Wall Street Journal
October 23, 1981
Kartuzy, Poland – Maretta Dzoilek will wake up long before dawn at least one day
this week and wrap herself in three thick layers of clothing. She will slip quietly out
the front door, so as not to disturb her sick mother, and go out into the bitter cold to
wait in line for hours outside the neighborhood newspaper kiosk.
Miss Dzoilek - a frail, 31-year-old hospital switchboard operator – will say little or
nothing to those around her as she waits for the shop to open. Conversations in
lines these days too often end in arguments.
She complains but endures the tedium for the reward at the end – cigarets to use as
barter. If she is lucky, she’ll be able to buy four of the 12 packs her ratio coupons
entitle her to each month. She’ll go through the same sort of ritual later in the week
to buy her monthly half liter of vodka.
Miss Dzoilek herself rarely smokes or drinks, but such goods have taken on special
significance in Polish society. “Tobacco and alcohol are the best currencies
nowadays,” Miss Dzoilek says warily. “Money no longer matters.”
Stock in Trade
This small northern town of 15,000, just 20 miles from the Baltic coast and 70 miles
from the Soviet border, is surviving on barter. If one has the right item to trade, he
can bypass some of the other exasperating and ubiquitous lines and frequently
empty shop selves.
This month, Miss Dzoilek wants to us her vodka and cigarets to buy toothpaste,
washing powder and coffee. She also hopes to persuade a nurse to help find
medicine, otherwise unobtainable, to treat her mother’s asthma.
When Miss Dzoilek gets to work in the morning, there isn’t any small talk about the
weather or last night’s television. Conversation takes the form of hard bargaining -
a discussion of who has been able to get what items and what he wants in exchange
for them.
“People won’t help you anymore unless you can give them something in return, “
Miss Dzoilek laments. “Kartuzy was once such a happy place, but now all we do is
bicker and suffer.”
Pulling the Rug
Kartuzy is nestled between scenic lakes and it is a place to which city dwellers from
nearby Gdansk and Gdynia traditionally escaped for relaxation and a taste of
country life. But now that the frustrations of everyday life have damaged
friendships and disrupted society, the welcome mat to outsiders has been removed.
Tourists are viewed as a drain on the town’s short supplies.
The economic crisis that has so changed Kartuzy, has altered the life of villages,
towns and cities throughout the country. Tension is building that many Polish
economic experts feel could erupt in food riots before year’s end. Strikes to protest
food shortages are spreading and already have resulted in street skirmishes
between citizens and police. Worthless money continues to accumulate in the hands
of families who don’t have enough to eat and who must face the daily, exhausting
struggle to obtain necessities that money can’t buy.
Finance Minister Martin Krzak has warned “The devolution of Poland into a bartar
society is our greatest problem. We must stop cigarets from becoming money and
money from becoming nothing.”
The Worthless Zloty
Indeed, the Zloty, Poland’s monetary unit, is one of the few things in Kartuzy that
isn’t in short supply. More than one-third of Polish wages aren’t matched by goods
in shops, and that gap grows every day. Incomes have increased more than 25% in
the past year, but the supply of consumer goods has dropped by nearly as much. A
general flight from money is taking place, and as a result, the most desirable and
least available products – spirits, cigarets, sugar, meat, washing powder to name a
few – have become the means of exchange.
People who can get these products most easily have become the new elite. They
include the neighborhood butcher, the hardware-shop worker with access to
washing powder, the candy-store manager who has chocolate, the doctor who
demands cigarets in exchange for treatment and the plumber who won’t touch a
drain unless cigarets figure in the deal.
Miss Dzoilek’s mother was amazed recently when the carpenter who replastered a
hole in her ceiling rendered his bill: a pack of cigarets and half a liter of vodka.
Tadeuz Ochmidt, 21, numbers himself among the new Kartuzy elite. He has only a
basic education and earns a modest wage, but sells washing powder – and he is all
the rage.
“You have to be important enough or you are forgotten,” he explains almost
boastfully. “If I don’t leave a package of washing powder during my next visit to the
dairy store, I can be sure they will have no eggs for me the time after that.”