The New Soviet City and the Role of Cultural Work in Identity Construction of Migrant Workers (Case Study: Victoria City, Romania)

Problem statement and purpose of studyAccording to Kotkin (1995), the building of the new socialist cities served, apart from the geopolitical, demographic and industrial objectives, as a micro political process of creating the new man. Soviet concepts of urban planning imagined, almost mythically, how the whole of society would change. Following the slogan “Build a plant and civilization will follow”, like Magnitogorsk, Nova Hutě, Dimitrovgrad's or Visaginas, the birth of Victoria City, due to the internal mobility of workers, remains one of the most interesting social experiments. This issue however is still under addressed in the Romanian literature, the most recent debates being those of the 70s. The aim of this case study lies in trying to observe the means by which, in the absence of a common history, traditions and customs, the socialist powers tried to ensure the integration of migrants into the new community and their identity reconstruction.In this new space of socialism, for newcomers such concepts as evolution, reconfiguration, belonging, and redefinition become key elements. How can you have an identity when living in a new city with no past, no traditions and customs?Methods This article addresses the role of “cultural work” in the construction of a sense of belonging to the newly created community. Therefore, it will analyse documents from the local archives in combination with the analysis of a series of personal photos of the first internal migrants in Victoria.Results and conclusions Manifested in various forms, from the production and interpretation of music, professional dancing, theatre, painting and sculpture, this kind of proletkul was meant to be a substitute for the lack of a genuine tradition, producing a new social lifestyle and thus a new identity. In this respect, apart from their ideological pattern, our analysis of relevant personal photos suggests the conspicuous role of socialization as a tool for transmitting values and behaviors, underlying the construction of identity in a new social context. Although the ideological lines imposed what Clark (1993) called “the theatralization of everyday life under socialism” (p.35), it will be interesting to observe, in a further investigation, how far the ideological practices overlap with migrant's informal life