Kyrill Kunakhovich, "Communism's Public Sphere: Culture As Politics in Cold War Poland and East Germany" (Cornell UP, 2023)

New Books in Sociology · Mar 1, 2023 · 1h 7m

In Communism’s Public Sphere: Culture as Politics in Cold War Poland and East Germany (Cornell University Press, 2022), historian Kyrill Kunakhovich explores communist Poland and East Germany as laboratories of a transnational “cultural public sphere.” Under regimes that banned free speech, political expression shifted to spaces of art: theaters, galleries, concert halls, and youth clubs. Kyrill Kunakhovich shows how these venues turned into sites of dialogue and contestation. While officials used them to spread the communist message, artists and audiences often flouted state policy and…