Footnotes

Garbarnia: A Fallen Communist Tannery, Pomerania (October 2009)

This is in response to Slate article: Anne Applebaum: 1989 And All That (special thanks to Dr. Frank Popper at Rutgers and Princeton universities for pointing it out to me).

Applebaum is correct: Communism still matters in Eastern Europe (and in the West) but I disagree that there really ought to be a controversy taking place as to whether or not the transition is over for EE countries. This is where ethnography trumps journalism or armchair scholarship because it assumes change and focuses revisionist history on how the people are changing rather than whether the people are changing in the first place. I am always baffled by the articles who talk about how Poland has embraced the capitalist mindset and how it is an exception to the transition phases of the other Eastern European countries. I ask myself if the author has even been to Warsaw (where sky-skrapers built in the early 1990s stand almost empty) let alone to a Polish village. In 2009, Communism is very real in Poland.

Without a doubt, the transition is still very much behind, not only in privatization (in Poland a government agency called the Agencja Rynku Rolnego still owns most of the physical property and structures of what used to be state farms and there are Communist workers of those old state farms who still have Communist production circles or kolkhozy and pay rent to the state) but also the mentality of the people in understanding how to use the capitalist system. The best selling book for little children is still Elementarz which establishes the Communist foundations of citizenship (which includes a “who are our friends” section of the book depicting children carrying Cuban, Chinese, Russian flags and the worker ideal in the factory, etc) .

Throughout the 4 months of research in Poland, I met people who recall the fall of Communism in 1995-1996 because that is when the local tannery industry (in photograph) which employed over 60% of the village, fell to privatization. The fall for the West was of course in 1989 but as of late in Poland (given Nobel Prize Winner Lech Walesa’s tarnished image and also now the anti-Americanism due to the U.S. Missile Defense Shield in Redzikowo), the symbols of 1989 have been demonized in the ugly politics on the national level. Additionally, the new historical order has led to the legitimisation of victimhood politics of Jews, Ukrainian, Gypsy, Bielorussian, Lithuanian and other Eastern European minorities which previously were hidden under the post-1945 polonisation campaign. For ethnic Poles, such a perception of the political order fuels Nostalgia for Communism. Pomerania is in fact in the voting polls the most Communist-leaning still in the country (given that the Communist project was most established there) and not one person I interviewed admitted to taking part in any Solidarity Movement because the SM is now associated with the colonisation of Poland by the European Union.

When thinking of anti-Communism in Poland, it is important to understand that Communists and non-Communists lived together in villages and most were neighbors. There were families who had a daughter signed up to the Communist party (to acquire resources for the family) while the son remained “anti-Communist” (to have access to local resources such as tomatoes from the other anti-Communists’ garden). So to “get” bread, families were both Communist and Anti-Communist at the same time. Those who carried out the Communist orders in the village were often “excused” by the anti-Communists because the two neighbors both knew that this was all a theater. of actors and people needed to work to put bread on the table. So I think instead of thinking of opposition in the form of “political” opposition, it is important to think more of it in terms of economic exploitation: that for example the Communist brigadier on the state farm turned a blind eye on his non-Communist neighbors to steal potatoes from the state-farm to feed their families. It was this system of “permissions” between neighbors on both sides to exploit the system which led to its indirect opposition, but I would not even call it a “niche” or “civil society” that was entirely anti-Communist or pro-Communist. It was a set of social-economic relations dealing with Communist and non-Communist resources which developed on the local levels. I would say that any resistance against the church was also a form of acting out Communism because many such Communists went to church in another village on Sunday where no one would recognize their faces.

The city of Gdansk this year was celebrating its “historical” place in Polish history (the site of Westerplatte where World War II began) and the site of the Gdansk shipyards. To the locals outside of Gdansk, the city has always represented a piece of the West (from German influence) which  in 1989 did not act in accordance to the wishes of the locals. The Solidarity Movement is typified as a very Gdansk contained uprising based on the unique experiences of the shipyard workers with the shipyard authorities. The way that the locals around Gdansk (in Pomerania) knew about the Solidarity Movement was when a group of Solidarity Movement came to the local tannery and (supposedly) bullied people into protest and signing petitions they did not really want to sign. It was another method of control. In order for the transition to be complete, there needs to be a reassessment of the Polish rural mindset. For people to begin to take responsibility for their own construction of their realities and their histories. To understand what is and is not their responsibility as Polish and European Union citizens. Until then, they will disagree with any political or economic order which disrupts their ignorance.

Thanks for reading,

E (Pomerania, Nov. 2009)