Where did Poles spend summer vacations in the PRL era?

@johnny reb
For the slow...johnny reb threatened a woman on this board after cyber stalking her. johnny reb has made many sexualised comments to women on this forum.

Plenty of practising Christians go to the beaches in Poland, and you can do wandering eyes and feel lust in your local supermarket. No need to go to a beach.

Anyway, the lust just vanishes after a few minutes of being used to it. It's acclimatisation. A Saudi man will go crazy over a bit of leg because he rarely sees them. Westerners however don't walk around their local swimming pool with a permanent hard on.


Just plain misogyny. Women are often doing better than them and they're rarely paragons of masculine virtue anyway so they get like that. In the same way, being white trash they get racist.


Sadly true. It's only the tip of the iceberg too. Him and his seedy chum Deepak have tried all sorts of tricks including trying to get people fired from their jobs. Fortunately they have in every case failed.

But the first couple didn`t wear fig leaves initially when under Godess` full protection. They started to when deprived of Her grace.

They wore them and they were enough, only when God expelled them from paradise did they need warmer clothes.

They did but check when. First they were walking nude. Veritable Paradise!

in which Adam and Eve used fig leaves to cover their nudity after eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

For Gods sake Pawian, they were porking ich other:::)))

What does it mean???

For prominent Poles, Crimea was nice? Plus stuff from Czechoslovakia seemed like one from the West, even though it was not a very popular destination back then.

Poles did not go to Crimea. If they could afford it and got a passport, they went to the West, mainly to work illegally.

Although it's not in Crimea (but near it) there was that nice song, Batumi, by Filipinki. That suggests that holidays in other parts of the eastern bloc were something that people could at least aspire to.

Wasn't there also a chance of holidays in Bulgaria?

I think he's talking about vacation trips...

And there was very little tourism from the satellites to the USSR... and none at all from the USSR to other Warsaw pact countries.

Internationally, the big foreign summer vacation destinations in the PRL would have been Balaton in Hungary and the Black Sea Coast of Bulgaria (esp around Varna)

Other seaside commie places (Romania and Jugoslavija) seem to have been much less common destinations.

Worth remembering that for almost all of the period that Poland had the PRL, most western Europeans couldn't afford foreign holidays and didn't have passports.

The better off could, but didn't always. For the majority (in the UK at least) they might be able to manage a weekend by ferry to Dublin or Ostend (no passport needed) however foreign holidays, Spain etc, started to come in dribs and drabs from the 70s and were too expensive for many. That was the era (in Poland and the west) of holiiday camps, sometimes belonging to your trade union. That and nasty boarding houses by the sea.

By "prominent" I meant Poles who had close ties to the CCCP party. Otherwise, you're right that regular Poles with a non-restricted passport preferred traveling to the West or South of Poland, not the East.

Do you mean the PZPR?

It had three million members.


For most of that period, relatively few Europeans, regardless of country, had a passport at all.

There was neither the word communism nor socialism in the name.

The R at the end explains that without needing to state the obvious.

R is for working class. It can be interpreted differently.

Hard to know how, unless exploiters have suddenly started sharing their accumulated capital with the proletariat out of the kindness of their multimillionaire hearts.♥️

From my experience - France, Greece, Germany, Turkey.

The russian Party was called Communist, the East German party was called Socialist and the Polish party was a workers' party. These differences were visible not only in the name.

Meaning it was more accurate, compared to the gangsterism that was r*SSia's pretence at Communism and Germany's Ordnung-crazed attempt at Socialism.

As a Workers' state it was closer to Socialism.

That explains the ration cards....

Yes, the closer part.

As you well know, they were infested with payola and grift.

Part and parcel of socialism.... it's not workable at a societal level. Which elements can be integrated at a national level?

Not exactly true. My grandparents and parents generation travelled - not much, but on several occasions.

It was considered a prestigious thing to do. Also, an opportunity to make lots of money buying Czech/German/Polish goods and then reselling them back home.

You first had to come up with a reason for why you were going. Most often, these trips were linked to party exchanges, student delegations, scientific cooperation, or some kinda heavily chaperoned group tours. Through bribery and favors, you could get yourself "written into" some delegation.

After some Googling now, I found a blog article with numbers for internal and external Soviet tourism.

Internal Soviet Tourism: 100 million people annually. Main destinations: Sochi, Crimea, Lake Baikal, the Caucasus, and the Baltic States.
Purpose: Most trips organized through work, by the Trade Union.

External Soviet Tourism: 500-700k annually (1980s).
Main Destinations: Bulgaria (the lion's share), GDR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania.

What's curious is that Poland was low in the ranking, second from the bottom from Romania. Apparently, this was due to Solidarity and the overall complicated political climate. The Soviet government did not want citizens exposed to this.

Romania - surprisingly - simply had a bad reputation as an uninteresting and deeply unfriendly country. Caecescu's government did not particularly welcome Soviet tourists, and there was a huge language barrier. In addition, the author writes that Romanians came across as "aloof" and "deeply nationalistic" to Soviet tourists raised on the idea of Internationalism.

Albania left the Warsaw Pact in 1968 and was off limits to Soviets.

Yugoslavia was semi-accessible, but trips there were tightly controlled. The favorite destinations there were along the Adriatic coast.

The real Soviet "elite" could of course travel to places like New York and Geneva, as "members" of various UN delegations.

If you were some kind of untouchable star like Vysotsky, you could even live in Paris with your girlfriend.

IINM he was a hard core Stalinist (for sure Enver Hoxha was, I remember reading articles in Albania today (from uni library).

Somehow, China managed to co-opt Albania, turning it into Mao's little outpost in Europe. Truly bizarre.

Muslim Communists, in the heart of Europe, supported by a patron half a world away with an agrarian economy.

My grandma also travelled with my grandpa to Saddam's Iraq, shortly after he seized power in a coup. My grandpa was one of the men involved in setting up a factory, ostensibly for putting together tractors from kits shipped from the Soviet Union, but in reality to make an Iraqi copy of the T-72 tank using Polish and Czech parts. I believe this tank was called the Babylon tank.

She told me, that she saw Saddam's political enemies hanging from lampposts. But also that it was the freest she had ever felt in her life, up until that point. A level of glamor which she had never seen before. Hotels with swimming pools, and smart waiters. Exotic fish and fruits. Lots and lots of Americans and Brits (Saddam was fighting Iran at the time, or getting ready to, and as such was friend of both the USSR and USA).

But that's not tourism, but work.

This was my "tractor" grandpa. The other, maternal, grandpa was a lifelong trade unionist. He went on lots of trips, like Italy and Japan, where he met with local communists and trade unionist leaders. He brought back one of the first VCR's in our neighborhood, from a trip to Tokyo. Then my mom sold it, and it helped finance the purchase of an apartment for the young family (yes this is how expensive VCRs were in the USSR).

Rationing exists in every country. Food rationing is universal in your country and in Poland.

In neither can you buy food without ration coupons.

Not because of shortages... that's a socialist specialty.

If your coupons are the wrong colour, you've got a permanent shortage