Driving Towards Socialism

A car is unlike any other piece of equipment. Many people pray to it, experience erotic thrills at the sight of it, believe that it has a soul, call it a secret name and, when no one is listening, talk to it. A car is the key to freedom, and maybe that is why it stimulates the acquisition gland so strongly through the human imagination. With a car, you gain the desired, if somewhat illusory, independence: you can be where you want, when you want.1

The above words are those of Andrzej Krzysztof Wróblewski, a columnist and journalist associated with the Polityka weekly, writing in the late 1980s. Krzysztof Pomian treated the car as a civilisational achievement that could easily be filled with meaning; it symbolised material status, a lifestyle. The car carried within itself the idea of rebellion and freedom, but also comfort and safety.2 Henri Lefebvre called it a “Leading-Object” that promotes hierarchisation in various ways. The French sociologist wrote: “Today the greater part of everyday life is accompanied by the noise of engines.”3 Roland Barthes went even further when, in his classic collection of essays Mythologies, he deified the latest model of the Citroën DS 19 by way of a play on words, calling it a “Goddess” (déesse), and stated that cars are “almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals.”4 Fascinated by speed, Italian futurists reached deeper into the past, writing in their Manifesto about “a roaring car … more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace.”5 In his famous essay “Life Behind the Wheel,” sociologist John Urry noted the importance of the car as an article of individual consumption.6 Jean Baudrillard, on the other hand, observed that the car is “one of the main foci of daily and long-term waste, both private and collective.”7 Many such opinions and statements point to the vital role played by the car in the last century.8 For the twentieth century, it was what the railroad and the steam engine had been a hundred years earlier, central as they were to the nineteenth-century transportation revolution.9 Roberto Salvadori placed the car on the same level as another revolutionary invention of the preceding century—the cinema. Together, they constituted a synthesis and symbol of the process by which individual and social life were mechanised.10

Modernity, speed and progress were especially important to communism. They perfectly corresponded to Marxism’s demand for modernisation and fascination with technology, which can be seen, for example, in the Soviet obsession with the conquest of space11 and of the air,12 but also with the automotive industry.13 The development of industries responsible for the production of automobiles offered an opportunity for the technological modernisation of the entire economy. However, socialist vehicles were not to be passenger cars—a potentially destabilising factor due to their association with the values of individualism—but rather tractors, trucks, and buses, to serve the collective.14 Hence the primacy, in almost all socialist economies, of truck production over passenger cars and of collective transport over individual motorisation. Exceptions were Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany), whose automotive traditions dated back to the turn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, despite serious attempts to eliminate some of the problematic meanings and symbols associated with the passenger car and to turn it into a mere means of transport, the perception of individual motorisation in countries ruled by communists after 1945 did not differ significantly from that of their neighbours on the western side of the Iron Curtain. As early as 1957, Stanisław Lem wrote in Przekrój that the car was used primarily “to shine, to spread the peacock’s tail, to stab a knife into the heart of friends and to twist it slowly. … The car thus becomes more of an object of worship than an object of use; it is not so much a means of transport from place to place as a wonderful device, transporting its owner from the gray crowd into the sphere of the Refined Elite.” In one of his commentaries broadcast by the Polish Radio, Andrzej Szczypiorski stated: “In the current stage of civilisation, the automobile has ceased to be a means of transportation and became a means of expression for the psyche of an individual living in the society. Instead of an object, it has become a goal.”15 These sentiments were echoed by Waldemar Hanasz, who believed that the development of individual motorisation was the beginning of the end of the communist system.16

For a number of years, the history of the automobile and of the automotive industry has been an object of growing interest for scholars in various parts of the academia, including the humanities.17 There are definitely more publications concerned with the development of the automotive industry in Western Europe18 and in the United States19 than in countries that, after World War II, found themselves within the sphere of influence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or within Soviet borders themselves. One author who deserves to be mentioned here is Lewis H. Siegelbaum, whose history of “cars for comrades” set the direction for further research on motorisation in the people’s republics.20 He also edited a volume of studies devoted to motorisation in the Eastern Bloc.21 There is a relatively large amount of studies about motorisation in East Germany.22 Among the most important authors in this area are Jonathan Zatlin and Peter Kirchberg.23 Luminita Gatejel compared the situation in three countries: the USSR, East Germany, and Romania.24 In turn, the case of Czechoslovakia has been studied by Valentina Fava, who was primarily interested in the history of the local automotive industry.25 The differences and similarities between Eastern and Western Europe were addressed by the authors of an edited collection entitled Towards Mobility: Varieties of Automobilism in East and West.26

Meanwhile, the history of the Polish automobile and Poland’s automotive industry has so far not been the subject of broader interest for historians.27 As far as the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL) is concerned, Mariusz Jastrząb has published the most on the subject.28 The only monograph on the history of the automotive industry in the PRL is a book about the Syrena car by Karol J. Mórawski.29 Jakub de Mezer has written about Polish motorcycles.30 Tomasz Szczerbicki authored a popular monograph on the Syrena and other cars from the PRL era, but these works are mostly comprised of trivia amassed by an author driven by a deep passion for automobiles.31 Another volume by this author, on the history of the Mercedes in Poland, is similar in character.32 Paweł Sowiński noted the impact that motorisation had on tourism on the margins of his work on the subject.33 Błażej Brzostek’s study about everyday life in Warsaw devoted a great deal of space to motorisation and its impact on the life of the city’s inhabitants.34 A great deal has been written about the history of the production of individual models; among the most important of such contributions are works by Aleksander Rummel35 and Andrzej Zieliński36 devoted to Polish car production. Representatives of other fields in the humanities, such as sociology, psychology, and anthropology, have referred somewhat more often to issues related to the automotive industry.37

The development of the automotive industry in Poland was closely associated with political breakthroughs—a fact noted by Jacek Kuroń, who said in an interview with Jacek Żakowski: “The final victory of the new [communist] order gave Poland the Warszawa car—a copy of the M-20 Pobeda built on Soviet license … The child of the thaw [in 1956] was the Syrena …. In 1968, production of Polish Fiat 125p began.”38 If we add to this the change of power in 1970, when Władysław Gomułka was replaced as first secretary by Edward Gierek (who, unlike his predecessor, adopted the “car for everyone” policy), we obtain the timespan, from 1945 to 1970, which encompasses the main parts of this book. Roch Sulima writes that with the departure of the Syrena—the last Syrena rolled off the assembly lines in 1983—“the heroic episode of the Polish socialist automotive industry came to an end.”39 Certainly, it is worth pondering the words of this cultural anthropologist for a moment. An analysis of the postwar quarter century tends to suggest a slightly different chronology of this “heroic period,” one which coincides exactly with the years 1945–1970, especially if one takes into account the growth of individual motorisation. In my opinion, this period ends with the appearance of “Maluch”—more precisely, with the announcement by Edward Gierek’s administration of its plans for development in this area—rather than a decade later. Thus, I limited the chronology of my book to the years 1945–1970. This decision was prompted by the fact that during this period, Polish society first encountered private cars on a large scale. Never before and never after did the number of cars increase so rapidly (though only in relative numbers) as when Władysław Gomułka was First Secretary. Even if it was not until the 1970s that a real automotive boom came to Poland, several phenomena in the thus far under-examined period of 1956–1970 related to the constantly increasing presence of the passenger car on Polish roads. It was in this period that important social attitudes and behaviours towards the automotive industry were shaped, that Polish society “learned” about cars, and that cars exerted influence on Poles. Hence the chronological framework of this book.

An account of the development of the Polish automotive industry would be incomplete without reference to the beginning of the twentieth century and the Second Polish Republic, when cars first appeared on Polish roads. State policy towards motorists during that period, along with the devastating effects of World War II, were decisive for the later fate of the industry. The first chapter is devoted to these issues. The second chapter covers the years 1945–1955, when the Polish state rebuilt its automobile fleet with great difficulty and practically from scratch. It contains information about the institutions responsible for the development of the automotive industry, about plans established for the industry, and about the ways in which motor vehicles were obtained. This was also the period when the production of passenger cars began in Żerań, the popular name for the Passenger Car Factory (FSO), which was located in Żerań, a district of Warsaw.

The difficulties associated with obtaining licences for cars are also discussed in this chapter, which closes with a description of the “automotive everyday” in the face of deepening Stalinisation, manifested, among others, in restrictive legislation on vehicle registration, but also on automobile traffic. The following chapter describes the quarter century of Władysław Gomułka’s rule. Gomułka, colloquially known as comrade “Wiesław,” the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, governed Poland from October 1956 to December 1970. The fourth chapter is devoted entirely to “Poles on the road to the automobile.” It discusses the possibilities of buying one’s own car, both through official sales channels (Motozbyt, internal export, redundant company vehicles) and through non-official distribution systems (maritime import, car exchanges). This chapter also presents privileged groups, which had easier access to passenger cars compared to the broader society. A separate subchapter is devoted to miners and to the irregularities in the allocation of vouchers and shares in the foreign exchange fund. The last chapter focuses on the everyday concerns of Poles who had their own automobiles. It discusses what are, in my opinion, the most important phenomena and problems experienced by the motorised segment of the society in the 1950s and 1960s: the condition and size of vehicle fleet, issues of road safety, legislation and crime related to motorisation, problems with fuel, service stations, parking lots and garages. Separate sub-chapters present case studies of sorts, often reaching beyond the period of Władysław Gomułka’s era; this is necessary in order to demonstrate the sources of particular problems.

The main assumptions and the course of the development of the automotive industry in Poland, including the role of automobile manufacturing and its place in the country’s economy, are therefore well within the purview of my study. Of particular interest are the following questions: What kind of pragmatism characterised the actions taken by authorities, and to what degree had it hindered or catalysed developments? Did the authorities see privately owned passenger cars as a manifestation of “Western fashion,” a real threat undermining the regime’s ideological foundations, or rather as a modernising impulse that could help increase the expansion of the economy? (Such was the case with countries on the western side of the Iron Curtain.) Could a passenger car become an export commodity that generated significant profit and thus attracted the much-needed foreign currency? In the socialist economy and its realities, the plans of the authorities were one thing, and their implementation was something quite different. So, did the expansion of the necessary infrastructure—roads, service stations, gas stations, a sufficient number of garages and parking spaces—keep up with developments within the automotive industry? The picture would be incomplete if an attempt were not made to reconstruct the impact these developments had on the Polish society—for instance, due to safety concerns in connection with the increase in the number of motor vehicles travelling on the roads.

The catalogue of problems is long and naturally, for my purposes here, had to be limited. Thus, even interesting questions—such as changes in the way Poles spent their free time, the presence of vehicles in culture, or the impact of automobiles on environmental pollution and the landscape, which changed irreversibly under the influence of the expanding automotive industry—were beyond the scope of this work. Apart from sketching the postwar history of the Polish Automobile Club (Automobilklub Polski, AP), it does not discuss the various social organisations that interacted with the automotive industry broadly understood. In practice, each of these subjects deserves a separate study. Two-wheeled vehicles, which were extremely popular in Poland at the time, rarely appear in these pages. Omitting this subject was one of the more difficult choices I faced while writing. Nevertheless, I decided that focusing on passenger cars would simplify the narrative, making it clearer and more accessible to the reader.