"Central Europe: 'Ostalgia' for the Communist Past"

Victor Gomez, Transitions OnLine

Why Central Europe’s young are dancing, dressing, and drinking as their parents did before 1989.

When they were young, they longed to wear real Levi’s blue jeans and thirsted for Coca Cola. Today, many East-Central Europeans are switching back to the brand names of their youth. They wear communist-era sneakers, dance to the synth-sounds of aging 1980s pop bands, and drink cheap Coke imitations.

A wave of nostalgia for the cheap and often shoddily made consumer products of the long-gone communist era is sweeping across this region. In eastern Germany, they call it Ostalgia, a play on the German word Ost, for East. But the trend is obvious in practically every country of the region.In Hungary, last year’s re-appearance of the communist-era Tisza brand sneakers were a massive hit. In the Czech and Slovak republics, aging rock bands from the 1970s and 1980s, such as Olympic, are not only still around but have been enjoying a surge in popularity in recent years.

And everywhere in East-Central people are turning to the soft drinks of their youth. Back in the socialist heyday, virtually every communist country in the region made its own version of Coca-Cola. Poland had Polo-Cockta. Czechoslovakia had Kofola for the Czechs and Cofola for the Slovaks. East Germany had Club-Cola. Hungary didn’t really have a Cola substitute, but it had Traubi-soda, a carbonated grape drink.

All of these brands are back with a vengeance. Both Kofola and Traubi are among the top-selling soft drinks in their respective countries. Not only are the drinks popular among people who remember them from their youth but even many youngsters in the region who couldn’t possibly remember the “old days” are snapping them up.

The trend even seems to have caught some people in the region by surprise. “Polo-Cockta is back! The appalling substitute for the real thing!,” wrote an exasperated Krzysztof Varga in a recent edition of the Polish weekly Tygodnik Powszechny. “Now that we have practically everything, we have suddenly started to miss those failed substitutes.”

The recent popularity of such products is all the more striking in the face of the changes that have refashioned the region since Soviet-style communism crumbled in 1989. While certainly not everyone in the region has prospered since the collapse of communism, the changes are undeniable.

A myriad of private shops, Western food and retail chains, and a flood of sometimes crass advertising have swept across the post-communist landscape, replacing the gray and crumbling facades of 15 or even 10 years ago. Many people have responded to this by opening up their wallets like never before. In ever increasing numbers, East-Central Europeans are making regular use of credit cards and taking out mortgages, behavior that was unheard of in the region just a few years ago.

In addition, at a political level, several of the region’s countries are now members of NATO, and this year eight of them joined the European Union and took part in their first European Parliament elections.

The 36-year-old Varga, one of Poland’s most popular young writers, chalks up the recent spate of nostalgia for products like Polo-Cockta or Kofola to a simple “longing for one’s youth.”

In support of Varga’s opinion, a recent poll conducted by the Public Opinion Research Center (CBOS) in Poland found that the feelings of nostalgia for the past seem to be more widespread among certain age groups. The poll found, for example, that 71 percent of respondents who are now between the ages of 35 and 44 said life made more sense to them in the 1970s than it does now. Somewhat surprisingly, only 56 percent of those aged 55 and over said life was better back then.

Agnes Losonczy, a Hungarian sociologist, said in a recent interview with the Hungarian daily Nepszabadsag that for a certain group of people, the communist period represented the climax of their lives. In a recently released study, Losonczy traced the fates of 70 families in Budapest, and found that 33 of them were fundamentally shaken by the transition from communism. It is not that they disagreed with the collapse of communism, but the euphoria they initially felt at the collapse of the regime quickly gave way to despair as economic hardships set in.

Losonczy says many of these disappointed people tend to separate the regime, which failed, from the ideal of a more egalitarian society, which had given meaning to their lives, and which many complain has been lost altogether along with the sense of security that the old regime used to provide.

MAKING MONEY FROM COMMUNISM

Whatever the reasons behind the current wave of communist-era nostalgia, it is clear that it is turning into a big business opportunity. And if it seems somewhat ironic that so many people in the region are wistful about their communist-era youth at a time of unprecedented integration with the West, there is a far bigger twist in all of this. The current spate of nostalgia is being fully exploited by the same kinds of capitalists that used to get Lenin’s blood boiling.

Eager to cash in on the trend, a motley assortment of domestic entrepreneurs, local companies, and giant multinationals are trying to outdo each other in catering to the communist-era longings of the region.

The Swiss-based chocolate-making giant Nestle scored a major hit when it bought one of Hungary’s most popular chocolate brands, Boci csoki, in 1991. Founded in 1923, the Boci csoki factory was nationalized in 1948, after the communists came to power in Hungary, but it maintained its popularity. Nestle actually re-invented the chocolate by including a sweet filling. However, obviously sensing the power of a familiar brand name, the Swiss company kept the Boci csoki name.

But by far one of the most impressive commercial successes among the peddlers of old communist brand names has been the revival of the Tisza sneaker in Hungary. Most Hungarians under 40 today grew up wearing Tisza sneakers in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, over the course of those two decades, the old-fashioned, high-top sneakers made with fake leather and a PVC sole became a symbol of socialism in Hungary.

“Tisza was the only sneaker here in the socialist period,” explains Judit Szakacs, a freelance writer and TOL correspondent in Budapest. “We all had a pair, wishing we had Adidas instead.”

After 1989, though, under tough competition from Western brands, the Tisza sneakers faded from view. But last year, the Tisza company re-launched the brand with the help of an ingenious marketing strategy.

There were no TV ads and little publicity. Instead, the company targeted the youth market. Before it opened the sole Tisza shop in Budapest, it started distributing stickers with the Tisza logo in dance clubs and on flyers advertising parties. The company also gave pairs of sneakers to popular DJs. When the shop finally opened, the new Tisza sneaker was an instant hit. The new Tisza sneaker is made with real leather and real rubber, but it still has the old, familiar, socialist look.

In a way, the Tisza sneaker is characteristic of the odd way in which such products of communism can suddenly seem like symbols of the new youth in Hungary. Once enthralled by the new Western products available in their stories, young people in the region seem to be turning to products that can only be described as uniquely originating in their own country.

In fact, the Tisza sneaker has been so successful that it has even started to turn off some young Hungarians who are looking for the same originality that initially made the Tisza brand appealing. “I would wear them, but not in Hungary; maybe in Bangkok, or anywhere else. Everyone has them here,” says Viki Soregi, a 25-year-old doctoral student of literature at Eotvos University in Budapest.

Other entrepreneurs in the region have tried to re-create the atmosphere of the communist era in more exaggerated and light-hearted ways. In Prague, the Prace bar has been serving up draft beer and communist-era memories for several years now. Prace, which means “work” in Czech, is a haven of communist memorabilia. The bar is decorated with communist posters, pictures of Czechoslovak communist leaders, and busts of Lenin and Stalin. The pub tends to be frequented by young Czechs as well as a large number of expatriate Westerners living in Prague, who more often than not fail to recognize the faces of the old Czechoslovak communist leaders. No matter--they like the beer and at least know a picture of Lenin when they see one.

Such bars are becoming a standard feature of many large cities in the region. While Prace is clearly over the top in terms of décor, some retro-bars in the region have a more authentic look. One prevalent feature of Hungarian nightlife under communism was the presszo bar, a type of watering hole that was specifically created by the regime to replace the old grand cafes of Budapest. The presszo bars--which means “plan” bar--were dim and cheap places to drink and smoke, and most have long since followed their regime into the dustbin of history.

But at least one of them, the Terv presszo located in the posh financial district of Budapest, is alive and well. Inside the dimly lit interior of the Terv, patrons sit in plush-covered chairs at fake-marble tables. The menu is emblazoned with the bar’s logo: the outline of a factory complete with smokestacks belching out smoke and a star. Aside from liquor and coffee, Terv’s menu also offers the infamous “warm sandwich”--a toasted item smothered in ketchup that comes filled with a “sandwich cream” consisting of a meat or mushroom spam-like spread.

Marianna Boncz, who works at the Terv presszo, says most of the interior has remained unchanged since the establishment first opened some 40 years ago. While the Terv has its regulars who have been coming here since the bar opened, Boncz says that it has recently started to attract young professionals and bankers who work in the area, as well as foreign tourists.

LET’S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN

Popular culture has also seen a wave of nostalgia for the golden oldies of the communist era, whether old films, TV shows, or rock bands. The state-owned Czech Television station’s decision a few years ago to show reruns of a 1970s detective series caused a furor among former dissidents--but it also scored huge ratings.

Set in the late 1940s and 1950s, the series features the heroic deeds of Major Zeman, a stern-faced communist-era police officer, as he battles pro-fascist villains, tracks down heinous criminals, and foils the plans of anti-communist dissidents. Many of the show’s episodes are communist reinterpretations of true stories: everything from actual murder cases to dissident opposition to the regime. In each episode, Major Zeman is portrayed as a selfless and valiant crime-fighter who battles against villainous and bloodthirsty opponents.

When the public broadcaster Czech Television first resurrected the show in 1999, it followed each episode with a documentary about the true story behind the episode as well as a panel discussion featuring historians and witnesses who remembered the particular case in question. Those efforts did not spare the station from a fierce barrage of criticism from former political prisoners, politicians, and journalists, who argued that showing the re-runs was an insult to people who had suffered at the hands of the communists or even that it might have some nefarious propaganda influence on young people today.

The Confederation of Political Prisoners, an organization representing some 7,000 people who were jailed for their beliefs under the communist regime, even tried to bring criminal charges against the station under a law passed in the early 1990s which bans the propagation of any ideology that advocates the suppression of human rights.

Despite these efforts, the show remained on air and scored a big ratings success for Czech Television in the 1999-2000 season. But that wasn’t the end of it. This year, the private station TV Prima is showing re-runs of Major Zeman on its own--and it still garners strong ratings. Major Zeman, a communist propaganda hero, has started making money for commercial television in the Czech Republic. Meanwhile, the show’s many opponents seem to have either grown tired of the fight or have become resigned to the fact that they cannot stop Major Zeman from being shown to new generations of young Czechs.

Along with Major Zeman, aging rock and pop bands from as far back as the 1960s have continued to score big with Czech audiences. The Czech band Olympic, a group of rock dinosaurs that have been around since 1963, is just one example. Last year, the band staged a series of 40th anniversary shows across the Czech and Slovak republics, playing to sold-out sports stadiums in cities like Bratislava, Ostrava, Brno, and Prague. Led by their balding lead singer Petr Janda, 62, Olympic has been a fixture on the Czech pop scene for decades, regardless of the regime in power. But last year’s shows marked a revival in the band’s popularity.

While Olympic, like some other Czech performers such as the crooner Karel Gott, have maintained a relatively consistent level of popularity over the decades, other former communist-era stars have only recently resurfaced. Michal David, a singer of over-synthesized dance songs with cheesy lyrics who was popular in the 1980s, has enjoyed something of a comeback in recent years after spending part of the 1990s in the Czech Republic’s pop wilderness.

David is best known for songs like his 1982 hit “Non-stop”,” in which he sings the words: “Non-stop, I want to live non-stop. And with whatever comes along, I have an urge to fight.” Fighting words, perhaps, but David certainly wasn’t fighting the communist regime. In fact, he was heralded by the regime as a pop star and performed at festivals in the Soviet Union at a time when other singers were banned from performing at all because of their political views.

Last year, though, David celebrated the success of his 2002 album Abnormal heat, after it surpassed the 10,000-mark in terms of sales in the Czech Republic. He is also unapologetic about his past. “My only sin was that the Bolsheviks did not see my songs as damaging to their aims. They were about optimism, about love, about me wanting to live non-stop,” David said in an interview last year with the Czech daily Mlada fronta Dnes.

But East-Central Europeans are also remembering the past in slightly more serious, if odd, ways as well. Four years ago, the Zacheta gallery in Warsaw organized an exhibition entitled “Grey Colour 1956-1970: Culture in the Gomulka Era” about daily life in Poland during the administration of communist leader Wladyslaw Gomulka. While the exhibition included a wide range of displays aimed at recreating the atmosphere of communist rule in Poland, one of the most popular sections was a full-scale reconstruction of a typical communist-era milk bar, complete with a rude waitress serving up half-cooked pancakes.

A DARKER SIDE

While the milk bar at the Zacheta exhibition served as a somewhat humorous reminder of the very real daily difficulties of living in a socialist state, that hasn’t stopped some people in the East-Central European region from looking back on the communist era with more than just a bit of nostalgia.

This may reflect what many academics and commentators have come to view as fundamental differences in the way different age groups and social classes have experienced the transition to Western-style democracy.

Along with the Western consumerism and the political changes have come the darker aspects of Western capitalism, such as unemployment and widening social inequalities.

In many ways, each country in the region seems increasingly divided between the “winners” of the transition to free markets, and the “losers.” For younger, urban, educated, and multilingual Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians, life during the transition has been filled with opportunity.

But for many others, the changes have been difficult. These include many of the region’s pensioners, the unemployed, and those who inhabit the heavily industrialized areas of the region, such as southern Poland or the northern parts of the Czech Republic.

For many of those people, the nostalgia sometimes runs deeper than a sentimental attachment to communist-era consumer products. In Poland, where the economy went through a tough slowdown two years ago, many people think back on the “good old days” of the 1970s. Back then, communist leader Edward Gierek presided over a series of “reforms” bankrolled by loans from the West and aimed at creating a sense of prosperity by flooding the country with consumer goods. In the end, though, Gierek’s economic policies crumbled under the sheer weight of accumulated foreign debt. Today, some observers blame his policies for Poland’s post-communist debt crisis in the early 1990s.

But in a relative sense, Gierek’s era marked a contrast to the gray years of the 1960s and the economic hardships and political conflicts of the 1980s. The result is that today many Poles view Gierek, who died three years ago, as a positive figure. In a 2002 public opinion poll conducted by CBOS, 56 percent of respondents said their lives were “better” under Gierek than they are today.

In another poll carried out this past May for the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, TVN Television, and Radio Zet, respondents were asked which post-war Polish leader had done the most for the country. Again, the largest group of respondents picked Gierek. The former communist leader was selected by 46 percent of Poles, beating out the world renowned anti-communist leader Lech Walesa, who was the choice of 39 percent.

But another question in the same poll revealed the fault-lines in Polish society more clearly. While 69 percent of respondents whose highest level of education was elementary school said life made more sense to them under communism, only 36 percent of people with a university education said the same thing.

Similarly, a poll conducted in 2002 by Gallup polling agency in Hungary found that 61 percent of respondents with an elementary education rated the era of communist leader Janos Kadar, who was in power from the late 1950s until the late 1980s, as “good” or “outstanding.” In contrast, only 31 percent of respondents with a university education gave the same ratings to the Kadar era.

Hungarian sociologist Eva Kovacs has a simple explanation for the numbers. “Life was more secure [back then],” she said in an interview with the Hungarian journal szoc.real. “And those people for whom the fall of communism coincided with their growing old, losing their job, or going into retirement, in reality long for their younger days, their active life, together with the Kadar regime.”

Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic, increasing support for the Communist Party in public opinion polls seems to point to similar trends in that country. While the former communists in the other countries of the region have reformed themselves and changed their names, the Czech Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia retains both its name and some of its old image. While the party avows that it is now a strictly democratic movement, many Czechs see it as a barely reformed relic of the former totalitarian regime.

Yet despite this image, the party has been registering about 16 to 18 percent support in recent opinion polls, which makes it the second most popular party in the country. But with the other parties in parliament still refusing to formally work with the Communists at the national level--let alone form a governing coalition with them--the party has languished in opposition since 1989.

While the rise in support for the party has elicited various reactions in the country, ranging from concern to dismissal, most observers agree the Czech Communists are simply benefiting from a protest vote. In fact, even Communist Party officials concede that. The task now, according to prominent Communist politician Miloslav Ransdorf, is to translate the protest vote into positive support.

While some Czechs might shudder at the prospect of “positive” support for the Communists, not everybody is worried about their possible ascent to power.

"I am not worried about the practical implications of the Communists' rising popularity and their possible participation in governing. The Communist Party today functions in a totally different international environment than after World War II. There is no Soviet Union, we are part of NATO and the EU," says Jiri Pehe, a longtime adviser to former President Vaclav Havel who currently serves as director of New York University in Prague.

Still, Pehe is not pleased with the Communists’ current popularity ratings. “It is more a moral question for me. In my view, it is a sad statement about this society that an organization with a criminal past, for which it really never apologized, has so much influence,” says Pehe.

A MIXED BAG

Still, do such things as increased support for Czech Communists or the wistfulness of some Poles and Hungarians for the security of the past represent the same urge that makes people--even young people, who hardly have memories of communism--spend money on products like Tisza sneakers or Polo-Cockta?

In a way, they couldn’t be more different. The frustrations of many people in the region with the difficult and long transition to a democratic and capitalist society are understandable. In a sense, those frustrations are reflected in the polls that show a nostalgia for the securities of the past regime.

The popularity of the consumer products of that regime, on the other hand, is a somewhat different matter. It is perhaps partially a longing for youth, partially a rebellion against the dominance of Western products, and partially just a matter of taste.

But in another sense, these two trends share one important similarity. When the communist regimes of the region collapsed in 1989, many people figured that the old communist parties and their supporters would literally die off and vanish, perhaps to be replaced by modern leftist parties.

Similarly, many pundits argued and still argue that a longing among the people of the region for Western prosperity and consumer goods had at least as much to do with the changes as loftier questions of political freedom and justice. Who would want the shoddy goods produced by the old regimes now that real Western companies were peddling their wares in the region?

But, today, many people in East-Central Europe seem to be showing that historical continuity is a powerful force. If nothing else, then, these two trends have surprised a lot of pundits who thought they knew what was happening in the early 1990s.

Or maybe they are just temporary fads, to be eventually dispersed by the increasing prosperity that is supposed to come with European Union membership, or destined to flicker out like all other consumer fads do in capitalist countries. In that case, it might be better to munch on some Boci csoki, sip some Polo Cockta, or tune in to the latest episode of Major Zeman while it all lasts.

[Victor Gomez is a former senior editor at Transitions Online and at its predecessors, the Open Media Research Institute and the print magazine Transitions. Additional reporting by TOL correspondents Wojciech Kosc (Poland) and Judit Szakacs (Hungary).]