Socialist culture, participation and expert knowledge in Poland and Romania in the long 1960s

ABSTRACT During the long 1960s (mid-1950s to early 1970s), mass culture developed in Poland and Romania at the intersection of state policies in the field of socialist culture, ideas of democratic participation and the growing importance of expert social scientific knowledge for governance. By comparing studies that critically examined the outcomes of socialist cultural policies at the time, the article contributes an East–East perspective to the scholarship on the global 60s and socialist modernity. It reconstructs the main features of the model of socialist culture and analyses how researchers engaged with this model and its implementation. Some emphasized people’s participation in line with the party-state’s yet unfulfilled aspiration to create a democratic ‘socialist culture’. Others produced expert knowledge based on theoretical and empirical sociological research on mass culture. The article reveals how the relationship between party-state and ‘the masses’ – both as subjects of cultural policy and as consumers of culture – was mediated in research on socialist culture in Poland and Romania in the long 1960s.