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Collective Actions in Europe A Comparative Economic and Transsystemic Analysis Csongor István Nagy
This book discusses how societies, groups and individuals remember and make sense of global neoliberal change in Eastern Europe. Such an investigation is all the more timely as the 1990s are increasingly looked to for answers explaining the populist and nationalist turns across the globe.
The volume shows how the key processes that impacted many lives across the social spectrum in Eastern Europe, such as deindustrialization, privatization, restitution and abrupt social reorganization, are collectively remembered across society today and how memory narratives of the 1990s contribute to current identities and political climate. This volume establishes the memory of economic transformation as a research focus in its own right. It investigates different levels of memory, from the national through the local to the cultural, analysing key myths of the transformation, giving special recognition to the social space and vernacular memories of the transformation period and reflecting on how the changes of the 1990s are mediated in cultural representations.
Given the book’s interdisciplinary scope that covers several fields, it will prove to be of interest to those working in memory studies, contemporary history, sociology, East European area studies and literary and film studies. It will also serve as a significant point of reference for those researching the interdisciplinary and rapidly expanding field of transformation studies and thus is an invaluable source across different fields.
Veronika Pehe is a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where she leads the Research Group for Historical Transformation Studies. She specializes in cultural history, memory and film and television.
Joanna Wawrzyniak is associate professor in sociology and director of the Center for Research on Social Memory at the University of Warsaw. She is vice chair of the EU COST Action Slow Memory: Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change
European Remembrance and Solidarity
The recent crisis of the European project (the Euro, migration, Brexit, the rise in national populism) has brought about new questions about the direction of EU integration. The debate on a common European memory and identity has been equally dramatic, and in particular since the expansion of the EU towards the east, as pleas for proper recognition of the ‘new’ Europe within a common European historical awareness have emerged. With a number of volumes studying social memories in connection to art, religion, politics and other domains of social life, the series editors wish to contribute to the debate on European memory and identity and shed fresh light on the region of Central and Eastern Europe and Europe more broadly, a region stretched between the past and the future in the negotiation of identities – both national and transnational. The editors encourage comparative studies of two or more European countries, as well as those that highlight Central and Eastern Europe in reference to other regions in Europe and beyond.
The book series is developed in cooperation with European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (www.enrs.eu).
Editorial Board of the book series: Marek Cichocki, Peter Haslinger, Catherine Horel, Csaba Gy. Kiss, Dušan Kovác, Elena Mannová, Andrzej Nowak, Attila Pók, Marcela Salagean, Arnold Suppan, Stefan Troebst and Jay Winter.
Coordination: Małgorzata Pakier, Ewelina Szpak
Titles in the series include:
Image, History and Memory
Central and Eastern Europe in a Comparative Perspective
Edited by Michał Haake and Piotr Juszkiewicz
Memory and Religion from a Postsecular Perspective
Edited by Zuzanna Bogumił and Yuliya Yurchuk
A New Europe, 1918–1923
Instability, Innovation, Recovery
Edited by Bartosz Dziewanowski-Stefanczyk and Jay Winter
Remembering the Neoliberal Turn
Economic Change and Collective Memory in Eastern Europe after 1989
Edited by Veronika Pehe and Joanna Wawrzyniak
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ European-Remembrance-and-Solidarity/book-series/REMEMBER
The European Network Remembrance and Solidarity
The European Network Remembrance and Solidarity is an international initiative, the aim of which is to research, document and enhance public knowledge of the twentieth-century history of Europe and European cultures of remembrance, with particular emphasis on periods of dictatorships, wars and resistance to political violence. The members of the network are Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, with representatives from Albania, Austria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia and Lithuania present in its advisory bodies.
More information: www.enrs.eu
ENRS is funded by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Ministry of Interior of Hungary, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland, the Ministry of Culture of Romania and the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic.
Remembering the Neoliberal Turn
Economic Change and Collective Memory in Eastern Europe after 1989
Edited by Veronika Pehe and Joanna Wawrzyniak
First published 2024 by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
The right of Veronika Pehe and Joanna Wawrzyniak to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Chapter 6 originally appeared in German as Thomas Lindenberger. 2020. ‘Wahrheitsregime und Unbehagen an der Vergangenheit. Ein Versuch über die Unaufrichtigkeiten beim deutsch-deutschen Zusammenwachsen.’ In Jahrbuch Deutsche Einheit 2020, edited by Marcus Böick, Constantin Goschler, and Ralph Jessen. Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 73–94. Published with the permission of Aufbau Verlag GmbH & Co. KG.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-55333-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-55334-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-43017-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/b23366
Typeset in Times New Roman by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
This publication was financed by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity. ENRS is funded by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Ministry of Interior of Hungary, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland, the Ministry of Culture of Romania and the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic.
List of illustrations xii
List of contributors xiii
Acknowledgements xviii
1 Neoliberalism, Eastern Europe and collective memory: setting the framework 1
JOANNA WAWRZYNIAK AND VERONIKA PEHE
PART I Founding myths and counter-narratives of the transformation 19
2 Shock therapy mythologies: contested memories of Poland’s Balcerowicz Plan 21
FLORIAN PETERS
3 A recurring bone of contention: the memory politics of Slovakia’s economic transformation 39
MATEJ IVANCÍK
4 From communism to neoliberalism: conflated memories of Bulgaria’s corrupted transition 59
TOM JUNES AND IVO ILIEV
5 Political uses of memory of the early period of the post-Soviet transformations in contemporary Russia 77
OLGA MALINOVA
6 Regimes of truth and the discontent of memories: self-deception and denial during the growing together of the two Germanies 93 THOMAS LINDENBERGER
PART II
Vernacular memories and biographical narratives
7 Economic change, skills and the shifting horizons of social recognition: East German and Czech care workers remember the disruptive 1990s 115 TILL HILMAR
8 ‘The lost years’: gender, citizenship and economic change in Romania during the long 1990s 132 JILL MASSINO
9 ‘There was no more work, no more life, no more anything…’: Hungarian workers’ memories of the neoliberal transition 149
TIBOR VALUCH
10 How the Polish business elite remembers the neoliberal turn 164
KAMIL LIPINSKI AND JOANNA WAWRZYNIAK
11 The neoliberal turn in biographical narratives of young people in Poland
ADAM MROZOWICKI AND JUSTYNA KAJTA
III
12 Privatization comedies as media of memory of the Czech(oslovak) economic transformation
VERONIKA PEHE
13 Screening the criminal underworld of capitalist nation-state making: Dogs and memory of the 1990s in Poland
SAYGUN GÖKARIKSEL
14 The moral right to economic crime: remembering the Russian 1990s in a tragic mode in Aleksey Ivanov’s Nasty Weather (Nenast’ye)
KSENIA ROBBE
15 Films without a viewer: Ukrainian filmmakers and memory of the neoliberal turn in the post-Soviet space
OLGA GONTARSKA AND VERONIKA PEHE
16 The Ger man ‘floating gap’: post-unification memory in literary fiction
JOANNA JABŁKOWSKA AND MAGDALENA SARYUSZ-WOLSKA
17 ‘We’re rushing towards capitalism like the Titanic towards a fucking iceberg’: representations of East German (social) transformation in films and TV series from the 2000s until today
18 Memories of the neoliberal turn in comparative perspective: a research agenda
AND JOANNA WAWRZYNIAK
Illustrations
Figures
4.1 Voter turnout in Bulgaria, 1990–2021 (Source: Central Electoral Committee)
5.1 Number of presidential speeches and talks including references to the experience of the 1990s (Source: The President of Russia website, www.kremlin.ru)
5.2 Evaluative scales of characteristics of the experience of the 1990s in presidential speeches (Source: The President of Russia website, www.kremlin.ru)
Tables
9.1 Population of Hungary by economic activity 1980–2001 (persons) (Source: Hungarian Statistical Yearbook, 1998. Budapest Central Statistical Office, 233. Employment data from the 2001 Census Budapest, Central Statistical Office, 2003, 134)
9.2 Distribution of active earners by economic sector 1980–2001 (Sources: Hungarian Statistical Yearbook, 1998. Budapest Central Statistical Office, 234, Employment data from the 2001 Census Budapest Central Statistical Office, 2003, 135)
67
80
81
151
152
Contributors
Saygun Gökarıksel is an assistant professor of sociology at Bogazici University, Istanbul and a member of the School of Social Science, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His research and writing engages the themes of law, history and politics, especially transitional justice and human rights, from a critical legal and political anthropological perspective. His current research concerns the reckoning with the communist past in Poland and Eastern Europe, with a focus on violence, archive, memory and capitalism. His most recent publications include Beyond Transparency: The Communist-era Secret Police Files in Postsocialist Eastern Europe’, Archives and Records, 2020; Facing History: Sovereignty and the Spectacles of Justice and Violence in Poland’s Capitalist Democracy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2019; and (with Umut Türem) ‘The Banality of Exception?: Law and Politics in ‘Post-Coup’ Turkey’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 2019.
Olga Gontarska defended her doctoral thesis on visions of the past in the Ukrainian feature films in 2021 at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Since 2015, she has participated in several historical research projects and worked for the Hannah-Arendt-Institut für Totalitarismusforschung, Columbia University, the University of Melbourne, the Museum of Polish History and the ‘Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre’ Centre. In 2016, 2017 and 2018, she held short-term research fellowships at the Institute of History of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kyiv. Since 2021, she is a researcher at the German Historical Institute, Warsaw. Her research interests include the history of transformation in Central and Eastern Europe and searching for new historical sources for research on contemporary history. Her recent publications cover memory politics and cultural politics in Ukraine.
Till Hilmar received his PhD in sociology from Yale University in 2019 and is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology, Vienna University. He is a faculty fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology and an assistant editor of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. His research interests include qualitative approaches to inequality, cultural and political sociology, social memory and post-1989 transformations. His
book Deserved. Economic Memories after the Fall of the Iron Curtain, published with Columbia University Press in 2023, examines popular experiences of the East German and the Czech post-1989 transformations in a comparative perspective.
Ivo Iliev is a political scientist and PhD researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His research interests lie in the domains of political economy and economic sociology, with a focus on postcommunist capitalism, European integration and digital economy.
Matej Ivancík works at the Department of General History at the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava. His research covers civil society, nationalism and intellectual and political discourses in late socialist and postsocialist (Czecho-)Slovakia. He co-authored the book Civil Society in Central Europe: The Leftist Perspective (Prague, 2020; in Slovak) and co-edited Narratives of Remembrance. 1968: The Past Present and the Present Past (Bratislava, 2020).
Joanna Jabłkowska is a full professor of German literature at the University of Łódz (Poland). Her research focuses on contemporary German, Austrian and Swiss literature, nation building and utopia in German literature as well as Polish–German literary relationships. Among her publications are monographs about apocalyptic visions in twentieth-century German literature (Literatur ohne Hoffnung, 1993) and about Martin Walser’s works (Zwischen Heimat und Nation, 2001). She has edited numerous collected volumes and published more than 50 articles and chapters.
Tom Junes is an assistant professor at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a member of the Human and Social Studies Foundation in Sofia. He holds a PhD from the KU Leuven (Belgium), and as a postdoctoral researcher he has held fellowships in Warsaw, Vienna, Budapest, Helsinki, Potsdam, Jena, Sofia and Florence. His research interests cover Eastern European history and Cold War history with a focus on youth and student movements, communist and socialist party politics, and post-1989 protests. He is the author of Student Politics in Communist Poland: Generations of Consent and Dissent, and has published widely on topics relating to student protest in Eastern Europe.
Justyna Kajta is a postdoctoral researcher at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities. She holds a PhD in social sciences (University of Wrocław, 2017). Her main research interests concern youth, social movements, class (im)mobilities, social and political changes in Central and Eastern Europe as well as qualitative research, e.g. biographical method and discourse analysis. She is the author of (in Polish) Young radicals? On the identity of the Polish nationalist movement and its participants (Nomos, 2020).
Thomas Lindenberger is a professor at the History Department at TU Dresden and the director of the Hannah-Arendt-Institute for Totalitarianism
Contributors xv
Studies at TU Dresden. He works on the social and everyday life history of twentieth-century Germany and Europe. Among his recent book publications are Eigen-Sinn. Zycie codzienne, podmiotowosc i sprawowanie władzy w XX wieku (ed. with Alf Lüdtke, Poznan 2018), 100 Jahre Oktoberrevolution. Zur Weltgeschichte der Russischen Revolution (ed. with Jan C. Behrends and Nikolaus Katzer, Berlin 2017) and Clashes in European Memory: The Case of Communist Repression and the Holocaust (Studies in European History and Public Spheres, vol. 2, 2011, ed. with Muriel Blaive and Christian Gerbel).
Kamil Lipinski holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Warsaw (2021). His research concerns the conversion and legitimization of economic capital, stratification and economic sociology. Thanks to his engineering and sociological background, he acquired diverse professional experience in private and public institutions of the CEE energy sector. His recent publications cover wealth accumulation within the business elite in Central Eastern Europe.
Anna Lux is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of History from the University of Freiburg/Breisgau. She holds a PhD from the University of Leipzig (2011). After that she worked on the DFG-funded project ‘Innovation through “non-hegemonic” production of knowledge: “occult” phenomena within media history, cultural transfer and science 1770–1970’. Since 2018, she has been working on a research project entitled ‘The Controversial Heritage of 1989’ (Das umstrittene Erbe von 1989) and primarily studies popular representations of 1989 and the time of transformation.
Olga Malinova is a professor of the HSE University and chief research fellow of the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences. The fields of her research interests are political ideologies and political discourse, symbolic politics, politics of memory and Russian identity construction. Her recent publications are ‘Framing the Collective Memory of the 1990s as a Legitimation Tool for Putin’s Regime’, in Problems of Post-Communism, 2021, 68(5), 429–41, and ‘Legitimizing Putin’s Regime: The Transformations of the Narrative of Russia’s Post-Soviet Transition’, in Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 2022, 55(1): 52–75.
Jill Massino is an associate professor of Modern European History at UNC Charlotte. She is co-editor (with Shana Penn) of Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe (Palgrave, 2009) and author of Ambiguous Transitions: Gender, the State, and Everyday Life in Socialist and Postsocialist Romania (Berghahn Books, 2019).
Adam Mrozowicki is an associate professor at the University of Wrocław, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Sociology, Poland. He holds a PhD from CESO KU Leuven, Belgium (2009) and a habilitation in social sciences (economic sociology) from the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of
Wrocław (2016). His academic interests lie in the areas of the sociology of work, comparative employment relations, precarity, workers’ agency and subjectivity, critical social realism and biographical methods. He co-led the DFG-NCN-funded project PREWORK on young precarious workers in Poland and Germany and currently leads the NCN-funded COV-WORK project on socio-economic consciousness and life strategies of workers in Poland following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Veronika Pehe is a historian based at the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where she leads the Research Group for Historical Transformation Studies. She holds a PhD in cultural history from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, and has published on questions of nostalgia, retro, popular culture, oral history, memory politics and the history of the economic transformations in Eastern Europe. Pehe is the author of Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Culture (Berghahn Books, 2020).
Florian Peters is a historian specialising in the modern history of East Central Europe based at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He has been interested in Polish struggles over the past since his doctoral thesis devoted to late socialist politics of memory (Revolution der Erinnerung. Der Zweite Weltkrieg in der Geschichtskultur des spätsozialistischen Polen, Berlin 2016). His latest book (Von Solidarnosc zur Schocktherapie. Wie der Kapitalismus nach Polen kam, Berlin 2023) focuses on economic reform discourse, changes of property regimes and their social contexts in Poland’s post-socialist transformation.
Ksenia Robbe is a senior lecturer in European Culture and Literature (Russian) at the University of Groningen. She works at the interfaces of postcolonial and postsocialist, memory and time and gender and feminist studies. Her current research is focused on memories of the 1980s–90s ‘transitions’ in contemporary Russian and South African literature. She is the author of Conversations of Motherhood: South African Women’s Writing Across Traditions (UKZN Press, 2015), editor of Remembering Transitions: Local Revisions and Global Crossings in Culture and Media (De Gruyter, 2023) and co-editor of Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Confronting the Empire’s Legacies (Routledge, 2019) and (Un)timely Crises: Chronotopes and Critique (Palgrave, 2021).
Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska studied sociology and film studies in Łódz (Poland), Giessen and Mainz (Germany). She holds a PhD in literary studies and a habilitation in cultural studies. Currently, she is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. Her research concerns cultural memories in Poland and Germany, historical films and reception studies. Her contributions include monographs on Polish-German cultural memories (Spotkania czasu z miejscem, 2011), visual cultures in early post-war
Contributors xvii
Germany (Ikony normalizacji/Bilder der Normalisierung, 2017) as well as articles in German Studies Review and The Public Historian.
Tibor Valuch is a social historian and research professor at the Center for Social Sciences, Institute of Political Science. He is also a professor at the Institute of History, Eszterházy Károly University in Eger. His main research fields include the social and cultural history of Hungary after the Second World War, history of everyday life in contemporary Hungary and Central-Europe, contemporary European social history and the social history of consumption in modern Europe from a comparative point of view and labor history. His latest book is Everyday Life under Communism and After: Consumption and Lifestyle in Hungary, 1945–2000 (CEU Press 2022).
Joanna Wawrzyniak is an associate professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Research on Social Memory at the University of Warsaw. Her current research interests include memories of socialism, neoliberal transformation and deindustrialization in Poland, as well as cultural memory in various parts of the world. She has co-edited special issues for Memory Studies, Contemporary European History, East European Politics and Societies and Polish Sociological Review. Her books in English include co-edited Regions of Memory (Palgrave 2022) and Memory and Change in Europe (Berghahn Books 2016). She has co-authored The Enemy on Display (Berghahn Books 2015). Her most recent co-authored book in Polish is Ciecia. Mówiona historia transformacji (Cuts: Oral History of Post-Socialism, Wyd. Krytyka Polityczna, 2020).
Acknowledgements
The editors of this volume would like to express their gratitude to the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS) for their generous funding of the conference Myths, Memories and Economies: Post-Socialist Transformations in Comparison (Warsaw 2019), where the original ideas underlying this book were presented. The ENRS Director, Rafał Rogulski, as well as Małgorzata Pakier and Ewelina Szpak from the ENRS Academic Unit, supported us with their patient advice and marvellous logistics en route to the publication of this volume. We are very grateful to all the participants of the Myths, Memories and Economies conference, as well as the discussants at the round table Remembering the 1990s: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Studying the Memory of East-Central European Economic Transformations we organized at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (New Orleans, LA, 2021), for their constructive feedback that helped us to refine our understanding of memory of the neoliberal turn in Eastern Europe. We have been privileged to work with a committed team of authors, who keenly participated in several additional book workshops commenting on each other’s chapters. Finally, the volume would have never seen the light of day without the patient and meticulous work of its language editor, Philip Palmer. We thank you all for this rewarding collaborative effort.
1 Neoliberalism, Eastern Europe and collective memory Setting the framework
Joanna Wawrzyniak and Veronika Pehe
In 1989 the first national debt clock was installed on Sixth Avenue, one block away from Times Square, New York, by real estate mogul Seymour Durst, who wished to express his concern at excessive government spending. The idea was soon replicated in many countries of the world. In Warsaw, such a clock appeared in 2010 as a result of the activism of the Civil Development Forum, an organization run by former finance minister and co-architect of the neoliberal turn in Poland, Leszek Balcerowicz. Apparently, the clock serves as a reminder of the flow of time and the danger of bankruptcy. And yet, for many, it serves as a warning for the future just as much as a reminder of the transition period of the 1990s, when fiscal austerity measures were put in place as a condition for reducing Poland’s foreign debt and opening the country’s path to capitalism (Kurysia 2020).
This book focuses on memories of the most profound change of the late twentieth century: the institutionalization of neoliberalism as both hegemonic economic ideology and social and cultural practice. The impact of the historical processes entangled with neoliberalism (such as the 1970s crisis, globalization, fiscal austerity measures, deindustrialization, privatization and the growing relevance of foreign direct investment over domestic economies) has been felt the world over. However, the impact of these processes was particularly abrupt and acute in the area formerly governed by communist parties that is referred to by various terms such as Central and Eastern Europe, East-Central Europe and simply Eastern Europe.1 In that sense, Eastern Europe can be seen as a social laboratory of neoliberal practices. What this actually means, however, for different levels of society and specific groups is difficult to decipher. Therefore, the primary aim of this book is to unveil a dynamic, multidimensional picture of how the processes that have come to be referred to as the economic ‘transformation’ or ‘transition’ have been remembered. Moving away from issues already discussed in the postsocialist literature on how change should be instituted within Eastern European economies, the authors of this book ask questions that speak more acutely to the present day: in particular, this volume traces how neoliberalism became the legitimizing myth of the socalled transition and what counter-memories in politics and culture it provoked. It is particularly sensitive to the accounts of those who contributed,
Joanna Wawrzyniak and Veronika Pehe
resisted and negotiated economic change: politicians, cultural producers, social movements, businesspeople and workers. Overall, this book argues that memories of the postsocialist transformation in Eastern Europe are important because like the national debt clock, they intervene in the ways we understand the present.
The neoliberal turn
Definitions of neoliberalism have produced much argument among economists, as demonstrated by studies undertaken by the different ‘schools’ of neoliberal thought (including Freiburg, Chicago, Cologne, Geneva and others) and debates over how neoliberals define the role of the state (Slobodian 2018). It is not our ambition to contribute to these discussions. In this book, rather than engaging either with economic theory or its intellectual history, we follow a sociological approach that sees neoliberalism broadly as ‘the project of economic and social transformation under the sign of the free market’ related to ‘the institutional arrangements to implement this project’ (Connell, Fawcett and Meagher 2009). Although the key category of neoliberalism is the free market, at least since the 1970s this has implied the existence of state-led agencies and international regulations rather than the laissez-faire economic policy associated with nineteenth-century economic ‘liberalism’. In the realities of the Eastern European societies, neoliberal changes operated in two interconnected spheres, namely as a newly imposed institutional design and as a driving ideology that dominated not only the local but also the global mindset in the 1990s. In this volume we are interested in how processes unleashed by ideologically underpinned institutional redesign have been remembered and continue to function in the present.
Before discussing our approach to memory, let us start by critically considering three sceptical arguments that question whether the ‘neoliberal turn’ should be the right category to capture the essence of that memory. These revolve around the origins of the transformation, social actors’ perspectives and the question of alternative terminology.
To begin with the first question: was there indeed a neoliberal turn in the region? The vast social science literature produced by transformation studies has provided impressive evidence showing that not only were some elements of the market introduced much earlier than at the beginning of the 1990s in Eastern Europe, but also that the very origins of ‘neoliberalism’ should not be seen as being driven solely by the capitalist world (Bockman and Eyal 2002). Already in the 1970s, convergence theories were discussing the similarities between socialism and capitalism rather than seeing them as discrete systems (Kneissel, Huyssen, and Moore 1974 and Halal 1988). Recently, historians have proposed to see the economic and political upheavals of the 1990s in a longer perspective. Globalized studies of 1989–91 have set this transformational event in a wider chronological and geographical transnational context reaching beyond the Eastern bloc and have worked to overcome the
national and nation-state perspective (Mark, Iacob, Rupprecht, and Spaskovska 2019). Philipp Ther’s seminal book Europe since 1989: A History (2016) demonstrated how the East European transformations were part of a larger process and how, in fact, Western European countries were undergoing a ‘co-transformation’ at the same time. A lively scholarly discussion has erupted over the intellectual roots of neoliberal reform in Central and Eastern Europe, which shows how Eastern European economic experts were conversant with Western and non-aligned countries’ economic paradigms, while at the same time developing autochthonous forms of economic thought under socialism (Bockman 2011; Pula 2018 and Rupprecht 2020).
No doubt intellectual debates, expert discourses and technological changes, as well as work relations, consumption patterns and daily lives were to an extent entangled with those in other parts of the world long before 1989. And yet we certainly concur with those currents of transformation studies that point out that neoliberalism, both as a hegemonic ideology and the setting for institutional reforms, significantly changed the norms and values structuring social life, influenced people’s choices and shaped their actions anew, both in formal and in informal ways. The new institutional design owed a great deal to the spirit of the Washington Consensus and was advocated by international organizations, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and vast networks of international advisory and domestic experts. The Washington Consensus approach to reforms was seen by both local and international actors at the time as the main option for reforming the decaying postsocialist economies and connecting them with global markets. In exchange for foreign aid and the reduction of international debt, the aforementioned international organizations demanded the introduction of fiscal discipline and measures designed to counteract inflation. They advised the liberalization of trade and opening of domestic markets to foreign goods. Although there were experiments with the private sector east of the Iron Curtain well before 1989, the mass privatization of state-owned enterprises, sped up by the liberalization of inward foreign direct investment, was among the defining processes of the 1990s. The robust domestic private business of medium and small enterprises grew in its shadow.
Neoliberal policies implied changes being made to the legal system to make it responsive to the needs of the market economy and international cooperation. Importantly, such changes also permuted governance in the public sector in areas such as healthcare or education, where practices of new public management were introduced based on the assumption that ‘the quality and efficiency of the civil service should be improved by introducing management techniques and practices drawn mainly from the private sector’ (Bleiklie 2018, 1).
The privatization processes of state-owned enterprises were followed by abrupt deindustrialization, decomposition and the symbolic devaluation of the working class. Austerity measures meant unemployment and deprivation for large groups of society. The growth of small and medium enterprises and
Joanna Wawrzyniak and Veronika Pehe
the opening of domestic economies to international corporate investors unlocked new and diverse career opportunities. Reprivatization and the restitution of property to former, pre-socialist-era owners resulted in sometimes abrupt social transfers that catapulted individuals into the new, propertied class. Coupled with technological and post-Fordist shifts, neoliberal policies implied changes in organizational cultures, as well as to the skills required on labour markets.
Such a pronounced transformation in the organization of social life as a result of neoliberal economic policy also brought about a change in values. After the collapse of the collectivist framework of state-socialist states, individualism became the foundational principle of social organization, along with personal responsibility, flexibility in the world of work and a suspicion of generous welfare policies and redistributive measures, which were labelled as ‘communist’ by neoliberal policymakers. In this way, the transformation became a normative project with a ‘liberal pedagogy’ that aimed to create ideal liberal subjects (Szacki 1995 and Bucholc 2020) and the neoliberal setting fostered an ‘entrepreneurial’ or ‘neoliberal’ self (Dunn 2004, Matza 2012 and Makovicky 2016).
The actual effects of this radical socio-economic as well as cultural changes were replete with conflicts, tensions and negotiations, and ultimately resulted in various hybrid, fuzzy socio-economic forms with institutional solutions that differed from country to country in the region (Bohle and Greskovits 2012). The various countries also differed in terms of the scale of the oligarchization of business, informal economy, corruption and crime that accompanied the hasty implementation of reforms (Ghodsee and Orenstein 2021).
Turning now to the second consideration: is ‘neoliberalism’ the right word to use if the actors of the time did not actually call themselves ‘neoliberal’? Admittedly, ‘neoliberalism’ was not widely used in the public discourse of the 1990s as a term denoting the dominant reformist master narrative, neither by its proponents nor by its commentators. In countries like Poland and the Czech Republic, the initial intellectual debate was rather streamlined around discussions around ‘liberalism’, with the classic writings of Adam Smith or Friedrich Hayek being read by some opposition members and counteracted with various ideas collectively referred to as ‘the third way’ (Kowalik 2009). Also, it was the framework of simplified nineteenth-century economic liberalism that served the aforementioned ‘pedagogy’ of the transformation rather than discussions on the complexities and contradictions of both the broader liberal ideas and the neoliberalism of the end of the twentieth century (Walicki 2013). In turn, in the public discourse of post-Soviet countries, including the most telling example of Russia, ‘neoliberalism’ functioned as an example of Western orthodoxy from which the reforming elites either wanted to distance themselves or which they blamed for the chaos of the 1990s; at the same time, the critics of the Russian reforms argued that the state-centred, oligarchic type of Russian capitalism that emerged was far from meeting the standards of the Washington Consensus (Rutland 2013). Needless to mention, the majority of the
Neoliberalism, Eastern Europe and collective memory 5 implicated subjects of the transformation, from businesspeople to workers, did not call themselves the ‘agents’ or ‘victims’ of ‘neoliberalism’ on a daily basis because they were immersed in the terminologies of their own social groups.
It was only later, around the turn of the millennium, that the critics of the transformation reforms from the left, as well as observers from abroad, called the reforms ‘neoliberal’, partly in response to the rise of the alter-globalization movement that formulated criticism of ‘neoliberal globalization’ and in particular protested against the role of international financial organizations in implementing neoliberal policies worldwide. Aligning themselves with a critical diagnosis of the turn away from Keynesianism in the Western world, critics argued that dispossession and disenfranchisement of large social groups by ‘neoliberal globalization’ contributed to the rise of neonationalism and the new radical right as the only available defence mechanisms in the new neoliberal order. Such critical understandings of neoliberalism pointed out that the discontent with neoliberal policies produced unintended side effects, including the rise of ‘populism’ and ‘neofascism’ or, in David Ost’s (2022) terminology, REN PILL, that is, Right-wing Exclusionary Nationalist Popular Illiberalism. Such analyses of the economic and political changes in Eastern Europe started to circulate more broadly over the last two decades (Kalb 2011; Kotwas and Kubik 2019; Ost 2018 Orenstein and Bugaric 2022).
From this perspective, it makes sense to refer to the way economic change and its attendant social effects have been remembered through the prism of a ‘neoliberal turn’. However, in this book we will approach neoliberalism in a dual manner: both etic and emic. The etic approach refers to the institutional processes described above. Although a number of alternative, often more gradualist approaches were proposed by domestic experts in the different CEE countries, a neoliberal agenda advocated by both local economists and international financial institutions had prevailed in most countries by the second half of the 1990s, though timings differed from case to case (Bohle and Neunhöffer 2009; Kowalik 2009 and Rameš 2021). Following many scholars, we thus assume that neoliberal policies were the main scenario that profoundly transformed Eastern European societies in less than a decade. And yet, our goal is also to expose some of the emic – and often only implicit – understandings of this term when retrospectively looking at the 1990s. In shifting the focus to memory of the neoliberal turn, we are in fact showing how amorphous this term is in the understanding of different actors – political elites, cultural producers, different social groups and, indeed, scholars.
And, third, what is to be gained from privileging ‘the neoliberal turn’ over the plethora of alternative concepts used to describe the processes in question? The notions employed in broad public and academic discourse to refer to processes of economic reforms range from perestroika (restructuring) in the Soviet Union and die Wende (the turning point) in Germany, to transition, change, postsocialism and the dominant ‘transformation’ in Eastern Europe. The primary advantage of speaking about a neoliberal turn is that it is less vague and imprecise than all those terms. Even though it does not capture all the semantic
Joanna Wawrzyniak and Veronika Pehe
and local nuances, it encapsulates important commonalities, including the lack of alternatives to the market economy, a notion that was dominant in most postsocialist countries already in the early phase of economic reform. Overall, other terms might have been used more broadly, but the premises of the Washington Consensus forming the neoliberal canon became the main components of economic change, even if they were named differently in public discourse or contested during the reform processes.
Moreover, one advantage of speaking about the neoliberal turn rather than of a vague and imprecise transformation is that this enables studies of Eastern Europe to be granted a global dimension. Whilst the words ‘transition’ and ‘transformation’ to a market economy imply the unique status of this region, the neoliberal turn helps to relate Eastern European history to worldwide processes that had as diverse local manifestations as Augusto Pinochet’s reforms in Chile in the 1970s, the strikes in the United Kingdom in 1980s, the protests in Argentina in 2001–2, the Asian crisis of 1997 and the global financial crisis in 2008. One of the most profound arguments for viewing Eastern Europe as a significant case of global processes is the ‘compression’ in the time and space of phenomena that have been more gradual and diverse in other localities, such as the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism, immense technological changes, connection with global capital, labour and commodity markets, deindustrialization, deregulation, privatization of key infrastructure and services and the introduction of corporate management and public management practices (Bandelj 2007 and Hardy 2009). All those processes, which were condensed into several years, were connected with attempts to build liberal political institutions. Indeed, Eastern Europe embraced most of the problems of late modernity over a single decade, so it did not come as much of a surprise to contemporary observers when those experiences were followed by a shift away towards ‘illiberalism’ fuelled by the accumulated stress, disappointed expectations and unfulfilled hopes of the 1990s.
In this way, this volume intersects the transformation literature produced in the 1990s and early 2000s in political science, sociology, anthropology and economics, which covered the processes of democratic and economic change in postsocialist countries, though this scholarship was later challenged for its overly normative ambitions (Bunce 1995; Carothers 2002; Hann 2002 and Kopec ek and Wcislik 2015). Indeed, the state of the research on the transformation can perhaps itself be considered a form of memory that will prove of value to scholars tackling the growing field of memory of the transformation.
We are also aware of the immense social science literature in local languages on the processes, effects and experience of transformation. For instance, economic questions have been at the forefront of concern for German scholars, as demonstrated by the large-scale project on the history of the Treuhandanstalt (Trust Agency: the federal body tasked with implementing the structures of a social market economy in the former GDR) carried out at the Leibniz Institute of Contemporary History.2 But that is just one example among many efforts in local languages that demonstrate awareness of the pressing need to historicize
the period of free market transformation and democratization, especially as a number of Eastern European countries today are questioning, or even rejecting, the liberal ideas that guided the postsocialist changes. In this introduction, we have mainly limited ourselves to works published in English. Literature in local languages is explored by this volume’s authors in individual chapters. While we can say that the history of economic change in Eastern Europe has become increasingly well-mapped, it remains the case throughout the region that the mnemonic dimension of that change remains underexplored.
Why memory matters
Over the space of nearly three decades, Eastern Europe’s postsocialist transformations have become a realm of mnemonic conflict – a realm that is entangled with other layers of memory, especially those related to the Second World War and the socialist past, despite having its own discursive dynamics. Although it would be premature to declare Eastern Europe’s coming to terms with its state-socialist past as completed, there has certainly been a shift of focus demonstrable in heightened public interest in the period of the 1990s and its use (and abuse) in the discourse of different groups. Political leaders across the region have realized the potential of either claiming or critiquing the heritage of the economic transformation. As Kristen Ghodsee and Mitchell Orenstein demonstrate in their interdisciplinary assessment of the transition titled Taking Stock of Shock (2021), interpretations of the outcomes of economic transformation remain ambiguous and polarized. Some see the transition as an unequivocal success story that brought some formerly socialist countries ‘back to Europe’, while others condemn it as a time of economic hardship caused by the largely neoliberal policies of the time and a period in which large-scale corruption, economic crime and cronyism took root, negatively influencing postsocialist countries’ political culture to this day.
Not only have some scholars interpreted the rise of populism and political extremism as a consequence of the neoliberal turn of the 1990s, but populist and authoritarian political subjects have themselves capitalized on conflicting memories of the postsocialist social and economic upheavals. Harsh criticism of the failures of the 1990s has served as one of the primary building blocks behind Vladimir Putin’s claim to power in Russia, as Olga Malinova demonstrates in her chapter in this volume. Invoking the memory of the 1990s and the transformation also plays a prominent role in the rhetoric of the ‘illiberal’ countries of Central Europe. Both Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary and Jarosław Kaczynski’s Law and Justice in Poland have framed the changes of 1989 as a betrayal of liberal elites, and it is only now that these leaders are enacting a ‘true’ transformation (Ost 2019; Peters 2021 and Bernhard 2021). Similarly, in Germany, nationalist, populist and far-right forces have exploited the economic grievances of former East German voters disenchanted by the uneven development of East versus West to cast the memory of 1989 as an ‘unfinished’ revolution, as is evident, for instance, in the Alternative for
Joanna Wawrzyniak and Veronika Pehe
Germany (AfD) slogan Vollende die Wende (‘Complete the Changes’). Yet it would be too much of a simplification to classify the instrumentalization of memory of the transformation as a defining feature of populism. The former Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš (2017–21) has often been labelled a populist, yet he has not been particularly interested in stirring memory conflicts of any kind (Pehe 2021). Equally, scholars have paid attention to how different types of populism vary in the extent to which they endorse or critique the neoliberal agenda, with right-wing forms of exclusionary populism often continuing to pursue neoliberal policy (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017). But the bottom line remains that practically every formerly socialist country has its own version of a political dispute over the 1990s, whether populist actors are involved or not.
At the same time, popular culture across the region has started to turn back to the 1990s, sometimes critically, and at other times with a hint of nostalgia for an era of new opportunities and unprecedented personal freedom. Since the term ‘nostalgia’ was put forward in an already classic study by Svetlana Boym (2001), it has been much used in the study of memory of the socialist past and extensively developed in the recent scholarship about the region (Boele, Noordenbos, and Robbe 2019 and Pehe 2020), yet it would be simplistic to view the current memory boom around the 1990s as an extension of this phenomenon. This volume shows that memories of the neoliberal turn are diverse and defy simple categorization. They also differ significantly across national contexts where the implementation of economic reform took various courses. In most national contexts studied here, the memory regime of the 1990s remains ‘fractured’, to use the terminology of Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik (2014), in such a way that different interpretations of the past compete and certain actors insist that only their vision of the past is correct, thus generating conflict. Memory of the transformation is still in the process of being formed, and in this volume we aim to capture the essence of one of the aspects of that memory that we consider to be crucial throughout the region –namely, how economic reforms impacted how the post-1989 period is understood today.
The chapters in this volume demonstrate that the two crucial dimensions of neoliberalism – the ideological project and the set of particular policies – have, in themselves, become objects of remembrance. While the former has become the domain of myths and memory politics in the political sphere, the latter has impacted the memories of everyday life among various social groups.
Let us pause here for a moment to reflect on how we understand collective memory, a notion sometimes contested due to its alleged reification of some sort of group mind. Sociologist Jeffrey K. Olick stresses that the critics of ‘collective memory’ wrongly comprehend it as ‘a thing, and not a process’ or ‘as something what societies have, and not what they do’ (Olick et al. 2011, 45). In this volume, we subscribe to Olick’s perspective that collective memory is a dynamic process composed of a
variety of retrospective activities and products: collective representations (publicly available symbols, meanings, narratives and rituals), deep cultural structures (generative systems of rules or patterns for producing representations), social frameworks (groups and patterns of interaction), and culturally and socially framed individual memories. (Olick 1999)
Most of the burgeoning scholarship on collective memory has recognized the complexity of those processes in which memory is both transmitted and changed. Scholars have also produced a myriad of sub-concepts, such as cultural memory, communicative memory, counter-memory, sites of memory and memory activism (to name just a few) that help them to focus on varied mnemonic phenomena and their diverse functions and means of transmission (for an overview, see Wawrzyniak 2022).
Following this broad view on collective memory, the chapters in this volume are interested in biographical memories, cultural memory (collective representations of the past, as represented by various media) and memory politics (i.e. views of the past propagated by state institutions) as well as their respective social frameworks. These frameworks can be initiated by different actors at different levels of particular social milieus, politicians and other stakeholders such as NGOs, educational institutions and ‘memory activists’, as well as cultural producers. Only these wider collective frameworks can give individuals the tools to make sense of their own memories and understand them within a network of shared temporalities, norms and values. Importantly, however, the frameworks can be in conflict with each other and produce different accounts of the past. We therefore ask a different question than that posed by existing historical accounts of the Eastern European transformations. Our line of enquiry is not what happened but rather how different actors understand what happened. It is such self-perceptions of the promises and expectations brought about by economic change and their fulfilment or disappointment that shape different groups’ subjective understandings of where they find themselves today.
Eastern Europe has long been at the centre of interest for scholars of memory studies as a site of traumatic experiences, particularly during the twentieth century. This body of work has often focused on questions of how memory contributes to a sense of national or group identity and questions of trauma or nostalgia (e.g. Boele, Noordenbos, and Robbe 2019; Głowacka-Grajper 2018; Todorova and Gille 2010; Pakier and Wawrzyniak 2015 and Bogumił 2018). But the economy has rarely entered memory studies even though it was the radical and accelerated change in the economic organization of Eastern European societies that had profound effects across all levels of society and remains an event that structures individual biographies, cultural imaginaries and political discourse. Shifting the focus to the memory of this change allows us to investigate not only its effects but also the – often conflicting – narratives and emotions that are attached to them.
Joanna Wawrzyniak and Veronika Pehe
Focusing on retrospective appraisals of economic transformation can help us disentangle the historical subjectivities of different actors and reconstruct different temporalities and meanings of the transformation – a dimension that has been studied by sociologists and social anthropologists (Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Berdahl, Bunzl, and Lampland 2000; Kazmierska and Waniek 2020 and Mrozowicki 2011) but is still largely missing from memory research on the transformations that focuses on historical politics and transitional justice. The interpretation and understanding of economic phenomena are embedded in social and cultural factors. An exploration of how historical experience is remembered will encounter not only rationalizations but also – and perhaps primarily – emotions. After all, the political and economic leaders of the Eastern European transformations promised to bring reforms that would raise standards of living and bring their countries closer to the West. This promise was not purely economic in nature, but also mobilized hopes and aspirations not only of better lives but also of a better way of organizing society. Yet this promise also brought feelings of disappointment and social exclusion to those sections of the population where it was not fulfilled, fuelling feelings of social injustice where neoliberal reforms generated large social disparities. The chapters in this volume thus also provide new insights into how different actors have harnessed and lived through the emotions and affects associated with the implementation of economic change. Whether this takes the form of politically fostered indignation at economic and political injustice, media representations of collectively experienced emotions such as shame at perceived economic and cultural backwardness, the individual experiencing of excitement at new opportunities, or, conversely, bitterness about unequal economic opportunities (for instance, among men and women) – economic memories, rather than being a matter of mere facts and figures and depersonalized economic processes, are a deeply emotional field.
This volume brings attention to several layers of memories of the neoliberal turn. The first part of this volume discusses ‘economic foundational myths’, i.e., widely shared beliefs about the ideological project of the economic transformation most frequently formulated by political elites, who employ them to give social reality a coherent narrative. The second part examines memories at the level of biographical narratives, which most often relate to individuals’ experiences on the labour market, as this is the sphere where the majority of the population comes into contact with the changing economic regime on a daily basis. Till Hilmar has defined economic memories as ‘vernacular memories that reference agency in the past as overcoming labor market challenges’ (2021). How individuals remember their encounters with the changing world of work in the 1990s cuts across social categories, and the chapters in this volume refer both to elite groups, such as businesspeople, policymakers and experts, and to those who felt deprived of their agency by structural changes, for example, through downsizing of unprofitable enterprises. Finally, the volume speaks of ‘memory implicated in economic change’, where the object of remembrance is not economic policy as such, but rather the attendant social and cultural effects produced by economic restructuring and deregulation. This type of
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CHAPTER V CHLORINE
Chlorine is of interest in chemical warfare, not only because it was the first poison gas used by the Germans, but also because of its extensive use in the preparation of other war gases. The fact that, when Germany decided upon her gas program, her chemists selected chlorine as the first substance to be used, was the direct result of an analysis of the requirements of a poison gas.
To be of value for this purpose, a chemical must satisfy at least the following conditions:
(1) It must be highly toxic.
(2) It must be readily manufactured in large quantities.
(3) It must be readily compressible to a liquid and yet be more or less easily volatilized when the pressure is released.
(4) It should have a considerably higher density than that of air
(5) It should be stable against moisture and other chemicals.
Considering the properties of chlorine in the light of these requirements, we find:
(1a) Chlorine is fairly toxic, though its lethal concentration (2.5 milligrams per liter of air) is very high when compared with some of the later gases developed. This figure is the concentration necessary to kill a dog after an exposure of thirty minutes. Its effects during the first gas attack
showed that, with no protection, the gas was very effective.
(2a) Chlorine is very readily manufactured by the electrolysis of a salt (sodium chloride) solution. The operation is described below. In 100-pound cylinders, the commercial product sold before the War for 5 cents a pound. Therefore on a large scale, it can be manufactured at a very much smaller figure.
(3a) Chlorine is easily liquefied at the ordinary temperature by compression, a pressure of 16.5 atmospheres being required at 18° C. The liquid which is formed boils at -33.6° C. at ordinary atmospheric pressure, so that it readily vaporizes upon opening the valve of the containing cylinder. Such rapid evaporation inside would cause a considerable cooling of the cylinder, but this is overcome by running the outlet pipe to the bottom of the tank, so that evaporation takes place at the end of the outlet pipe.
(4a) Chlorine is 2.5 times as heavy as air, and therefore the gas is capable of traveling over a considerable distance before it dissipates into the atmosphere.
(5a) The only point in which chlorine does not seem to be an ideal gas, is in the fact that it is a reactive substance. This is best seen in the success of the primitive protection adopted by both the British and the French during the days immediately following the first gas attack.
At first, however, chlorine proved a very effective weapon. During the first six months of its use, its value was maintained by devising new methods of attack. When these were exhausted, phosgene was added (see next chapter). With the decline in importance of cloud gas attacks, and the development of more deadly gases, chlorine
was all but discarded as a true war gas, but remained as a highly important ingredient in the manufacture of other toxic gases.
M U S
It was at first thought that the existing plants might be able to supply the government’s need of chlorine. The pre-war production averaged about 450 tons (900,000 pounds) per day. The greater amount of this was used in the preparation of bleach, only about 60,000 pounds per day being liquefied. Only a few of the plants were capable of even limited expansion. In an attempt to conserve the supply, the paper mills agreed to use only half as much bleach during the war, which arrangement added considerably to the supply available for war purposes. It was soon recognized that even with these accessions, large additions would have to be made to the chlorine output of the country in order to meet the proposed toxic gas requirements.
After a careful consideration of all the factors, the most important of which was the question of electrical energy, it was decided to build a chlorine plant at Edgewood Arsenal, with a capacity of 100 tons (200,000 pounds) per day. The Nelson cell was selected for use in the proposed plant. During the process of erection of the plant, the Warner-Klipstein Chemical Company, which was operating the Nelson cell in its plant in Charleston, West Virginia, agreed that men might be sent to their plant to acquire the special knowledge required for operating such a plant. Thus when the plant was ready for operation, trained men were at once available.
F . 19. Chlorine Plant, Edgewood Arsenal.
F . 20. Ground Plan of Chlorine Caustic Soda Plant, Edgewood Arsenal.
The following description of the plant is taken from an article by S. M. Green in Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering for July 1, 1919:
“The chlorine plant building, a ground plan of which is shown in Figure 20, consisted of a salt storage and treating building, two cell buildings, a rotary converter building, etc. In connection with the chlorine plant, there was also constructed a liquefying plant for chlorine and a sulfur chloride manufacturing and distilling plant.
“The salt storage and treating building was located on ground much below the cell buildings, which allowed the railroad to enter the brine building on the top of the salt storage tanks. These tanks were constructed of concrete. There were seven of these tanks, 34 feet
long, 28 feet wide and 20 feet deep having a capacity for storing 4,000 tons of salt. There would have been 200 tons of salt used per day when the plant was running at full capacity.
“On the bottom of each tank distributing pipes for dissolvingwater supply were installed, and at the top of each, at the end next to the building, there was an overflow trough and skimmer board arranged so that the dissolving-water after flowing up through the salt, overflowed into this trough and then into a piping system and into either of two collecting tanks. The system was so arranged that, if the brine was not fully saturated, it could be passed through another storage tank containing a deep body of salt. The saturated brine was pumped from the collecting tanks to any one of 24 treating tanks, each of which had a capacity of 72,000 gallons.
“The eighth storage bin was used for the storage of soda ash, used in treating the saturated brine. This was delivered from the bin on the floor level of the salt building to the soda ash dissolving tanks. From these tanks it was pumped to any one of the 24 treating tanks. After the brine was treated and settled, the clear saturated brine was drawn from the treating tanks through decanting pipes and delivered by pumps to any one of the four neutralizing tanks. These were located next to a platform on the level of the car body. This was to provide easy handling of the hydrochloric acid, which was purchased at first, though later prepared at the plant from chlorine and hydrogen. The neutralized brine was delivered from the tanks by a pump to a tank located at a height above the floor so that the brine would flow by gravity to the cells in the cell building.
“There were to be two cell buildings, each 541 feet long by 82 feet wide, and separated by partitions into four sections, containing six cell circuits of 74 cell units. Each section is a complete unit in itself, provided with separate gas pump, drying and cooling equipment, and has a guaranteed capacity of 12.5 tons of chlorine gas per 24 hours.
“Each Nelson electrolytic cell unit consists of a complete fabricated steel tank 13 by 32 by 80 inches, a perforated steel diaphragm spot welded to supporting angle irons, plate glass dome,
fourteen Acheson graphite electrodes 2.5 inches in diameter, 12 inches long and fourteen pieces of graphite 4 by 4 by 17 inches, and various accessories. (The cell is completely described in Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering, August 1st, 1919.) Each cell is operated by a current of 340 amperes and 3.8 volts and is guaranteed to produce 60 pounds of chlorine gas and 65 pounds of caustic soda using not more than 120 pounds of salt per 24 hours, the gas to be at least 95 per cent pure.
F . 21.—Interior View of the Cell Building.
“The salt solution from the cell feed tank, located in the salt treating building, flows by gravity through a piping system located in a trench running the length of each cell building, and is delivered to each cell unit through an automatic feeding device which maintains a constant liquor level in the cathode compartment.
“The remaining solution percolates from the cathode compartment through the asbestos diaphragm into the anode compartment and flows from the end of the cell, containing from 8 to 12 per cent caustic soda, admixed with 14 to 16 per cent salt, into an open trough and into a pipe in the trench and through this pipe by gravity to the weak caustic storage tanks located near the caustic evaporator building.
F . 22. Nelson Electrolytic Cell, showing the Interior Arrangement of the Cell.
“The gas piping from the individual cell units to and including the drying equipment is of chemical stoneware. The piping is so designed that the gas can be drawn from the cells through the drying equipment at as near atmospheric pressure as possible in order that the gas can be kept nearly free of air. When operating, the suction at the pump was kept at ¹/₂₀ inch or less. The quality of the gas was maintained at a purity of 98.5 to 99 per cent. The coolers used were very effective, the gas being cooled to within one degree of the
temperature of the cooling water, no refrigeration being necessary The drying apparatus consisted of a stoneware tower of special design containing a large number of plates, and thus giving a very large acid exposure. There was practically no loss of vacuum through the drying tower and cooler. The gas pumping equipment consisted of two hydroturbine pumps using sulfuric acid as the compressing medium. The acid was cooled by circulation through a double pipe cooler similar to those used in refrigerating work. The gas was delivered under about five pounds pressure into large receiving tanks located just outside the pump rooms, and from these tanks into steel pipe mains which conducted the gas to the chemical plant.”
The purity of the gas was such that it was not found necessary to liquefy it for the preparation of phosgene.
P
Chlorine, at ordinary atmospheric pressure and temperature, is a greenish yellow gas (giving rise to its name), which has a very irritating effect upon the membranes of the nose and throat. As mentioned above, at a pressure of 16.5 atmospheres at 18° C., chlorine is condensed to a liquid. If the gas is first cooled to 0°, the pressure required for condensation is decreased to 3.7 atmospheres. This yellow liquid has a boiling point of -33.6° C. at the ordinary pressure. If very strongly cooled, chlorine will form a pale yellow solid (at -102° C.). Chlorine is 2.5 times as heavy as air, one liter weighing 3.22 grams. 215 volumes of chlorine gas will dissolve in 100 volumes of water at 20°. It is very slightly soluble in hot water or in a concentrated solution of salt.
Chlorine is a very reactive substance and is found in combination in a large number of compounds. Among the many reactions which have proved important from the standpoint of chemical warfare, the following may be mentioned:
Chlorine reacts with “hypo” (sodium thiosulfate) with the formation of sodium chloride. Hypo is able to transform a large
amount of chlorine, so that it proved a very satisfactory impregnating agent for the early cloth masks.
Water reacts with chlorine under certain conditions to form hypochlorous acid, HOCl. In the presence of ethylene, this forms ethylene chlorhydrin, which was the basis for the first method of preparing mustard gas. In the later method, in which sulfur chloride was used, chlorine was used in the manufacture of the chloride.
Chlorine reacts with carbon monoxide, in the sunlight, or in the presence of a catalyst, to form phosgene, which is one of the most valuable of the toxic gases.
Chlorine and acetone react to form chloroacetone, one of the early lachrymators. The reaction of chlorine with toluene forms benzyl chloride, an intermediate in the preparation of bromobenzylcyanide.
In a similar way, it is found that the greater number of toxic gases use chlorine in one phase or another of their preparation. One author has estimated that 95 per cent of all the gases used may be made directly or indirectly by the use of chlorine.
Chlorine has been used in connection with ammonia and water vapor for the production of smoke clouds. The ammonium chloride cloud thus produced is one of the best for screening purposes. In combination with silicon or titanium as the tetrachloride it has also been used extensively for the same purpose.
On the other hand one may feel that, whatever bad reputation chlorine may have incurred as a poison gas, it has made up for it through the beneficial applications to which it has lent itself. Among these we may mention the sterilization of water and of wounds.
In war, where stationary conditions prevail only in a small number of cases, the use of liquid chlorine for sterilization of water is impractical. To meet this condition, an ampoule filled with chlorine water of medium concentration has been developed, which furnishes a good portable form of chlorine as a sterilizing agent for relatively small quantities of water.
Chlorine has also been applied, in the form of hypochlorite, to the sterilization of infected wounds. The preparation of the solution and the technique of the operation were worked out by Dakin and Carrel. This innovation in war surgery has decreased enormously the percentage of deaths from infected wounds.
CHAPTER VI PHOSGENE
The first cloud attack, in which pure chlorine was used, was very effective, but only because the troops attacked with it were entirely unprotected. Later, in spite of the varied methods of attack, the results were less and less promising, due to the increased protection of the men and also to the gas discipline which was gradually being developed. During this time the Allies had started their gas attacks (Sept., 1915), and it soon became evident that, if Germany was to keep her supremacy in gas warfare, new gases or new tactics would have to be introduced.
The second poison gas was used in December, 1915, when about 20-25 per cent of phosgene was mixed with the chlorine. Here again the Germans made use of an industry already established. Phosgene is used commercially in the preparation of certain dyestuffs, especially methyl violet, and was manufactured before and during the war by the Bayer Company and the Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik.
Phosgene can not be used alone in gas cylinders because of its high boiling point (8° C.). While this is considerably below ordinary temperatures, especially during the summer months, the rate of evaporation is so slow that a cloud attack could never be made with it alone. However, when a mixture of 25 per cent phosgene and 75 per cent chlorine, or 50 per cent phosgene and 50 per cent chlorine is used in warm weather there is no difficulty in carrying out gas attacks from cylinders. At the same time the percentage of phosgene in the mixture is sufficiently high to secure the advantages which it possesses. These advantages are at least three:
(a) Phosgene is more toxic than chlorine. It requires 2.5 milligrams per liter of chlorine to kill a dog on an exposure of 30
minutes, but 0.3 milligram of phosgene will have the same effect. This of course means that a cloud of phosgene containing oneeighth (by weight) of the concentration of a chlorine cloud will have the same lethal properties.
(b) Phosgene is much less reactive than chlorine, so that the matter of protection becomes more difficult. Fortunately, word was received by the British of the intended first use of phosgene against them and consequently they were able to add hexamethylenetetramine to the impregnating solution used in the cloth masks.
(c) The third, and a very important, factor in the use of phosgene is the so-called delayed effect. In low concentrations, men may breathe phosgene for some time with apparently no ill effects. Ten or twelve hours later, or perhaps earlier if they attempt any work, the men become casualties.
Pure phosgene has been used in projector attacks (described in Chapter II). The substance has also been used in large quantities in shell; the Germans also used shell containing mixtures with superpalite (trichloromethyl chloroformate) or sneezing gas (diphenylchloroarsine).
M
Phosgene was first prepared by John Davy in 1812, by exposing a mixture of equal volumes of carbon monoxide and chlorine to sunlight; Davy coined the name “phosgene” from the part played by light in the reaction. While phosgene may be prepared in the laboratory by a number of other reactions, it was quite apparent that the first mentioned reaction is the most economical of these for large scale production. The reaction is a delicate one, however, and its application required extended investigation.
The United States was fortunate in that, for some months previous to the war, the Oldbury Electrochemical Company had been working on the utilization of their waste carbon monoxide in making phosgene. The results of these investigations were given to the
government and aided considerably in the early work on phosgene at the Edgewood plant.
F . 23. Furnace for Generating Carbon Monoxide.
Of the raw materials necessary for the manufacture of phosgene, the chlorine was provided, at first by purchase from private plants, but later through the Edgewood chlorine plant. After a sufficient supply of chlorine was assured the next question was how to obtain an adequate supply of carbon monoxide. A method for this gas had not been developed on a large scale because it had never been necessary to make any considerable quantity of it. The French and English passed oxygen up through a gas producer filled with coke; the oxygen combines with the carbon, giving carbon monoxide. The
oxygen was obtained from liquid air, for which a Claude liquid air machine may be used. The difficulty with this method of preparing carbon monoxide was that the amount of heat generated was so great that the life of the generators was short. Our engineers conceived the idea of using a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen. The union of carbon dioxide with carbon to form carbon monoxide is a reaction in which heat is absorbed. Therefore by using the mixture of the two gases, the heat of the one reaction was absorbed by the second reaction. In this way a very definite temperature could be maintained, and the production of carbon monoxide was greatly increased.
F . 24.—Catalyzer Boxes Used in the Manufacture of
Carbon dioxide was prepared by the combustion of coke. The gas was washed and then passed into a solution of potassium carbonate. Upon heating, this evolved carbon dioxide.
Phosgene was then prepared by passing the mixture of carbon monoxide and chlorine into catalyzer boxes (8 feet long, 2 feet 9 inches deep and 11 inches wide), which are made of iron, lined with graphite and filled with a porous form of carbon. Two sets of these boxes were used. In the first the reaction proceeds at room temperature, and is about 80 per cent complete. The second set of boxes were kept immersed in tanks filled with hot water, and there the reaction is completed.
The resulting phosgene was dried with sulfuric acid and then condensed by passing it through lead pipes surrounded by refrigerated brine.
The Germans prepared their phosgene by means of a prepared charcoal (wood or animal). Carbon monoxide was manufactured by passing carbon dioxide over wood charcoal contained in gas-fired muffles and was washed by passing through sodium hydroxide. This was mixed with chlorine and the mixture passed downward through a layer of about 20 cm. of prepared charcoal contained in a cast iron vessel 80 cm. in diameter and 80 cm. deep. By regulating the mixture so that there was a slight excess of carbon monoxide, the phosgene was obtained with only one-quarter of one per cent free chlorine. The charcoal (wood) was prepared by washing with hydrochloric and other acids until free from soluble ash; it was then washed with water and dried in vacuum. The size of the granules was about one-quarter inch mesh. Their life averaged about six months.
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Phosgene is a colorless gas at room temperatures, but becomes a liquid at 8°. The odor of phosgene is suggestive of green corn or musty hay. One liter of phosgene vapor weighs 4.4 grams (chlorine weights 3.22 grams). At 0° C., the liquid is heavier than water, having
a specific gravity of 1.432. At 25°, the vapor exerts a pressure of about 25 pounds per square inch. Phosgene is absorbed by solid materials, such as pumice stone and celite. Pumice stone absorbs more than its own weight of phosgene. Thus 5.7 grams of pumice absorbed 7.4 grams phosgene, which completely evaporated in 60 minutes. German shell have been found which contained such a mixture (phosgene and pumice stone). While the apparent reason for their use is to prevent the rapid evaporation of the phosgene, it is a question whether such is the case, for a greater surface is really present in the case of pumice stone than where the phosgene is simply on the ground. Phosgene is slowly decomposed by cold water, rapidly by hot water. This reaction is important because there is always moisture in the air, which would tend to lower the concentration of the gas.
Phosgene is absorbed and decomposed by hexamethylenetetramine (urotropine). This reaction furnished the basis of the first protection used by the British. Later the catalytic decomposition of phosgene into carbon dioxide and hydrochloric acid by the charcoal in the mask furnished protection.
For most purposes a trace of chlorine in phosgene is not a disadvantage; for example, when it is used in cylinders or projectors. Under certain conditions, as when used as a solvent for sneezing gas, the presence of chlorine must be avoided, since it reacts with the substance in solution, usually producing a harmless material. Chlorine may be removed from phosgene by passing the mixture through cotton seed oil.
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It was mentioned above that hexamethylenetetramine (urotropine) was used in the early pads (black veil and similar masks) and flannel helmets. This was found to be satisfactory against chlorine and phosgene, in the concentrations usually found during a cylinder attack. The mixture used consisted of urotropine, sodium thiosulfate (“hypo”), sodium carbonate and glycerine. The glycerine tended to keep the pads moist, while the other chemicals
acted as protective agents against the mixture of phosgene and chlorine.
The introduction of the Standard Box Respirator with its charcoalsoda lime filling increased very materially the protection against phosgene. In this filling, the charcoal both absorbs the phosgene and catalyzes the reaction with the moisture of the air with which the phosgene is mixed, to form hydrochloric acid and carbon dioxide. Soda-lime absorbs phosgene but does not catalyze its decomposition. This shows the advantage of the mixture, since the hydrochloric acid, which is formed through the action of the charcoal, is absorbed by the soda-lime. Experiments seem to indicate that it does not matter which material is placed in the bottom of the canister, but that an intimate mixture is the best arrangement. Using a concentration of 5,000 parts per million (20.2 mg. per liter) a type H canister (see page 217) will give complete protection for about 40 minutes; when the air-gas mixture passes at the rate of 16 liters per minute the efficiency or life of a canister increases with a decrease in temperature, as is seen in the following table (the concentration was 5,000 parts per million, the rate of flow 16 liters per minute)
Temperature
From these figures it is seen that at -10° C. the life is about 50 per cent greater than at summer temperature. As would be expected the life of a canister is shortened by increasing the concentration of phosgene in the phosgene air mixture. This is illustrated by the following figures:
(25,000 p.p.m. is equal to 101.1 mg. per liter.)
There is rather a definite relation between the concentration of the gas and the life of a canister at any given rate of flow. Many of these relations have been expressed by formulas of which the following is typical. At 32 liters per minute flow, C⁰ ˙ ⁹ × T = 101,840, in which C is the concentration and T the time.
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The empty shell, after inspection, are loaded on trucks, together with the appropriate number of “boosters,” which screw into the top of the shell and thereby close them. The trucks are run by an electric storage battery locomotive to the filling unit. The shell are transferred by hand to a conveyor, which carries the shell slowly through a cold room. During this passage of about 30 minutes, the shell are cooled to about 0° F. The cooled shell are transferred to shell trucks, each truck carrying 6 shell. These trucks are drawn through the filling tunnel by means of a chain haul operated by an air motor to the filling machine. Here the liquid phosgene is run into the shell by automatic machines, so arranged that the 6 shell are at the same time automatically filled to a constant void. The truck then carries the filled shell forward a few feet to a small window, at which point the boosters are inserted into the nose of the shell by hand. The final closing of the shell is then effected by motors operated by
compressed air The filling and closing machines are all operated by workmen on the outside of the filling tunnel.
F . 25.—Filling Livens’ Drums with Phosgene.
The filled shell are conveyed to the shell dump, where they are stored for 24 hours, nose down on skids, in order to test for leaks.
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Phosgene was first used in cloud attacks in December, 1915. These attacks continued for about nine months and were then gradually replaced, to a large extent, by gas shell attacks. Phosgene was first found in German projectiles in November, 1916. These shell were known as the -shell. Besides pure phosgene, mixtures of
