at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Laura gave a talk about her dissertation project “Not ‘from Dishwasher to Millionaire’, but ‘from Peasant to Farmer’: the Politics and Narratives of Social Advancement in the Polish People’s Republic”. At the end of the summer, we met with Laura to discuss her research plans, dissertation, and post-graduation plans, as well as the materials she had found during her stay at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The interview has been edited for clarity and shortened.
Tell me please about your research path, how did you become interested in your topic, in the history of the Polish People’s Republic?
I got interested in it when I was looking for a bachelor’s thesis topic. At that point, I had an assistantship that entailed transcription, translation, and making short summaries of “memoir competitions”.
This is a specific sociological genre which was invented in Poland in the early 20th century and was very popular in the Polish People’s Republic. Usually, sociologists send out a call where they ask a group of people (often marginalized groups, such as workers or peasants) to share their memories on a concrete topic or their ideas about the future. These memoirs would be used afterwards in sociological research as well as in political and journalistic publications.
So, I started reading a set of these memoirs for my assistantship and got so intrigued by them because the texts in this specific volume were written by young Polish country dwellers who grew up after the Second World War and described their youth in the villages in the socialist state. Some of them were hopeful, writing about how for them it had been the greatest achievement of their lives to continue their scholarly education in the new socialist state, given that their parents before the war would have finished one or two classes. Others had quite a different experience; they wrote that they were sorry and bitter that they had to stay at home after finishing primary school to care for their siblings and engage in farm duties. These people found it unfair that after being promised equality and opportunities for education by the socialist state, they couldn’t profit from it (yet).
And when I started doing my PhD, I came back to these sources, and while doing some casual reading, I stumbled upon the French novels that explored a very similar topic of social mobility. For instance, Didier Eribon or Annie Ernaux in their novels explore the topic of French youth in the 1960s and 70s, who moved from the countryside to the cities and experienced educational mobility, and also different challenges associated with that upward social mobility. I found all these topics very similar to the Polish experience, although one might assume that Poland and France are two different sides of Europe at that period. So, I initially started thinking about my PhD research from these two sides – the autobiographic documents and the European comparison.
Your work draws on a wide range of sources—newspapers, legal texts, archival materials, and competition memoirs that you already started talking about. Could you elaborate on your experience of working with them, especially the competition memoirs? Are there any differences in the methodological approach?
There are specific difficulties when it comes to working with competition memoirs because they are written from the first-person perspective, and they are highly “subjective”. In that sense, they are different from sources such as court cases or legal texts. The latter are traditionally seen as neutral, or objective, because they are created for or by an institution, following specific norms. However, I would say that in current historiography, the borders between “subjective” and “objective”, “ego-documents” and seemingly “objective” or institutional sources are very blurry. If we start asking questions such as what specific norms conditioned the creation of these institutional sources, we will see their “neutrality” deconstructed.
An additional difficulty with the competition memoirs is that other factors apart from the author’s intention came into play in how they were created, given the context of state socialism and censorship. The organizers of the competitions would have wanted to hear people’s ideas about a specific topic so that they would state that directly in the call, or some topics might be excluded from the memoires because they were politically controversial.
Dealing with those sources means for me that I take into consideration all interests that come into play in creating such a memoir-competition text. Good historical criticism always pays attention to all the interests in creating a source, so I would have a similar approach when looking at a “traditional” source; just in this case, I would need to be a little bit more aware of the overlapping interests.
Why did you decide to continue studying in Poland and not in France or some other country?
When I just started my history degree, I didn’t want to do Polish history. I was born in Poland but grew up in Germany, and I always thought that studying the history of one of your home countries is boring, so I should do something else instead. But then it came as such a convenience to know a second language, and it provided me with so many insights into the cultural context that I just naturally navigated towards it.
I also don’t consider my project to be solely in Polish history; I’d rather like to position it in the post-war European history, in a more general context of post-war economic prosperity, when the countries were being rebuilt after the catastrophe of the Second World War. Socialist countries were so far seldomly analyzed under the framework of this European post-war prosperity and modernization promises, and that’s where I think my research comes into play – to look at Poland from a European perspective, and not as an isolated national case.
From what you are saying, I have an impression that you are trying to offer an alternative to the rather generalized theory about totalitarianism as a regime in socialist countries that controlled all spheres of human life, and supposedly didn’t leave any space for individual agency?
Well, this is a slippery slope here. My approach is not to classify the extent to which the Polish socialist state was totalitarian or authoritarian from a political science perspective; rather, it is to examine who created and co-created the state and why. How and why did so many people participate in the building of a socialist statehood, seeing it not only as an authoritarian project (which it was in many ways), but also as a collective endeavor of modernization?
I want to point out how people co-created the socialist state from below, how they participated in building institutions, infrastructure of the socialist state that would provide them with possibilities of social mobility, how they took advantage of these institutions, some with clenched teeth, some cynically, some enthusiastically.
You’ve spent a lot of time working with the Slavic Reference Service at UofI. Can you tell me more about the sources you have found?
Urbana-Champaign was the first time since my introductory classes during my studies that I really used physical bibliographies (again). I had thought that by now, they were replaceable by digital tools, such as online catalogues and registries of archives and libraries. However, SRS showed me some specific bibliographical collections of publications, for example, on rural and peasant issues in the Polis People’s Republic, that had highly specific articles in niche journals that I would have probably not found so quickly by using digital tools.
Apart from the reference books, I worked at the library with sociological publications by Polish researchers who launched memoir competitions and wrote theoretical literature about social advancement. The SRS has an extremely large collection just of scholarly publications from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s from Poland. Additionally, I could use the large collection of newspapers and journals that SRS holds and use their digital infrastructure, such as the microfilm scanner, to look through a large number of editions from newspapers such as Trybuna Ludu, which was the main news organ of the Polish United Workers’ Party, in only a short period of time.
Your upcoming archival work focuses on infrastructure in Łódź and Lublin. Why did you choose these cities, and what insights do you anticipate gaining from them?
I chose them somewhat randomly, but nonetheless, they make up good exemplary cases. Łódź was the second largest city in the Polish People’s Republic. It was an industrial city specializing in the textile industry, with a large working-class population and a revolutionary tradition; therefore, it was deemed an ideal city for the implementation of socialist policies. It received its first proper University only in 1945, and it was specifically promoted as being a place of higher education for the workers of Łódź and their descendants.
Unlike Łódź, which is located in the center of Poland, Lublin is peripheral, near the Ukrainian border. It is surrounded by rural areas and traditionally very catholic and conservative. I chose Lublin and the surrounding regions as an alternative to Łódź, allowing me to consider the conservative Catholic stance of peasants and more rural populations, on the one hand, and the progressive, industrial Łódź, on the other.
Apart from the cities themselves, I will also examine the regions surrounding them, as the countryside and its population are an important site for social advancement policies.
After you defend your dissertation, what are your aspirations for future work?
I would love to stay in academia because I really appreciate the flexibility and diversity of it, the perspective of indulging in topics for a long time, and developing your interests. The downsides connected to finances and a general stability of life are severe, and I might reconsider after having finished my PhD, but so far, I am enjoying the flexibility of it, and I hope I will be able to do something similar after my graduation. I hope I will be able to take the best out of academia, which is really diving into the topics that I am passionate about.