Inflation of several per cent quickly faded from the headlines and gave way to other news. Such inflation, being long absent in our country, evokes associations. In the People's Republic of Poland there was officially no inflation, there was an "inflationary overhang", which was fought with cyclical price rises, officially "price-income operations". Inflation nowadays also means price rises, but we have different times, a different system, different causes and opportunities to get out of difficulties.

In the coca-cola-flowing days of Edward Gierek, many people were young, went on their first date and bought their first jeans, hence throughout the 1990s well over half of Polish citizens missed them, at least in the polls. So it did not help to remember that the system of that time had no way out of the economic difficulties inherent in it. Hence, that system collapsed under the inflationary overhang, although its downfall had to be allowed by the headquarters in Moscow through Gorbachev's perestroika.

Inflation at 1,000 per cent

The oldest communists no longer remember how it all began. In 1950 there was an exchange of money - bank savings at a ratio of 100:3, money held in wallets and at home at a ratio of 100:1. The times were pathetic and a poet named Jan Brzechwa celebrated the smash as follows:

Workers will not lose money on the change
Because by enriching the state, they are enriching themselves,
Because they are the homesteaders of this native land,
Where you can hear the rumble of machinery and the singing of tractor drivers.
Where new houses are standing, New Huta is growing,
And the hands are as strong as the new currency!

SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE The currency was strong, as 1 zloty was to be equivalent to one rouble, "the strongest currency in the world" and worth 0.22 grams of pure gold. The currency's strength persevered until 1953, when prices were raised by 47%. There was no revolt - Stalin was still alive, and when he died shortly after the increase, Stalinism was still alive by 1956. In truly oppressive dictatorships, people do not revolt. They allow themselves to do so when the oppression has eased somewhat.

In 1956, on the wave of the coming thaw, Poznań revolted. There was no increase in prices, but there were increases in labour standards and unpaid overtime, meaning that impoverishment came not from prices but from wages, which is all the same. The rebels captured the prison and there arms, street fighting in the city claimed 56 lives and several hundred wounded.

In the times known as "a little stabilisation", Wladyslaw Gomulka did not raise prices until the end of his reign. It was the drastic increases in December 1970 that ended his rule. The street "incidents" on the Coast claimed 44 lives, with 1116 people injured by gunshots (official figures). The rises were reversed and the inflationary overhang, i.e. the lack of coverage of money in commodities, was still at its best.

Gomułka's successor, Edward Gierek, lasted until 1976. He also had to back down from the prices raised then. There were no people killed in the street incidents in Radom, but beatings of detainees in police stations and jails were common. The Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) was formed to help those imprisoned, and the Radom June influenced the consolidation of other opposition groups as well.

When strikes broke out across the country in 1980, especially on the Coast, organised opposition came in very handy. The worker-peasant alliance postulated in the propaganda was present in the speeches of the secretaries, and the real cooperation between the intelligentsia and the workers led to the politicisation of the economically motivated revolt and the emergence of Solidarity, a competition to the authorities in all areas of life.

The next very severe (270%) increase was already introduced under the rigour of martial law, declared on 13 December 1981. Successfully, because under the barrels of rifles. The next increase in 1988 ended, after a wave of strikes, with a farewell not only to the next first secretary of the Party, but also to the system.

The centrally planned economy tried for more than forty years to forget the rules of the market, while supply and demand did not forget the communist Poland. As a farewell to real socialism, inflation exceeded 1000% at the turn of 1989/90. "What do you know about inflation?" can be said to young people by anyone who remembers it. The inflationary overhang - but what an overhang! - showed its power and went into oblivion.

Gone, too, were the shops where nothing was permanent. Even in the best days of early Gierek, it was said that some commodity had just been 'thrown' on the market, and there was never any toilet paper. The times of social queues for furniture, village women with veal in the towns, vouchers for cars, ration coupons for food, shoes, alcohol and cigarettes - all in the name of the noblest ideals of humanism, then socialist.

Wellspring of democracy

It was so beautiful, because youth is always beautiful, as the polls mentioned at the beginning of the text said. And who cared? The post-socialist world - not just Poland - has plunged into mindless consumption. Nothing is settled by a "balloon voucher", for merit and good behaviour - everything is money. The churlish Marxists did not live to see the new man, not materially motivated. In addition, a great many necessities - that is, under communism, luxury goods like everything else - are available en masse, not just to millionaires. Ideals have lost out to lowly matter.

And just when it seemed that nothing sublime awaited mankind any longer, because the inflationary overhang could not be counted on, a light of hope shone in the black tunnel of the future, and it shone triumphantly red, like an aurora unobstructed by CO2 fumes.

Here are plans for rationing and ration coupons, just a few years from now, in the name of the noblest ideals, this time of climate. The central administration of the states could not be relied upon, they are too ossified and inflexible. What good comes from the local governments, the real wellspring of democracy.

For a dozen years or so, the mayors of the world's largest cities - currently 97 cities comprising one-twelfth of the world's population and a quarter of the world's GDP - have been meeting and advising on the future, agreeing, signing a common position, and committing themselves to each other to do better, especially on CO2 emissions.

In 2019, mayors from all continents signed up to recommendations and urgings to the authorities - it should be understood that of the states - on what needs to be done by 2030 to reduce global warming. There are points of very specific restrictions there, intended to affect everyone on earth, especially those in the wealthier countries who have something to give up.

Meat was allocated 16 kilograms per year in the realistic variant and 0 kilograms in the idealistic one. Under General Jaruzelski, the card ration was 30 kilograms for white-collar workers, more for blue-collar workers. Today in Poland, the annual average is more than 70 kilograms per person per year. We should eat 90 kilograms of dairy products a year, 0 in the ambitious version, and we eat 900 kilograms. We will be able to buy 8 pieces of new clothes a year, although it would be good if 3. One cannot help asking, for example, are gloves one piece or two?

Once every two years you will be able to fly somewhere by plane, back and forth, no more than 1,500 kilometres. The more ambitious version is once every three years. Cars are allowed 190 per 1,000 citizens, currently in Poland there are more than 600, in the target version - 0.

All this is of course impossible, no one will agree to it. City managers, even the biggest ones, do not legislate for their countries or for the world. That would mean serious people editing and signing - tales, accounts of their dreams or framework ideas for cabaret skits? Locking the world into a pandemic, which Vladimir Putin cancelled by attacking Ukraine, would also have seemed impossible if someone had presented it earlier.

Communism is to return, and the kind the world has never seen, except in North Korea, Cambodia and China. There will be rationing, overseerism, denunciations and, naturally, punishment. The communism is to return to us. To most of the cities in the C40 Cities association that have never experienced it, it is yet to come, probably the more they long for it.

The new engaged art

Communism as we know it required engaged art as its propaganda. Now you don't see any poems, novels that are realistic in form and ecological in content and mass songs, not even serials and hits. The times are different.

Now, without pomp and mass impact (which might scare people away), one can expect appropriately progressive elements of storylines and visuals - above all films - in small numbers for the time being. In time, this will be taken for granted, like what has already happened in mainstream mass culture - feminisation, an increase in non-binary characters or multiracial casting in historical films, or "white" opera and theatre since time immemorial.

Some film character, not necessarily in relation to the action, will energetically put down a plate of steak, walk out of a clothes shop after a short thought or utter the line: "My shirt will definitely outlive me". No more car chases, no more love scenes in taxis and gangster conversations overheard in police cars. From now on such things are only to be found on the underground and on bicycles. Not right away, slowly, so that the frog doesn't realise it's being cooked.

In Russian, the forefront language of communism until not so long ago, there is a saying: "tisze jediesz, dalsze budiesz", which C40 Cities has forgotten. Some evil people, resistant to the ideals, dug up somewhere the unprotected content of the recommendations and guidelines of the associated cities, and an unnecessary discussion began. Even the mayor of Warsaw had to explain himself: "We are dealing with some recommendations that are not legally binding for anyone". For now. He radically distanced himself from what he himself had signed, saying still: "a load of nonsense". What's right is right.

Under real socialism, called the commune after its collapse, people consoled themselves with jokes. There was a category with the Highlander - a beacon of common sense against the various manifestations of communism.

On the round anniversary of Lenin's birth, the TV station is looking for someone in Poronin who remembers him. They found an old shepherd who tells how he met Lenin. He approached a stranger in the area, dressed in urban clothes, and asks:
- Are you, sir, that Lenin?
– Well, me.
– Well, then I'll get him by the ass and to the police station.

In advance, that is, before the revolution; for a police station - you can dream on. Nowadays, in the European Union and other global organisations, countries sign general directives in percentages of CO2 reductions, and sensitive activists convert this into pieces and kilos, so no police stations can be counted on, even if a shepherd were to be found.

– Krzysztof Zwoliński
- translated by Tomasz Krzyżanowski

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists