Historical story

Clubbing with Bierut. Nightlife of Stalinist Warsaw

Streams of vodka, dancing until dawn and girls looking for celebrities in cramped, smoky bars ... Is this a picture from one of the modern pub districts of a big city? Not. It is a night in the Polish capital in the times of ... Stalin, Bierut, Gomułka and absolute poverty.

In the difficult 1950s, power was played. People were looking for entertainment and distraction from the bleak, perspective-less reality. They were partying in homely atmosphere or hot Latin rhythms wherever they could:in small apartments, cinema and theater halls, restaurants, cafes, on seaside beaches, in city parks, canteens, hotels, music and student clubs. Regardless of whether the provincial peasants, the migrant workers or the urban intelligentsia were having fun, no event could be complete without vodka.

Intimate big world

The guide "We are in Warsaw", published in 1956, listed forty cafes, eighteen restaurants and eleven cinemas in the city center itself. Amateurs of nightlife in the capital could choose from about 400 places.

Warsaw clubbing from 60 years ago was as follows:first, you could go to Orłówka on the corner of Żelazna and Chmielna Streets, which may not be the most sophisticated place, but it had its fans. You ordered "binoculars" and "jellyfish", meaning two hundred and jelly, and then drank and eaten standing up.

How to take a break from the gray reality of the People's Republic of Poland? It's best to start with binoculars and jellyfish, and then go to the city ... In the photo there is a line (probably) for toilet paper (source:public domain).

Then you could go to Praga, where a dancing took place at Targowa Street in Oaza. However, the loudest pub in Warsaw at that time was Kameralna, located in Nowy Świat, at number 16. Piotr Bojarski quotes in the book 1956. Awakened ”memories of the poet Roman Śliwonik:

[Kameralna] it was a substitute for the great world that supposedly existed somewhere, but also not for sure. But even if it was, it was overflowing with lights, cars, prosperity.

Restaurants such as Kameralna were enclaves of a lifestyle, fashion and custom alternative to socialist realism. No wonder that they attracted the so-called "bikinis", who, in the opinion of the people's authorities, were a symbol of moral decay and all the evil that flowed from the West. This style was described in detail by Leopold Tyrmand in "Dziennik 1954":

[…] tight pants, piled hairstyle, so-called mullet, shoes on fantastically thick lard. aut.]. Colorful socks, very visible from under the short legs, a bizarre jacket made of phantasmagoric material, a terribly high collar of a shirt. [...] they smelled different, imperialist America, because they modeled their clothes on its eccentric young citizens.

And Marek Hłasko added in "Beautiful twenty years":

Bikiniarz is bored, he is bored with people, life, Poland […]. Bikiniarz longs for the fullness of life, however, the exponent of such a life for him is the atmosphere of a nightclub, the possibility of sexual activity and love adventures.

Clubbing in Warsaw

Taking inspiration from the lush life of Kameralna for his stories, Hłasko was one of the many members of the capital's elite who spent nights in this iconic place. Jerzy Andrzejewski often fell for vodka and pickles there, and Leopold Tyrmand, Henryk Grynberg, Roman Polański and Marek Nowakowski used to come here.

The greatest celebrities could count on the unwavering interest of the fair sex and the opportunity for romance. Famous for his success, Hłasko constantly met new girls who he did not always treat in a gentlemanly way. To a young official from the Film Center on Puławska Street, he first promised a wedding and showered flowers, and then called "by the cup".

Who doesn't like melba? In "Kameralna", however, it was not appropriate to order it ... (photo:Robbie Sproule - Flickr, license CC BY 2.0).

Jerzy Urban recalled that it was a pub where writers, prostitutes, local "magnates" from the gray economy gathered . Kameralna was, in his opinion, the hottest place on the pub map of 1950s Warsaw. However, it was not the only one.

Warsaw gays liked to meet, for example, in the Alhambra on Aleje Jerozolimskie, and the intelligentsia in the Antyczna cafe at Plac Trzech Krzyży. In fact, clubbing could take place even without going to the other side of Marszałkowska:it started in Bar pod Dwójką and ended in Bar pod Setka ... or in a sobering-up center.

In ruins for a bottle of wine

Warsaw from six decades ago was full of sensual entertainment. Depending on the budget of the client, you could go to "young ladies" either to one of the hotel restaurants or better pubs, or to the street. Prostitutes were, for example, in Kameralna.

Jerzy Urban recalled that there were only two dishes that could be ordered:de volaille and melba but no self-respecting client took them. Prostitutes liked ice-fruit desserts so much from the bartender in Kameralna:"How many melbs, so many whores!"

In turn, the well-known theater and film director Izabella Cywińska, minister of culture in the government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, studied ethnography at the University of Warsaw and researched the lives of Warsaw prostitutes. To get to know them a little better, she went with her uncle to the restaurant at the Polonia Hotel. Her memories are quoted by Piotr Bojarski in the book 1956. Awakened ":

He explained to me what and how. That this one and one hundred percent that, this one is probably like that, and this one ... In the end, one of them came to me with complaints that this is not my area, that it is unheard of, that some shit is cramming and picking up the best customers, that is old gentlemen. We slipped out of there like unrepentants.

Much cheaper streets could be found, for example, in the vicinity of Chmielna, among the ruins and rubble. Ernest Skalski recalls that from their place of work they were called "Georgians" and points out that in the summer it was more difficult, because "amateur competition went out onto the street:students, clerks, nurses who wanted to earn some extra money". Jacek Kuroń also wrote that the inhabitants of the House of Young Workers on Ogrodowa "went to rubble for a few zlotys, for a bottle of wine".

In the Warsaw of the mid-1950s, you could also watch a striptease. The first took place in the Central Students' Club of the Warsaw University of Technology "Stodoła", opened in April 1956 at Emilii Plater Street. The model allegedly danced in a borrowed French bra, which at its culmination ... could not unfasten, because it fastened differently than Polish bras.

Ernest Skalski, on the other hand, recalls the show at Kongresowa in the Palace of Culture and Science: I remember that the young lady was getting off her clothes quite painstakingly. And when she was about to take off her bra and panties, huge paper flowers were popping up on the stage.

People's Poland is vodka

As Krzysztof Kosiński writes in the introduction to his "History of drunkenness in the times of the People's Republic of Poland", Poles in this era became "one of the most drunk nations in the world". In the mid-1950s, a statistical citizen spent almost one average monthly salary on alcohol. Alcohol was one of the easiest and most widely available products in the times of the Polish People's Republic.

This was due to a large consumption of alcoholic beverages associated with the "proletarian-folk" style of drinking, that is, a lot and often. Even hairdresser's water was drunk for dandruff, denatured alcohol known as "blind", purified aviation gasoline, Czech polish.

And although it will sound shocking, in the 1950s, as Krzysztof Kosiński emphasizes, the quality of vodka left a lot to be desired, because… there were no washing machines for returnable bottles. So it happened that people stored kerosene, gasoline or solvents in them, and then sold them at collection points and refilled vodka if not thoroughly or not washed at all.

Quoted by Piotr Bojarski in the book 1956. Awakened ", writer and screenwriter Janusz Głowacki recalled that it was fashionable to drink from a briefcase at the time:

In the People's Republic of Poland, everyone carried briefcases, both a clerk, a worker, and a writer. You would go to the premises, order orangeade and add to the glasses from the briefcase, because alcohol was expensive on the spot. In the morning people were seen lining up. They were waiting for the opening of the first liquor store.

Even Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper did not avoid the Polish "Wyborowa". Well, at least on the set of "Love in the Afternoon", which this shot comes from (source:Allied Artists Pictures Corporation, public domain).

What was drinking? Cognacs, wines, rye and select vodka, accompanied by liqueurs. Vodka, which reigned supreme in homes and pubs, was Poland's national pride. When the movie "Love in the Afternoon" was released in 1957, in which Gary Cooper offered Audrey Hepburn "Wyborowa", the audience chanted. Then they went to drink after the screening.

In the mid-1950s, revenues from the sale of alcohol accounted for 11% of the budget and grew year by year, so it did not pay off for the state to fight drunkenness. Was there a problem at all? A popular anecdote in response to the question of when alcoholism will be abolished under socialism, stated: We still have to wait a little longer, but we have already made a big step in this direction - we have eliminated the game! In 1956, the first sobering-up stations began to be established in Poland:first in Warsaw, then in other large cities.

At the end of the 1950s, 97,000 people annually went to "sobering up". people. This is often how night clubbing ended.