Currently, I’m in Poland and on Monday I visited Museum of Life in the Polish People’s Republic.
It’s a place presenting everyday life in Poland under the communist regime from 1945 to 1989. I remember some of the things from my childhood, other I learned from parents or at school. It was an interesting visit bringing back some memories.
Few words from the authors of the museum:1
“Like most people born in the mid-1980s, we know communism from the pages of history textbooks and television programs. However, to us, it was conversations with people who lived in socialist Poland, that awakened a genuine interest in what existence in that period looked like. We were fascinated by gripping true life stories of ordinary people, stories that were surprising and shocking.”
There are sections of the exhibition like the one about “the Party” – The Polish United Workers’ Party which ruled from 1948 to 1989. They controlled all spheres of social life and in a peak had over 3 million members. It wasn’t mandatory to be a member of the party but generally, only members could get a managerial position in the centralized economy.
In this section, you can find the 6-year plan of reconstruction of Warsaw which was ruined during the WW2 especially after the Warsaw Rising. Some of the experts were even considering moving the capital of Poland to another city. Yet, it was decided that Warsaw will be rebuilt with the Old Town in its historical shape. By the way, in 1980 Warsaw’s Old Town was placed on the Unesco’s World Heritage Sites list as “an outstanding example of a near-total reconstruction of a span o history covering the 13th to the 20th century”.2
I remember when we were traveling for holidays in our “Maluch” (small Fiat or small car) in the 80s, generally it could fit 4 people but sometimes we managed to get more people in. There wasn’t much room left inside the car so we had luggage on the roof racks. Fiat 126p was the most common car in the 80s.
The queues in front of the shops were a common view due to a shortage of products. Sometimes people were buying not what they wanted but what was left on the shelf. Then in the 80s the ration coupons were introduced to regulate the purchases.
Like in any other aspect of life in PRL there was a housing shortage as well. It was hard to get a flat for a regular citizen, some categories of citizens were privileged, also flats were allocated based on the amount of space for each inhabitant. Before I was born my parents got a flat for 4 people, but there was only 3 of them back then, so they got another person allocated to the flat to meet the quota.
The “Solidarity” wasn’t the first anti-communist movement, the opposition existed throughout the whole period of PRL and manifested in demonstrations, strikes and underground activities despite the brutal repressions. Finally, in 1989, the “Polish Round Table Talks” began between the authorities and the opposition. The first partly free elections happened on the 4th of June 1989 ending the People’s Republic of Poland.
