This one coming at you live, courtesy of the cellular network, from the steps of Pałac Kultury i Nauki in downtown Warsaw, an unwanted gift from Stalin to Poland, a solitary long-lost cousin to Stalin’s “Seven Sisters” in Moscow.
This is my fist visit to Poland, and some forty minutes of daylight into it, the excitement of being in a genuinely former Eastern bloc country hasn’t worn off. I walked through the catacombs of underground newsagents and jewellers around Warsaw’s central railway station and then around the Pałac this morning and have wound up on the steps in the shadow of a suitably heroic working class statue looking to kill some time before my meeting and, I suppose, looking for some evidence to fit my working theory about the place: I always do this in a new locale: try to figure it out, in very basic terms. What makes the people tick; why do they do what they do; how will they react to me. It’s a form of preservation. This morning, my theory’s predictably unimaginative: the Poles are a defiant and long-suffering people still overhung with the shroud of Mother Russia, nonetheless looking west, the rude shoots of sprouting capitalism pushing gaudily through cracks in the concrete of the former era, today’s inhabitants caught uneasily in the crosstalk between two incommensurate regimes.
And, of course, I find plenty of evidence of that sort – you don’t have to look for long: the grand Soviet building, a sort of stunted, baroque Empire State Building, formerly grand but latterly muted; hemmed in – besieged – by parked western European cars; its heroic spire now barnacled with cellular receivers and satellite dishes; its heroic working class figures and athletes strangely emasculated (Discobolus modestly wears underpants, a variation on the Greek ideal I’d not seen before), and just across the street, a block of new and shoddy skyscrapers, like ugly priapic weeds, thin vertical high-rises boasting, to the memory of Marx and Engels, sacrilegious names: Hotel Intercontinental; Sharp; Bank Austria. As a piece of municipal scenery, the Pałac bears the comparison well: it is no Chrysler Building, but it has a permanence and grandeur singularly lacking from the more modern constructions in its environment. In a century, it will still stand; I wouldn’t lay that bet about any of the new buildings. Still, all the time its Communist roots are being re-explained. Stalin, who commissioned the structure, has been obliterated from the book – literally, a volume carried by one of the bas-reliefs has his name plastered out (Marx, Engels and Lenin lived on to tell their tale), as part of a process apparently known as “de-Stalinisation”.
Back to my working theory. Unimaginative it may be, but it’s a coherent and simple theory, if outrageously condescending – I’ve barely been in the place half an hour – and it is one I presume locals wouldn’t recognise. They’d see it as either utterly false, or at least so ignorant of nuance, undercurrent and competing cross-current as to be meaningless and worthless to a local who must to navigate the cultural and social dynamics of this place every day. Communism died twenty years ago, it was only around for seventy years in the first place, and in that time other transformative revolutions would have affected life more profoundly than any centrally planned economy could, no matter how oppressive (the Second World War, for one). And Poland wasn’t invented in 1918, after all.
Painting with a broad brush and the limited palette of a narrow (or ignorant) historical perspective is a tourist’s luxury (and prerogative); a tourist’s picture isn’t designed to be heavy duty or to carry much content (enough to make for an interesting trip and competently flag down taxis and order coffee). A six month stay in Warsaw would be a different proposition and might yield a very different and more detailed painting; I’d be obliged to flesh out my telling of the Warsaw story a very different way. But there would be vestiges of my caricatured first impression.
That is how, invariably, we arrive at conclusions. My strong suspicion is that, in most walks of life, when confronted with a novel situation, as a point of entry we exercise our tourist’s prerogative: form preliminary views based on whatever small and imperfect knowledge we happen to have, and if none, draw analogies to things we do know, test them, meld them, fine tune them. What we don’t – can’t – do is come at a new situation with a completely open mind. There is no point at which we have no view at all – there is no “perfectly rational and unbiased” stance.
But observe that as we progress from our rough-hewn preliminary working model, assuming we don’t immediately reject it outright, as we progress in our understanding, our hypothesis will grow increasingly more elaborate and sophisticated (in the sense of being detailed and complex, as opposed to “representative of reality” as such). Assuming it survives, the more detailed and complex it is, the better will be able to fit “facts”, though there may be isolated portions that don’t reconcile awfully well (if they really are isolated from each other we will tend not to notice the discontinuity and in any case it won’t matter much). At length we will have invested a lot of time and energy and we may find our initial hypothesis has spawned new hypotheses, applications we hadn’t originally contemplated and, as a result, we have new analytical techniques available to us.
All this hard work is cumulative and is put to good use, and none of it is predicated on the original rough-cast view being accurate, as such. But something else happens as our hypothesis progresses in complexity: the opportunity cost of abandoning it increases. In the first half hour of my visit I ran two or three working hypotheses and quickly rejected two; six months afterwards I have invested a great deal of energy, and achieved some workable success, with the one that remained: the price of throwing it away now and starting from scratch becomes increasingly unpalatable unless there is something jarringly wrong with it.
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