Childhood memories

In some of my earlier posts I clearly stated my disgust for Communism and everything it stand for. Sure the façade was great: equality, common property, equal rights  and so many others and what is the result: it is enough to look to North Korea or Cuba and you will understand. For those who are still not convinced I will confess some of the memories from my childhood that maybe could convince you.

The first thing that should make you and anyone that is mentally sane is the way of addressing to people: in any officially communist country all the people are comrades. What does this actually mean ? Well the principle is good: we are all equal and no one is above the law but … let’s just be honest we never were, we are not and we’ll never be equals. Some of us are smarter, dumber, funnier or simply older. Even to say that a man and a woman are equal is ridiculous (I know many will jump hearing this but is true! a man and a woman may have the same rights but they are different, a woman give birth to children, can breast feed them, is sensible, a man is stronger physically, deals with stress in a different way and the most important one 🙂 can pee standing ) And if all this didn’t convince you I will give you my last argument: as a very young child (1st until 4th grade) I had to call my teacher comrade . At the time (since this is all that I knew) it seemed natural to me and for me it even had a different, extremely respectful meaning and even now when I think of my first school teacher I still call her in my mind the same but just think how it sound for a 8-year-old child to be the comrade of a 55 years old teacher. Don’t you think it sounds a bit ridiculous ? How would you like to be called by any snotty 6 years old “Comrade, comrade …” I am sure you would love it.

You should also know that in any “respectful communist country” there are no baby sitters because for every person the almighty state provides a proper job so when the children finish the school around 12:00 at noon there is no one yet at home since the parents only get home around 3:00 – 4:00 PM (sometimes even later) so what can we the children do ? Well some schools keep the children for longer hours but in most of the cases the children just go home (to their grandparents – if they have) but most of them just have a key from the house and go (almost) straight home unlock the door and do whatever they have to do (eat, play, homework etc.) To ensure though that the child will not lose the key usually our parents used to tie it to a string that was hanged to our necks (just like a necklace). Because of this entire generations of children were called: “the generations of the necklace key”

All these were partly fun (for us) but others were not: I remember for instance that during winter (by winter I mean temperatures of -20C ) the building central heating system was not functioning (because of lack of fuel) so our parents tried to heat the house with electrical heaters which partly did the job unless there was a power black out too. What other options did we have ? well just one: put on more clothes. I swear there were nights when I went to bed wearing 2 pairs of thick pants and covered myself with 2 thick blankets, this is how cold it was. It probably sounds funny reading it but I assure you that this was anything but fun.

I think is very difficult today for anyone to imagine going to a supermarket and find all the shelves empty, but try … This is how I remember all the stores. I remember my father going out daily after he got back from work to buy some food and always taking a bag with him “just in case he can find something”  (this was his expression). In those times when we went in the city centre and we noticed a queue of people we first went at the end of the queue and only after we asked: “What are they bringing ?” and the answer could be anything from soap to bananas or from oranges to shoes. Do you still think this was fun ? Well when the people started to be desperate because we couldn’t even find bread The Party had a 2 great ideas:

• Let’s rationalize everything, in this way there will be enough … nothing for everyone
• Instead of every family to cook for their own members let’s make some big canteens for the entire nation. This way The Party can better control the food portions, the food quantity and who deserves it.

The first idea they implemented it at national level and from that moment on even to buy a bread you needed money, to wait for a few hours in a long queue and a ticket provided by the administration.

The second one was only partially implemented in the big cities. For this they built some huge buildings that the people started to call Hunger Circus (no relation what so ever with “Hunger Games” although …). Luckily the Communism fell before this second idea was finalized and today almost all those old buildings were converted to what the communists hated the most: the symbol of the capitalists: The Mall.

Let me also tell you about cooking: most of the big cities used gas for cooking but since the pipe infrastructure was not completed at national level many cities used some LPG gas. At the time there were at national level some LPG cylinders that were (obviously) refillable. One such cylinders was enough for cooking purposes for  few months so changing/refilling them was no big deal. In the last years however even this became a problem. The supply of new canisters was so low that the queues for changing a LPG canister was of hundred of people tat stayed in the queues many times more than one day. At the end the people just left in the queue instead of a person a stone on which they wrote a number (their place in the queue) and each person had to remember his number and just came back the second day, then the third and so on until the new canisters were brought. The queue looked now like a snake of stones, turning and twisting, tens if not hundreds of meters long with one man here and there to guard the stones and make sure no one moves them.

This my friends is the real face of the communism; this is what I remember from my childhood about it.

All the best my comrades,

DK

A story of greed and … bad luck

I mentioned my grandfather in some of my previous posts. This is a story that happen during his life time so in communism times.

It happen right after the war ( WRII ) when my country fell under the iron soviet boot.  My grandfather was a miner in a local cold mine him just as almost everyone else hopped that the new (socialist/communist) regime will bring something better for them and for the first years it seemed it will work but slowly the ideals were lost and the pettiness from the human nature triumphed as you will also see below: after the war my grandfather joined a small team of miners (a team leader and three other workers – including himself) that following the Stakhanovite principles tried to match it. This movement was “supposedly” started by a Russian coal miner: Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov that managed in a single work shift to extract more than 100 tone of coal which meant about 14 times his quota. My grandfather’s team managed to do the same so for the communist propaganda machine this was a huge success that had to be transformed in national prowess so they were treated like heroes: received medals of honor, were invited to social events all over the country and last but not least each of the team member received a flat (obviously to rent, since private property was a “capitalist” habit that was not well seen in the communist countries) in a newly build neighborhood of houses.

This neighborhood was composed of about 6 similar houses each having 4 independent apartments and they were considered the best houses at that time from the entire town. They were so new that the town hall didn’t give them a name or house numbers so the people started calling them The District of the Privileged and this remained its name for many many years even far after the street received a proper name. Even today the old man know it by this name.

The interesting part about it was though how was it build: the state commissioned the project to one manager giving him access to funds for materials, salaries etc. The person in charge supervised the project but he also cut many corners to save, or better say steal, some money and he did a great job with it. As a result although from outside all the buildings look identical there are no two that are similar: some have bigger cellars, in some the cellars are plastered while in others are unplastered, in some the floor model, and materials are different and sometimes even the rooms dimension are different. At the end of the project the manager was also given one of the “fancy” apartments that he built but his bad luck only begins since in 1948 and a few years later 1952 the new regime decided in his wisdom to nationalize all the natural resources and all the private companies, lands virtually anything that may be related to “private property”. The nationalization affected only the land and business owners but there were fears that the middle class might resist to these changes so to insure that there will be no resistance the government decided to make a “stabilization” basically changing over night the used currency notes with some new ones with different values. This was all ok, the problem was however that every person could only exchange a fixed sum from the old currency notes to the new ones and the sum was small enough to make sure that the middle class will have no more financial power. To most of the (poor) people this meant nothing but to our project manager this meant the world because over night he woke up with a lot of useless papers (the old currency notes). He tried to ask people to change some money for him but the amount he received was just enough to buy him alcohol :). The funniest part was that after this happened he started rolling his cigars in currency bills (since this was the only use he could find to his fortune). A few month later he died in his home and when the neighbors finally went in to clean the house after the burial since he had no relatives his house was full of empty bottles  but more interesting was that beneath his bed they also found something else: two big suitcases full with (old) money. In this particular case the punishment was almost divine: he stole a lot of money but did not manage to enjoy them but for all the honest shop owners or peasants with some small piece of land this was a nightmare.

DK

Socialism & Co

Although I really hate politics  (even if it is state politics or just corporate one, actually is there a difference ? 😉 ) politics is everywhere in our life even if sometime is called differently: convincing, persuasion or even gossip.

However what I would like to talk about are events that I have lived (me or people I knew), a subject that from time to time comes back to life to my disappointment. There are always people that say: “it was better during communism” or even worse “it would be good if we would have now communism”. This last statement always scares me and this is my subject for today. As you all know (or at least should know) after the end of  World War II Europe was basically divided in two: West (Norway, Sweden, Finland, UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Austria and of course West Germany on one side and East having former USSR, Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and East Germany on the oder side. While the West tried what we learned in school to be capitalism the Eastern Block tried (or better say were forced by the almighty friend Stalin to try) the socialism. But since socialism was just a set of ideas a proper implementation of this concept had to be found and the various countries tried this (within some decent limits – after all if you got too far papa Stalin&Co would immediately come to “help” you correct the error with his tanks: see invasion of Hungary from 1956 of Czechoslovakia from 1968). The best brightest child of socialism, the phrase that was commonly used at that time was “the socialism with human face” was of course the communism.

There are many who even today cry for the “good old days” but that is ok, they will soon go away (to be understood will die of old age 😉 ) … but what is dangerous is that many young people who did not live through it still think it was better than now. For those I write now and I plan to post a series of posts about this subject. But before going too much into details I will tell you a few stories that I know that happened:

• when the communists came to power after the war one of the first thing they did (the order did came from the Russian comrades but was implemented by local people): they killed or in some cases imprisoned all the school teacher and the priests from the small villages. Why ? well the teacher and the priest were the most educated and esteemed people from the village (most of the times the only ones that could read and write) so in order to avoid any possible opposition they … fixed it preemptively.
• let me tell you about one of the prisons the communists used (it is true it was used “just” for politically imprisoned): in the prison itself there was a pretty tall tower entirely made of metal plates (including ceiling and floor). At the last floor there was just one circular room with some windows (with bars, of course but no glass) so the wind could blow in … . They used to take one prisoner at a time there, no shoes, no socks, no worm clothes in the middle of the winter (when usually the temperature is -20 C). The only thing the prisoner could do to worm himself was to run in circles (since the room was big enough) but since the floor was metal this made a lot of noise (like walking into a big storage room) that was loud enough to be heard by all the other prisoners. So they run until they were too exhausted and when they stopped (so no more noise …) everyone (prisoners and guards) knew the prisoner fell so we will shortly freeze to death so they brought the next prisoner and so on everyone was waiting for his turn to … die.
• when the war ended Russian liberators came to my father’s village (they were all very poor peasants) and they said: “In the war you fought against us so because of this one man from every family has to go to Siberia as retribution”. My father’s family had at that time just one man: my grandfather, there was also my grandmother and many young children so it was obvious to everyone that if my grandfather would go all his children will die of hunger so his elder son (my uncle) who was at that time around 17 said that he will go instead so his younger brothers and sisters can live. For some reason my grandfather accepted so he was taken and among many things they did to him I do remember just one: they made him put his bare feet into a bucket with water outside in the winter and they left him like that until the water froze completely; and they did it “just for fun”. He did survived and has even able to come back but he did die at the age of 40 (I wonder why). When my father grew up and married my mother he told her that he will never forgive my grandfather for allowing his son to go instead of him “what kind of father sends his son to die instead of him ?” my father used to say. Was he right, was he wrong ? I don’t know.

So do you still think Communism is cool ? I will tell you more soon … but until then … be careful what you wish for because you might actually receive it !

DK