> Polish authors found plenty of ways to be critical without having to divert into genre fiction.
There is this misconception popular even among young Poles that the communism in Poland was a period of hardship and oppression. Sure, many things were bad, but if one talks to one's parents and grandparents, they seem to be mostly happy with that period and in many ways would gladly trade it for what we have today.
Especially censorship in Poland was mostly a façade. The system paid lip service to it, but generally people were free to criticize the government, communist reality and made a great lot of self-criticizing works of art.
Living might have been harder in other Soviet states. It definitely was bad in Russia. But here in Poland, we had as benevolent socialist system as one could be. You could be known as a religious person and not a member of the Party, and still hold a top accounting position in a strategic government enterprise.
Beware of romanticizing of the past by the older generation, who will be good at remembering their own relatively trouble free lives while ignoring the hardships that others endured.
Poland had a ton of things that were very very wrong, look no further than the SB and their victims. The fact that 98% of a nation experienced no significant hardships does not detract from that at all.
It is very well possible to have a totalitarian dictatorship in which everybody has a job and there is food on the table and an outward appearance of relative prosperity, but totally rotten underneath.
Poland did not have a 'benevolent socialist system' by any measure.
I'll just leave this link here, you can research the SB and Jaruzelski on your own good time:
Anyway I wouldn't trade a 'benevolent socialist system' (somehow Polish case) for a 'benevolent fascist system' (somehow Portuguese case). Average life standards in Portugal were light-years distance from Polish ones.
Ex: While living in Poland, once I commented to a friend that my grandparents could barely read and one grandmother couldn't read at all. He thought I was joking. Or another example: my grandfather got his first shoes when he went to military service. These situations were unthinkable in Poland during communist times. In Poland at the same time lots of people were having university education and most people from lower classes were having holidays.
There is this misconception popular even among young Poles that the communism in Poland was a period of hardship and oppression. Sure, many things were bad, but if one talks to one's parents and grandparents, they seem to be mostly happy with that period and in many ways would gladly trade it for what we have today.
Especially censorship in Poland was mostly a façade. The system paid lip service to it, but generally people were free to criticize the government, communist reality and made a great lot of self-criticizing works of art.
Living might have been harder in other Soviet states. It definitely was bad in Russia. But here in Poland, we had as benevolent socialist system as one could be. You could be known as a religious person and not a member of the Party, and still hold a top accounting position in a strategic government enterprise.