Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West by Agata Pyzik Read Free Book Online Page A

disclosed. That often meant civil death. Something which in principle was supposed to lead to punishing people who once could’ve beaten people to death (during the repression of mass strikes in 1970 and 1981, or the anti-Semitic repression of student protests in 1968), transformed into aregular witch-hunt consciously set up by the right wing to get rid of their political opponents. The mood of conspiracy never left us, and the Smolensk catastrophe was obviously an eruption of this. From the belief that Russians caused it wilfully to the view that it happened from their negligence, it was all to the benefit of the far right in Poland. Still, lustration appealed to the large part of the society who felt they were wronged somehow in 1989, by the opposition elites who had made a cushy deal with the communists at the Round Table. Thus, we landed again with the unbearable threat of ‘populism’, that is supposed to wipe out all the blame from the neoliberals. The ‘populist’ right are often public defenders of the remnants of the welfare state, helping the spread of negative propaganda about the ‘politics of welfare’.
    A quite opposite phenomenon is Russia’s nostalgia towards communism. There are several modes of it. The contemporary Russian left is rejecting the legacy of communism after the first ten years of the revolutionary period, until Stalinism. But the nostalgia of the ordinary man in Russia, as many post-Soviet liberal intellectuals believe, the one that makes people vote for Putin, is a nostalgia for Stalin, and the ‘glorious’ empire he represents. But this isn’t just confined to the impoverished workers and peasants of Russia. When you listen to most popular music in contemporary Russia, (like the mega-popular counter-tenor singer Vitas) or read aspirational magazines, like
Snob
(the title of the popular magazine of the liberal intelligentsia!), or look at contemporary art, the prevailing feeling is that of imperialism. The residual love for splendor and bling was necessary after the demise of Soviet blankness. At the same time, Russia is a country with some of the biggest inequalities in the world. Older people may feel in a need of a tsar-like, strong leader, but their existence is shrinking.

Post-politics of nostalgia
    After ’89 we observed the waning of and even the hostility towards any politicized thinking that would, especially in the former East,be called ‘ideological’, labelled as belonging to the previous system and so on. It is funny how when the leading liberal-leftist association, Krytyka Polityczna, published a book on post-1989 documentary film, where authors wrote on the ‘ideologies of Polish capitalism’, there was a sacred outrage all over the liberal press, a shock at calling capitalism too an ‘ideology’, as if this word was necessarily reserved for the fearful ‘Komuna’ (a derogatory term for communism used universally in Poland). Just as everywhere else, the 1990s meant for the ex-Bloc the end of politics as we knew it: end of politics practised with the help of political programs, political differences, with everything landing in a undifferentiated mass. Political parties lost their original meaning – in the recent election in Poland it was hard to say what any candidate associated himself with. This is the world of postpolitics, as we know it from the last decades of elections in Italy, Russia and, increasingly, the rest of the Bloc.
    These manipulations of history and memory are a direct revenge on the communist system, in which it isn’t a mystery why uncomfortable, inconvenient facts from history were erased from the books and not put in the public domain. As the PRL was silencing the memory of the Independence Day (as it was connected with the inter-war, bourgeois Poland), the wartime Home Army or the Warsaw Uprising, in contemporary Poland history is nothing but the remembrance of those three facts. In this vein, the religious right wing part of the