Shock Therapy

Compared to the South Korean or Brazilian landfills I saw in my brother’s Newsweek, the municipal dump of my Silesian hometown looked small, hemmed in by a forest of coniferous trees and the joyful self-sufficiency of allotment gardens. As my dog, Luksik, a mutt the size of a miniature pinscher, marked this new territory with his leg lifted against the wide-open, rusty gate, I measured my expectations against the pile of trash in front of me. No seagulls, obviously, because Siemianowice is far from any significant body of water. No crows even. Surprisingly, not much stench. But above all, no people scavenging in sight.

It was 1991. Only two years prior, the anti-communist Solidarity movement won the first free election by a landslide that buried Polish Communism dead. Supported by the Vatican and Ronald Reagan, Solidarity was suspect to my Marxist parents, but most Poles were tired of the equalized poverty of communism and the shortages of the eighties. After the brief euphoria of a smooth, democratic transition, which inspired other revolutions in the region, including in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, Poland entered a long phase of deep economic crisis. Those who voted for Solidarity candidates had hoped for Swedish-style socialism but instead got “shock therapy”: deregulation, privatization, and austerity. The vacuum created by the end of communism, exploited to introduce neoconservative free market policies, demanded a complete restructuring of every institution and every person’s life: where and how we got food, what we read and watched, what we admired and what we believed was true.

I was almost fifteen. I had just started high school, where instead of Russian (the tool of Soviet imperialism now phased out of schools) I had begun studying English, its global vistas and promises of mobility so alluring that no one yet noticed its imperial power. My brother’s Newsweek magazines replaced in our house the glossy weekly Kraj Rad, or “Land of Councils,” a magazine about the Soviet Union to which my father had subscribed until it folded in 1990. Kraj Rad projected propagandist images of USSR prosperity: smiling faces of pioneer children, five-year-plan-smashing workers shaking hands with apparatchiks, vigorous volunteers harvesting in idyllic settings. Newsweek imagined abundance differently. Its advertisements showed happiness as leisure and consumption: expansive golf courses, couples snorkeling in crystalline seas, peachy faces with perfect teeth grinning over piles of exotic fruit.

In the articles, though, images of claustrophobic poverty outnumbered those of spacious plenty. I was only