Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West Page 7
Moreover, the aggressive racist attacks, anti-Roma and in general anti-Eastern refugees become more and more the everyday reality, especially as the far right groups spread across the former East unharassed by the police. Only in the last few months, have the repeated arsons and attacks at the communities received much publicity. It’s interesting that the eastern refugees stick mostly to the eastern Poland, so called Borderlands, always historically multicultural, but not now.
The problem with racism doesn’t only concern Poland among the countries of the former East. Racist attitudes, especially towards Roma, are visible in Slovakia, or Baltic States, where the Latvian and Estonian speaking majority is hostile towards a very large Russian-speaking minority. But in Poland, the ubiquitous racism is even more shocking, given that currently over 2 million Poles are on an economically induced emigration in Western Europe. There are recurring opinions that Poles are merely reproducing towards the refugees what was already happening to them in the West. This is false in several ways: Poles are not political refugees, unlike the Chechens who come from a war-torn country - and their country isn’t as poverty-stricken as Ukraine, let alone Vietnam. This outright racism is often justified by the ethnic cleansing that Poland, like many Soviet-occupied countries, endured after 1945. The Yalta conference and Stalin’s idea of ‘national’ socialism led to the expulsion of Germans, Ukrainians and Belarussians from the territory of the new post-war Poland; and Poles were expelled en masse from Soviet Belarus and Ukraine. This, combined with the Nazis’ extermination of Polish and Soviet Jews, left ethnic homogeneity and an ethical abyss. This way from what was historically a multi-ethnic territory, Eastern Europe has become divided into several strange, homogenized wholes. This argument often serves another opinion, that as artificial national constructions, cobbled together by Stalin, the socialist experiment in Eastern Europe couldn’t succeed.
1.7 Friendship as an alternative to the state, a temporary drug Nirvana
Feelings of superiority, racism and xenophobia are gradual. There’s always someone less well off than us – so while a Pole can suffer hostility in the richer Western countries, for himself poorer and more geographically Eastern countries may start playing the same role – we’ve seen a sophisticated version of this in Kaliningrad. As Poland, since the Holocaust and Soviet homogenization, is 99% Polish, its attitudes can be extremely racist. It is often too hastily and too easily justified by the economic issues, yet it doesn’t seem enough of an explanation for the enduring hostility Poles have towards Roma, Vietnamese, Belarussians, Chechens or Ukrainians. Expressing racism is nothing to be worried about, as there are no organs which would take care of hate speech. When a Warsaw policeman shot an illegal trader from Nigeria, he wasn’t even charged. They cultivate feelings of hatred and irresponsibility, out of twisted revenge on ‘komuna’.
But are Poles or other Eastern Europeans, who do suffer racist attacks in the UK, actually so ready to fight back? It transpires that Eastern migrants in the UK hardly ever claim benefits and rarely organize or unionize against the exploitative conditions of their work. They seem silenced in the West, where they could have stood up against actual mistreatment. Why does it happen? Is this traumatized subjectivity, or maybe, as they usually come from countries where a welfare state is not obvious anymore, they don’t even know they have a right to it? This doesn’t stop articles on cunning Eastern European benefit scroungers appearing often both in the UK gutter press and in the more classy press in Poland.
A depopulated main street in the former cotton-manufacturing city of Łódź appeared recently in The Sun, titled as ‘the Polish city that moved to Britain’ as an effect of migration. Yet, the paper’s photographer had to try really hard and photograph it at around 7 in the morning, because usually Piotrkowska Street is one of the liveliest streets in the country, full of original cafés, clubs, restaurants and singular shops. But if the Sun went to any similar mid-sized British city, there it would discover the real misery, depopulated streets, ugly retail shops and Bargain Booze. In terms of devastated cities, the UK has a visible primacy.
Post-transitional cruelty
One of the topics that keeps coming back recently in the Polish press is the problem of the mutual cruelty between Poles. From boorishness in everyday contact on the street, pushing each other, quickness to aggressive exchanges of words, to tolerating the suffering of others; accidental police and law enforcement victims, eviction victims, women who didn’t get medical help if that ‘threatened the foetus’ and died as a result, tolerating domestic violence and sexism, not tempering racism. All this in a country declaring itself 90% Catholic, which has apparently never heard of Christian charity.
Various explanations are given. Poles got savage because of communism, say some, it’s obvious, that this state where education was insufficient, conditions and hypocrisy brutal, must have led to the brutalization of society in the process. It’s a ‘peasant mentality’, say others. Poland had centuries of peasant serfdom, who had to give all their work to the master. At the other end, since the era of ‘noblemen’s democracy’ (in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries a single nobleman could stop the whole national assembly with his veto) and then the 123 years of partition and occupation that followed, we have a complex where under the clothes of many an average Pole there’s a impoverished nobleman, resentful of his fate.
The third and most likely answer is different, and possibly contains the other two. It is the brutal capitalist transition, the sudden loss of jobs and security by people who were never before endangered by unemployment, the collapse of the economy, inflation and loss of security that made people unforgiving, hateful and vulnerable. Despite this, Poland is visibly a richer country than many in the former Bloc – it is the only major European country to have avoided a recession, thus far. Yet the growth figures hardly manifest themselves on the faces on the street. Life is a daily struggle: to buy for less, to get before someone in the queue, to gain something, anything, even if it’ll be just brusqueness towards the neighbor or getting a better deal than him.
‘No big deal’ is the popular saying in Poland: no big deal someone has died in a custody; no big deal someone has died in a hospital; no big deal someone was evicted out of the flat for being late with the rent, or died before they got proper health care. What matters is that I am ok, or at least better than this unfortunate.
Life is a struggle for most Poles, who earn much below the European standards, while working longer hours. In a country, that prefers to ‘liberalize’ the employment laws, so that they could employ people on even worse conditions, on worse contracts, with little or no social security or stability of employment. But when Solidarity union recently put out a program of action against ‘junk contracts’ and poor working conditions, with a general strike of miners, metalworkers and transport workers in the industrial belt of Silesia, employers claimed that it was they who were doing the workers a favor, not the other way round – the employers who work hard and are being exploited. It’s unfair that the poor ‘entrepreneur’ has to pay health insurance for the worker, because clearly, it’s him who studied harder and in general invested more into the greatness of the new Poland. These faithful students of Balcerowicz walk around as the Polish elite now, part of the establishment, intent on shutting down those last few remnants of the old system: schools, cheap milk bars and social clubs. They advocate demolishing Poland’s post-war modern architecture, but the future in Poland clearly belongs to them. Represented by the ruling party Civic Platform, they declare and believe themselves to be ‘modern’, which in their language means: privatize, be entrepreneurial, work only for yourself.
So it may just be precisely otherwise: the brutishness and cruelty Poles share to each other is due their lack of security, the poor housing, the instability of employment. I feel that every time I travel on Wizzair or Ryanair back home, which each time is a painful disappointment. People push and never help each other. Mothers never comfort their crying childre
n. The mistreatment by the airlines results in a mistreatment of each other. It’s all in all a very depressive image. Cheap airlines and their opening simultaneously with the New Europe, and the extension of the EU around 2000s was decisive in making this whole human experiment possible. Before people were, of course, coming to Western Europe and trying to work illegally, spending days on buses, or even clutching the underneath of a truck, as depicted in the famous Polish film from 1988, called aptly 300 miles to Heaven, where two boys, facing the hopelessness of the grim late 80s Poland, decide to escape their parents and hold onto the bottom of a truck, illegally getting to Sweden. Watching this film as a young girl, just like the boys, I believed this temporary suffering may be worthwhile if it serves the future.
1.8 The derelict House of the Sovets in Kaliningrad
Poles hating on each other on a Ryanair flight is the Polish class system in a nutshell. Despite the everyday declarations of politicians about growth, Poles still prefer to leave than sit jobless. And ‘Western’ has always meant ‘better’, so even a job much below your qualifications, but for higher wages, is a success. This is a vivid illustration of the continuing ‘Eastern syndrome’. Class differentiation is the most visible element in post-transitional societies, where the visible impoverishment of the communal spaces of neighbors, the overexpenditure or the tacky luxurious office blocks housing the chosen, those who were better off through the transition, especially those who successfully turned into real Europeans and work as creatives, they look sceptically at the working class majority, that doesn’t look good as a neighborhood and spoils the Polish success story as a positive narrative. On the other hand, the Polish press is full of two kinds of emigrant stories. One has a dark, tragic tone and worries about the effect on Poland, the other are stories of the cunning, ‘smart’ Poles as welfare kings and queens, normally spread by tabloids like the Sun. In Poland they are written by the intelligentsia daily Wyborcza.
Dark art for dark times
Of course, the way people reacted to the capitalist changes differed with respect to the nature of communism in their country. In Poland people tend to react with greater sense of blessed dignity, given that one of the reasons Poland so enthusiastically reacted to the capitalist 90s was the catastrophe following the ‘Martial law’ of the early 80s and its aftermath, where Solidarity was banned and repressed. Poland paid for it with isolation. Martial law, with all its grimness, greyness, lack of goods, and a nightmarish national debt that resulted in dramatic shortages of food and all possible goods. The rationing of food meant that a typical phenomenon of the 80s were the ‘packages’ from the West, mostly America.
With my family for the first eight years of my life I lived in the gigantic Warsaw estate which is world famous for standing as the epitome of 80s depression and anomie, in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog. Shot in 1988, Kieślowski’s vision was highly influenced by the recent Martial Law, which left a stigma on Polish society, the last humiliation, which tainted our way of leaving communism. Ten episodes take place in one and the same grim huge block estate. Its inhabitants are subjected to various moral dilemmas, all tracing around the modern meaning of the ten commandments. What shocked me watching it recently for the first time since the 90s was the difference in my reaction. I remembered Dekalog as only bleak, tragic, with some cheap metaphysics and touchy-feely moralism inserted in between. What I saw now was a masterly, extremely intimate and emotionally truthful portrait of Polish society, in which communism isn’t even what matters. Kieslowski seems to say that our moral integrity is often a question of coincidence, an accident. Someone officially respected can turn out unreliable; someone untrustworthy can be a saving grace. Nobody in this cycle seems to blame their misfortunes on Komuna, although it exists in the very essence of this film, its visual sensitivity and bleak style. It depicts a society on the brink of collapse, with all the social bonds seriously damaged. Yet what Kieślowski is interested in is the assessment of social bonds, social trust and inter-human relations. Interpreters usually focused on how hopeless the time of the late communism was, but what appealed to me was rather a basic belief in human decency. Politics is of course present there, but it wasn’t meant to be a typical chernukha or ‘black film’ project. We had chernukha in Russia, the Black Wave in Yugoslavia, Black Documentary School and Cinema of Moral Concern in Poland. All were, with different moral premises, concentrated on depiction of the darkest, bleakest aspects of human existence. ‘Chernukha’, a strictly Soviet aesthetical complex, is about making the bleakness a style. It was partly based on the brutality of Soviet and post-Soviet life and came into use as word during Perestroika (though the sentiment itself can be dated back to the brutality of Tsarist times no doubt).
Kieślowski was a very prominent European filmmaker, to the extent that this cycle was shown in its entirety on UK TV. But much more present was actually his post-communist cycle, 1990s Three Colours, foreign co-productions partly made in France. In fact, they watched exactly the way I imagined Dekalog. They depicted Europe post-catastrophe in a much less realistic, less socially engaged, gritty or specific way and in a more metaphorical and in the end, sentimental manner, in the name of the three slogans of the French Revolution. It was a clear sign that in the new postcommunist Europe we can focus on different problems. In Blue we even have a composer, who creates a ‘Symphony for Europe’, in practice the cruelly kitschy music of Kieślowski’s court composer Zbigniew Preisner.
Yet the Black Cinema made its return when the post-89 economic crisis took its effect. Today, its role is taken by the Romanian New Wave and a new generation of Russian directors. Chernukha lives and lives well in the contemporary Russia as crime stories, TV serials and novels. It must be said that on surface they strongly confirm the status Russia has abroad: as the country of mafia, crime, cruelty, violence, the abuse of women. But on the other hand, they’re often a social critique of the post-Soviet interregnum and dehumanisation, with in the end a strange relishing of it. From the Bandit Petersburg crime stories by Alexandra Marinina, to the political, postmodern SF by Vladimir Sorokin and Viktor Pelevin, and films like the two parts of Brother, the comedy-horror Night Watch (Nocnyi Dozor) and Day Watch (Dnevnyi Dozor), to the Sorokin-scripted 4, by Ilya Khrzanovsky, where Russia is shown as an endlessly dark, dystopian, Stalker-esque post-industrial zone, a society where pigs and young women are cloned for consumption and shady political goals, evoking lost urban myths, especially Lysenkoism and the USSR’s ‘war on nature’. Stalker itself, not ‘officially’ set in Russia, is a kind of chernukha which disavows it. It managed to create a wholly original phenomenon taking only from the Russian traditions, yet remaining extremely attractive to the (also Western) viewer, partly because it indulges our stereotypical view of Russia.
In the film Nirvana (2008), a retro-futurist tale of two heroin-addict girls from Petersburg, the new Russia is a hallucinatory, deadly, tough country easily claiming lives. Shot in the flamboyant aesthetic of the 80s New Wave revival, it is in keeping with the ethos of the ‘Piter’ punk scene, recalling the times of the USSR, where the youth subcultures were a shield against the system. In the new Russia, pervaded by crime and death, what matters is a shot of the drug, a short but certain euphoria, and friendship evolving between those abandoned by the state. 4 goes further – it’s a fantasy about biological mutation, a fantasy of both Soviet closed ‘science towns’, where experiments are carried out, and the new anxieties of the free market, where a human becomes just a pack of meat.
Chernukha dominated Polish cinema throughout the 80s and 90s, but it was hard to say whether the brutalization, visible poverty, corruption and violence presented on the screen were a result of a conscious artistic concept, or simply a document of the country’s cinematography falling apart. The 1980s especially were full of malfunctioning youth institutions: families, schools, borstals. We had drug films in the type of Christiane F., on young people taking specially contaminated heroin, so called ‘kompot’. Sinister, dejected dramas
about youth drug addiction, prostitution, derailment, lack of scruples, violence and the general feeling of the world falling down, a dramatic poverty combined with the black market, gave the grim effect that “everything can be purchased for a penny”. The youth fall down most dramatically, as the young generation is usually the one that is experimenting the most with their lives.
It was the time of biggest social zombiefication. In Cargo 200, telling a story from the 80s, a brutal political satire and horror movie at the same time, women are raped and beaten to death, while human remains coming en masse from Afghanistan in coffins, help smuggle drugs. The gathering horror in the movie was a conscious act against a growing nostalgia of the USSR, but it was hard to say, if it wasn’t also the accusation against the current system. Cargo 200 started a discussion in Russia about the interpretation of the 80s. If we recall films of this era anywhere, it was sinister also on the other side: proleification of cinema, rise to prominence of directors like Mike Leigh, and not far away the grim trip-hop and new kind of cheap drugs, especially the ‘brown sugar’ kind of heroin. To this Polish hip-hop also responded, especially Kaliber 44 and Paktofonika, two short-lived acts who lived in the proletarian suburbs of the Silesian city Katowice, whose leader killed himself at 22. Today their legend has come back as a story of Polish social transformation in a grim social biopic You Are God (2012), also shown in the UK.