What was it like in 1989+ in Poland when the Soviet house of cards fell?

Finest hour -YES
in a long time- NO

In terms of successful, non-violent change where everyone benefited, it's hard to see anything between the Wielkopolska uprising and 1989.

(okay, so the uprising was violent, but only a little bit)

I remember everything western was much sought after: music, jeans, etc. Eastern religions, music and philosophies were explored, but maybe it was a part of the hippie movement. I'm sure my parents struggled, but we lived in Warsaw, vacationed with tent all over eastern Europe in summers and went skiing in winters. Meat was scarce, but in retrospect we ate pretty healthy - fresh bread, fruits and vegetables. When I moved to US I was 16, I greatly missed the cultural scene and the ability to move around without the signifficant financial investment.

on the other side, I remember my mother constantly standing in long lines for food (both of my parents were engineers), getting busted for some czek lace we brought from vacation, our apartment searched by authorities, long haired friends getting beat up by huligans...

Nevermind, that was all before '89

what were they looking for?

Does anyone remember the smell of Pewex? When I was a child I thought it smelled like heaven.
I think by 1993 most corner stores looked like Pewex.

how long after'89 did the Pewex stores last?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pewex

Check Polish wikipedia for details: pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pewex
1993 - first bankruptcy application, rejected
1995 - debt reached 183 millions PLN
1996 - Bank settlement, main shareholder French Concorde Investment
1997 -150 Pewex shops under total control of Concorde. Pewex took up property management as the Association of Commerce and Real Estate Pewex SA, "Towarzystwo Handlu i Nieruchomości Pewex SA", THiN Pewex

2003 - THiN Pewex merged with Concorde. The final end of Pewex brand on the Polish market

Thanks. What does the SA stand for at the end of a Polish company's name?

Spółka Akcyjna.
It's the Polish term for public corporation.

thank you

black market stuff, I guess. The neighbours must have been wondering how can we afford all these vacations. Not that their suspicions were completely unfounded. My father took pride in doing things "na lewo". Unfortunately, he didn't change much even after years is the US. He still has unhealthy disregard for authorities. Recently, he built an illegal dam, and filled his little lake with carp.

Has anyone mentioned EMPIK yet? One would sit at the corner with the Guardian or something equally foreign, sip "turkish style" coffee and pretend to understand English. :-)

I hear that EMPIK still exist, only it is much upscaled. I went to empik.com and it looks to me like a grand bookstore, rather than just a reading room or a club. Something like Chapters/Indigo in Canada. Am I right?

Yep. I remember those good old days from 1994. EMPiK Gorzów WLKP - we affectionately, if jokingly, called it 'the International Club' - served kawa po grecku which you could stand the teaspoon up in, and feel your arteries hardening with every sip. Periodicals included - as well as the Guardian international edition which I think was the first of its kind - various other curios like el Corriere della Sella, Paris Match, Figaro and a hot of others. There was no guarantee, of course, that said periodicals were of the current week, month or even year. All this in a haze of blue cigarette smoke which made the scene look like antique woodcraft under tissue paper.

Now it's a pretty good - actually very good - highstreet bookstore, with the usual DVD and photography section thrown in as well.

Real coffee heaven! Now Empik employ their staff on wanky .75 contracts in order to abuse employment laws.

Glad you told me that. Back to supporting the local bookstore!

On my occasional travels to Warsaw I was mostly interested in visiting two bookstores: the giant one in PKiN, with its lo-o-o-n-g rows of technical books (I was mainly interested in physics and mathematics) and the small Russian bookstore on Nowy Świat, where I could buy Russian translations of western monographs and textbooks - literally for peanuts. I guess, that would compare to $2.00 vs. $60.00 in today's money. I could easily afford the translations, but never the original ones.

I still remember reading "Feynman's Lectures on Physics, vol 3, Quantum Mechanics" in Russian, and appreciating his combination of good style and clarity. Not that I was ever fluent in Russian, but Latin formulas, as well as diagrams, were quite helpful in comprehension of the language.

How I initially missed the specialized bookstores, after moving to Canada, since here they operate like any other business - they cannot afford stocking and keeping many technical books at any given time. There is one reasonable bookstore at U of T, at St. George campus, but it is not even close to the one in PKiN.

Obviously, one can always order the books via a catalogue, but this is not the same: reading readers' comments on Amazon is hardly comparable to browsing a book, smelling it, feeling its style, and judging its level of difficulty.

When the first Chapters bookstore was opened it was stocked with reasonable collection of technical books - 12 shelves or so - but now they are down to a few, representing real mismatch - from a book on "dams construction" to "knitting and crocheting". Pathetic! But Internet helps nowadays to fill the gaps.

That's where I bought a huge, 4 volume Russian/Chinese dictionary. It wasn't awfully cheap but something of that caliber in the West would have cost a few hundred dollars at the time. In hard currency the 4 volumes cost me about $1.50 in 1986.

Never before or after did I see a language dictionary so richly edited and so well graphically designed.

My parents tell me stories of how it was pretty bad all the time.

So, when did Western stuff like CD's, car dealerships, fast food restaurants, travel agencies, Biedronka, German food stores arrive on the scene?

German food stores? What are they? everything else was here b/w 90 and 96 more or less....

eg Lidl

Long before Lidl there were SAMs and SUPERSAMs in Poland so it's nothing new to us.

that's right but in my day all that was available in the Super Sam was canned peas, vinegar and canned mutton (if you were lucky).

Yeah,well was your question about stores or about products availability?Anyway you should know that was our speciality during PRL times.What I mean is that there was no coal in a coal producing country yet nobody was cold in a winter,there was no food in stores yet nobody was hungry,there was no gas but whoever had a car was driving and so on.In another words nic nie było ale było.


You also need to take into account that in "your day" styrofoam band a.k.a Solidaruchy was calling for strikes and work stoppages.You know their credo Im gorzej tym lepiej.

No. First were local family stores and local businessmens' chain stores. You belittle Polish enterprise skills.

Orbis,Gromada,Juventur.


Pol-Mot (western cars),Polmozbyt (domestic and KLD cars).


Pewex,Baltona,bazars.


Bary mleczne and small private enterprises.

A prize for the first person who can tell me what building replaced this Orbis office (in 2003!): I wish I'd got a colour photo of it while I could have....