THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC 449management vainly opposed the ingrained habits of an endlessly ingenious
workforce. Low productivity, shoddy standards, and gross inefficiency often
appeared for no sound technical or economic reason. In this regard, People's
Poland was the heir to attitudes bred in the conditions of Tsarist Russia and
multiplied by the strains of two successive German occupations.
Transport and communications made rapid strides in certain well-defined
sectors. The Polish State Airline (LOT), flying Soviet Ilyshin and Tupolev
machines, covered routes totalling 49,000 kilometres, and linked all the major
home cities and most European capitals. The merchant navy had swelled from
506,000 DWT in 1950 to 23 million in 1973, and included an important world-
wide tramp trade. The Polish State Railways (PKP) reported improvements in
electrification and rolling-stock. The State Bus Line (PKS), provided regular
services to all towns and villages. In the cities, municipal tramcars, trolley-
buses, and buses offered standards of regularity if not of comfort, which were
fast disappearing in Western Europe. The production of the 'Polski Fiat' under
Italian licence was boosted private car ownership to 690,700 by 1973. Even so,
for many Polish families, the horse-drawn cart was no less familiar than the
motor-car or the aeroplane. The pre-war German steam-engine was as com-
mon as the diesel locomotive. The rolling country-road, with its carts, cobbles,
drunks, and stray geese, stretched much further than the two or three lengths
of bumpy motorway.
Tourism in Poland manifested all the typical weaknesses of state enterprise.
Native holidaymakers were strictly segregated from foreign tourists. The for-
mer were housed in cheap, austere, communal centres administered by trade
unions and places of employment. The latter were hosted by ORBIS, the State
Tourist Agency, or by Youth Travel services such as ALMATUR or JUVEN-
TUR, and were required to pay in hard currency for scarce, expensive accom-
modation in a small number of oversize, pretentious establishments. Private
guesthouses were officially discouraged, and provisions for self-planned, family,
or individual holidays hardly existed.
New social structures were rapidly emerging from the wartime levelling.
Claims that Poland had a classless society were belied by the most obvious evi-
dence. The new 'Red bourgeoisie', the 'New Class' - with their private villas,
fast cars, silk suits, fashionable wives, pampered children, and foreign holidays
- enjoyed incomes and social benefits far beyond the reach of the working man.
Their ranks are drawn from the higher levels of State, Party, and industrial man-
agement, and from the growing circle of thriving private professionals such as
medical doctors or badylarze (market gardeners). Among this privileged elite,
the prevalence of high cash incomes and low direct taxes has combined with the
shortage of good quality consumer goods to encourage an extreme cult of con-
sumerism which can only be described as 'bourgeois fetishism'. The industrial
work-force has its own aristocracy, in which high-earning shipbuilders, steel-
workers, and coal-miners hold a commanding position. At the bottom of the
scale, in contrast, the peasants were treated for thirty years as the enemies of