Some anons wanted to know how life looked in communism. Was planning to write a bit about it for a while anyway.
Ok, here it goes. I was born in 1977, in Łódź, Poland. Big, textile-industry city. When I became "aware" of what's around me, it was already in the mid 80's - a complete economical collapse of most communist countries.
Naturally, some communist countries had it better, some worse, the early 70's ware pretty decent in most, I think, but by the 80's, the economies of most soviet countries ware already in deep shit, with centrally-controlled economy system collapsing, industry insanely backwards, inefficient and pollutant, etc - I'm not gonna write about all that crap, you can find it elsewhere I'm sure. Instead, I'm gonna share with you some personal snippets, images from life… You will find a lot of those things ridiculous, but that's exactly how communism worked - with complete disregard for logic and open contempt for economy. You will probably think I make some of that shit up.
By that time, some western movies ware being shown on TV, a few people already had VHS recorders, VHS tapes ware being smuggled from the West, copied locally & sold on black market, also, some magazines etc. ware being smuggled too, so we had a good image of how life in the West looks, although, from today's perspective, it was extremely idealised. Everyone in the eastern bloc thought that everything in the West is better....
# Toilet paper. You must have heard that one. From time to time, toilet paper was so rare due to some shortages in the industry, people had to wipe their asses with paper. Occasionally, government would organise events where you would get a bunch of toilet paper rolls if you brought enough newspapers for recycling.
# Popcorn. Never ate it until communism fell, haven't seen anyone make or eat it either. Seen it in USA movies and wanted to taste it. When I grew up a little, I started visiting with parents those markets where farmers ware finally allowed to sell some of their stuff. After a while I found corn breed that would "blow" (most corn doesn't). I burned my first kettle, because I didn't know I was suppose to put oil in it first.
# Sweet-Sour food. I never imagined something like that can make sense - I thought, "Only candy, cookies, cakes & chocolate can be sweet, how can normal dinner food be sweet? It must be salty!" When borders opened and western-made goods flooded Poland (finishing off already crippled local economy), mum bought a can of Uncle Ben's sweet & sour sauce, we ate it with rice & chicken, and it tasted so weird, but surprisingly good.
# Pizza. We saw all those pizzas in the American movies, I wondered how it tastes. In my town, there was only one pizza place (800.000 people city!), called PAPA-LOLO, but it looked more like a cake, baked it in rectangle mold, thick cake, nothing like that in glorious 'murrika… It was until early 90's when first pizza places started to emerge, shit was cash!
Anthony Rivera
Why did they make people use regular paper for toilet paper? To keep those assholes red!
Asher Sanders
Stop spreading lies about socialism right now you fascist scum! REEEE
Julian Richardson
# "Chinese". I fucking love asian cuisine. I make good sushi, spring rolls, dim-sum, wonton, and other asian stuff. Maybe I'm compensating. Needles to say, I had no idea how that thing they eat from paper boxes in american movies until long after communism fell. None of those exotic food ingredients were imported.
# Everything was gray. Literally. All the walls, buildings and sidewalks ware grey from dirt, exhaust fumes etc. - there simply was no money for any renovation. To see a recently painted building was local news. The cloths were gray, because the fabrics didn't use quality dyes, plus people couldn't afford to buy new rags so often. Cars, too. Google it - you won't find a single eastern car that is clear blue, orange, yellow or green - all the colours ware twisted into grey, because paint like that was cheaper, maybe they even didn't know how to make bright-coloured car paint, I don't know. Same for insides of all buildings. All shades of shit-tone oil paint everywhere… or gray. Our mentality looked "gray" to the westerners too, we just didn't know it. Just like people living in Russia or Belarus look "gray" to us if we visit, we appear cheerful & open in comparison. Kinda like in that comic from wulffmorgenthaler "rainbow in Poland". :)
lol. Good one. :)
Jose Gray
# The "zaklep" (slap it?) game. Pretty fucked up when I think about it now. It was a popular game for us when I was a little kid. As I mentioned, people would sometimes bring magazines from the West. You know those thick mail-order catalogues from before the internet, the size of a phone book? Like ebay on paper? Ok, you don't know, but you can imagine. :) The game, that we played in kindergarten, elementary school or at home, looked like this: One kid would turn the page, and the rest (usually 2-3 or 4) would "slap" with their fingers the objects they want as fast as they can, whoever was first to touch the object in the catalog he liked, he would "have" it. It looks ridiculous now, maybe even horrid. But I remember having an old Matchbox catalogue of glued models that I praised highly, borrowed it to my friends numerous times, the pages barely held together from watching. Many years later I was finally able to buy my first Matchbox model on grey market, it was a Harrier.... LOL, I managed to find it, it was the one from 1984. matchboxkits.org/product_info.php?cPath=28&products_id=313 shieeet....
Jason Ward
goulash communism is best communism
Ayden Harris
I always found it interesting how rampant piracy and bootlegging was in post-communist states. The guys who started CD Projekt apparently had a hard time at first selling videogames in poland since there was no regular economy and everything was pirated. Was there any legit entertainment people actually spent money on in the 80/90's or was everyone just too poor to afford the real thing? Or was it that there wasn't anything legit to buy?
Hudson Torres
OP here. Ok that's enough key taping for now, I'll be back later if anyone wants more. Is Sup Forums a quick board, Im new to it? How fast are threads archived?
Xavier Sanchez
With all this food obsession are you a fatty now?
Aiden Foster
Too poor. Piracy ended when people could afford to buy games without having to spend 1/3 salary on one title. It's that simple. Piracy now is as low as in Western countries, because, even though we are still cheap niggers of Europe - we can simply afford games.
Tyler Hughes
>Piracy ended when people could afford to buy games That explains why piracy is still the norm in russia
Charles Garcia
If your diet would consist of mashed potatos, schabowy ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotlet_schabowy ) & cabbage salad for decades, you'd have food obsession too. :)
No, Im not fat. And I love to cook, I think I have it after my father. Made an awsome pizza yesterday! Ok I have to run guys, bbl.
Probably. When I was a kid and young all my games ware pirated.
Xavier Richardson
To put it in simple terms, legal retailers had no good shit, only pirates had it. Sometimes big soviet bloc labels would put out compilations of western artists, but I have no idea whether they paid any royalties for it (probably not). The rule of thumb was that if you want a western movie or a record you go to a pirate kiosk or market. This continued way into the 90s, when the real thing became available, but was too expensive for most people to afford.
Samuel Ross
never had toilet paper shortage ate popcorn some old lady was making and selling infront of the village cinema our cuisine doesnt have sweet sour stuff, so thats no communism related yea there were no pizza either it was indeed a symbol of western welfare nothing was grey, we had a bright red moskvic and a green lada my grandparents took me for holidays every year, every day during that i got a matchbox we played the slap game too
ppl were smuggling clothes from yugo and turkey eastern germany was a place to go for lego and other stuff
unironically leaders of the party were getting western cars
it was a surreal place compared to now but unless you were >nobility >kulak >ex fascist you were fine
Samuel Davis
It really is interesting how piracy and bootlegging seem to be more tied with supply and demand rather than how vigorously intellectual property rights are enforced.
Jason Fisher
I'm not OP and I'm a little younger, but I remember that there were some legal "shops" where you could copy new games (my first computer was Commodore 64 bought in the '80s). We didn't have any law banning pirated software up to 1994. Those "shops" had some kind of catalogue, all you had to do was chosing a game you want and it was copied for you.
I can confirm almost everything, the only point I remember in a different way was that supposedly poor quality of dyed clothes - I thing that OP confused "communist" clothes with cheap Chinese/Vietnamese products that were imported here after the fall of communism. But, of course, it's possible that our timelines crossed only recently.
Anyway, the worst theng, in my opinion, were queues. I spent a large part of my childhood standing with my mother in some queue. When we tried to buy some furniture for my room, we had to visit "our" queue reguralry for several months to tick our name off from some kind of "queue list" (if we didn't do it, we would lose our place in the queue).
Benjamin Cruz
>theng thing >reguralry regularly
Julian Harris
Poland in the '80s was much worse that Hungary, in 1980 we had that Solidarity movement (basically 1/4 of all Poles joined an anti-communist trade union) and it was crushed by gen. Jaruzelski's military junta (the martial law era, 1981-83) so then we were sanctioned by the USA. We had still members of opposition murdered by the commies in the '80s (the last one in 1989), etc. etc.
Andrew Ward
>(the last one in 1989), etc. etc. Nope, bro. They continued to murder people long after (ks. Zych, Falzmann etc.) , hell, we can speculate that they still did it until recently - the Serial Suicider :-)
William Garcia
>ks. Zych He was murdered exactly in 1989, several months after ks. Suchowolec. As for Falzmann I can agree, but this wasn't my point.
Andrew Scott
I'll give two stories from when I first arrived in Australia. My mother bought two items from the shopping centre that proved elusive.
The first a banana - I ate it with the skin on not realising that it had to be peeled.
The second my mum bought icecream and she hid it from me and my sister fearing we'd eat it all. She hid it in the pantry and it melted and leaked everywhere.
Fuck communism.
Christian Brown
I remember that once a year (usually before Christmas) all state media were full of news about incoming ships with Cuban fruit. It was like some kind of countdown - "ships from Cuba already left seaports"; "in one week bananas will arrive to Poland"; "just three days", kek.
Tyler Martin
Yea we only had oranges & bananas on X-mass. Costed an arm and a leg but grandmas would always buy some for us kids.
Dominic Sanchez
Zapraszam do zapoznania się z moimi wpisami na temat Japonii (blogspot): "Słońce Japonii jest czerwone". Pozdro z Dalekiego Wschody.
Jace Garcia
>lodz i heard this city is full of racist is it true?
Ian Reyes
What sane person needs toilet paper? Only obese americans with eternal hemorrhoids. When you have unlimited water, you can wash your ass with bidet hose or in shower. Stupid poland. This is why you cant into space.
Jace Mitchell
>bidet >in a soviet bathroom Also, >implying homo sovieticus showered more than once a week.
Isaac Wilson
insurgentdude?
Cooper Kelly
>Or was it that there wasn't anything legit to buy? That was indeed the case. The market was too small in the beginning to warrant an economic success for local distributors and foreign entities weren't interesed either. That's also why there were no regulations regarding piracy and public radio used to broadcast C64 and Atari software.
Christopher Davis
we didn't get this - thus my ignorance.
No sorry, I haven't posted here in 4 years until today.
Nolan Green
>quality thread on Sup Forums
Please keep going, this is interesting.
Sebastian Bailey
>he can't cut one meter of hose from his dacha garden and bring it home
Brayden Myers
>all these copyrightshills thinking that copy is piracy
Dylan Ramirez
What do you mean? Lodz is rather ugly (it's a post-industrial city), but being attacked in Poland is probably only a little more probable than in S. Korea: numbeo.com/crime/rankings_by_country.jsp
I've thought scale models and trains from GDR were a quite common a thing in socialist bloc countries. According to this guy from wealthy Poland, they were not :^(
Jackson Fisher
Your mother was quite stupid, huh? Ice cream was the most common dessert in socialist countries.
Logan Sullivan
He probably meant those little Matchbox models and stuff like that, not commie toys. You could buy Lego or Matchbox toys only in Pewex - special shops where you didn't pay using Polish zlotys, but US dollars or some special equvalent of US dollars distributed by the government: >Pewex (short for Przedsiębiorstwo Eksportu Wewnętrznego - Internal Export Company) was a chain of hard currency shops in the People's Republic of Poland. They sold otherwise unobtainable Western goods in exchange for Western currencies, most commonly the United States dollar or Pekao bank checks.
>During the 1980s' economic crisis, when the state-owned shops for ordinary people offered barely anything, the Pewex shops were sometimes the only places where one could buy basic foodstuffs and other basic articles like toilet paper. Finally, in the 1980s, Pewex shops became one of the very few places in Poland where cars and flats could be bought without having to wait for several years. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pewex
That's where my parents bought Lego for me.
Jacob Gonzalez
>stupid
I wouldn't go that far with it. She did what she could with what she was given and then decided to improve on that. So I have a great deal of respect for her regardless of whatever comment you want to employ.
> Ice cream was the most common dessert in socialist countries.
It wasn't common in 60s Bulgaria at all. Not every socialist country was Russia. You should know these things. Either way man - love your country.
Jordan Williams
Russia was the poorest tho.
Kevin Sanchez
This story about eating non peeled bananas and about ice-cream doesn't look probable, you could easily buy ice-cream, even during the '80s, but - of course - only several kinds, no fancy flavours or stuff like that.
I watched Polish people's enthusiasm on television when John Paul II returned to Poland in 1979.
Zachary Baker
Fuking kapitalistik pigs, I shall rape your children and eat you alive
Michael Johnson
Oh, sorry, if you mean the '60s then I agree, you explained my doubts from this post Anyway, in the '80s Bulgaria was the main holiday destination for all people who could afford this kind of trip. "Wczasy w Bułgarii" (vacation in Bulgaria) is still proverbial here. It means somethething one could only dream about during the communist era, now it's used as a joke.
Michael Russell
>and eat you alive Look, I know that meat in Russia costs 3 times as much as in Poland, while salaries are 4 times smaller, but come on! Eating humans is unhealthy.
Grayson Garcia
...
Brandon Mitchell
i remember how my teacher was telling us how geography worked during PRL
you would be asked specific questions like who is bigger exporter of coal (poland) and other stuff where we would lead, to make you think were some kind of superpower thanks to communism and soviet union
Connor Edwards
I was born in 1987 and I remember only commie cartoons. That nostalgia feel.
Leo Lopez
> The guys who started CD Projekt apparently had a hard time at first selling videogames in poland since there was no regular economy and everything was pirated. Yeah, considering how expensive the games they published were (the foreign ones)? You could've bought the same pirated game from Russians on the market for 1/10th of the price and on legit-looking (printed) CDs.
Can you (or any other anons ITT) reccomend any books about Communist Poland? I'm interested in both the big picture history of it and the daily life memoirs of people who lived there.
Joseph Gutierrez
it would be pretty damn dull to read stuff like that desu
Lincoln Hall
write more user. I would like to read more about these years
Jaxon Bell
bump
Robert Sanchez
It's more interesting that to try and compete with piracy they translated videogames like BG2 to polish and added something extra in the physical copies just like they do today. Good lessons to be learned.
Zachary Myers
...
Henry Thompson
There was a comic I read from a Polish woman who was 10 during the mid 80s. It's called Marzi, and I'd say it was a pretty interesting read. The part about Chernobyl was somewhat revealing.
>Don't inform people about the leak because everyone has to celebrate May Day
Josiah Brown
Why? It's totally foreign and interesting to me. (although I like to read those same types of books about my own state and region too)
OP is 20 years older than me and grew up in Communist Poland, I find his early life fascinating when comparing it to my own middle class upbringing in the suburban American South in the 90's/00's.
Robert Morgan
you will have more fun reading something like "god's playground" instead of shitty gommie times where you had to stand for few days in line to get some toilet paper or bread
Christopher Thomas
Thanks, I'll check it out.
I remember when I was about 10 I developed a fascination with Chernobyl for some reason, I checked out every book from the library about it and did online image searches for mutant children from there, I didn't realize at the time that 99% of the pictures were shooped lol. I think that I found the idea of mutated plants, animals, and people to be fascinating and creepy.
Josiah Moore
Thanks, that book looks good.
I mean, I don't know if you were old enough to expirience those times yourself and find descriptions of them to be boring and/or unpleasant to remember because that was your ordinary everyday life, but that's exactly what i want to read about since it's so alien to me. I want to read about the good and the bad about what it was like at that time and place.
Austin Bennett
Just watch "Alternatywy 4" It has all you need to know about commie poland.
Jaxson Thompson
I doubt that there's antyhing worthwile on the subject that was translated into English.
