TV Reviews : Shattering a Rosy Outlook of Poland

Remember the all-night party on the Berlin Wall? Put away the balloons and horns. Eastern Europe is waking up to Life Without the State, and it’s not necessarily an enjoyable new day.

That is the overwhelming message of “Frontline’s” latest report, “Poland: The Morning After” (tonight at 9, Channels 28 and 15). Rosy, optimistic accounts of a freshly scrubbed capitalism about to blossom in the former Eastern Bloc may be flagrantly off the mark, if the film’s glum cautions are true. And in Poland, where a free-market economy is emerging--free even of the welfare securities typical of Western European social democracies--the shock to the system may be too much.

The needs of various Polish classes are in grave danger of canceling each other out. The Solidarity-run government of the new Prime Minister, Tadeusz Masowiecki, is allowing prices to rise while putting a clamp on wages and government spending. This naturally hits the pocketbooks of Solidarity’s original base: labor. Workers at an Ursus tractor factory reject Solidarity’s advice, and strike. Then, an offer to raise the price on tractors comes through.

That may mean a wage raise, but it will surely price farmers out of the market. One farm family speaks bitterly on camera about the new policies and how the future will be worse. A college student has decided to leave Poland for good, since staying would mean a life’s work to buy the toys that mean so much: a stereo, a TV.

The cold air of survival of the fittest hangs over the Poland of this report, and the promises of future public protest by factions on the extreme right and left tend to make the air chillier.

“Poland: The Morning After,” encumbered only by an uncredited narrator with an unhelpfully thick accent, contradicts most news reports on Masowiecki’s popularity. While the film holds some hope for the patience of Poles to withstand the unprecedented journey from state socialism to free-market capitalism, it suggests that Masowiecki’s days are numbered. It would have been good to hear from the prime minister himself.