Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West

by Pyzik, Agata

  Unfortunately, in reality, we couldn’t be driving further away from space and the computer world, as Soviet technology had its most modern, forward-thinking years already behind it. Paradoxically, when we caught up with the dominating futurist fashion within pop-culture, time-traveling and computer technology, as in the children’s trilogy of Pan Kleks, we had lost any potential to even overtake the West with our ideas. Post-81 the socialist utopia started to growingly morph into dystopia.

  The catastrophic SF of Piotr Szulkin, one of the most distinctive 80s Polish visionaries, disclosed a quite different realization of the futuristic dreams, filled with fear first at the communist, and then capitalist versions of totalitarianism. It’s an Orwellian vision immersed in philosophical existential deliberations over the media, cynicism and the mental destruction of the individual. According to Szulkin’s films, the Soviet Bloc will be destroyed by communism, after which capitalism will take over, and turn out to be equally destructive. In a very loose adaptation of Wells’s War of the Worlds (1981), one country, which due to English names could seem Western, is invaded by Martians, who are a ‘higher’ civilisation - one which ruthlessly oppresses the lower one on earth, as the Martians are bloodthirsty, horrific creatures, who vampirically live off humans. The world becomes overpowered by cynical media exploitation, and a brutal state apparatus assumes absolute control.

  Even if the intention was for Martians to stand in for the Soviet Union (who were supposedly on the verge of invading Poland in 1981, which was then “prevented” by the introduction of Martial Law by General Jaruzelski’s junta), in fact they rather resemble the other Cold War Empire – The United States of America. Their omnivorous media, popular culture and capitalist greed seem to be something that bothers Szulkin even more than the Soviet reality, as in Ga Ga – Glory to the Heroes (1985), where in post-communist, twenty-first century Americanized reality, humanity has conquered other planets. But on the colonized new worlds, mankind installs prostitution, vice and omnipresent media rule. In the finale, the hero is to be executed at a gigantic stadium media event broadcast across the entire solar system. We live in the world after the apocalypse, that’s obvious: in 1984’s O-Bi, O-Ba, End of Civilisation, after the nuclear war the whole humanity is reduced to living underground, like worms (several years before, and in a much more convincing way, than it was done by Emir Kusturica in Underground) and in these humiliating conditions they wait for the mythical Ark to take them away, the Second Coming, not knowing it’s only the criminal state apparatus’s propaganda. Instead of the Ark coming, the copula over the pitiful hole humankind lives in is collapsing. Still, the light revealed by the cracks is taken by the humans as the arrival of the Ark. Space in Szulkin’s films is nearly always one or another form of prison: people vegetate in claustrophobic, dirty hovels, waiting for miracles that never come.

  At the time Szulkin was developing his visions, People’s Poland was in some of its darkest periods. We had rather more mundane problems, with austerity after the Martial Law and a collapsing economy. The topic of scarcity strangely enough must have become domesticated in the pop landscape of late komuna, because it kept coming back obsessively in pop music. Too down to earth to seriously debate about flying to space, Izabela stuck to disillusionment.

  Lost in Contradictory Images

  One of the things that has been growing obvious in the most interesting contemporary art in Poland is an interest in the visual culture imagery of the communist past. With delight artists take up and paint or re-enact aesthetic elements of the everyday life of PRL. This trend remains charmingly and quite openly close to the more general, hipster gesture of cherishing retro for its own sake. Slawek Elsner repainted dozens of images from the popular weekly Panorama, in which he also mimed the poor print quality of 70s Poland. Paulina Ołowska, meanwhile, does not stop at re-enacting only the aesthetics, she re-enacts whole situations and elements of everyday life. She repaints the popular visual elements of socialist life: postcards with DIY fashion, often bizarre and on the verge of kitsch yet too strange to become it, or magazine covers and punk leaflets. She makes collages, merges the original print and her creation, which become indistinguishable. Part of the appeal of Ołowska’s adaptations is the sheer love of clothes. In this way she builds a significant relationship with the period, and can’t be reduced just to empty retro posing of a fashionista. Maybe it’s the love of material culture that puts a bridge between an empty retro-mania and the ideology these aesthetics represent. But does Ołowska identify with the women who had to sew their own clothes, as there was nothing in the shops, or is she just amused with their earnestness? Using that expression from Tyrmand, Applied Fantastics, she stresses rather the ironic aspect of how living in PRL meant constant improvisation and miracle-making on an everyday basis. And somehow, she’s then seduced by this miracle.

  5.18 Richard Boulez and Kora, 1983, photo by Tadeusz Rolke

  It’s obvious that in the work of Elsner or Ołowska, where the communist past undergoes a painterly conceptual resurrection, there’s a strong hint of nostalgia - a nostalgia often inspired by the disappointment the post-89 culture brought, also visually. But this seeming longing for PRL has to be constantly disavowed. ‘Polish magazines stayed on a very poor editorial level, especially lithographic and print techniques’ says curator/gallerist Łukasz Gorczyca in his text for a catalogue of Slawek Elsner’s works. Yet, as we’ve seen, Polish magazines like Przekroj and Ty I Ja showed a rather high and even innovatory level of originality. Polish magazines weren’t just simply the poor imitation of the Western model of consumption, as Gorczyca suggests, they were often trying to build their own version of lifestyle. Yes, they were restricted by the shabbiness and limitations of real socialism, but the lacks they had made them aspire to create something on their own. Interestingly, whenever the topic of nostalgia after the aesthetics of Soviet times comes up, commentators and theorists rush immediately to assure us it has nothing to do with the politics. The recent interest of young Russians in Soviet cinema or old games, or anything connected with the system is, apparently, apolitical. Maybe this is typical of the weakness of so much of current political aesthetics, which is not politicized enough, uprooted from its original meaning and in the end, pretty but meaningless. Photographs of people enjoying themselves in the DDR or USSR can be found all over the internet. But then people enjoyed their life and holidays also under fascism. An image proving that people enjoyed themselves playing ping pong under communism doesn’t actually prove anything in particular.

  5.19a DIY as a way of survival. A popular series of ideas for knitwear which will inspire artist Paulina Olowska decades later. Here ‘Hunting’.

  We’ll never get an honest reassessment of the past if we keep denying that this nostalgia at play is also political. Or rather – that it suggests the death or lack of the politics which made certain positive elements of this reality possible. Yet the nostalgia or even sheer curiosity after this period is enormous. Any books, gadgets, memoirs, films issued from the post-war era, regardless of their value, are meeting with popularity, not only in Poland, but in all ex-Bloc countries. Socialist modernist architecture is being constantly revived. The most popular current books are invariably either memoirs from PRL (Lech Wałęsa’s wife Danuta, the daughter of General Jaruzelski, or Jerzy Urban, the notorious government PR in PRL and in free Poland the king of the gutter press - to name just the biggest) or historical books, alternately endorsing and condemning PRL as a criminal regime or an “occupation”. Blogs of the gadget and lifestyle aficionados mushroom everywhere. There’re even attempts to “live in PRL” – people who have decided to live as if 1989 never happened: for a year one couple wore, ate, read and consumed only goods produced in PRL, after which they published a book about the experience.

  5.19b Spoof or original. Paulina Olowska playing with the aesthetics of PRL within post-modern painting. Cake, courtesy of Metro Pictures.

  In this way the creation of the phantasm called ‘
PRL’ becomes just the superficial question of wearing a specific kind of clothes, living in cheesy design or eating retro bad-quality food, without any attempt to dig into the meaning of this time. There’s just a façade, with nothing in terms of actual rethinking of the ideology, apart, of course, from total condemnation. But the dominating nostalgia does say more about us than we want to admit. We do feel traumatized by the transition, we do feel something is missing, but we don’t openly address it. We don’t want the simplistic narrative where Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik save the world, because we feel that this isn’t true. There are many academic dissertations on that period published, but nobody is trying to look at the current financial crisis and the emerging protests and the current fascination with the past as part of the same phenomenon. We may live still among the – now shrinking – architectural decorations of communism, but communism itself still stands somewhere undiscovered in its practical essence.

  Afterword

  This book has probably ended up having much more of a ‘local’ perspective than was originally intended. I wanted to render several obsessions of this greatly obscured era, and to rectify the omissions I saw in the literature. Since I began writing this book in 2012, the political and social situation of the countries discussed were (and are) changing every day. I also focused more on Poland and the closer ‘East’ and less on Russia, which right now seems to be facing the greater upheaval. I tried to capture the main currents and motivations of these countries and the perceptions the West (understood mostly as Western Europe and the US), has about it, or perhaps, doesn’t have at all. Living between the constant wish of being ‘more appreciated by the West’ and a curious wounded pride is the current reality, but must it be necessarily the destiny of the East? There are many possible answers to that. There are attempts in today’s scholarship at retrieving the positive out of the position of a ‘Slav’ which so often in history rhymed and combined with that of a ‘slave’. We were the Slaves of Europe and the first real periphery of the capitalist West, and the center cannot live without the periphery.

  It is hard to talk about any “specter haunting Europe” yet, but something has happened recently. As austerity measures are taking their toll, we are surrounded by the rhetoric of scarcity. There’s no more money, politicians convince us – the resources have run out. But to demand more, to demand the return of the welfare state, would be more than just childishness on the part of the impoverished – it’d be calling for…communism! Even though according to the world news, we’ve just had two years of constant protests, dissent and revolution, Eastern Springs, riots, Greek and Spanish hot summers, it seems that the only thing we don’t have is a consolidated left. Apart from SYRIZA in Greece, who were the only far-left party in recent decades to come close to forming a government, leftist parties are in defeat, never recovered since the 1970s. We are on the brink of the biggest crisis of capitalism in history, yet even at the slightest sound of reforms a Democrat like Barack Obama, much more economically conservative than the Republicans of the Roosevelt or even Nixon era, is called a “socialist”. In The Communist Horizon, Jodi Dean, a professor in New York from a new generation of American Marxists, gave a full list of the new Red Scare rhetoric in America and elsewhere. The welfare state, free healthcare, free education, equality, feminism, taxation – all this belongs to the great Communist Menace, socialists lingering just round the corner. ‘Communists’ protested against the Iraq war, didn’t vote for Bush Jr., want to tax the rich and regulate the market, support insurance and food stamps. Among the bank bailouts and cuts an unbelievable thing has happened: as we can see in Poland, it’s the capitalists who speak to us in the tone of victims.

  How, in the face of the current upheaval, can we regain the positive meaning of communism and use it to the left’s empowerment? There’s an internet meme called “Full Communism”, a half-prank, half-serious critique, mostly from anarchist circles, of the left’s reformism. Dean is significantly more serious than that, but she insists on divorcing the meaning of the word from its previous historical applications. Her major aim is to release the left from the deep sense of shame into which the liberal critique of communism has put it. “The mistake leftists make when we turn into liberals and democrats”, she says, “is thinking that we’re beyond the communist horizon, that democracy replaced communism, when it serves as the contemporary form of communist displacement”, whereas “capitalism always interlinks with conflict, resistance, accommodation and demands. Refusal to engage in these struggles affects the form capitalism takes”. It’s a bit like Bertolt Brecht’s claim in conversations with Walter Benjamin: “It’s not communism but capitalism that’s radical.” Because it’s capitalism that destroys and creates, and goes forward no matter what, and communism that wants to put the brakes onto it, to stop it and make it think. Conservatives somehow succeeded in presenting themselves as those who come to help, despite destroying the bonds of solidarity and hence not being ‘conservative’ at all, pushing the destructive agenda of shock therapy. The left should stop being afraid of winning and being in the spotlight, says Dean, who wonders ironically why re-using the words “proletariat” or “bourgeoisie” seem ludicrous, while competition, efficiency, stock markets, bonuses and financial success, or the re-branding of feminism don’t. All that serves to prevent us from recognizing and obliterating notions of class, work, division, inequality or privilege.

  What, however, about those who remember a quite different ‘communism’? It remains a dirty, bad word for those, including large parts of the left, who invariably associate it with the East, whether the USSR and its satellites, or China, to prove that it’s invariably a failed project - moreover, a murderous one. In Poland, for instance, hatred of ‘communism’ is the only thing that unites our conflicting camps. In many ex-communist countries, especially those which joined the EU, this is a verboten word, that sends us straight back to the Gulag: when Krytyka Polityczna put out a selection of Lenin’s works edited by and with a preface by Slavoj Žižek, it faced ostracism, and the right-wing government managed to put a ban on communist ideology equally with Nazism. You can’t publish The Communist Manifesto in parts of the ex-Bloc without risking a fine or a ban. Meanwhile, East European representatives in the European Parliament recently tabled an official declaration that communism and fascism were equivalent. Žižek, as a former communist dissident himself, has had a huge role in rehabilitating and restoring the idea of communism as a possibility, beyond its failed realizations from the past. Dean, who does not have a background in Soviet studies, came to the idea via Western Marxism, and prefers to cite Latin American rather than East European Communists, which is admirably internationalist – but it would have been helpful if she had something to say to those for whom the word is anathema for more reasons than red-baiting.

  ‘The big transformative questions have generally been forgotten”, said the late Eric Hobsbawm, displaced by “fanzine history, which groups write in order to feel better about themselves”. Despite for the last three decades critiquing the Soviet Union, until the end Hobsbawm’s ‘unrepentant communism’ was still hugely controversial. There’s a good reason why the word instills fear during a capitalist meltdown. One of the toughest questions for any leftist is the political legacy of the Soviet Bloc. While many of us, their former residents, constantly refer to the socialist past as deeply flawed, we seem strangely possessive of the term, one that today, perhaps, has a completely different meaning and regains it in the time of crisis. Liberals in Poland routinely equate Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez, but their example couldn’t be more different. Socialist ideas of some sort are still vital in the parts of the world that are unified by the fact they’re not and never will be the ‘center’ – Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and others are now struggling to came up with new economic policies that claim to be socialist, while the former East of Europe only ever considered a singular, and Western, option. East-West binarisms haunt us still, though, because for five decades the Col
d War provided the framework and a mutual narrative, which shaped people’s lives. Being from the East, and its consequences, was and is real.

  I intended this book to be a counter also against another current way of treating the recent past, especially post-1945. On the liberal left we have currently a renaissance of the ‘spirit of ’45’, to name it after the recent film by Ken Loach. From the last writings of the late Tony Judt, to the engaged intelligentsia, we experience a renewal of popularity of the post-war consensus as a reaction to the current rampant neoliberalism. This call for the social democratic spirit has its good sides, e.g. its defence of the welfare state, but it ignores completely the fact that the spirit of ’45 also included Cold War imperialism, often involving the repression of (often communist) liberation movements through colonial wars in Indochina, Malaysia and elsewhere. With the exception of neutral Sweden and Finland, Western European countries were colonial empires and were all very pro-American, which all involved the isolation of Eastern Europe. At the core of this thinking there’s a rejection and condemnation of what was happening on the other side of the Curtain and their post-war modernity. Modernity is good, but only that represented by the ‘enlightened’ part of Europe. Needless to say it’s a narrative in which people from Eastern Europe cannot find themselves, nor find a positive proposition for the future.