A Social Life of Property

What was fascism? What was communism? What is neoliberalism? This project revisits these questions through a twentieth and twenty-first century history of a single street in Eastern Europe. The street, for centuries home to Magyar villages, once marked the outer edge of the Soviet Union and today traverses the border between Ukraine and Slovakia. Governed successively by Hungary, Austro-Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary during the first decades of the century, the street came under German and Soviet occupation at the end of World War II. When the Soviet army completed its westward push for territorial conquest, soldiers erected a border fence that sliced the street in two. This study represents the culmination of a decade-long endeavor funded by two major research grants: from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research in the United States (2007-2009) and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (2008-2012). Based on archival research in six countries and a decade-long ethnographic study conducted in three languages, this study follows the residents of this rural street through the major social experiments of the twentieth century,  showing that for them, it mattered very much who governed and how, but not always in the ways we might think.