Woe is me, an Eastern Bloc Girl
December 18th, 2022
In the past year or so, the Internet seems to have exploded with images and short form videos romanticizing the Eastern Bloc. And it leaves me conflicted.
Picture this: it is a gloomy afternoon. Fog has settled in, enveloping itself around your surroundings – the brutalist, socialist realist blocks of flats, grey and uninviting – just like that thick scarf you wrapped around your head, or maybe more like an ushanka in which your ears are tightly tucked. As you step, your hips move to the rhythm of the sound your boots make on the unevenly placed cobblestones. A single child is climbing a carpet beater frame in the periphery of your vision, with no one else around otherwise. Water droplets drip off of road signs, your breath is visible, and not just as a result of the lit Marlboro Red cigarette hanging out of your mouth. In your inner coat pocket weighs some existentialist novel. You pass a store and try to take a look inside but the yellow net curtains in the storefront are blocking your view (1). They signal to you that this shop is not for people like you, a mere commoner somewhere in Eastern Europe. For that is where you are, and as you close your eyes and listen closely, you can hear Molchat Doma playing from somewhere around the corner.
Or so you’d think, if what you know about the place comes exclusively from Pinterest boards or an explore page of your chosen social medium. Because in the past year or so, the Internet seems to have exploded with images and short form videos romanticizing the Eastern Bloc. And it leaves me conflicted.
The thing is, I’m from Poland. And coincidentally, as of late, the way my identity’s been constructed socially revolves purely around being a Polish girl (sometimes “the Polish girl”, but it’s rare since there are so many of us scattered around this city). Whether it’s about my name, a stereotype, someone pulling the thread in a public setting after asking about my background, someone else announcing they are also Polish (kind of) – almost every single social interaction I’ve had in the past week or so has boiled down to my nation state of origin. And for someone who likes to think of themself as a complex, multidimensional being (especially after years of hard work to internalize and really wrap my head around the fact that I am allowed to be more than just one thing, even more so as a woman, that I don’t have to hone in on one aspect of my personality and god forbid, that if somebody else expresses that same characteristic it does not mean I have to dig within myself for some other specific thing to protrude as the core of my being, the only thing other people see me as, the only thing I embody, and but for me, no one; but for me, nothing), it makes me feel a wee bit odd. For the longest time I would openly communicate that, when thinking of home, I don’t even identify with my country. I identify with my city, or the whole Tricity, or maybe the Pomeranian Voivodeship, or the coast – but that’s as far as I’d go.
And yet, when the topic of conversation shifts to my nationality, I allow its overtaking. I indulge in sneaking Polish phrases into my sentences, I’m sure my eyes light up with frustration when discussing national politics or when I try to explain that we don’t universally wheeze spewing hatred for all the minorities of the world (although it’s important to note that I also come from a position of privilege within the social strata – a middle class family, maybe even upper-middle in an isolated period of time, a good education, an access to culture and its works, basic needs met, caprices satisfied every now and then, we could go on. Point being, it’s a viewpoint more easily adopted with such background, but obviously it isn’t isolated within it).
Being an Eastern Bloc Girl is no longer woeful. It’s sexy.
You must be able to sense how glad I am when someone mentions having visited, and how disappointed I am after they say they were surprised that it looks like any other European country. How interesting, it’s almost as if time was passing, and the country was developing with it. Who could have thought?
I am fairly certain that this dichotomy of pride and shame, self-deprecation and defensiveness, being the underdog or scapegoat, but also a manifestation of resilience is familiar to anyone coming from the former Eastern Bloc. I can’t speak for all of them but from what I shared with you so far, I hope you get a glimpse into how conflicting the identity itself is. Enter the TikToks, the reels, and all this gets even more complicated.
On the one hand, it feels rewarding to have the aesthetics of where you come from recontextualized into something pleasing and desirable. For once, you are not gazed at with pity, but intrigue. What you’ve considered ugly, and poor, and a remnant of a sad past suddenly becomes nostalgic to you, and inaccessible to those outside of your experience, scratching that slightly elitist itch that was born out of insecurity. Because along with the images of architecture, design, the gloomy weather and depressive atmosphere, you see beautiful women. Dressed in faux furs, sometimes even real ones that were passed down by generations, and wearing ushankas on their pretty little heads. If summertime is portrayed, they don flowy dresses and have field flowers tucked into their hair, or maybe they have woven them into intricate flower crowns. Along with the seasons, they transform. From the mysterious, brooding intellectuals, intimidating and Dostoyevskyesque, or Kafkaesque, or almost as if written by von Sacher-Masoch (the furs). Into Slavic nymph-like beings, delicate and elusive, hiding in meadows and hanging around lakes, taken straight out of paintings by Alfons Mucha. Either way, being an Eastern Bloc Girl is no longer woeful. It’s sexy.
Of course, there is the other side of it. Yes, what you see in all the edits is technically true, yet it omits big parts of the picture. Mostly how those girls come from our time, and the environment shown is frozen in the years 1945-1990. Despite how stylized it may look to us now, life in a Soviet satellite state was not as pleasant as these images make it seem. For Poland it was a time of ambiguity, confusion, and the absurd. Access to universal health care and free education was established, rapid industrialization and urbanization came about, homelessness was almost eradicated and a job guarantee was put in place.
When people from outside the former Eastern Bloc, and specifically what we consider the West or even worse – Americans – watch those videos, look at the pictures of girls, and express how they wish to have lived in the Eastern Bloc when it was still a thing, I cannot help but furrow my brow
At that time, Poland had also one of the lowest crime rates in the world. All those achievements did not come without a price. Economic hardships and social unrest were common throughout the years, all up until 1989. The free education provided was controlled by the government, subjects that could question socialist ideology were supervised or adjusted, and full secularization took place, removing religious studies from the curriculum altogether and deeming philosophy superfluous. As a result of economic planning, the country faced an economic collapse in the year 1975 and quickly became indebted to foreign nations. This led to an extreme increase in food prices, with some basic goods becoming scarce or fully unavailable. Queues became one of the most common social settings, whether it was in ordinary convenience stores or administrative institutions, which led to some positive social interactions but also immense amounts of frustration (the phrase “You, sir, were not standing here” has now become a common reference which you can get on shirts, or even play a board game by that name, which simulates the shopping experience in Soviet-occupied Poland). Institutional officials were known to be fussy and dismissive, usually leaving the people having to resort to bribing (often with food items of high value and quality) in order to be served or their business to be taken care of. This included municipalities, post offices, or even airports. Polish citizens could not escape government surveillance, whether by the physical presence of Soviet troops, the Ministry of Public Security that acted as secret police forces, or the official police organization called Citizen’s Militia, which was also responsible for peacekeeping and protest suppression. The government’s surveillance practices also encouraged civilians to survey their neighbours and welcomed denunciation, now making it a recognized form of literary genre that you learn to write in school (or at least you did in my day). Surveillance also led to common censorship within the arts, making many creators use satire to smuggle critical messaging in their works under the keen eyes of the government.
So, when people from outside the former Eastern Bloc, and specifically what we consider the West or even worse – Americans (2) – watch those videos, look at the pictures of girls, and express how they wish to have lived in the Eastern Bloc when it was still a thing, I cannot help but furrow my brow. Who is holding the power? Is it me, the Polish girl who might not feel less-than any longer, who gets a chance to connect with other Eastern Bloc Girls over the same conflicting feelings, who is now allowed to make something pleasant of the past and stories told by elders? Or is it the Other, who first poked fun at the very essence of what they now romanticize, or even sexualize?
I don’t have the answers to those questions. All I can tell you is, it is fun for me to follow the accounts, and it does feel weird to see other people be so responsive to the content. And no, we do not live in Silent Hill, as much as the surrounding’s reminiscent of it.
I would like to leave you with my top 3 Polish films that through satire and auto-ironic humour show all the intricacies of living in a Soviet satellite state. These are gems, hope you enjoy.
1. Teddy bear (Stanisław Bareja, 1981)
Cult classic. Most recognizable “self-mocking” comedy of the PRL era, source of famous zingers like "film is the most important of the arts", "this is a teddy bear on the scale of our abilities" or "right is the direction of our authorities”.
2. The Cruise (Marek Piwowski, 1970)
A ground-breaking comedy that was one of the first Polish feature-films produced improvised. Makes fun of the anti-intelligentsia course of the communist regime, just take a look at the famous scene of the “man-about-town” game (player guesses which of the other players is the author of an anonymous smack on the buttock), in which a philosopher’s argument gets interrupted by a butt smack on the part of a representative of power structures put in place.
I long for the day my friends agree to play this game at parties. Smack away.
3. Man – Woman Wanted (Stanisław Bareja, 1973)
Yes, technically the butt of the joke is a guy dressed as a woman. Listen, I know how it looks, especially with how Poland is notorious for denying the rights of the LGBT+ community.
But I promise you, the whole point is that no one realizes he’s a man, no one pokes fun at him because of it, his wife is encouraging of it, and he gets to infiltrate a totally different social group and makes the best out of the reality in which a housekeeper earns much more than a highly-educated art historian.
And with the way it ends, one could argue that the way cross-dressing is handled is quite progressive! Actually, someone should write something about how gender relations are portrayed in this film. Let me look that up.
Footnotes
(1) In Poland, people like higher-rank military officers or members of the Ministry of Public Security (aka the secret police), had their own supply channels since the end of WWII. This included shops from behind “the yellow curtains”, which shielded the view from passers-by. The goods were of better quality, higher quantity, and much lower price than in the shops open to common people. Also, they were available in the first place, which was not a guarantee on the “free market”.
(2) Nothing against Americans (ok, some things against Americans, but you get what I mean), I just find it funny how they seem to be super into this whole thing, but maybe it’s just that they’re so sick of the capitalist nightmare they created that they can no longer help themselves?
