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PREFACE:

In a 2 6efi ber 2010, two decades after the fall of the state socialist sys tem in Hungary, the glossy headline of an interior decorating magazine on a Budapest newsstand caught my eye: “Gray, grayer and grayest!” The words were a startling provocation in a place where gray had come to stand in for the Eastern European material and po liti cal landscape during state socialism and remained an image the country sought to escape. 

“We tend to associate gray with what is boring, but there are a thousand kinds of gray, and when combined with colors its varieties are endless,” wrote the author as she described a lush interior of multiple textures and hues of gray created by a decorating firm called Zinc. The accompanying photo featured silver frames and silvery satins, a velvet armchair in gun-metal gray, coalcolored pillows strewn on a soft, light gray carpet, and a lamp shade the color of anthracite. “Just look around,” she enthused, “how these furnishings evoke the dawn fog, the rain- soaked highway, the pebbles on the lakeshore! . . . But here in our home [Hungary], everything gray is bad.

 The weather is gray, the people are gray, gray is all that is dull, depressing, uninteresting. It’s time to rehabilitate the gray!” (Kelemen 2010). In Hungary, gray is far more than a color. It is an aesthetic quality that powerfully links material environments with political aff cts. Gray evokes not just a landscape dominated by concrete block housing, but a whole array of impressions and sentiments.

 During socialist times, Western observers oft en invoked the grayness of Eastern Europe as a shorthand for their perceptions of life behind a dark Iron Curtain, of enforced poverty and the fatigue of daily provisioning, of unsmiling salesclerks, scarce goods, and the lack of colorful advertising and commerce.

 In these accounts, color oft en signifi d the pleasures and possibilities of capitalist consumption, of the free dom to express one’s identity through style. In the political rhetoric of the 1990s, the claim that state socialism failed because the state could not satisfy the consumer desires of its population became uncontroversial. “Capitalism” rapidly displaced “democracy” as the ultimate victor of the Cold War, and color became a powerful tool for asserting its legitimacy (Manning 2007a).

pitomize the gray of state socialism. Founded as Hungary’s model socialist town in 1951, it was first named Sztálinváros, or City of Stalin. Throughout my years of visiting the mill town, from the 1970s through the 1990s, Hungarians Iencountered from Budapest or other historic towns couldn’t contain their disapproval: “Why would anyone want to go there?” they cried, distancing themselves and indeed the country from everything the city stood for.  Dunaújváros was regarded as the ugliest city in Hungary, the much-publicized exemplar of Soviet city planning and emblematic of Hungary’s subordination to the Soviet Union. Indeed, its distinction as the first planned socialist city in Hungary had long served to link it with other such cities in the Soviet bloc— and consequently denied it an identity as organically Hungarian.

 For many, it was a reminder of a t ragic history in which Communist rule had suppressed or distorted Hungary’s bourgeoisdemocratic development, forcing this small, central European country to undergo a Soviet rather than a “normal” West ern- style modernization.

  In Dunaújváros itself, residents were acutely aware of this stigma, yet many fie cely defended the town’s credentials as a modern, Hungarian city— the successful realization of a centuries-long dream that Hungary would one day produce its own steel. After 1989, its residents took on the double burden of trying to incorporate the city into a Hungarian landscape that was itself being incorporated into a European one. 

The city was thus an ideal site in which to investigate how the socialist state had forged new relationships among the state, material goods, and people, and how these were being transformed in a postsocialist environment .