Abstract
This article presents the history of for-profit mobility from communist Poland, that is, transnational labor migrations and the movement of cross-border petty traders. On the basis of primary research in archives and new scholarship on the history of communist Poland, it presents the scale and dynamics of cross-border movements since the partial opening of the borders in the mid-1950s to the final erosion of the communist regime in 1989. It analyzes the main factors and patterns of the expansion of mobility in both its legal and irregular streams, including the relevant policies of the Polish government and the governments of migrants’ destination countries, the mechanisms of the gray and black markets, especially of hard currencies, and the development and diffusion of social practices of migration. It argues that for-profit mobility was a large part of the second economy as well as a form of disengagement from the communist state and its first economy, a way of selective opting out of socialism. Analyzing the relations between its expansion and the evolution of the communist regime, the article claims that for-profit mobility produced un-communist social spaces and was an important factor eroding the regime’s legitimacy and control over its subjects, thus paving the way to the post-1989 stage of Poland’s transformation.
While international migrations and other forms of transnational mobility have become a major topic of research and public interest, migrations from the communist states remain under-researched. This applies in particular to migrations inside the communist world, despite some interesting new studies. 1 This article presents for-profit mobility from communist Poland, that is, the streams of cross-border mobility that generated income: the labor migrations and the movement of petty traders. It analyzes the main factors and patterns of their expansion and the relations between this expansion and the evolution of the communist regime, down to its final demise in 1989. I argue that this mobility was an important phenomenon eroding the regime’s legitimacy, its control over and influence on its subjects. It had a significant direct impact on a small but fast-growing group of migrants and their households, and an indirect impact on a much larger group of their relatives, friends, and neighbors who saw the effects of mobility for migrants’ consumption, wealth, and economic independence. I am going to show how an initially marginal phenomenon expanded in the late 1980s into a massive one, becoming a significant part of the massive opting out of the socialist economy. This mobility made up a large part of the shadow or second economy and remained in a peculiar, mutually parasitic, relation with the socialist first economy. For the communist regime, whose cornerstone was the control of the etatized economy (including employment of almost all the workforce outside agriculture), the expansion of the shadow economy, and especially its transnational, migration-related part, was a serious challenge.
This history lies at the intersection of the history of international migrations, the social and political history of communist Poland, and the analysis of the operation of communist regimes. It rests on archival research in the main collections of communist Polish bureaucracies: the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MSW), its Passport Bureau in particular. 2 It benefits from post-1989 studies on Poland and other communist states, from observations and analyses made during the PZPR rule (sometimes for its leaders), as well as the fast-growing scholarship on international migrations and related policies globally.
From the Marxist-Leninist perspective, international labor migration from a socialist country, that is, a country of full employment, was impossible. The Polish People’s Republic (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa [PRL]) was to provide employment for all: its Constitution proudly declared that work is the right and duty of every citizen and specified that citizens have the right to paid employment, secured by the social ownership of the means of production, eradication of the sources of economic crises, and unemployment. 3 Moreover, the need to populate the Western Territories, annexed from Germany in 1945, and the plans for industrial expansion, especially during the great leaps forward of the early 1950s and early 1970s, required a mass supply of labor. Through almost all the years of the PRL’s history, the nationwide demand for labor was indeed greater than its supply: the socialist shortage economy also suffered from a shortage of labor. Labor migration from the PRL should thus be oxymoronic, both from the ideological and practical perspective. However, as presented below, streams of legal, state-organized labor migration did develop, both within the Soviet bloc and across the Iron Curtain (which increasingly was a misleading metaphor), as well as even wider flows of irregular labor migration. Similarly, petty trade, which was supposed to disappear as a form of “speculation” (a heinous pathology typical of capitalism), not only emerged but gradually expanded, eventually reaching a scale unknown in Polish history either before or after communist rule.
We should note that any history of international migration between communist Poland and other communist states is possible because of Stalin’s decision to impose communist rule on the countries of Central Europe without annexing them to the Soviet Union. He could have made them into new Soviet republics, as he had done with the Baltic states in 1940, and as some of the local communists wanted. Instead, he built a Soviet bloc of satellite but separate and formally sovereign states, each with its communist party, administration and economy, as well as border control and migration policy. It is difficult to overestimate this decision, and not only for the history of migrations, especially after the Thaw in the USSR in the mid-1950s, which allowed for a relative variety of “national paths to socialism.”
This article focuses on migrations that by UN standards were largely short-term (i.e., lasting between three and twelve months) or even shorter, lasting a few weeks or just days, thus not meeting the relevant UN definition. 4 However, they had some of the features and functions of longer-term migrations and were often repeated, lasting cumulatively much longer. For similar reasons, this article includes the cross-border mobility of petty traders, a phenomenon of similar causes and outcomes, which in the PRL involved more people than labor migration. Scholars of Polish migration in the late twentieth century made a good case for including these short-term mobilities in their research, and a growing body of scholarship pays attention to various kinds of similar movements globally, forming part of a broader “mobility turn” in the social sciences. 5 Studying mobility from communist states seems especially interesting because of the communist governments’ true obsession with control of the mobility and the elaborate policies and institutions they built to exert such control. Learning why these policies were increasingly ineffective may also shed light on some contemporary tendencies in international mobility control.
The migrations are not only interesting per se, but are also symptoms or factors of other interesting phenomena. In this case, the development of international mobility resulted from and contributed to the erosion of three sets of policies essential to the communist regime: the control of exit, suppression of markets and private business, and isolation from the capitalist West. In all these fields up until the mid-1950s, Polish communists strove toward maximum control of mobility, full suppression of undesirable economic practices, and far-reaching isolation from the West. Stalin’s death and the Thaw brought a change of tide: a relaxation of these policies and a gradual retreat by the state, partial and not without regression, that continued in the following decades. This created the conditions for the mobilities presented here, which in turn weakened the control of movement, contributed to the expansion of the second economy, and produced transnational social spaces connecting Poland with the West. We may call this de-totalitarization, a process opposite to the expansion of the totalitarian state: the state of unlimited monocentric government, based on ideology and political mobilization. 6
Mobility from Communist Poland
In the years of high Stalinism, 1949–1954, the PZPR government introduced passport policies and a system of border control that largely imitated the highly restrictive Soviet exit policy. International mobility from Poland declined to the lowest levels in known history, and private travel outside the communist bloc practically disappeared. In 1954, in a country of 27 million people, only 52 individuals obtained passports for private trips to the West and some 50 got emigration permits. The PRL became practically a closed state. But the most severe restrictions did not last long. After 1955, following the Thaw in the USSR, the Polish communists gradually lessened restrictions on foreign travel. This allowed for a rapid expansion of emigration, mainly to Germany (East and West) and Israel, which took more than 350,000 resettlers before 1959. The major part of the new flows across the Polish borders, however, was of a short-term nature: in 1955–1959, short-term mobility amounted to more than 550,000 trips, mainly to the neighboring communist states. 7
The re-stabilization of the regime after 1957, and the ensuing “tightening of the grip” on migrations brought a temporary reduction in the amount of international mobility, but it was not a simple return to the status quo ante. It was a significant reform and reconstruction of the relevant rules and institutions. Out of the initial confusion regarding what a non-Stalinist, yet socialist, passport policy should entail, there gradually emerged a new, complex set of guidelines that replaced the crude non-exit policy of the past.
PRL policies toward travel abroad depended on the destination and the legal status of the trip. Short-term mobility had three different categories: official/business travel (podróże służbowe, “service trips”), organized collective travel, and individual private travel. Each of these categories had its own set of regulations and passport policy guidelines as well as different types of passports. For this analysis, I need to mention the “service passport” (paszport służbowy, issued also to scholars, artists, and sportsmen going abroad for conferences, performances, and sport events), the collective passport, and the private (tourist) passport. Each of them had two versions: one valid only for the European communist states (known as wkładka paszportowa or passport insert) and the other valid for all countries of the world. In the 1970s, a series of agreements between the European states of the Soviet bloc allowed for the visa- and passport-free movement of their citizens with regular identity documents (dowód osobisty).
Through the 1960s and 1970s, short-term mobility, primarily within the Soviet bloc, kept growing, as the Polish government developed economic cooperation with other COMECON states and looked favorably at personal contacts of Poles with their citizens. Under the banner of “socialist friendship and cooperation” there was an increase in the streams of visa-free movement by official delegations, managers, and specialists at state-owned enterprises, sport teams, artists and students, as well as individual and group tourists. The total number of trips grew from 178,000 in 1960 to 780,000 a decade later, of which almost 90 percent were within the bloc. 8
In the 1970s the figures multiplied. First, in 1972, a bilateral agreement with the German Democratic Republic (GDR) opened the border for the movement of Poles and East Germans on the basis of regular identity documents, that is, without the need to apply for a passport. Within this year, the number of trips abroad for Poles jumped from 1 million to 10.6 million. Because some of them made repeated trips, the number of travelers was lower, yet this increase was also dramatic: by June 1972, 2 million Poles got a stamp on their IDs allowing for passport-free entry into the GDR. 9 Restrictions on currency exchange, introduced the next year in reaction to the crowds of Polish shoppers emptying East German shops, reduced the number of trips to some 8 million, but in 1976–1979 it grew again, along with the development of similar, passport-free travel to other countries of the bloc. Several million Poles applied for the pink stamp, which allowed for “crossing the border and staying in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Romania, Hungary and the USSR.” Before 1980, they were making between 9 and 11 million trips annually. Never before had Poles traveled abroad in such large numbers. 10
The early 1980s witnessed a dramatic decline in these flows. Following the establishment of the Solidarity movement and the rapid deterioration of Poland’s economy in 1980, the GDR and Czechoslovakia unilaterally restricted the entry of Poles, fearing that they would spread the dangerous virus of free trade unions and empty the shops of consumer goods. After 13 December 1981, Martial Law almost completely closed the borders for some time. Alongside the gradual removal of its restrictions, mobility grew back to 3.5 million trips in 1985 and to 7 million in 1988, then eventually exploding in 1989, when it reportedly exceeded 19 million trips. Of these, as we can estimate, 13‒15 million trips were to communist states and 4‒6 million outside the bloc. The figure of 19.3 million trips means that the number of trips per one thousand inhabitants was more than five hundred, that is, as if every second Pole, infants and the elderly included, went abroad. 11
The liberalization of the passport policy and implosion of the system of international mobility control, which the communist party had maintained for forty years, took place even before the turning point of the semi-democratic elections of June 1989 and the ensuing establishment of the Solidarity-led government. This liberalization was part of the general peaceful refolution, while the effects of the latter, the dismantling of the communist dictatorship and the emergence of the rule of law, secured the new freedom of movement from a return to the past constraints. 12
The government allowed for the renewal and expansion of temporary movement outside the Soviet bloc later than for travel to communist states, and kept it restricted well below the levels of the latter. After its initial expansion in 1955–1957, fearing it might negatively affect Poland’s balance of payments in hard currency, the government raised the passport fees and currency exchange rates for tourists, which reduced their flow to the West by almost half. 13 In the following years, a combination of financial restrictions and selective increases in passport refusal rates kept private mobility to the West between 60 and 90 percent lower than the scale of travel to communist countries.
Nevertheless, travel outside the bloc became much easier than it had been in the Stalin era. Individual Westward mobility grew from fewer than seven hundred trips in 1955 to fifty-five thousand in 1957; organized tourism went from nothing to a few thousand visits annually. In the 1960s, the total of trips to non-communist states oscillated between forty and one hundred thousand a year, of which business travel with “service passports” comprised 30–60 percent. In the 1970s, the explosion of mobility to Central and Eastern Europe overshadowed the smaller but also substantial increase of flows to the rest of the world, which accelerated after the Helsinki conference of 1975. The Helsinki accords paid attention to the liberalization of migration, travel, and personal contacts across borders, while coincidentally, from 1976 onwards, the PRL sunk into economic crisis. The troubles made its leaders more sensitive to Western pressure concerning human rights, as well as more interested in labor migration by Poles and their remittances in hard currency. 14 By the late 1970s, the Poles made as many as six hundred thousand trips annually to non-communist states.
In 1981, when the government was in retreat under the pressure of the newly established Solidarity movement and confused passport officers issued passports liberally, they allowed for as many as 1.2 million such trips. With the imposition of Martial Law on 13 December, mobility to the West declined back to the scale of the 1960s. Luckily for Poles, this regression did not last long: as early as 1984, westward mobility exceeded the pre-1981 level, with 738,000 registered trips. The gradual liberalization of Polish passport policy towards the trips outside the bloc combined with the continuing restrictions on entry of Poles into other communist states, made mobility to the West relatively higher. While in the 1970s, trips to the West accounted for just 3–5 percent of the total mobility abroad, in the 1980s, they made up 20–25 percent of it.
Paradoxically, the same communist party that presided over an almost complete closing of the country’s borders in the early 1950s introduced conditions for an unprecedented expansion of international mobility twenty years later and dismantled the restrictive system of mobility control in the next decade. Introducing millions of Poles to foreign travel, it exposed them to new experiences and temptations, which the initial severe restrictions on exit were intended to prevent. The economic decline of the late PRL and the erosion of its passport policy brought about a true explosion of mobility, its for-profit part in particular. We may divide this into streams of petty traders and labor migrants, the latter consisting of those working abroad either legally or illegally.
Great Petty Trade
The gradual liberalization of the passport policy since the mid-1950s responded and contributed to the growing desire for travel abroad. By the early 1960s, business trips to Czechoslovakia or the USSR, group excursions to Budapest, shopping in East Berlin, or family summer holidays in Bulgaria became widely known and highly desirable, a part of the rewards available to members of the communist establishment and to a growing number of ordinary Poles. This should have contributed to the regime’s popularity, and it probably did, but it also opened room for various unexpected and undesirable practices among travelers. Border guards and custom officers increasingly complained of “pathologies of the tourist movement,” mainly smuggling of consumer goods, gold, and foreign currency by “false tourists.” 15
What the officers called “pathology” was often an important or the main reason for a trip abroad. Growing numbers of Poles were attracted to foreign travel by trade opportunities resulting from large price disparities and disparities in the availability (or unavailability) of consumer goods in Poland and other countries. Goods such as home appliances, jewelry, clothes, or shoes were in high demand and relatively expensive. Their black-market prices allowed for large profit margins: the traders made substantial returns, sometimes up to a few hundred percent. Investing a thousand złoty into a suitcase of commodities could bring several thousands in return, equivalent to a few monthly salaries. The relatively low costs of international transport, which evidently had not been set with this kind of mobility in mind, contributed to making the phenomenon of petty trade widespread. Some custom regulations were initially also quite favorable, and when the authorities tightened regulations on one kind of goods, the traders switched to others or learned ways to smuggle. For example, traders moving a commodity whose import or export was strictly limited made multiple trips with a small quantity of such goods or divided a larger quantity among several travelers so that none of them exceeded the customs limit. 16
Notably, the pioneers of petty trade in post-Stalinist PRL were the repatriates from the USSR: Poles in the territory annexed to the USSR who for various reasons had not resettled in Poland’s new borders right after the war and were permitted to emigrate only in 1956. Before moving, having sold their furniture or state bonds (which Soviet citizens were often obliged to buy), many bought radios, fridges, cameras, or motorcycles, which they could legally take abroad with them. Soviet regulations allowed for such a practice most likely because none had expected it to become this massive. Poles on private visits or business trips to the USSR soon begun to imitate their example, setting in motion a snowball effect: a diffusion of commercial practices and expansion of cross-border flows. 17 News of these commercial opportunities spread fast, also attracting people who otherwise would not have applied for a passport. Soon, they made a major part of the flows: in the 1960s, custom and border guard officers reported that those involved in petty trade included most participants in collective tours, a major part of individual tourists, and at least a large percentage of business travelers. This allows for a conservative estimate of one to three hundred thousand trips annually involving such petty trade. 18
Going from Poland, the traders took electric irons, cameras, crystal glasses, silver and amber jewelry, vodka and other kinds of goods, depending on the season and destination. From abroad they brought in East German shoes, Hungarian phonograph records and salami, spare parts for Škoda cars from Czechoslovakia, spices from Bulgaria, electric tools and gold from the USSR, etc., as well as nylon stockings, waterproof polyester raincoats, blue jeans, and electronic watches from the West. Pioneering traders explored new paths, tested demand for new commodities, and invented smuggling tricks and ways of avoiding passport and custom control. Their best practices, that is, those bringing highest returns and entailing lowest risks, proliferated by imitation, while news about attractive commodities or loopholes in the tariff barriers spread via social networks. Polish and foreign administrations responded by tightening regulations and sealing loopholes, but in the constant race between the highly centralized state bureaucracies and the mobile crowds of innovative and networking traders, the latter had a strategic advantage. As the cross-border human flows grew, the risk of getting caught decreased, encouraging new people to try, which in turn further expanded the flow, and so on. Even the collective “Friendship Train” tours to the Soviet Union—the emblematic form of socialist international mobility, and the one most supported and supervised by the authorities—were not immune to the “pathologies” of petty trade.
Sometimes, despite official criticism of “speculation,” the regulations and other conditions of international mobility encouraged or even forced travelers to engage in more or less illegal business. For example, low limits on legal currency exchange made many tourists bring with them various commodities known to be in demand in the destination country, so they could sell those items and use the money to buy food and services while abroad. Similarly, even if bringing certain goods or larger quantities of some goods from abroad was illegal, selling them could be surprisingly easy. State-owned delicatessen shops in major Polish cities legally bought foreign foodstuffs and alcohol from individuals, without asking about the source of the imports. In the same way, state-owned shops of secondhand goods (Komis) bought and sold non-food imports, turning a blind eye to how and where they could have come from. For example, in 1960 alone, such shops sold twelve thousand foreign watches worth 12 million zloty, while the Main Custom Office registered as many as . . . five legally imported watches. Some of the Komis shops specialized in supplying imported parts and components for industry. These shops thus served as an interface between the formal, state-owned economy and the informal, semi-legal economic gray zone, and the outside world. 19
The golden years of Polish and East European petty trade were the late 1980s, when Gorbachev’s bold reforms began to rapidly and chaotically alter various Soviet policies, including those on international travel. Satellite states followed, although at a varying pace and non-uniformly. As a consequence, in 1987–1989, Central and Eastern Europe saw a series of hastily introduced facilitations for intra-bloc tourist traffic, and an ensuing disorientation among the border guards and customs officers about what was now acceptable and what still needed to be prevented. This coincided with the deepening of economic problems and expansion of the black and gray markets, combining into a powerful stimulus for millions of Central and Eastern Europeans to engage in international travel for petty trade or work abroad.
In Poland, the liberalization of the passport policy in 1987–1989 found particularly fertile ground. Many people remembered the benefits of travel abroad in the 1970s, and international petty trade know-how was widespread. At the same time, as economic conditions deteriorated from bad to dramatic, with many consumer goods unavailable and in great demand, the fast expanding and increasingly tolerated gray markets in such goods combined with accelerated inflation and skyrocketing of black market exchange rates for foreign currencies (see Table 2). Other communist economies were more stable, with shops better supplied than in Poland (except for Romania), but they also experienced various shortages and unsaturated demand for certain consumer goods. Polish “false tourists” explored the imbalances, spotting opportunities for export from and import to Poland, as well as for cross-border trade with a third country. As the phenomenon of petty trade expanded, its practices and social institutions became increasingly sophisticated and widely known. This in turn made buying and selling easier, and some of the transactions gradually moved from the black to the gray markets of largely tolerated informality. 20
Polish Citizens’ Temporary Trips Abroad, 1956–1988
Source: Author’s compilation on the basis of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Passport Bureau annual reports 1956–1988, after 1970 printed as “Migracje zagraniczne. Informacja statystyczna”; Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance, various files. “Socialist” and “Capitalist” were the categories applied in the Ministry statistics.
Trips with official “service” passports, including sportsmen.
After 1974, counted jointly with private trips.
Black Market US Dollar Exchange Rates and Average Salary
Source: Data on the exchange rates are from Włodzimierz Słupecki, “Dwuwalutowość polskiego systemu gospodarczego w latach 1976–1989” (Warszawa, 2000); average salaries are from the Main Statistical Office (GUS) Statistical Yearbook, various years.
Data for June of each year, except 1988–1989, when it was for December.
The mobility of Polish “false tourists” reached an unprecedented scale. In Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and western parts of the USSR, the Polish tourist became synonymous with a peddler. “Wherever we parked [our small Fiat 126p], local people surrounded it soon,” reads an account of a Polish tourist travel to a Black sea resort. “‘Are you Poles? What are you selling?’ they asked. For it was obvious that we were selling something.” 21 In Hungary and the USSR, locals begun to call the open-air markets where foreigners sold their merchandise “Polish markets.” Large Polenmarkts emerged in Vienna and West Berlin too, while the bazaars of Istanbul became a key supply place for informal imports to Poland and other communist states. The more adventurous Polish false tourists reached as far as Mongolia, China, Thailand, and India. 22
Conservative estimates show an increase in trade trips from approximately 450,000–900,000 in 1986 to more than a million, possibly even 2.5 million, in 1988. In the last year of the PRL, when the border guard agency registered 19 million trips abroad, at least 2–4 million, and possibly as many as 6 million Poles’ visits abroad had a commercial character. The term “petty trade,” adequate to describe their individual transactions, is clearly inadequate as a name for this mass phenomenon. The numbers of trips do not represent the numbers of migrants, as some of them circulated repeatedly, yet we can safely assume that in the late 1980s several million Poles went abroad, and that the majority went for petty trade.
Temporary Labor Migration
Temporary labor migration from the PRL was smaller in scale than the mobility of petty traders, but it developed both legal and irregular streams. In the massive literature on international labor migration, their illegal component is usually defined in terms of the irregular employment of migrants, namely, according to the regulations of the destination country. For migrants from the PRL, this was usually the case, but their work abroad was often also irregular from the perspective of the Polish authorities. Many migrants hid their employment from Polish passport officers and had obtained their passports by declaring other motives for travel abroad, such as a family visit, leisure, or study.
As noted above, both the official ideology and the macroeconomic reality of communist Poland should have prevented unemployment, but there were periods when people in certain regions, unskilled female workers in particular, had problems finding a job. 23 Moreover, there were always those who wanted to work abroad even if a job could be found locally. Those interested could use one of three legal ways to do this, using their channels of recruitment and patterns of migration. In order of development, these were (a) the mobility of cross-border commuters who worked in Czechoslovakia and the GDR under the relevant intergovernmental agreements but who maintained households in Poland; (b) the migrations of highly qualified specialists, usually organized by Polservice, a state-owned placement service; and (c) the export of services, that is, migrations of work teams organized by Polish enterprises, involved mainly in construction projects abroad.
Circular cross-border mobility had begun to grow in the late 1950s when Poland and Czechoslovakia renewed the prewar convention on small-scale border traffic, which had almost disappeared under high Stalinism. This reopened the door to transnational employment of inhabitants from the border regions. Local authorities welcomed this as a way to provide jobs for the thousands of unskilled female workers who could not find employment in these peripheral regions but were needed by Czechoslovak enterprises nearby. Also, seeing it as a way of hands-on training, the central planners were initially supportive of the arrangement. In 1966, at the request of the East German government, Warsaw allowed people to take up similar employment across the western border. In the early 1970s, fearing a rise in unemployment as a result of the coming of age of the large cohort of baby boomers, it extended recruitment from the border zones to all of Poland, giving the provincial authorities the power to control the scale and structure of movement with a system of annual limits and permits. Together with higher foreign wages, paid partially in local currency, and the right to bring in duty-free goods bought from these earnings, this expanded such employment from a few thousand people in the 1960s to tens of thousands in the 1970s. Altogether, up to 150,000 Poles, mostly young, female, blue collar workers, worked abroad under this program through the 1960s and 1970s. 24
East German and Czechoslovak communists wanted to hire more Polish workers and repeatedly requested their comrades in Warsaw to allow it, but the latter had mixed feelings. When in the 1970s they engaged in a massive industrialization drive, they gradually scaled down the extent of recruitment and made foreign employers pay an additional fee for each worker. They were also sometimes dissatisfied with the wages, positions, or living conditions offered to the workers. 25 However, it seems that the basic reason for their reluctance was a Marxist way of thinking about the value added by labor, and who was to appropriate it. They calculated that the value produced by a Polish employee at an East German or Czech factory was much higher than the total of her salary and benefits, and were unhappy that the surplus (i.e., the profits) went into GDR’s pocket, rather than their own. They were not critical of the exploitation of workers per se but of the fact that their workers were exploited by a foreign government, even if a communist one. From their perspective, Polish labor was in a way the property of the communist Polish state. 26
For this and other reasons, Warsaw preferred the second form of labor migration: the export of services by Polish companies. These were contracts, mainly in industrial construction, under which Polish enterprises sent large work teams to construction sites abroad. Contrary to the cross-border employment above, the members of the teams remained employees of Polish companies: they received higher salaries and got a part of their earnings in the currency of the country of deployment or in dollar-denominated Pekao Bank coupons, 27 but they worked and lived together, were governed by Polish labor law, and were covered by the Polish national health insurance. More importantly, the additional value produced by this extra-territorial labor remained fully in the hands of the Polish employer— state-owned enterprises such as Elektrim, Polimex, or Budimex. This stream of labor migrants grew slowly to reach some ten thousand in the early 1970s, and expanded quickly later on. In 1975, as many as thirty-four thousand Poles were working at 141 construction sites in the communist countries and at 68 sites in the capitalist ones, from Libya to Siberia. 28
The third and smallest stream of labor migration consisted of individuals, usually highly qualified specialists, who were delegated to, or found a job abroad in higher education, health care, engineering, etc. To manage their movement, the government established Polservice: a state-owned enterprise, which acted as a recruitment and placement service, taking a 15% commission on migrants’ earnings. In the 1960s, only a few hundred people left Poland annually this way for contracts up to three years long, often to developing countries. Several hundred others went abroad under various intergovernmental agreements or UN programs. 29 In the 1970s, the numbers of such highly qualified migrants grew to several thousand a year, working from Iraq to Mongolia and from Senegal to the FRG.
For 1980, the Main Statistical Office (GUS) reported as many as 76,000 Poles working legally abroad, of which 14,000 commuted across the borders. 44,000 worked and lived in other communist states, 14,000 in developing countries, and more than 4,000 in developed capitalist countries. If we add artists who performed abroad on tours lasting from a few days to a few months, students in paid internships and seasonal jobs, as well as the effects of the rotation of workers, we arrive at a figure of 100,000 people who were legally employed abroad that year. 30
Legal labor migrations were less affected by the Martial Law of 1981 than other forms of international mobility, but some decline was visible as well, with some 95,000 migrants registered in 1983 and 88,000 in 1984. In the following years the statistics bounced back, to 105,000 in 1985 and about 150,000 in 1989, with the increase generated by the growing stream of workers in the export of services. They worked predominantly, comprising 70–80 percent, in communist states, such as Czechoslovakia (44,000), the GDR (38,000) and the USSR (26,000), and outside the bloc in the FRG (10,000), Libya (4000) and Iraq (2000). Working in neighboring countries was more attractive than ever, because migrants could come back home more often and profit from petty trade: they were partially paid in local currency and could legally bring home various goods that were in short supply in Poland. Selling them in the Polish gray markets allowed migrant workers to multiply the salary they earned abroad. For example, when the official exchange rate of the East German mark was 17 złoty, and the black market rate 60–80 złoty, buying chocolate in the GDR and selling it in Poland returned 200 złoty for each mark invested; bringing shoes or black pepper brought in 250 złoty, and baking soda could make as much as 300 złoty for a mark. 31
Estimating the scale of irregular labor migration is much more difficult, as migrants did their best to hide their goals from Polish passport officers, and were usually illegally employed abroad. As a rule, when applying for passports the declared intention usually was a family visit, for which the applicant produced an invitation from a relative—real or invented, or student summer camps. Migrants often extended their stays abroad, especially if they found a good job. As few Poles cold afford an extended, multi-month stay in the West, we may safely assume (as passport officers did) that almost all such stays involved some kind of gainful work. Passport officers believed that as many as 90 percent of all trips to the United States involved employment. Only a minority of visits to the United States ended by the declared date and some of them lasted a few years, which was a rational strategy when transatlantic travel was expensive and the chances of coming to the United States a second time rather low: the risk of refusal of a passport or of a US visa was high. 32 Other popular destinations were France, Great Britain, the FRG, and Canada, as well as Austria and Sweden, which in the 1970s opened the borders to Poles for visa-free visits. Some migrants also found irregular employment in communist states, especially in the GDR, where state-owned farms and factories hired seasonal Polish labor outside intergovernmental agreements, sometimes camouflaging this as internships or summer camps for the youth. 33
In the 1960s, when private mobility to the West was limited, the scale of unregistered labor migration could not exceed a few thousand trips annually. In the next decade, especially after 1975, it grew quickly. In 1977, the Passport Bureau registered more than 20,000 overextended stays, of which 14,000 lasted more than three months. In 1978 it noted 35,000 overstayers, and in 1980 as many as 68,000, of whom more than 38,000 returned after more than three months abroad. We may safely estimate that at least 50,000 of them were labor migrants. 34 To this number, we may add 20–30 percent of shorter private trips, lasting just a few weeks, which were a popular way to get a seasonal job at a German, British or French farm, or a Austrian construction site. In 1980, such an assumption would give us a figure of 100,000–150,000 short migrations. If we sum up all the above streams of labor migration in the year 1980—some 100,000 registered migrants, mainly in communist states, some 50,000 migrations by overstayers in the West and the 150,000–200,000 short-term trips—we reach a total of 250,000–300,000 Polish migrants who took a job abroad, in most cases irregularly. This was a small fraction of the total of 12 million employees (or 17 million of the active population), but they were becoming role models for the larger group that was to come in the 1980s. 35
Martial law affected all streams of Polish international mobility, but in the longer term it indirectly contributed to their expansion. In the late 1980s, several powerful push and pull factors made labor migration more popular than ever before. PRL’s economic crisis reached a new low, forcing many people to seek extra income. Activity in the shadow economy and irregular markets were increasingly tolerated by the government and easily accessible. Spiraling inflation and exchange rates made the value of earnings abroad rise much faster than incomes in Poland. When the average monthly salary equated to just some 25 dollars, a (tax-free) income abroad of 200–300 dollars made for a year of hard work in the PRL; the few thousand US dollars or Deutsche marks that could be brought home from a few months of work abroad made the migrant a rich person (see Table 2). As one of the migrants recalled, “I arrived on Sunday [in Chicago] with a job waiting for me, and by noon on Monday I had earned a month’s salary”. 36
In the 1980s, work abroad became widely seen as an effective coping strategy and migrants became attractive role models: between 70 and 85 percent of respondents in public opinion polls declared their readiness to migrate for a short or a long period. 37 As the worried head of the Passport Bureau wrote to his superiors: “[The returning migrants] spread around opinions about the opportunities for easy and fast enrichment in the West. They glorify the quality of life in the capitalist countries, which expands the circle of those interested in temporary labor migration . . . or permanent emigration.” 38
While the potential for labor migration grew in Poland, barriers to foreign labor markets lowered and the demand for migrant labor grew. Exit restrictions, which had limited migration from the PRL in previous decades, were fast eroding, down to their practical disappearance in 1988. By 1987 the MSW had facilitated issuing passports for temporary travel outside the bloc and ceased punishing those who overstayed their visits abroad. Making this information public was an obvious declaration of tolerance for irregular labor migration, that is, a way to encourage them. 39 Foreign visas remained a problem, but many Western economies had experienced the expansion of lower segments of their labor markets, were hungry for cheap and flexible migrant labor, and tolerated widespread irregular employment. 40 With substantial long-term outmigration, in the 1980s some 1.2 million Poles left for good, and having established many personal contacts with foreigners in previous years, the migration networks of Poles had expanded and could serve new migrants with information and assistance. Migratory know-how had also accumulated and become widely available to those who wanted to go.
As a consequence, the second half of the 1980s saw a rapid expansion of labor migration, both in the legal and the irregular streams. By cautious estimates, the number of informal migrations grew from a few tens of thousands in 1983 to five to seven hundred thousand in 1988, and probably a million in 1989. Their total number for 1983–1989 was between 2 and 3.2 million. As per the legal labor flows, in 1983–1989 more than a million such migrations took place, mostly to construction projects carried out by Polish companies in Czechoslovakia, GDR, the USSR, as well as in Iraq, the FRG, and Libya. 41 The numbers of migrants were lower because a substantial number of them migrated more than once, but we may estimate that by the end of the PRL at least 1.5 million Poles had gained experience in temporary work abroad. 42
The Migrations and the Evolution of the Communist Regime
Earnings abroad substantially changed the migrants’ financial situation and their positions within Polish society as well as in relation to the communist regime. Migration was a highly effective path to relative prosperity or at least to financial stability, preventing the decline of consumption and living standards in a period when many people were affected by such decline. In the 1980s, work abroad, according to one migrant, “help[ed] us, to some extent, be free from the worries of everyday [bad] supplies.” Besides meeting material needs, foreign earnings made it possible to achieve a variety of life goals, from helping one’s children in their careers and social advancement (through better education or purchase of a flat that made it possible to move to a city) to continuing prestigious but underpaid academic work (“I work all year as a scholar for my own satisfaction, and two months for the money, in Belgium”), to expensive hobbies and exotic travel. They could even buy time, by hiring a “stander” (a person who stood in queues for others), and avoid the nuisance of waiting in the ever-present long queues. 43
This process undermined the communist regime’s very foundations: for a fast-growing group of its subjects, the “People’s Government” was no longer the one and only supplier of jobs, attractive incomes, desirable goods, and the related social status. The migrants owed their new possessions, improved consumption, and social status to their own hard work, skills, and resourcefulness, which they often applied against the regime’s regulations, and it was all possible thanks to access to some very non-communist institutions: to capitalist labor markets abroad and black or gray markets at home. 44 The widespread exposure to the market and its apparent superiority in supplying desired goods and well-paid jobs greatly weakened the effects of decades of indoctrination about the disadvantages and threats of capitalism. As early as 1978, a Central Committee apparatchik remarked that “[citizens are yielding] to a fetish of capitalist currencies, high earnings and high living standards in the West . . . , to the opinion that good work makes sense only in the West.” 45 By 1989, too many Poles had been exposed to Western ideas and cultural patterns, including consumer desires, and yielded to the above-mentioned fetish. In 1989 they did not see much reason to maintain the struggling socialist economy, and the communist government that had kept it that way.
More than symbolic for this shift was the growing role of Western currencies in the Polish economy—a process synergic with the expansion of labor migration and earnings abroad. In the late 1980s, US dollars and Deutsche marks increasingly replaced the Polish currency in a large part of private savings and in certain transactions, to the extent that economists spoke about the “double currency system” (dwuwalutowość). Between 1982 and 1988, the value of private deposits in foreign currencies in Polish banks grew six times, from 618 million to 3.6 billion dollars. By black market exchange rates, in 1987 their value exceeded the value of private savings in Polish złoty. 46 Similarly, the value of sales in dollar shops (known under the oxymoronic name of “domestic export”) grew from five million dollars in 1970, to 374 million in 1982 and almost 700 million in 1988. By the end of the decade, dollar sales amounted to as much as a quarter of the value of the retail sales in złoty (by the black market exchange rate). 47 When inflation accelerated, people paying with inflation-safe dollars or the Pekao coupons were favored clients for anyone selling expensive goods such as flats, cars, or land—many small ads read explicitly that the intended buyer should be a “returnee from abroad” (powracający z zagranicy), that is, be able to pay with hard currency.
The slogan “Tam zarabiać, tu wydawać” (“Earn there [in the West], spend here”) became the popular wisdom. It conveyed not only one’s belief in the superiority of earning in a capitalist economy but also the rationality of bringing hard currency to Poland, where its purchasing power was greater. This was a consequence of the greatly overvalued black market exchange rates for hard currency, which largely resulted from . . . government policy. The main factor shaping the exchange rate of the dollar was the price of the most popular domestic product in the dollar shops: Polish vodka. When the price of a bottle of the spirit was 100 złoty in regular shops and one dollar in the shops of the Domestic Export Enterprise Pewex, the indirect dollar exchange rate was 100 złoty, no matter what the official exchange rate was. The overvalued black-market exchange rates were thus the product of a deliberate policy of the PRL government, inconsistent with its officially declared principles.
This mechanism was known to the party leaders, but even if they regretted its demoralizing consequences, they were not ready to stop it. The reports of the National Bank of Poland made it clear that the high exchange rates “generate excessive and socially unfavorable (unfair) redistribution of incomes: all those who earn in foreign currencies . . . benefit from a de facto currency rent.” However, the same mechanism that produced this rent gave the government hard currency, which PRL needed desperately: “the net inflows from [private] foreign currency accounts [in Polish banks] and the domestic export . . . have been much higher than the total of credits . . . , which Poland has obtained in the world markets.” 48 In the 1980s, the Polish economy was in a trap. The integration with Western markets in the previous decade—in the years of détente, cheap foreign credit, and industrial expansion based on Western technologies—made the PRL dependent on Western supply of components and parts for industry, and on continuing hard currency revenue to import and service debt. The government could not risk anything that might have affected revenues in hard currency, including “domestic export” and migrants’ remittances.
We may see it as an expression of the tendency to seek solutions to problems generated by the communist economy outside of this economy, which Jadwiga Staniszkis found in the toleration of various “capitalist niches,” such as private farming or small business. Similarly, Burawoy and Lucas wrote that communist states attempted to alleviate the dysfunctions of their economies by the opening up of the market in the second economy. Furthermore, Katherine Verdery noted a communist government tendency for “international solutions to internal problems”: the repeated attempts to solve their economies’ structural problems without making structural reforms, by reaching out to the capitalist world. 49 The policies of expanding the network of Pewex shops and attracting bank deposits in dollars, as well as the trend to liberalize passport policy, increase legal labor migration, and tolerate irregular migrations and imports by petty traders, seem to fit well with these observations.
We may put these tendencies in another perspective, namely, that of deregulation. 50 The expansion of the non-socialist economy in the late PRL, of which the mobility presented here was a part, was by definition a way of expanding the spheres of lesser or no regulation. We may wonder if the policies that led to this expansion were just coincidental to the policies of deregulation of Western economies, like those in Thatcher’s Great Britain and Reagan’s America, or were they somehow related, across the Cold War division of the world.
Currency rent created conditions especially favorable for circular migration. Studies on migration in the 1980s, such as the Center for Migration Research project on migration from Podlasie and Śląsk Opolski, and the research by Joanna Pommersbach, who focused on migration to Norway, found a well-established pattern of repeated migration. 51 The migrants went abroad for a limited period, for example, for two months every year, taking extended summer vacations from their jobs in Poland, to get seasonal jobs in agriculture, construction, or services abroad. A few hundred dollars brought from such a trip amounted to more than their annual income at home. This circular movement allowed them to live relatively well through the rest of the year in Poland, where they kept their households, jobs, health insurance, etc. While disengaging from some spheres of the socialist economy, they nevertheless benefitted from the PRL’s welfare provisions, such as subsidized housing, public transport, health service, or education (to which they contributed less). They opted out of socialism selectively.
We can see the same combination of earnings in foreign markets, profits from hard currency rent, and exploitation of the communist welfare state in the households receiving remittances from a family member (or members) abroad. Such a collective strategy of “delegating” a family member to work abroad and send remittances home is well known in migrant-sending countries worldwide; it is a rational response to various constraints that prevent migration of the whole household, and to disparities in purchasing power in the countries of origin and destination. The intention of coming back or sending remittances to the country of origin, where living costs are much lower, is also the reason for the migrants’ formidable capacity for saving while abroad. 52
The strategies of selective opting out were not unique to the denizens of communist states. Victor Azarya and Naomi Chazan, who examined social reactions to the malfunctioning of the state and nationalized economy in postcolonial Guinea and Ghana, write of strategies of “self-enclosure” or “separation” from the state. Such disengagement from the state and its official economy included entering into black market activities, return to barter and natural economy, emigration and moving back from urban to rural habitation, renouncing positions in the state administration, as well as retreat to traditional forms of solidarity (ethnic, kinship) and the use of alternative methods of justice. Collectively, these led to the creation of systems parallel to or substituting for those of the state: alternative outlets for needs that remained unfulfilled by official channels, which reduced dependence on those channels, and gave some protection from their uncertainties. Among the consequences of such changes, the “proximity to the state and its power apparatus has lost some of its influence on social status. Power and authority have been detached, leading to increasing status incongruence.” 53
These observations must sound familiar to students of the late PRL. The 1980s brought a dramatic decline of the PRL’s economy and welfare state, reducing their capacity to meet the needs of the population, to deliver goods and services in satisfactory amounts and quality. This caused not only widespread frustration and dissatisfaction but also various proactive responses, similar to those noted by Azarya and Chazan. 54 Seeking goods, which the etatized economy could not deliver, and evading the restrictions it imposed, millions of Poles turned to a variety of coping strategies, which disengaged them from the communist state. Sociologists wrote of “escapes outside the system”—into private business or migration, of reluctance to take visible positions in the state and party administration, as well as expansion of alternative subcultures and cultural activism independent of official institutions. 55 Similar phenomena of withdrawal from the official artistic or political scene, into privacy or alternative spheres, where such spheres existed, took place in other communist states. 56 The practices of the shadow economy were probably the most consequential of the various forms of opting out of socialism, as they were the most universal. When the official economy did not satisfy so many needs, most of the inhabitants of the PRL resorted to the other economy in one way or another, as buyers or sellers, producers, or service providers. 57
The practices of for-profit mobility, which we analyze in this article, by definition transcended the borders of the PRL and other states, producing transnational social spaces. 58 When migrants crossed the boundaries of the Soviet bloc, they produced a space that also transcended the borders of communist regime: its political and economic system. However, at a closer look, we may find that even those migrants and petty traders who moved within the bloc crossed a border between the communist space and the un-communist 59 one: namely, between the formal socialist economy and the second economy, where they usually sold, and sometimes bought, their commodities and currencies. The latter economy, as defined by Elemer Hankiss, “is not planned and organized by the state, it is not vertically articulated, it is not centralized, it is not permeated by party control and ideology; it is a mixture of subsistence and market economy and not a redistributive economy.” 60
Hankiss believed that the second economy was interconnected, complementary to, and mutually parasitic with the socialist first economy. However, their operating principles were fundamentally different, and they competed, so to speak, in attracting/absorbing the limited amount of goods available. Victor Nee, in a study of the Soviet Union during the economic reforms of the early 1990s, noted perceptively that “the expansion of markets reduces the proportion of goods and services that are allocated by administrative fiat, and as a result the power of redistributors declines, as does the dependence of citizens on the socialist redistributive economy. . . . The less citizens are dependent on redistribution, the less powerful are party officials and economic bureaucrats.” 61
While the terms disengagement and opting out point at distancing from the communist state, even more important was the other end of such practices: the engagement in alternative spheres—economic, cultural, or political—and the production of their social spaces. Each transaction at a gray market and each undertaking in the informal economy contributed to the expansion of this economy and to the weakening of the official one. While such acts were negligible individually, when multiplied by millions of persons and performed increasingly frequently, they made for a creeping but powerful process of economic and social change. The mass scale and persistence of such un-communist practices led to cumulative effects with far-reaching political implications. This was the case even if the agents of the micro-changes did not have any political aims: we may call their acts disobedient adaptation or locate them in the category that historians of the GDR call Eigen-sinn rather than conscious resistance or opposition. 62 Those who contributed to the expansion of the informal economy at the expense of the socialist one were nevertheless objective agents of capitalism (to use the Stalinist vocabulary), whom the invisible hand of the market rewarded increasingly better than the party rewarded obedient citizens. Their relentless and innovative activity eroded the basis of the regime and corrupted its agents, confirming the observation of Kazimierz Poznanski that “evolutionary forces, unintended and random ‘searches’ by all actors, play a much more important role in shaping social regimes than is often recognized in the literature. These forces apparently were able to largely dismember even a system as carefully designed to prevent society from altering the course taken by a ruling group as the communist regime.” 63
