Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (36 page)

5.7 Socialist folk queueing for better clothing. But why in French? Cover of Przekroj authors fashion bible from 1958.

Przekroj
was never a simple proletarian agit-prop of the authorities. It was neither bourgeois enough nor proletarian enough, said to be too westernized for the communist
poputchiks
, and too ideologized for the pro-Western intellectuals. It continued to be inconvenient even after 1989, when it wasn’t socialist in content at all. So why did the civilizational mission of ‘culturation’ in the new society have to be always understood as ‘liberal’ or ‘bourgeois’? To answer this question we have to come back to the previous divagations on the force of proletarian culture in Poland. And this wasn’t strong enough – aside from the beleagured efforts of the PPS or the Bund, liquidated by the war, or the efforts of Polish futurists and constructivists, there wasn’t much of a legacy to build upon. Or, one could say, the proletarian culture, of big cities and their industrial bases, was often Jewish, and disappeared together with their extermination. So anything culturally sophisticated was automatically suspicious (or celebrated) as being ‘bourgeois’. Yet it’s hard not to sympathize with the style of
Przekroj
, today inspiring only nostalgia for the sophistication of its language and good taste, which despite being egalitarian in its message, also tried to decompress the crude ideological information it had to provide.

Another level of the strange discrepancy between the official state policy in “bringing up the nation” and the practice was the strange existence of ‘luxury’ goods. While
Przekroj’s
strategy was to seduce, become the part of a life and then ‘raise’ its readers,
Ty I Ja
monthly was pretty elitist: a strange combination of an artist and
luxury magazine, with an avant-garde lay-out designed by Roman Cieślewicz. Cieślewicz was a pioneer of animated film, pop-art and Neouveau Realisme in Poland, who later migrated to France to design for
ELLE
and became one of the most prominent Polish artists living in the West. Driving from surrealism and his own version of Pop, Cieślewicz’s covers invited the reader to dream, they were a window to the secret life of unexisting bourgeoisie, in the atmosphere of Bunuel’s
Belle du Jour
or the erotic tales of Walerian Borowczyk, another Parisian exile. It was expensive and presented haute-couture creations from Parisian fashion houses arranged in an artistic way, houses of artists and famous writers, in a way which didn’t at all correspond with anyone’s lives but those of the high officials.

For the communist authorities one of the most important aspects of the everyday ideology was to keep home production on the level which, at least officially and in the local media and broadcasters was presented as being “as good as” the Western one. Maybe at the beginning, in the post-war years, when the countries were still in reconstruction, this aspect didn’t matter, as the whole world, including the West, was dealing with shortages and austerity for several years after the war, with rationing lasting even in the UK until the mid-1950s. It was difficult in the freshly socialist, war-destroyed Poland to explain to people the shortages in production and the low tempo of the growth of the infrastructure. Yet, from today’s point of view, the growth and reconstruction of Polish cities, given that it happened from scratch, was immense and on an unheard of scale. This progress occurred at the same time as the harsh introduction of the communist order, in which any remnants of the pre-war structures were leveled. One may say they were leveled by the Nazis first, but it still meant the new system had a once in a lifetime chance to change the social stratification of Poland.

5.8 Popularising abstract art. ‘Przekroj’s postcards adorned with funny quasi-proverbs.

To young people after the war, it didn’t necessarily matter what the big conflicts and the big history were about. For them, the matter of life, here and now, was what counted. This is shown well in several novels from the era, such as Skvorecky’s
The Cowards
or Leopold Tyrmand’s
Zły
(‘Badass’), which describe the lives of young people right after or a few years after the war. The material side of life, the body, sexuality, enjoyment appear here as the filter through which young people perceive and receive the world. For Skvorecky’s young Czechs, it didn’t matter if the girls they encountered were the ‘enemy’. In this way we can also understand the creeping youth revolt that was taking place, though it never really triumphed in the Soviet Bloc, but had its phases and levels. The youth revolt in the Soviet Bloc was weird, because it at the same time rebelled against and embraced, or at least tried to, the very Western “consumerism” and “conformism” the Western youth were contesting. But who was the real rebel here and who was the conformist? One of the most interesting views was offered by the writer, anti-communist and admirer of all things Western Leopold
Tyrmand, in his banned
1954 Diary
, long a cult book in Poland but never translated into English:

A great deal of anxiety about “clobber”. The last Monitor announces a great failure, i.e. a new law about duty put on packages sent to Poland from abroad. This is the end, really. How to even start to show the scale of the unhappiness? Not many realize that since the end of the war three quarters of the clothing consumption of the society is being satisfied by abroad. Actually, America, a dozen charity organizations. That was the militant period of Polish fashion: the elegance was battle dress…

“Clobber” and color were in a great way dangerous for the system, because they were direct, everyday. Against what they say that they want to give joy, gaiety, colorfulness and carelessness, communists want only greyness, not-being, a colorlessness which wouldn’t take the population away from their sacred ideals. Some kind of uniform ugliness leveled to the rank of moral norm – this is a new ideal of the common usage. They want to see us all in Stalinist jackets and overalls. Lack of charm is a virtue, the appeal of the looks is subversion. Hatred of originality, joy, brightness, individuality, eccentricity, is within communism organic, because every egalitarian ethics is about seeing good in the average and plainness. You can’t show a pretty girly face on a magazine cover. But Poles, even the most stupid ones, understood, that the style one dresses is in every era a function of beaux arts, and this way of dressing is in a way an act of resistance. No iron curtains consist a barrier to it.

Tyrmand identified the Soviet ideology with the lacklustre nature of its clothes and design. Yet today we all know how “emancipation via consumption” ends – somewhere in
Sex and the City’s
Carrie Bradshaw’s epiphanies over Manolo Blahnik shoes. Fashion shows how the circumstances change the semantics of any object. In reality, the greyness of communism was another myth. But as the beauty of the system was meant to be one of the most visible and consistent elements of life under Eastern European socialism, surrounded from every side by images of idealized, fit but hunky workers, robotniks and robotnitze, looking at you from the monumental art, murals, buildings decoration, banners and streets, the viewer was not always gaining in the famous Stalinist “gaiety”.

5.9 Leopold Tyrmand’s novel ‘Badass’ (1955) was his protest against the new reality, by celebrating Warsaw demi-monde and reviving the pre-war city mythology (cover by Jan Mlodozeniec)

This chapter takes its title from one of Tyrmand’s phrases. The
1954 Diary
is a unique document of late Stalinism in Poland. Tyrmand was shaped by a different system – from a Jewish intelligentsia family, he was sent to Paris for architectural studies and survived the war in a Nazi camp in Norway. In post-war Poland he tried to pursue a literary career, publishing in
Tygodnik Powszechny (General Weekly)
, a Roman Catholic yet progressive magazine, still for a time allowed to publish with a light censorship. After
Tygodnik’s
liberal editors were fired all Tyrmand’s novels were pulled by the censors. Tyrmand was an example of a liberal, pro-Western intellectual, turned conservative in the clash with People’s Poland. His anti-communist crusades are today a record of what a non-communist intellectual, with the previous era in his memory, thought about the new reality. They have their limitations - Tyrmand was still very much indebted to the pre-war view of life and politics, and Western democracy remains an ideal for him, regardless of the political impossibility of its realization in Poland. A militant liberal, neither the anti-Semitic, nor nationalistic views prevalent in pre-war Poland made him embrace the new system. He became its most fervent critic, from a cultural and political point of view remaining a devotee of the West, deploring the new system’s shabbiness. While a petit-bourgeois in many of his cultural tastes, valuing the easy listening of Glen Miller as the highest form of civilization, this promoter of jazz and everything Western was one of the most colorful intellectuals of the Soviet period in Poland.

As I’ve stressed here, Poland in 1939 was an underdeveloped
country, pervaded with all the problems of the time: financial crisis, nationalism, right wing dictatorship, anti-Semitism, xenophobia. Tyrmand chose to ignore the fact that even if the Second World War didn’t happen, in those conditions Poland would at best become a minor country massively dependent on the West. Yet for him, the fact as a part of the Warsaw Pact Poland didn’t have to rely on the West was insignificant. He believed that the biggest tragedy of living under the burden of real socialism was the drastic lowering of any aesthetic, spiritual and intellectual aspirations and expectations of men and women: a reality where the silent subjection of the individuals to the authorities was not enough – it also had to have power over their minds. Tyrmand’s critique referred especially to the earliest, harshest Stalinist phase of PRL. As a member of the intelligentsia, Tyrmand had little understanding and belief in the efficiency of the programme of equality. The so-called social advance of the people from countryside to the cities he regarded as disastrous. The omnipresent socialist rhetoric and the newspeak of Stalinism was to him the death of reason.

Many of Tyrmand’s fears cannot be completely dismissed as the typical classist fears of the intelligentsia, a la Ortega Y Gasset, hateful of the masses. Tyrmand saw correctly the abyss between the existing shortages and the promises of the authorities. His “Primer on Communist Civilization”, translated and published in 1972 in the USA as
The Rosa Luxembourg Contraceptives Cooperative
, is an alphabetically juxtaposed ‘komuna vocabulary’, with short chapters like ‘How to be/do x’ or ‘What is X’, within communism. Topics include ‘How to survive education’, ‘How to use a telephone’, ‘How to oppose’, ‘How to be a playboy’ or ‘How to be Jewish’. There’s also one on ‘How to be a woman’, where Tyrmand seemingly demolishes the new liberties and equal rights women gained in socialism. First of all, the ideas of equality in communism were always rotten, and the in the process of joining the physical hardship of workforce, women gave up their womanhood and turned into masculinized unhumans. All this rather banal
misogyny wouldn’t interest us, were it not for the fact of how little has changed. In the new capitalism Polish women have in fact less freedom and are subjected to greater misogyny than under socialism, where at least basic freedoms, like abortion, contraceptives, and equality within the workplace were officially guaranteed.