542
PARTISAN REVIEW
the Warsaw airport with no trouble at all. Those guards looked as if they
had been grade-school kids back in 1981.
Not everything in Poland looks so young and squeaky clean. After
those nine years I did expect a visual and pulmonary shock, yet the deterio–
ration of both the urban and natural environments is something you must see
and inhale to realize. In Warsaw, you may rejoice upon surveying the famil–
iar square in downtown and not finding Felix Dzerzhynski's monument that
used to be its centerpiece (after decades of standing there, sometimes with
hands painted red under the cover of night by a resourceful protester,
Mr.
Conscience-of-the-Revolution was unceremoniously knocked down and re–
moved last spring). But the effect of its disappearance is partly wasted, since
the empty pedestal is obscured by a fence with large letters: WORK SUS–
PENDED.
Similar fences with similar Balthazar's-feast inscriptions have sprung up
all
over Warsaw. They surround unfinished buildings or the construction sites
of the subway system, which was half-heartedly initiated before the political
upheaval of 1989 but has never really gotten underway. In Krak6w, the
beautiful old city with houses and monuments literally crumbling from fumes
and chemical emitted by the nearby Nowa Huta steel mill and other facto–
ries, the notoriously bad quality of the air gets to you on the first day of your
visit. You do not merely feel it in your lungs but also see it in the form of fine
particles of soot settling immediately on your skin and clothes. Those who
are not accidental tourists but have to live in Krak6w on a daily basis (due to
the situation in housing, moving anywhere else is, as a rule, unthinkable) face
staggering health problems, the effects of which are especially dangerous to
young children.
The massive environmental devastation, the still catastrophic state of
housing, the economic stagnation ofwhich suspended public works are just the
most eye-catching signal: these, and more, are huge chunks of Communism's
frozen aspic that the new Poland has not yet managed to melt down. The
law on privatization of the economy, including heavy industry, has only very
recently, after a protracted and often bitter debate, been passed by the Par–
liament. How to implement it in a country with an impoverished populace is
still anybody's guess. The easiest solution, which would consist of permitting
indiscriminate foreign capital investment, fuels political fears that Poland could
become the economic colony ofother nations.
Still, even in Poland's economy something has stirred. The adoption of
the "Balcerowicz Plan," as the Poles, by reference to the new Minister of Fi–
nance Leszek Balcerowicz, have termed the way ofjumping straight back,
with no half-measures and no intermediary stages, into the market system,
has already had at least one beneficial effect: the elimination of price subsi–
dies has succeeded in curbing the inflation that raged as recently as the end of
1989. For the first time since 1944, Polish money has some real value,
