TVP WEEKLY: Tuesday 19 July marks the 50th anniversary of the start of Coca-Cola production at the Warsaw Brewery, under American licence. How was this possible when, amongst the countries of the eastern bloc, the drink was considered a symbol of “rotten capitalism”? I guess one can say that it was an irony of fate...

JERZY EISLER: Indeed, Coca-Cola was a symbol of “American imperialism”. Perhaps even bigger than General Electric or Ford. I remember that as a 14-year-old boy, returning with my father from Western Europe, I bought a bottle of coke in Vienna. I wanted to treat my mother and loved ones to this almost sacred drink. Today I can laugh about it, but at the time everyone wanted to try it. Although it was difficult to form an opinion about its taste after drinking the contents of a small jar or even a vodka glass...

A vodka glass?

I had one bottle of Coca-Cola, and I wanted to lavish it on at least a few people. So they got the drink not in proper glassware, but in whatever we had.

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This was before production started in Poland.

Yes, in the West, too, Coca-Cola was extremely popular. In France, for example, where it appeared just after the Second World War, it was so successful that wine producers in the Bordeaux region began to fear that the French would abandon their famous, very good wines in favour of coke.

Why did the communist authorities decide in the 1970s to launch production of a drink that was a symbol of “American imperialism”?

One of the ideas of Edward Gierek and his advisors was the “westernisation” of Poland (the People’s Republic of Poland, PRL) i.e. copying certain elements of life from Western societies of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Buying licences from Coca-Cola, and soon from PepsiCo, was part of this concept. Although these licences were not bought for the whole of Poland. There was Coca-Cola in some provinces and Pepsi-Cola in others. These were symbols of the American way of life.

However, whether one likes it or not, this “westernisation” was already initiated by Władysław Gomułka, who is not associated with either modernisation or progress. Meanwhile, it was during his reign that the Fiat 125p licence was purchased and mass production of this model was launched at Żerań. For the Marcin Kasprzak Radio Factory (ZRK) in Warsaw, a licence was bought from the German company Grundig, which produced reel-to-reel tape recorders. Adapters under Telefunken licence were also assembled in Poland.

Edward Gierek popularised that idea, taking advantage of the circumstances on the international arena – the policy of détente, the easing of tension between Washington and Moscow.

Products common in the West were imported into Poland here and there. For example, Dutch Van Houten chocolate or Marlboro cigarettes, which were luxury goods. Admittedly, Marlboro cigarettes produced in Poland were relatively cheap compared to other western cigarettes – available in the “Pewex” shops (a chain of hard-currency shops founded in the communist Poland) – were relatively cheap, but they were still more expensive (by perhaps 5-6 zlotys per pack) than the most expensive Polish Carmen cigarettes.

The licence for the production of the “little Fiat”, the Fiat 126p, was also bought. I remember how, in 1972, the French car magazine Auto Journal put the first picture of the prototype of this model on its cover, signed simply as “Fiat”. It was then that I learned that manufacturers were playing tricks, namely covering the prototype with strips, patches – in such a way that, before the car was officially launched for sale, the competition wouldn’t know its true shape, the various details, and thus wouldn’t be able to copy anything.

In Poland, it was accepted to call the Fiat 126p “a car for an average Kowalski”, but in reality this was not the case. When in the mid-1970s a “Kowalski” was earning 4-5 thousand zlotys a month, a “The Little One” cost 69 thousand zlotys, and that was when it was bought with a voucher. At the car market, a brand-new Fiat 126p in the mid-1970s cost 120-130 thousand zlotys, i.e. the equivalent of two years’ earnings.

In the 1970s, the focus was on automotive development in general. 1 August also marked the 50th anniversary of the purchase of the French licence for the production of Berliet buses. “A bus in a completely new style” – it was said on communist television.

It was the most famous investment next to the production of Coca-Cola and “The Little One”. It was supposed to be a bus for Polish cities. But I knew that the Berliet did not travel around Paris as a city bus. I had only seen it at the Paris airport, where it took people from the passenger terminal to the planes. This is a completely different kind of service. The Berliet was too fragile for a city bus in Polish conditions. In France, it carried an average of 20-30 passengers. In Poland, so many people rode the night line that at peak times the buses were stuffed to the brim, accommodating 100-120 people. No wonder the Berliet was breaking down. It was a misguided investment.

In communist Poland no one thought about this before buying a licence?

Rumour has it that a political factor played a huge role in the purchase of this licence. A large shareholding in Berliet was held by the French Communist Party. The company was doing badly and Edward Gierek and his advisors decided to support it.

However, there was a condition imposed on the French. Well, since the 1960s, excellent diesel engines have been produced in Mielec under licence from the British company Leyland. So the idea was to buy a licence for the production of buses into which Leyland engines would be fitted. Talks were held with Mercedes, who did not agree to this. The Berliet concern agreed. It is possible that with the engines from Mielec, the Polish Berliet was better than the French one. But it was still too fragile for our conditions.

Often, the purchase of Western licences turned out to be a bad investment. Of course, there were also successful investments, such as the trucks of the Austrian Steyr brand and the aforementioned French Berliet – used on construction sites – but there was no mass production. Gradually, production increased for the Fiat 126p. In the second half of the 1970s, the Bielsko-Biała and Tychy plants were already producing tens of thousands of “little Fiats” a year.

You could say that by betting on consumption, Edward Gierek had a good sense of the public mood?

By “westernising” everyday life, he wanted to convey to Poles: “Be polite, work more, more efficiently. Then you will get sweets.” He could not correct the narrative concerning the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, the Comecon, subordination and Polish history – these were either taboo or mendacious subjects. That’s why he decided to give the public something like the Olympics, namely, Western products.

I remember seeing Heineken beer in a can in a neighbourhood grocery shop before Christmas in communist Poland. I thought surely it was some kind of quasi advertising. But I asked around and it turned out that the beer was available to buy. At the time, a can of Heineken cost about 12-14 zlotys. Meanwhile, a bottle of Polish beer (there were no Polish beers in cans yet): 2-3 zlotys. I don’t know how Heineken was found in an ordinary local shop. In any case, my mother and I bought two cans to try this beer.

At the time, it seemed that Gierek understood the ambitions and expectations of the Polish people. Today, however, we know that he was not entirely accurate in reading the public mood. Because once you gave people “sweets”, you had to have enough of them to treat everyone – and not just one candy, but many. And that was unrealistic in those conditions. I have a saying that I often repeat: “You had to change the political system in Poland to solve the problem of buying up bottles and toilet paper”.

Did opening up to the West mean that in the Gierek era communist ideology no longer had much relevance?

I am not an enthusiast of Edward Gierek, just the opposite, but he had a lot of common sense. He was not steeped in ideology, although he was obstinate, hard…

One need only recall his speech of 14 March 1968. Gierek, then provincial secretary, at a rally of many thousands in Katowice, uttered the famous words about “Silesian water that will rattle the bones” – he was directing this at “the heathens of the old system, revisionists, Zionists, minions of imperialism”.

It was a terrible speech. He could speak in a terrible way. Nevertheless, he preferred to dress himself in the robes of a man of dialogue, of compromise. In May 1980, six months after the start of Soviet aggression against Afghanistan, there was a meeting in Warsaw between Leonid Brezhnev and French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Edward Gierek felt wonderfully at home as host. He called the two leaders friends. This was picked up by the French press, which wrote that after the recent death of the Yugoslav president, Marshal Josip Broz Tito, it was possible that it would be Gierek who would act as an intermediary between East and West. Only that four months later he lost power.

Was his policy of opening up to the West influenced by the fact that he lived in France and Belgium in the inter-war period and during the Second World War?

Certainly. It influenced the way politics was conducted; also the thinking in terms of the “sweets” to be given to the people. He did not come from the KPP school (Communist Party of Poland). He was a West European-style communist. That is, there were no major differences between communists, whereas those who lived in the West, whether they wanted to or not, nevertheless had to conform to certain democratic rules. Under real socialism, nothing of the sort took place. That is why Gierek, it seems, was more willing to compromise than other Polish communists.

In his memoirs, published after the regime change, he wrote that when he became First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) he promised himself that as long as he held this position there would be no shooting on the streets of Polish cities. And this is true. People were not shot on the streets during his term of office, which cannot be said of Bierut, Ochab, Gomułka, and Jaruzelski.

Nevertheless, the repression apparatus was also active in the 1970s, as the workers of Radom and Ursus, beaten and arrested in June 1976, for example, discovered. Speaking of Edward Gierek’s years spent in the West – shouldn’t this fact burden him in the eyes of PZPR members?

There is a clue, which I will tell you about very cautiously, as it has yet to be researched. Well, Gierek lived in Belgium until 1948. At that time it was one of the four countries in the West – along with France, Italy and Austria – where the Communists had a very strong influence. In Moscow it was hoped that they would succeed in gaining power there. Emissaries from the USSR were therefore sent to these four countries to observe the situation on the ground. It is said that the young Edward Gierek, a miner and communist activist, caught their eye, and it was the “Soviet comrades” who, in 1948, caused him to be brought to Poland as a matter of urgency.

Just a few months after his arrival, Gierek became a delegate at the unification congress of the PPR and PPS, that is, the de facto first congress of the PZPR. Thus it was an instant career. You cannot make an outsider of the system out of him. To say that he was only handing out “sweets” and so on. There is no doubt that he had his issues. To discover more, post-Soviet material will be needed. Although a colleague told me that even in the files of the Belgian police one can read something about it...

Let us return to “westernisation”. To what extent were Western supplies available in the 1970s? For example, were they available in the provinces?

No, because there were always not enough of them. For example, the Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola that we started the conversation with were mainly available in mid- to high-end hotel restaurants (today we would say – in at least three-star restaurants). Western products were therefore not for everyone. Besides, there was not enough of everything, including the aforementioned toilet paper.

Under Gierek, internal exports were popularised.

The “Pewex” Internal Export Company was created, where it was possible to buy Western goods for foreign currency: dollars and, above all, PeKaO goods vouchers, which had no value once they crossed the Polish border.

And how did the “westernisation” of communist Poland manifest itself on television or in the cinema?

In October 1976, the band ABBA, who were at the height of their popularity at the time, were invited to the Polish Television studio in Warsaw. As part of the promotion of their next album, the band performed premiere songs in the Studio2 programme. This must have cost a lot, but it also had its resonance. In addition, in the 1970s you could see more western films, especially American ones.

However, the opening to the West ended in an economic crisis. It will be recalled that the funds for the Western licences came from loans (a total of around $20 billion was borrowed). The authorities were guided by the so-called concept of self-paying loans, which can be summarised as follows: “With the money from the loans we will buy Western production licences and build factories using cheap labour. We will also sell the manufactured goods in the West, which will allow us to repay the loans.” So what went wrong?

As always in this type of planning – underestimation, and unwavering optimism, which I consider to be one of our greatest national flaws. And this is true regardless of the regime. We often have this nightmarish philosophy: “The most important thing is to get started, and then we’ll get there.” If I want to build something that costs 100 zloty, I should have 200 zloty, not 20 zloty and say “the important thing is to start and then it will run by itself.” Nothing will run by itself.

So the funds were wasted?

Yes, and then there were the costs of debt servicing, interest... Often the way in which loan money was spent was an example of stupidity. In the mid-1970s, the authorities had so fiddled to develop trade with the West that they ordered the import of... wooden lollipop sticks from Austria. Simply a disaster. Another example: the authorities were happy to buy the licence for the production of Massey Ferguson agricultural tractors quite cheaply. Only that it was based not on the Metric system, but on the Imperial system, for which we were not technically prepared. We did not have the right tools to produce these tractors. There were many such examples.

Edward Gierek explained years later that the increase in debt was linked, among other things, to changes in the exchange rate. He also put the responsibility on his successors.

When he came to power, credit was cheap and easy to obtain on international markets. But at the end of 1973, with the Yom Kippur War, the great oil crisis began. Arab states blocked the sale of oil to countries that supported Israel. They also significantly reduced its production. This took its toll on credit. Edward Gierek often made this argument in his books. He was right about that. However, there were also many reprehensible mistakes by Gierek himself and his colleagues. “The more power, the more responsibility” – this sentence should be printed on Polish banknotes.

It is often relativised in accounts of that time that Gierek was basically a good communist, because he opened up the People’s Republic to the West and generally wanted to do well, but it simply did not work out for him. Do we not succumb to a certain illusion today and look at Gierek’s rule through rose-coloured glasses?

His assessment depends on the comparative scale. If we compare Gierek with Bierut, Gomułka, Kania or Jaruzelski, he does not look too bad against this background. He was a good speaker, he was presentable, during farm visits he was able to establish contact with so-called simple people, he kissed ladies’ hands, and so on. All this was different from what we had observed under Gomułka. Anyway, Gierek had the bar set very low. His predecessor was a negative example of a politician’s media-savviness, with speeches read off the page for hours on end, full of names, numbers and details that are impossible to remember.

A few years ago, however, in a conversation with Prof. Antoni Dudek – on the occasion of the promotion of your book “Siedmiu Wspaniałych” [The Magnificent Seven] about the First Secretaries of the Communist Party Central Committee – you said that Edward Gierek had infected our consciousness. “Those there beat, murdered, destroyed, while this one oozed poison. (...) In the long run he did us the greatest harm. If anyone converted Poles into communists, it was probably to the greatest extent Edward Gierek” – you said during the meeting at Przystanek Historia.

He did indeed buy a large part of the population with the Western products we were talking about. It gave the illusion that it was supposedly like the West in our country. But it was not like the West – for reasons that could not be discussed in public.

In contrast, however, his rule was accompanied by a certain liberalisation – films that had previously been banned were released in cinemas. The same was true of some books that appeared in bookshops, although some were withdrawn from circulation over time. For me, Gierek was a... layabout. On the one hand a shrewd, cunning man. On the other, a politician who was able to be a partner to American presidents.

– interviewed by Łukasz Lubański

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and journalists

– Translated by jz