Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (3 page)

Past and present will get mixed up, forgotten memories will come out with the force of the repressed, like on the Paulina Ołowska painting on the cover. If your joy is a Joy Division, and you dream to the sound of Depeche Mode, you’ll follow me.

There are arguments that the “post” in “post-communism” should be treated like the “post” in “post-colonialism”. But the question arises: who of whom? Who was the colonizer and who was the colonized is not always as obvious as it would seem. By all accounts, many of the post-communist countries, despite the 23 years of “democracy”, still display the elements of traumatic and obsessive behavior typical of post-colonial countries. But because things were happening so fast between the late 80s and first few years of the 90s, today it’s hard to say if this trauma comes entirely out of the communist years, or is an effect of the brutal capitalist shock therapy most of the eastern Bloc underwent.

History has made a strange circle. As 2012, a year of intense protest in Eastern Europe (Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia) has shown, only now are people acting out the clumsily put together capitalist democracy of the early 1990s. It started on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow in late 2011. Still nobody dares to call it a class war: sometimes in the public discourse there passes a word on the “excluded”, which is quickly dismissed as evidence of “populism”. Political scenes all over the bloc nearly universally got divided into nationalism and neoliberalism, often complementary.

What we were to become was the “New Europe” - as the Hungarian low-cost airline Wizzair puts it, ‘Wizz off to New
Europe!’ As a term it has been used several times in history: it emerged in the 90s, as a name for the group of countries who had “successfully beaten communism”. It was the name that American Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave to those (mostly East-) European countries that supported the Iraq war. It gained an even stronger meaning in 2004, when the first slot of the “former East”, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, joined the European Union. Since then especially, the new breed of Polish politicians have been stressing how much it meant that Poland had become “a normal European country”, which has become the main government slogan ever since. We were “normal” (and even the “second Ireland”), when we were taking large sums of direct European subsidies, and we were normal when applying neoliberalism. When we entered the EU and some were saying ‘welcome to Europe’, some in the media were outraged: But we were always the center of Europe! This constant indignation hides a tremendous lack of self-confidence in confrontation with the former West. We know that the more politicians talk about “becoming a normal country”, the farther we are from really becoming it. But what is really the benchmark we could compare ourselves to?

It is of course the West, like in the good old days, that we’re supposed to model ourselves on. What followed the fall of the decaying communist economy around 1989 in most of the East, was the express adjustment to Western capitalism, where features like conformity to all that’s new and the rejection and despising of everything associated with the old regime (like collectivity, for instance), were the ticket to a career. The American scholar Elisabeth Dunn in her breakthrough monograph
Privatizing Poland
described the very beginnings of Polish capitalism as being exemplified by the many previous state-owned factories which were gradually taken over and privatized by Western owners, who mostly laid off all the previous staff. The more they felt connected with the old system, i.e., showing inclinations for defending the collective ethic, the more likely they were to go. 1990s Poland was a territory of brutal, fast class-making, where the previous mostly classless society had to quickly acknowledge the delicate but crucial rules of distinction. Among them was the cherishing of objects and status-symbols. The new managerial class were presenting their oversize cell phones with seriousness worthy of a Catholic mass. Yet what was happening was christened as the “Polish miracle”,
Polnische Wunder
, by Germany. Poland had its international debt cancelled, unlike many other countries in the Bloc, the foundation of the strong economic growth it has enjoyed in the last few years. It has registered strong if massively unequal growth, largely down to emigration, German-owned factories, and
EU subsidy for infrastructure projects like Euro 2012 stadiums, railways and motorways. A patronising coverage from our western neighbour never ceases, as just before Euro 2012 began
Der Spiegel
greeted us with headlines like: “Germans used to think of Poland as a country full of car thieves and post-communist drabness. On the eve of hosting the European Football Championship, however, the country has become the most astonishing success story in Eastern Europe. Relations between Berlin and Warsaw have never been better” (May 25
^th
2012). This is only the tip of the iceberg, as the very same article also greeted us for being “desperate” to join the Eurozone (in the middle of its greatest crisis) and for being “cosmopolitan and courageous” (in the East? Wow, amazing! etc.).

1.1 Land of sleaze and glory, Eastern Europe becomes the capital of grot

As we joined the normal countries, we were told, there would be free speech, a free press and free debate, all of which were prevented during the years of communist oppression. But in practice, this free liberal debate became a strange unison. Whenever someone in post-communist countries wanted to criticize the style of capitalist transformation, their voice was either ridiculed, or made inaudible. Media, especially the liberal newspaper
Gazeta Wyborcza
, played an enormous role in this. But first of all, we were completely astounded by something like “the media” at all. I remember the sacred feeling of awe that accompanied our first watching of the “new” post-communist telly, new jingles announcing commercials, the new design of the national TV News.

But I’d be rather careful with that regular element of any former East citizen’s memory, that is the awe inspired by the Western supermarkets with all the goods in the world displayed on their shelves. I never lived enough under this system to see much of the difference. I also observed the growing wealth of my middle class- becoming parents, who started working for a Dutch company, how our life on an enormous People’s Republic tower block estate and everyday rituals were becoming increasingly that of the (petit) bourgeoisie, and how we moved to a semi in the suburbs.

What Poland was then can be most efficiently told by one
picture: the opening of the first McDonald’s restaurant in the center of Warsaw. It collected all the intellectual elites of Warsaw, who hurried there to eat their first Big Mac. You can see in the picture the legends of intellect, writers, and poets, overwhelmed by sitting on the plastic chairs. This was America, this was the dream. The ribbon was cut by no one else but Jacek Kuroń, a former leftist legend of the opposition, who gave a little speech. I’d give a lot to hear what he had to say to the first people in the Bloc who were to sink their teeth into the legendary quality buns. That this is what we were fighting for, and, finally, we got it? Were those the horizons of the members of Solidarity, was this what people sat in prisons for? As for myself, I loved McDonald’s and it was only in my teens that I grew too sophisticated and learned to despise it. This is another stereotype about ‘People’s Poland’ anyway, as it transpires that in the late 1970s McDonald’s was negotiating with Edward Gierek’s government to open bars in Poland, but it was the political crisis (i.e., Solidarity), that got in the way!

The magic of the Western commodity and its nearly metaphysical influence on the post-communist psyche is one of the big topics of this book, which will be discussed in later chapters. In here, I only want to briefly mention this wonderful world and the role Western brands played across the Bloc. Western goods were of course sporadically available in the East, as smuggled, as packages from family and friends in the West, or in carefully supplied single brands, like Pepsi-Cola, which were readily available.

It was partly a story communist countries knew all too well, rehearsed since the 1920s even, if you’ll look at advertisements in early communist Russia. The problem of the desire for goods is already problematized in Mayakovsky/Rodchenko’s collaboration over the famous Mosselprom Moscow department store advertisements. Wary of commodity fetishism and its discontents, when advertising goods they also created unique ads for “products to come”, products that neither did, nor could have ever existed. As the cookies of Mosselprom stood for the greater projects of socialism, those to be, 80s communist countries were populated by kiosks and fairs where complete substitutes of goods, like stickers (omnipresent “West” cigarettes or Snickers) were standing for the heavens of the capitalism to come, that in the end will be produced by the (post-) Soviet industry and economy. They’re what Christina Kiaer, historian of Soviet art, using the phrase of child psychologist Winnicott, called ‘transitional objects’, which help to adjust to the reality principle. The dream object for the Russian avant-garde, though, was the object which will be so rich in meanings, so intricate, so evocative in its industrial form, that it’ll change the sensory apparatus of man forever, inducing an awakening from the phantasm of commodities. The dream of late Soviet citizens was the opposite of these high ambitions – they unsophisticatedly wanted exact Western goods and were waiting for their materialization. Somewhere in between them were the expectations of Walter Benjamin, who in the
Moscow Diary
of his visit in 1926 describes his acquaintance with the window dressings, and seeing the lacquered black box from Mosselprom calls it a “Soviet Madonna With
Cigarettes”, seeing there, on that display, the future collective.

1.2 Name clash, Marx meets the West cigarettes in Kharkov, Ukraine

The problem with the access to the desired goods of course wasn’t solved by the sheer accession to capitalism. This made it more problematic, because suddenly we were very unequal in how much we could have of the freshly available goods. Out of that not-yet-availability, a new kind of ‘brand’ started to emerge in Poland, fake brands that were like-but-not-quite the mega-brands. In the 90s and sometimes today still you can see on the Polish streets working class folk parading with the plastic bags branded as BOSS, but be not deceived they ever purchased anything in the luxurious BOSS boutique. We grew up with a lack of means, saturated by goods often made in China, but also in other cheap workforce parts of the world, supported by the familial fake brands, various Abibas-es, Diar-s, Polo-Cocta’s. It was as in the communist era, when we had always chocolate-like products not made of real chocolate, pseudo coca-cola and fake hamburgers. In the photographic reportage from this era, you see the poverty of the shop window dressings, which can often boast only loaves of bread.

Gazeta Wyborcza
was the publishing phenomenon of the Polish 90s, just like
Przekroj
was of the 50s and 60s. As the mission of the latter (which will be discussed in the last chapter) was to lead the new socialist classes through the maelstrom of the Polish People’s Republic (
Polska Republika Ludowa
, ‘PRL’ for short) while carrying some of the system’s values, so
Wyborcza
was the real carrier of the intelligentsia ethos, when, though nobody at the time saw it as such, all the previous natural ethos-maintaining forces disappeared. The cultural formation of the PRL middle classes (liking similar things, from literary canon to TV programmes), mutual values (only if they were built of the anti-communist resentment) – they were all replaced with the new ethos of the free market economy, in which it wasn’t your education, as in PRL, that was your distinguishing feature. With all the previous certainties of life
disappearing, it was
Wyborcza’s
responsibility to carry us towards an enlightened middle-classness. Founded by the ex-opposition, most prominently Adam Michnik, as an ‘Electoral Gazette’ for the first semi-free elections in 1989, it was an organ of the Solidarity union, i.e. the architects of the new freedoms, in which many of the editors were involved as members of the Worker’s Defence Committee (
Komitet Obrony Robotników
, KOR). To this they owed their mission as the conscience of the nation, even if they had increasingly less to do with actual workers. While capitalizing on the legend of Solidarity,
Wyborcza
started to represent the interest of the entrepreneurial class and did nothing to stop the development of neoliberalism, or the creation of a nationalistic populism in Poland, passively observing the ever-increasing toll of unemployment. People involved in the initiative of the ‘Round Table’, the talks between the Opposition’s inner circle and the Communist Party that effectively ended Communist rule, let the increasingly bigoted Lech Wałęsa take the reins, reacting way too late after the right wing had already spread. Increasingly it started echoing Margaret Thatcher and later Tony Blair, as they were patiently teaching the Poles how they should think to really become a middle class. Soon, the free public debate in free Poland became a strange unison. If you had not founded a little enterprise (at least, on time, early in the 90s), you could always be an educated member of the previous intelligentsia. But if you asked whether this meant that someone had been implicated in the previous system, you were carefully silenced. Now we all knew who to vote for - libertarian Union of Freedom and Leszek Balcerowicz, whose policies as minister of finance put Poland into the worst recession in its history in the early 90s, then ‘Solidarity’ Electoral Action, which grew out of the right wing mutation of the union. Today it’s Civic Platform, neoliberal and at the same time, ‘progressive’ enough to look good cast against the far-right nationalism and ‘populism’ of Law & Justice, another post-Solidarity party. Interestingly, our whole political scene since ’89 always was and remains to this day nearly
wholly dominated by people involved very closely with Solidarity, as its legend of liberators clearly still has a strong clout among the society. Yet the union itself is today attacked by them on the very premise of exclusively defending worker’s rights.