Come back Mr. Coca-Cola
By : Marek Matraszek
Few shed many tears last week for the final demise of Edward Gierek, former First Secretary of the old Polish United Workers Party (PZPR), the communist party that ruled Poland for 45 years after the war. Yet most Poles could not help feeling a twinge of nostalgia at the news that their former leader he was party secretary for 10 years between 1970 and 1980 was no more. In this reaction lies the essence that was the paradox of Gierek and the communist period that he presided over, as well as of Polish communism in the 1970s, and the reason why many Poles, try as they might, cannot fully come to condemn the system that oppressed them for so many years.
Gierek came to power as a result of an inner-party putsch in December 1970, just after the infamous massacre of shipyard workers in Gdansk during anti-regime demonstrations that had been sparked by food price increases. The previous leader, the ascetic and paranoid Wladyslaw Gomulka, had ordered troops commanded by General Wojciech Jaruzelski to quell the riots by force and as a result more than 50 Poles were killed. Poland stood on the verge of widespread revolt, and to defuse it, the communist party leadership used the time-tested method of switching leaders. Gierek, previously party boss in Silesia, was brought in, and managed to defuse the protests in a famous gesture by traveling to Gdansk and asking for the support of the workers in changing Poland. Foolishly they agreed and Gierek and his cronies were secure for a decade.
Gierek's Poland in the 1970s represented what party ideologists called "the phase of mature socialism," but which in practice was the beginning of the end of communism. The lesson of the Gomulka period was that the previous method of governance ascetic living, and a population forced into submission by a combination of ideological haranguing and forcible repression could no longer work. Gierek hit on the idea of giving the people a little of what they wanted, but at the price of letting the party go about its business of running the country and ostentatiously enriching itself. This was the Polish version of what had made Hungary under Janos Kadar so long-lasting: there, Goulash socialism, in Poland, Coca-Cola communism.
In practice, this meant relaxing travel restrictions so ordinary Poles could travel not only to the socialist states of Eastern Europe, but also to the West. Huge Western loans were taken up, with the idea being that they would be paid off by exports from the modernized industries they created. Western television shows were imported and Clint Eastwood movies bought for cinemas. For Poles at the time, this indeed represented access to what communist propaganda had convinced them was the essence of the West: consumer values, moral license, and capitalist industrialism. At the same time, the party apparatus turned its back on Gomulka's stern waspishness, and engorged itself on the benefits of the nomenklatura lifestyle. Everyone was participating in the grand game of high living, and turning a blind eye to the costs.
These costs soon became evident, and fast became the underbelly of the Gierek period. Gullible Western bankers piled in their dollars, not realizing that they were being poured down the plughole of an unreformed command economy, while following the oil shock of the mid-1970s, Gierek's hopes for export markets collapsed. Soon the economy was plunged onto a spiral of indebtedness, and Gierek, like a drunk, began to borrow even more to pay off existing debts. Inevitably, with the end of the consumer illusion, social tensions rose and first erupted in violent demonstrations in Radom and Ursus in 1976, and finally in the Gdansk Shipyards in 1980.
The latter half of Gierek's rule was one of increasingly fantastic propaganda, combined with growing poverty and the pervasive power of the secret police. It was a system that had to collapse and it did with the birth of the Solidarity free trade movement in 1980. Like his predecessor before him, Gierek became a victim of his party colleagues, and was crudely shunted aside in the summer of that year. When martial law was declared a year later, he faced the final indignity of internment, before descending into obscurity.
In many ways, Poland today is explicable only through understanding the Gierek period. It was then that Poland's absurd smokestack industries were created, and the country burdened with a foreign debt that continues to be a millstone around its neck. But the Gierek period also explains something deeper, namely why Poles, more so than almost any other former communist country, have been so forgiving of their former communist masters, and seem prepared to elect them into office at the drop of a hat. During the 1970s, most people became complicit in the system, accepting a dose of sanitized ersatz Westernization, happily accepting the price of turning a blind eye to the iniquities of the system itself. Today's right-wing politicians, agitating about the evils of communism, cause no small amount of moral discomfort. Conversely, representatives of the post-communist left are quite happy to feed the instincts of "disco Poland," that broad mass of the population who would like nothing better than to have a beer, invite some friends over for a "grill," and end the evening with listening to 1970s dance favorites. As for politicians? Bah! They're all crooks anyway but who cares, as long as they don't bother us! Roll on Sept. 23rd
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl (mailto:director@cec.com.pl)
