This chapter focuses on Wroclaw, a city born on the ruins of the nearly empty German city of Breslau in 1945. A city with a reinvented national identity, it was the capital of Poland's "Wild West", a free-spirited city of brigandry and rugged pioneers. Wroclaw, a city unlike any other in Poland, was also crucial to the Stalinist transformation of Polish society. The experiences of Wroclaw also reveal much about the way the Communist Party grew: it was neither a collection of outsiders and careerists, nor the embodiment of rural militancy. Perhaps surprisingly for a city so central to Stalinist industrialization, Wroclaw could not easily be identified by newcomers as a city of labor. A closer look at the Wroclaw work force finds, in fact, that workers were as troublesome to the authorities here as in more established cities. The nature of their resistance was, however, very different from more common modes of factory protest.