In Europe

the 17,000 people who used to work at the Lenin dockyard, there are maybe 2,000 left.’ The grass grows tall between the paving stones, the brick warehouses are empty, rusty railings run from one bush to the other, in the silence you can hear the melting snow gurgle through the zinc gutters. But the yards are not completely dead. A huge crane comes clanging past, a railway engine appears from around a corner, workers are welding and sand-blasting. This is not bygone glory, more like a slowly dissolving past.
    I am reminded of the story a lady friend, a photographer, once told me about an encounter in a small Portuguese village, not long after the Carnation Revolution. An old man she met there had pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘A member, for forty years.’ It was his certificate of membership in the Communist Party, the symbol of dozens of years of silent resistance, of hope of a better life – if not for him, then at least for his children. The collapse of the communist experiment was inevitable. For many it came as a liberation, but it was also a trauma, and this fact is systemically ignored in a triumphant Western Europe. It brought democracy and intellectual freedom, but only a small portion of the population was better off materially. In Poland, you can clearly see both sides of the story. The figures are amazing: inflation went down from 600 per cent in 1990 to 5.5 per cent in 2001. Foreign investments rose in that same period from several million to almost $5 billion, the country's per capita national production more than doubled from $1,500 in 1990 to almost $4,000 in 1998.
    At the same time, the average Polish citizen experienced something very different. Many of the social facilities that were once free or very inexpensive – medicine, hospitals, day-care centres, schools, care for the elderly – today cost a great deal. Millions of Poles lost their jobs, and the pensionsfor the elderly and invalids lost much of their buying power. As a fellow passenger told me in the train to Gdansk: ‘We used to have plenty of money, but there was nothing to buy. Now there's plenty to buy, but we have no money. In the final analysis, we're no better off. We've been fooled.’
    The collapse of the wall did not bring prosperity to huge numbers of Eastern European families, but rather shortage: at home, in the schools and hospitals, in every area. Figures from the World Bank clearly show the scope of the drama: in 1990, seven per cent of all Central and Eastern Europeans lived below the poverty line. In 1999 that had risen to twenty per cent. In that regard, Eastern Europe was worse off than East Asia (fifteen per cent) or Latin America (eleven per cent). The United Nations signalled the same trend: in 1999 there were ninety-seven million people living below the poverty level in the former Eastern Bloc, as compared to thirty-one million in 1990.
    The situation has to do in part with the legacy of years of stagnation and Soviet exploitation, with hopelessly obsolete industries, with maintenance that lagged behind by decades. In Poland, the small farmers are in big trouble. They cannot keep up with the competition from Western Europe and the rest of the world. In Berlin, fountains of water regularly burst through the asphalt: yet another broken water main from the DDR years. The Prague metro still used the leaden Soviet train carriages which the Russians had once foisted on the Czechs; in 1998, one of the capital's subway bridges nearly buckled under their weight.
    After the collapse of the wall, communism may be viewed as a failed and twisted experiment in social modernisation. ‘But,’ the writer, politician and acadamic George Schöpflin observes, ‘at a deeper level it was much more than that. It tried to create a new civilisation, and to base that on a fundamentally different way of arranging the world.’ The fall of communism also meant the fall of an entire system of morality, and it is within this vacuum that Eastern Europeans must struggle towards the development of new forms of citizenship. ‘Huge numbers of people have essentially no idea what politics is about, what can be reached through it and what cannot. They expect immediate results, and are filled with bitterness when those results do not come … Slowly, very slowly, the myth of the West is being replaced by the reality of the West.’
    Gazeta Wyborcza is Poland's biggest media company. The daily newspaper