Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West Page 6

  You can scream here

  Situated 450 kilometres from the Russian mainland, Kaliningrad is an isolated territory created by the Soviet Union. Carved out of the German East Prussian city of Königsberg and its hinterland after the war, bordered by southern Lithuania and northern Poland, it sits on the edge of the Baltic Sea, geographically separated from Russia but officially still part of the country, a hangover from a bygone era of empire. With its neighbors now part of the EU and NATO, as well as the Schengen zone, the city’s detachment from Russia is only growing. Kaliningrad’s extraordinary position in Europe has inspired strong responses in adjoining countries, and particularly in Poland, not only from politicians, but also from artists. In January 2012 a simultaneous exhibition, Enclave, was held at Warsaw’s Center for Contemporary Art and Kaliningrad’s National Center for Contemporary Art. Artists from Poland and Russia were asked to reflect on the idea of an enclave, with regard to Kaliningrad itself.

  What are the principal associations of the word “enclave”? Mostly negative: isolation, xenophobia, alienation. Judging from many contributions to the exhibition, Kaliningrad is a reflection of exactly that condition, a museum of dead ideology, surrounded by the ruins of an old system. Yet look closer and the city tells a different story. Both economically (it was given Special Economic Zone status in 1996) and demographically, Kaliningrad is doing significantly better than most of the rest of Russia. So which of those two images — cultural obsolescence or economic progress — is nearer to the truth?

  The Russian artists in the exhibition tended to respond more closely to the stated topic. Sound artist Danil Akimov produced the most ethereal work, a small room that became the city itself: a map was projected on the floor that was sensitive to footsteps and evoked the sounds of the respective parts of Kaliningrad. Art group Tender Bints (Nezhnye Baby) showed a video, Dirt, in which two women perform a strange ritual drowned in mud, telling a sad story of the women of the Curonian Spit, the enormous sandy peninsula which sweeps out from Kaliningrad towards Lithuania and forms an isolated enclave within an enclave. Some of the Polish works meditated on neighborliness and hospitality, kindness and the lack thereof. Karolina Breguła’s ‘Good Neighbours’, for instance, showed the artist walking around Kaliningrad knocking on people’s doors and introducing herself as “your nice neighbour from Warsaw”. For the most part, however, the Polish works in Enclave were Ostalgic - wistful portrayals of Kaliningrad that focus on the ruins of the previous system, and in particular on the most devastated elements of post-Soviet reality. Franco-Polish photographer Nicolas Grospierre focused on picturesque Soviet relics: the Palace of Soviets (constructed on the site of a castle built by the Teutonic Knights); decaying tower blocks; government buildings and courtyards; and, as an epilogue, a library in an abandoned school, replete with endless heaps of ruined books.

  Maciej Stepiński’s ‘Exclave’ series contemplated wistful trash: one of the most typical features of Kaliningrad seems to be abandoned rusty cars. As always, the problem with aestheticizing socialism like this is that it not only annihilates any potential positive uses of this project, declaring it as dead, but also provokes a melancholy longing for it. Other works not only took a maudlin look at the city, but also criticized it. In a film by Polish group ZOR the narrator, increasingly unimpressed by the concrete architecture of the city, says, “It’s a terrible city. The ugliest city in the world!” Ryszard Górecki’s ‘You Can Scream Here’ is a sign, hung on the Timber Bridge in Kaliningrad, which reproduces Edvard Munch’s famous image with the invitation, in German and in Russian, to replicate that scream. Why would anyone want to scream there? “There could be many reasons,” says the artist. “Germans can scream from grief for the city they lost. Russians — while looking at the city they have built. And tourists — from the disappointment of Kaliningrad.” Little wonder that the sign was removed by vandals after only a week.

  Enclave was only one of several major shows on Russian art in Poland in the last ten years. It’s as if enough time has passed now that Poles and Russians are no longer afraid of each other. But that trauma clearly remains strong. Many of these exhibitions still manifest signs of fear and distrust. The banner made for one Russian-Polish show by artist Anna Witkowska read, “BEWARE, ENEMY!” One might ask whether art is the right tool for overcoming these differences. But it is, at the very least, a good barometer of cross-border emotion. If there’s a show about a mutual friendship, you can bet that there are deep-running discrepancies and inequalities. But in Enclave we also see Poles looking at their neighbors with a certain fascination that might just transform into closeness. If anything, this show was a reminder of colonial interdependencies. Poles, at least on the political right, like to see Poland as a besieged, poor, betrayed country where things suddenly got better, at least by comparison. Now at last there’s someone worse off than them.

  Shows like Enclave say more about Poles than the place they visited. One fascinating element of the transition after 1989 was the way in which the post-colonial process of “othering” had an effect on the modernizing countries of Europe. Kaliningrad easily becomes a mystified “other” for the Poles. Many of the Polish artists who visit Kaliningrad speak of the “genius loci”, the specificity of the place, but fail to see it through anything other than Soviet clichés. The default reaction of the Polish artist is a traumatic image of the Communist past — and somehow we don’t want that image to be challenged. We like to think of Kaliningrad only as a prison or concentration camp, even though this is not what the citizens themselves see. In the past the norm was from someone to come from the west to Poland, see the Stalinist architecture and say, “Look at these horrible Communist ruins!” Now it’s Poles themselves doing that. We have done our homework on becoming a “normal European country” and now we’re telling our neighbors the news. What will come next? Will there be new quasi-colonial relations in capitalist Europe? East Prussia, which became Kaliningrad, was first an object of desire for the Teutonic Knights, and then became a staging post in the Red Army’s push to the west. It is, in its way, a tragic model of permanently colonized space.

  Sexy and Unsexy Countries

  There’s something common between all, even the most emanci-pated/cosmopolitan/hipstery/urban Poles, or maybe especially among them: when asked where we’re from we never say “Poland”, just like that, as if it was normal; we also don’t say it with pride. Most of times, we don’t want this thing to matter. And if we say that, be sure we will immediately start to explain ourselves. “Well, you know, Poland now is not what you think it is. There was some dramatic changes/ we’re a normal European country.” Normal. European. Those descriptions seem to matter to us a lot. We like to see ourselves as a part of something you all recognize (or at least something we see as such), god forbid as something that until recently was very poor, very grey, where no one from the West, apart from expats and stag parties would like to come for a visit, because why? I remember how deeply ashamed of being Polish we were in the 90s. It was a bad word. Once at the very beginning of 2000s I was taken by a friend to a Greek migrants party in Berlin, in a nice tenement, where all neighbors got together. My friend then told me she was asked “who are those half-Romanians?” I didn’t know there was a huge Romanian migration wave at this point, but remember my shock at this. I didn’t know whether it was the semi-racism or the fact I was called a Romanian that caused me more outrage. And this from a Greek!

  1.6 Community Center Lobby in Pripyat, the town built for the Chernobyl nuclear power plant workers.

  If we necessarily have to admit we’re Polish, there has to be something that compensates for it – a necessary sense of pride. “You know, Poland fought heroically during the war. Unlike many others, we never collaborated with the Nazis, 8 million of us died. We had heroic resistance and Home Army, and then the communists came and with them some traitors. Which war? What uprising? What communists? You might ask, seeing, that the person probably never lived through any of those
events. It doesn’t matter. The war is always still going on.

  As far as sexiness goes, in Poland we definitely consider ourselves unsexy. So do must other post-communist countries. Yet upon travelling across the ex-Bloc, what strikes you is the seediness, the astonishing amounts of peep-shows, sex-shops and various strip and ‘Gentlemen’s Clubs’, and the more one goes east, the more sleazy it gets. Polish Catholicism keeps this relatively quiet in Poland, but in Prague, Budapest, Kiev, Minsk, Riga, Tallinn, Belgrade and Moscow this is not an issue. When in a hotel, on the shelf there’s already lots of flyers, totally assuming you’re there to use Eastern girls’ charm. The sex industry that mushroomed in the East is only one side of its capitalist transition. Yet, the more sex, the less sexy it seems, the more sleaze, the less pleasure. If we’re to believe the Free Theatre of Belarus’ successful travelling spectacle Minsk 2011 (after Kathy Acker’s New York 1979), sex in Minsk is particularly off-putting. The piece collected all sorts of humiliating acts Belarusian folk have to endure and a huge dose of bleak humor as well, establishing the murky relations between sex, money and nationality. Yet the troupe displayed little consciousness about the place where they’re showing their militant piece. In London, it fuelled the liberal, narcissist positions which are simply rebuking the horrid Soviet republic, refusing to acknowledge the privileged position from which those criticisms could be made. The audience clapped furiously cherishing the ‘bravery’ of the dissidents, while overzealous broadsheet critics believed that in Minsk you are arrested for looking at someone for too long, while the play itself, with its depiction of the streets of Minsk full of aggro, implied you would only risk a hostile look back. Belarus, “the last dictatorship in Europe”, couldn’t have a worse reputation, but Western opinion, hoping for the demise of Lukashenko would gladly see also the demise of its welfare state. Western politicians and commentators clearly see it as a part of this “totalitarianism”.

  The “Ukrainian bride” was and still is a social phenomenon, the most abrupt meeting between the Western financial capital and the Eastern beauties’ submission. So imagine my shock, when I discovered Ukrainians are using it unironically. There’s a huge demand for an Ukrainian Bride, also among Poles, fed up with the relative emancipation of Polish women, who, as one of the commenters on the “Loving the Ukrainian Woman” forum puts it, expect them to help with housework and bringing up children! The patterns of exploitation are subtle. It’s enough to be a little bit better off, and it’s always from the West towards the East, or, as the Polish example shows, from the EU to the rest. The leader of Krytyka Polityczna Sławomir Sierakowski even used the term “Russian bride” in a Guardian comment piece, published there during their “New Europe” month (where apart from Poland, the “New Europe” was also…Spain, France and Germany). In his view, the Russian bride, all in political metaphor, “will make a good wife to the Polish husband”, who will rescue it after its abuse by tsars, Bolsheviks and oligarchs. Then it only needs the polite husbandly hands of Poland.

  An open transaction. A wife from an abused, impoverished country unlike emancipated westernized women is expected to be submissive, undemanding and grateful. The consequences of that model from not only feminist, but simply societal perspectives, are grim. In the popular HBO series The Sopranos Eastern Europeans serve as bodies to do sex and house work. At least several young Russian women come to the US, only to work in strip clubs and to find an American husband, usually becoming instead a goomar. In one episode the mobster Tony Soprano, when he’s not able to ‘perform’, quarrels with his Russian goomar, calling her ‘a communist cunt’. Judging from the series, at the beginning of the 2000s Americans had all sorts of racist attitudes towards the ex-Bloc, using all kinds of communist insults: Russian mafia are ‘commie bastards’, Poles are of course ‘Polacks’ (just like in another HBO success, The Wire, in which an attacked ‘Polack’, Frank Sobotka is trying, oh the irony, to save the dockers’ union). In The Sopranos the economically competing deprived are hostile between each other as well, in the classic narcissism of small differences: when the Russian mistress calls Tony’s house and is answered by his Polish maid, they make sure to exchange a hateful little dialogue.

  The emigrant literature that we have is often treated as an opportunity to take out the regrets towards the native country rather than portraiture of the new conditions. In AM Bakalar’s novel Madame Mephisto, the female character relishes in doing everything possible against the social norms in her country: she’s single, she’s promiscuous, she doesn’t want to have children, she sleeps with men of different skin color, she has an abortion and she works as a drug dealer. On top of that, so as to seal her transgression, she sleeps with the husband of her beloved sister, who unlike her, is a perfect businesswoman, now consecrated as a Mother Poland with a young child. In Illegal Liaisons, Grażyna Plebanek focuses on the taboo of extramarital sex and gender roles. Her male character not only is supported by his better-off wife as a Euro-bureaucrat in Brussels, has a passionate, toxic affair (with unusually graphic details for a Polish novel) with a foreign woman, but also takes the weaker, “feminine” part in both relationships. Polish women find emigration liberatory, because the feminism that they don’t always admit to supporting is much more present in the social reality and the legislature of the countries they visit.

  This is what in the end makes migration in the times of post-Fordism and post-communism so hopeless and such a vicious circle-like experience: the exchange is unequal and set up from the very start. We go to the country which offers us a better paid job. ‘I will never come back to this country’ ensues, while the operation of outsourcing is going on. The ‘Don’t waste your time for Poland (or, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia)’, that people keep repeating is nothing else than a call to ‘Fuck up this country even more’. The neoliberal economy sets up the most socially and economically culturally draining situation possible, yet the response to that is – more neoliberalism. Capitalism doesn’t work? That means it’s not capitalist enough. This is the mantra repeated by our politicians, most infamously by Leszek Balcerowicz.

  Post-communist countries are sometimes aware of this and then ashamed. In a funny social media scrap, the president of Estonia Toomas Henrik Ilves started a rant on Twitter against Keynesian economist Paul Krugman, who had used his column in the New York Times to criticize the use of Estonia’s ‘recovery’ from a huge crash in 2009-10 as a model for the rest of Europe – as he pointed out, a slight upswing from a catastrophe hardly counted as spectacular success. To this the politician answered with the accusation of racism. “Yes, what do we know? We’re just wogs”, tweeted the Estonian president - “We’re just dumb & silly East Europeans. Unenlightened. Someday we too will understand. Nostra culpa. Let’s sh*t on East Europeans: their English is bad, won’t respond & actually do what they’ve agreed to & re-elect govts that are responsible.” He didn’t offer statistics in his defence, but asserted that Krugman’s critique bore traces of even if not directly racism, then of dismissal based on his Western privilege, moreover, about a country he apparently knew nothing about. But in fact, despite that, Estonia, just like any other Eastern European country newly in the EU, simply obeys the austerity decreed by Brussels. So in his rant the Estonian president not only played the ‘underdog’ card, but did it to avoid a real discussion on economics. Because perhaps we do feel that we gave away too much and are overly subdued to what the West wants, yet admitting it would be too much for us.

  In The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq, the main character, Daniel, observes the merciless conditions in which the post ’89 world has found itself, especially for the citizens of the previous so called ‘demo-peoples’. Nowhere else are people so merciless when fighting for their own interests than Eastern Europe, he claims. Even the villains of the Balzacian world were nicer than those thugs. ‘Let’s beware brotherhood’, the French writer concludes. Together with the end of the Curtain, new attitudes started emerging in those post-Soviet count
ries, that were relatively better off as a result of the capitalist transition, or indeed, got slightly less fucked up despite all the attempts to the contrary. Poland, due to its accession to the EU and the accompanying subsidies is, as we’ve seen, definitely perceived as one of the ‘leaders’ in the former East.

  But what kind of attitudes did Poles gain as a result of the restoration of property, together with the liquidation of communal flats and free healthcare for everyone? The best way to measure it is to examine the relations Poles have to those who are at the bottom of the social ladder. As the leader of the East, Poland started to be an obvious destination for migrants or refugees of the many post-Soviet countries that were less successful in the post-89 restoration. Here, an eternal rule of capitalism seems to be at work: exploiting anyone you can, who is more vulnerable than us at this precise moment. For now, Chechens, Ukrainians, Vietnamese, are those exploited and discriminated against in Poland. A recent rental survey has shown how Poles are hostile to rent a flat or give a job to any of the nationalities above, or to someone of color.

  As every neoliberal country, where ownership is the only model of living, we now have a dramatic problem with flats. Yet what happens is the city selling the debts of tenants to businessmen who then carry out brutal evictions. In Warsaw another problem is the sudden claims from all those who had or inherited properties which were there before the war and before PRL’s First Secretary Bolesław Bierut issued a decree in 1948 abolishing private ownership. It was perhaps the only way the destroyed Warsaw could’ve been rebuilt, but now, together with the Stalinist or simply socialist modernist architecture, it stands for the straw-men of all kinds that stop Warsaw from becoming a tacky ‘Eastern tiger’, like some Eastern European Shenzen, even if hopes for that are nonsense. The inheritors are blocking construction sites or evicting people, even institutions, like schools who were in the city center for decades. And when they strike back, organized crime is ready, as with the killing of one of the leaders of the Tenants Movement, Joanna Brzeska, whose body was found burnt in the forest near Warsaw and was only two years later recognized as murdered by the court. Everyone attached to the movement runs the risk of social repressions, even for a un-PC status on Facebook about the mayor of Warsaw, when someone joked about having a dream, in which the mayor was dead.