Crazy 1990s in Poland - transition from communism to capitalism - stories

@aywenhou625
This program's intro caused me to take exams for the Maritime Academy in Szczecin after graduating from high school in 1990. After getting in I studied navigation. After graduating I started working at sea. I sailed on seagoing vessels for 3 shipowners for 25 years. Ahoy.

@ESTYMANAGRANIATV
I feel 30 years younger now.

@BenyNukem
I see that everyone from my generation remembers it. Back then it was something!

@numbsliwa
I remember as a kid you only waited for the opening credits. I will never forget how the first time I came across it, I thought some great series/movie about pirates was starting. I literally pissed myself when I saw it. But, I was so disappointed and in disbelief that this epic, legendary, brain-destroying little bastard opening credits was the introduction to such a fekking boring and shytty program that I thought then that someone on that TV had made a mistake and they had mistakenly shown something else.

@corsiarz77
It seems to have been on Sundays during the chicken soup time. I don't remember the content of the program at all, but the opening with the music is stuck in my head as if I heard it yesterday.

Crazy 1990s are also known for English learning hype. Before, the main foreign language taught in Polish schools as compulsory subject from grade 5 primary school was Russian. But most students refused to learn it as the language of occupiers.
All of a sudden, after the Eastern Block collapsed, everybody desired to learn English. People resorted to various offers and probably the most popular ones were courses which could be addressed to a lot of students at a time. It was important due to the shortage of teachers of English in the edu market.

Less popular ways of acquiring English was private tutoring, but many people couldn`t afford it or again there weren`t enough teachers in the area.
That is why TV educational programmes were also used to learn the language. I remember the most famous one - about a funny monster from space called Muzzy who likes eating clocks on Earth. The series was liked by kids and we, teachers, also played it to our students during course classes or at language camps.

Here you are.

Crazy 1990s in Poland - transition from communism to capitalism - stories
Who come up with these stupid titles?

If Poland had communism I would have never left..."To each according to his needs"...what's not to like...

BTW, nobody ever lived under "communism" and nobody ever will - except as a child. Some like it so much that they stay with mom and dad till they are both gone.

That was an empty slogan and the reality was much greyer. E.g, you could afford buying only one shirt monthly while your dreamed of two or three. That is why you defected to the West.

A quote from Foreign Crime thread.

This means that gangsters are taking an upper hand on the police
This was the case in early 1990s. The communist militia had been dissolved and the democratic gov introduced the police. Yet, it was tragically underfunded while gangsters who appeared in the new economic system had money, fast cars, lethal weapons etc.

I still remember the article describing a police chase after gangsters - their old communist car broke down on the road while chasing a new BWM.

• 
  a
  

They could have called a helicopter. 🤔

Helicopter??? And crash it in unfavourable weather conditions????

All film scenes showing communist militia using helicopters to chase criminals were made in good conditions. Rainless daylight, I mean.

Check how a disenchanted Pol American policeman deliberately crashes a Polish communist plane.

Sorry, only Polish.

Another famous helicopter scene, involving ruski mafia smuggling drugs into poland and further west

youtu.be/btkb7j6i7eY?t=2353

Why do you provide false addresses?? There is a dot in youtube word while there shouldn`t.

Fortunately I didn`t open it. I never do. :):):) Sorry, darling, you didn`t catch me with your virus infection coz I am much wiser than you. Ha!!!

That's true. However, I didn't refuse - I enjoyed learning languages and I was a good student so I was studying it. There were kids at my class though that couldn't even read the Cyrillic and so I was writing down the transliteration for them so they could "read" short texts aloud in the class.
Also, my father always told me: "It's good to know the language of the enemy." lol


Yeah, there wasn't enough English teachers in our city, so we had to learn Russian :/ I remember that one young lady would come to our school after classes and thaught us some English for only a short period of time.


OMG, I loved that show as a little kid! :D "Muzzy eats clocks" xD


That wasn't the only problem - many experienced police officers were fired for political reasons and so there weren't enough of them to train the new ones. Some new laws were introduced restricting the use of guns by the police. And, of course, it was a new reality for everyone - borders opened up, high unemployment, etc.

I remember one scene from grade 6 (Russian class started in grade 5) - our female teacher of Russian screams at one boy (two years older than me coz he had repeated twice) coz he is unable to read the Russian text. She was very toxic as a teacher and we were all fed up with her. That negative experience put me off studying Russian in a more profound way. I just didn`t care to know it better - I could read and write Cyrillic and it sufficed well.

BTW, that teacher was the wife of our local dentist, a good specialist, a quiet and unassuming man.

lol Our Russian teacher maybe wasn't that toxic, but was definitely irritating and generally not very pleasant - she had a very high-pitched, whiny voice, and when she was screaming it would get even worse ;O Sometimes I wondered if they made her the teacher of Russian to discourage us from learning that language ;D

Even if not, it still came out the same. After 8 years of learning russian, I have forgotten everything I have ever learned.

It must be the same with Polish since you are a German for many years.

I am often in Poland, I will not forget the Polish language.

So what?. His Polish is more than good.

In another thread we talked about the communist travel operator established in late 1940s called Employee Vacation Fund. It allowed millions of Poles/Polesses to spend vacation in attractive regions of Poland in communist times.

When the system collapsed, the Fund was taken over by the activists working for communist-controlled trade unions in 1990.

It is called the enfranchisement of the nomenklatura - a colloquial term for the process of privatization and takeover of public property by some activists of the party and state nomenklatura , which appeared during the political transformation in 1989 in Poland and other countries of the Eastern Bloc .

The process raised controversies, a lot of people criticized it for allowing such injustice like ignoring the fact that communists should be held responsible for their crimes instead of being awarded by becoming new owners of state companies.

However, some anti communist opposition activists saw it as a chance for communists to change their ideology from marxism to capitalism.
If people from the nomenklatura enter joint-stock companies, if they become one of the owners, then they will be interested in defending these joint-stock associations, and the joint-stock system destroys the Stalinist order ( Adam Michnik in June 1989, in an interview for the Belgrade weekly "NIN").

In order to make the economic reforms profound and irreversible, it is worth involving the nomenklatura people in economic activity so that they are personally interested in the success and durability of the reforms. In addition, if it were possible to harness the energy and undoubted abilities of the nomenklatura to mobilize the dead or half-living components of the national wealth, it could also pay off materially. I do not despair over the undervaluation of the assets passing into the hands of the nomenklatura companies. After all, one can always estimate. Will it be a form of crediting? It will be. Let us treat this as a dismissal of the nomenklatura, which served society, did not deserve it, but by losing its privileges and honors feels dispossessed of the achievements of two generations. I am in favor of a dismissal ( Jerzy Szperkowicz , Uwłaszczać i nie błędować , "Gazeta Wyborcza" of September 25, 1989; appendix C).

Among others our Ironside. He complained a few times that communists and their supporters robbed the state assets for themselves and there was nothing left for common people who were either forced to do menial jobs for peanuts or to emigrate. He chose the second option and emigrated to America in early 1990s.