In Europe (108 page)

Former dockworker Kazimierz Rozkwitalski drives me around the town. That is where the synagogue used to be. Burned down on the Kristallnacht in 1938, it is now a car park. This seaside bunker still bears the bullet holes from September 1939, the first shots fired in the Second World War. Look, the Gestapo used to have its headquarters over there, they started murdering intellectuals here right after the occupation began. Here we have the town hall, bombed to rubble in 1945, but can you really tell it wasn't built in the Middle Ages?

Kazimierz is a wonderful storyteller, and his German is excellent. Where did he learn it? He lets the name roll from his tongue. ‘
Inge Zimmermann, hundertachtzig Procent Nazi!
’ Between 1939–45 she hammered the German language into his youthful skull, and there it remains. He shows me the former Lenin dockyard, now Stocznia Gdańska SA. An enormous monument of stainless steel, anchors and crosses makes sure no one overlooks the fact that this is historic ground. Here was where the electrician Walşesa delivered his first speeches, here began the decline of an empire. One tattered banner is still hanging.

Why, after all the other failures, was it in Poland that the revolt against the communist
nomenklatura
finally succeeded? ‘After the Soviet Union, Poland was by far the biggest communist country in Europe,’ Kazimierz reminds me. ‘It had two or three times as many inhabitants as the other Eastern European countries.’ In addition, there was the all-powerful church. And the outspoken Polish patriotism. Plus a weak communist tradition. ‘The regime always left loopholes. For us, the common workers, the 1970s under Edward Gierek were perhaps the best years of all, it was never as good again after that. We always had work and food, we were allowed
to go on holiday, some of us already owned cars, the schools and hospitals were well organised. That's more than you can say these days.’

January 1990: the Polish Communist Party disbands itself. September 1993: the last Soviet troops leave Poland. August 1996: Gdansk's Lenin dockyard goes bankrupt. And now? We walk through the slush, the dockyard is a city in itself. ‘
Tot
,’ Kazimierz murmers, ‘
tot
’, just the way he learned it from Fraulein Zimmermann. ‘Fifteen years ago this place was full of ships and stevedores. There were still 30,000 people working in the harbour then. Today there are only 3,000. Of the 17,000 people who used to work at the Lenin dockyard, there are maybe 2,000 left.’ The grass grows tall between the paving stones, the brick warehouses are empty, rusty railings run from one bush to the other, in the silence you can hear the melting snow gurgle through the zinc gutters. But the yards are not completely dead. A huge crane comes clanging past, a railway engine appears from around a corner, workers are welding and sand-blasting. This is not bygone glory, more like a slowly dissolving past.

I am reminded of the story a lady friend, a photographer, once told me about an encounter in a small Portuguese village, not long after the Carnation Revolution. An old man she met there had pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘A member, for forty years.’ It was his certificate of membership in the Communist Party, the symbol of dozens of years of silent resistance, of hope of a better life – if not for him, then at least for his children. The collapse of the communist experiment was inevitable. For many it came as a liberation, but it was also a trauma, and this fact is systemically ignored in a triumphant Western Europe. It brought democracy and intellectual freedom, but only a small portion of the population was better off materially. In Poland, you can clearly see both sides of the story. The figures are amazing: inflation went down from 600 per cent in 1990 to 5.5 per cent in 2001. Foreign investments rose in that same period from several million to almost $5 billion, the country's per capita national production more than doubled from $1,500 in 1990 to almost $4,000 in 1998.

At the same time, the average Polish citizen experienced something very different. Many of the social facilities that were once free or very inexpensive – medicine, hospitals, day-care centres, schools, care for the elderly – today cost a great deal. Millions of Poles lost their jobs, and the pensions
for the elderly and invalids lost much of their buying power. As a fellow passenger told me in the train to Gdansk: ‘We used to have plenty of money, but there was nothing to buy. Now there's plenty to buy, but we have no money. In the final analysis, we're no better off. We've been fooled.’

The collapse of the wall did not bring prosperity to huge numbers of Eastern European families, but rather shortage: at home, in the schools and hospitals, in every area. Figures from the World Bank clearly show the scope of the drama: in 1990, seven per cent of all Central and Eastern Europeans lived below the poverty line. In 1999 that had risen to twenty per cent. In that regard, Eastern Europe was worse off than East Asia (fifteen per cent) or Latin America (eleven per cent). The United Nations signalled the same trend: in 1999 there were ninety-seven million people living below the poverty level in the former Eastern Bloc, as compared to thirty-one million in 1990.

The situation has to do in part with the legacy of years of stagnation and Soviet exploitation, with hopelessly obsolete industries, with maintenance that lagged behind by decades. In Poland, the small farmers are in big trouble. They cannot keep up with the competition from Western Europe and the rest of the world. In Berlin, fountains of water regularly burst through the asphalt: yet another broken water main from the DDR years. The Prague metro still used the leaden Soviet train carriages which the Russians had once foisted on the Czechs; in 1998, one of the capital's subway bridges nearly buckled under their weight.

After the collapse of the wall, communism may be viewed as a failed and twisted experiment in social modernisation. ‘But,’ the writer, politician and acadamic George Schöpflin observes, ‘at a deeper level it was much more than that. It tried to create a new civilisation, and to base that on a fundamentally different way of arranging the world.’ The fall of communism also meant the fall of an entire system of morality, and it is within this vacuum that Eastern Europeans must struggle towards the development of new forms of citizenship. ‘Huge numbers of people have essentially no idea what politics is about, what can be reached through it and what cannot. They expect immediate results, and are filled with bitterness when those results do not come … Slowly, very slowly, the myth of the West is being replaced by the reality of the West.’

Gazeta Wyborcza is Poland's biggest media company. The daily newspaper of the same name has a circulation of more than 500,000, spread over 20 local editions, and the group has 2,000 employees. In Warsaw I met cultural editor Anna Bikont, one of the paper's founders in 1989.‘
Gazeta Wyborcza
means “Election Paper”, and that is literally what it was,’ she explains. ‘Because of the elections, Solidarity was allowed to publish its own newspaper for two months, the first free newspaper in the Eastern Bloc. Adam Michnik came up with the idea – he always thought ahead – while the rest of us were still living entirely in that little, underground world of Solidarity. So we started the
Gazeta
, with four women at a kitchen table.’

For the Poles, the paper's appearance was a major event. ‘The most important thing was the language in which the paper was written. We were complete amateurs, we didn't write in the officialese of the Polish press agency PAP, we wrote in normal Polish. We used news from foreign press agencies, and we called our friends to verify things, we took our news straight from the source.’ The
Gazeta
was characteristic of Solidarity's tactics: its founders and readers did not fight head-on against communism, they simply organised themselves outside the apparatus, and on a massive scale. After the communists were voted out of office, the newspaper continued to be published.

Anna Bikont: ‘A whole world opened up for us, we got to know more and more people, correspondents began working in all the cities. At first the newspaper and Solidarity were one and the same, we were activists who were making a newspaper, not much more than that. But gradually we became more professional. We found out that there were different kinds of responsibilities: one old comrade became a cabinet minister, the other became a parliamentarian, and we became journalists. It was hard to be critical, because ministers were often personal friends as well. I remember the first time it really became messy. The Solidarity ministers had been given expensive apartments, just as under communism, and we wrote that this was completely inappropriate. They were furious.’

Within their own ranks as well the editors engaged in heated discussions. ‘Solidarity was a myth,’ Bikont continues. ‘It was, after all, a coalition of three totally diverse groups: trade union people, democratic dissidents and nationalists. In Gdansk, the trade unionists set the tone. In Lódź it was the nationalists; the discussion there was all about changing
the names of the streets. In Warsaw, people were concerned with democratic reforms, with procedures, with maintaining the rule of law. We had had a common enemy to keep us together, but as soon as the enemy disappeared the movement burst like a bubble. For the rise of a democratic Poland, however, our myth proved invaluable.’

In the end, Lech Walesa himself helped the editors of the
Gazeta
to break out of the dilemma. ‘The masthead of our paper included the Solidarity motto “Nothing divides us”. One day, Walşesa forbade us to use the union logo any longer. I remember how sad we were about that, it had always been a kind of spiritual anchor. But after a few months we started feeling relieved, it was as though the umbilical cord had been severed, as though we had finally grown up.’

Today, ten years later, Bikont looks back on it all with mixed emotions. ‘It was a huge success, both Solidarity and our paper, but in the end there were no real winners. The nationalists lost, because instead of their ideal Poland we got a democracy and a European Union. The church lost, because the priests didn't gain a foothold in the world of national politics. The democratic opposition lost too, because they didn't anticipate the traumas that a tough new brand of capitalism would bring to a country that had lived so long under a planned economy.

‘But there may be one group that won: the young people. They're in favour of Europe, they speak languages, they've travelled, they're open to the world. Great opportunities lie in wait for them. But for the generations that spent most of their lives under communism, hope was the only thing they had, and that hope has never borne fruit.’

That evening I dine with Jaroslaw Krawczyk, historian and editor-in-chief of
Centuries Speak
magazine. His hangover from the night before needs dealing with, and he does so with large quantities of beer. Outside the snow is falling by the bucketful, the grey flats are almost hidden by the flurries. Krawczyk strides through the neighbourhood, steps down to a cellar door, and we find ourselves in his favourite bar, an underground cavern where couples are kissing and a hefty blonde girl keeps putting brimming glasses down on our table.

We talk about Solidarity. ‘That was our 1968, the struggle of our generation. Many of our fathers were generals, party bosses. My father, for
example, still can't revise his opinions, he's still a communist. And as you know, we all hate our fathers.’ About the church in Poland: ‘A new religious movement is on the rise here: Radio Maryja. For the ill, the lonely, the pensioners. Nationalistic, almost fascistic. The poor people's hatred has a way of growing very quickly.’ About Europe: ‘As a Western journalist, you can travel all over the place, you do as you please. But look at my coat. It looks fine, but I bought it second-hand. That's the way we intellectuals have always lived here. You people in the West can talk all you want about Europe, but we
are
Europe, just like the Czechs, the Hungarians and the Rumanians.

‘The new Czech ambassador once told me that he had had to deal with complete idiots, but we Poles had very intelligent communists. I tried to refute it, but I finally had to admit he was right. The repression here actually
was
much milder than in the rest of Eastern Europe. The Communist Party was never really big here, it never had more than half a million members. Gomulka was never anything but a dim-witted tyrant. And Gierek always kept the door ajar to you people in the West.’

We talk about what came afterwards, about the differences between Poles and the rest, about how the misleading symbol of the Berlin Wall made it seem as though an abrupt end had come to communism everywhere at the same time. In reality, the old communist elites in Rumania, Serbia and Bulgaria remained in power for years, although they operated under a new, nationalistic flag. The Hungarians and the Poles, on the other hand, had done away with the old communism long before the wall fell. Hungary joined the IMF and the World Bank in 1982, the country had been living for years with a mixed socialist-capitalist economy. The Polish leader, General Jaruzelski, had been following the same line since 1981: first heavy oppression to put an end to the strikes and uprisings, then a gradual thaw and economic liberalisation. The state of emergency and the censorship were relaxed from July 1983; in 1986 Poland joined the IMF. After that the country became increasingly free. Krawczyk: ‘When I was twenty, I had no problem hitchhiking to Italy. And that was a real shock, let me tell you. Our reality was so drab. And suddenly there you were in that gleaming, colourful Venice. Horrible.’

His girlfriend comes in – a beautiful, friendly woman – and for a little
while our table seems aglow. She works for the Soros Foundation, the Eastern European network that uses the Hungarian-American billionaire's money to help stimulate democratic processes.‘Because of her, I'm getting a divorce,’ Krawczyk says, and falls silent for a moment. Then: ‘We're all Soros’ whores. At least, that's what Radio Maryja says. The church, Poland, that's the only real Europe. But Soros superimposes his own Europe on top of that, the Europe of the liberals, intellectuals, Jews. Yes, I'm sorry, but that's the way those people talk.’ His girlfriend agrees, yes, that's the way they talk, but she cannot stay any longer. Her son has announced that he's going to try out vodka with Tabasco sauce, and she wants to be there when he does it.