EUROPE: FIVE YEARS LATER : Plock, Poland : For Better or for Worse : Life after the death of communism is sweet for some, bitter for others. The adjustment has brought strains.

It was a wet, dreary morning, and the sulfurous belches from Poland’s largest petroleum refinery had this medieval town stinking like a rotten egg.

Kazimierz Matuszewski’s mood was just as foul. He was neatly dressed in pressed trousers and a matching knit shirt, but the unending line at the unemployment office had deposited him outside the front door. By the time he worked his way inside and got the bad news, he was soggy and ornery.

Sorry, no jobs. At least not for a 56-year-old former office worker who has been unemployed for more than a year. Matuszewski had heard it so many times before that he wondered aloud why he even bothered anymore.

“Under communism, we all had a good life,” he said wistfully, mopping raindrops from his bushy brow. “Everyone had security, everyone was granted a job. Even medicine was free. Now Poland is like America. You need a lot of money to get anything.”

Just off the main road a short distance away, Stanislaw Tucholski was sifting through a stack of invoices in the musty garage of his red-brick house. Tens of thousands of dollars in electronic and machine parts extended into the rafters. His Volkswagen had been long ago relegated to the pothole-ridden street.

The converted garage is a retail shop and showroom for Tucholski’s thriving metal works company, started in the late 1980s as a one-man operation hammering steel in the same cramped quarters. Tucholski now has 20 people working for him. His wife, Janina, helps run the business, and he is expanding into a cathedral-sized blacksmith’s shop just outside of town. His $60,000 in monthly orders come from as far away as Canada.

“A lot of people complain that things were better the old way,” said Tucholski, 45, who went to work for himself as a means of survival after being fired from his state construction job because of his Solidarity trade union activities. “That is nonsense. I dreamed all my life of having something of my own, and this would have been impossible until now.”

Tucholski is bullish on Poland’s future; Matuszewski longs for its past. Together they reflect the seesaw struggle for the nation’s heart and soul being carried out every day in towns and villages from the Baltic Sea to the Tatra Mountains, places much like this former riverfront capital 75 miles northwest of Warsaw.

The fate of the post-Communist experiment in Poland, as in much of Eastern Europe, is being debated by politicians, businessmen and academics in Warsaw, Gdansk and Krakow. But it is also being sorted out--often with great anguish and hand-wringing--by everyday Poles in little-known outposts in Poland’s heartland, unwavering towns that have outlasted centuries of change.

“We have shown that we can produce a revolution to destroy something, but we have yet to show that we can create something as well,” said Andrzej Celinski, a former Solidarity activist who represents Plock in the Polish Parliament. “Unfortunately, in towns like Plock many people’s mentality is still in communism. They have freedom, but they are not using it as pioneers would.”

Plock has endured many invasions in its thousand-year history, and town historian Jakub Chojnacki predicted with confidence that it will master the capitalist one as well. People complain a lot these days, he said impatiently from his antique-adorned Old Town office, but he said the arrival of free markets most probably will be recorded by future historians as just another colorful fiber in the plush historic fabric in this town, whose name in Polish is pronounced Pwawtsk .

Plock’s story is Poland’s story, a continuum of triumph and failure. It has been plundered and raided from east and west, has played host to kings and queens, has served as the nation’s capital, has burned to the ground half a dozen times and has been swallowed up by Germany twice in this century.

In the 1960s, as part of the socialist vision of an industrialized workers’ paradise, one of the largest petrochemical refineries in Eastern Europe was erected at the north end of town. It is a vast complex that has polluted the air, dirtied the soil, tripled the town’s population and cluttered its historic horizon with unsightly smokestacks and concrete apartment buildings.

free-market economy will change this town as well,” said Chojnacki, who does not hide his nostalgia for the lost Communist era, a period when his 174-year-old Plock Scientific Society enjoyed generous state subsidies.

“But this is still a question of many years to come,” he added. “The old system gave us free schools, retirement benefits and what we call the Plock phenomenon--30 years of industrialization. We are still waiting to see what the new system will bring.”

The wait is now entering its sixth year, and so far the unfolding journey has been a turbulent one, an emotional and psychological roller-coaster ride that has not yet settled on a steady course. For every success in this town of 130,000, it is easy to find a failure; for every hopeful dreamer, a bitter cynic.

Five years of democracy have given Plock its first millionaire, a clever investor who drives a top-model Mercedes and runs his business from a cellular telephone. It has also given the town its first homeless shelter, a small building near the main street where about 30 victims of alcoholism and drug abuse struggle to collect their lives every day.

“These used to be hidden problems under communism--you weren’t allowed to speak about them,” said Rev. Marek Smogorzewski, director of parish life for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Plock, which runs the shelter. “The changes have helped reveal that a lot of people have been left out and are needy.”

Ambitious high school students at the prestigious 800-year-old Malachowski School in the center of Old Town gather in the afternoons in an entrepreneur’s club and talk openly about earning lots of money. At a nearby pedestrian mall, other teen-agers waste away the afternoons smoking cigarettes and roaming the streets. Police say teen-age thieves looking for a shortcut to capitalism pose the city’s biggest crime threat.

“It is very important to get a job that pays well,” said 18-year-old Sebastian Kajak, who was writing mathematical equations in a Malachowski study hall. “In these times, you have to make sure you can manage financially.”

Outside on the cobblestoned streets it is virtually impossible to find a place to park, thanks to a proliferation of automobiles that would have been inconceivable under communism. Plock has one of the highest levels of car ownership in Poland, but its good fortune has come at a price. Car thefts are among the most common crimes in Plock, and the lure of easy money has apparently been too great even for some law enforcement officials. Police recently cracked one of the biggest rings of local thieves, only to discover the leader was a police detective.

“We are still learning this new way of life,” said Andrzej Dretkiewicz, the city’s mayor. “We didn’t have the luxury of going to a democratic country to observe how it worked. It has been difficult, but we are trying to make it work.”

Even the 12th-Century Plock cathedral has been struggling with the adjustment. High on a bluff overlooking the Vistula River at the edge of Old Town, it is one of the oldest churches in Poland and one of only three burial sites of Polish kings.

During 45 years of communism, it became a closed fortress, an inward-looking refuge for defiant Poles searching for faith in a faithless political system. Today, traditionally clad Roman Catholic priests and nuns openly walk the narrow streets of Old Town, attend civic events, bless factories and public works projects, and run the homeless shelter, a soup kitchen and a religious radio station.

But five years of democracy have plunged the church into an identity crisis. The crowded Masses--and overloaded collection plates--of the 1980s are gone; offerings are off by nearly two-thirds. Many priests, accustomed to a life of seclusion, have found it difficult to get out among parishioners, while churchgoers, used to seeing priests behind the scenes, resent their sudden visibility and public moralizing. Two-thirds of Poles surveyed in a recent poll said the role of the church in politics is too great.

“For years Polish Catholicism combined two things: faith and a voice of protest,” said Smogorzewski, the diocese official. “When freedom came, the element of protest was eliminated. This is a time of adjustment and transition in Plock, and that includes the Catholic church.”

Nowhere has the transition been more trying than in the job market, which under communism was synonymous with full employment but now resembles a game of Russian roulette.

Evidence of new jobs is everywhere. Billboards and storefront advertisements beckon customers on main roads and back alleys to hundreds of new shops and storefront businesses. Living rooms and bedrooms have been converted into offices and makeshift workplaces.

In the case of Miroslaw Drozdz, a pipe-smoking 42-year-old entrepreneur, his three-bedroom apartment doubles as a production line for customized T-shirts, caps and pins.

It is Drozdz’s third incarnation as a self-employed businessman. He made gobs of money in construction, then lost it all when a deal went sour and a business partner double-crossed him. He then leased a Danish tour bus and ran luxury European tours, but soon went belly up when the value of the dollar jumped, and he could no longer afford his loan payments.

“Please don’t laugh,” he said apologetically as he demonstrated his newest trade on a hand-held pin-making machine in his son’s bedroom. “It took me a year to get my sanity back. I haven’t had anything to drink since a year ago June. Thanks to these little buttons--did I tell you they are made of American steel?--we can manage to live.”

Nearly 8,000 daring entrepreneurs--from seamstresses to computer programmers--have jumped headfirst into the market economy in Plock, building businesses, hiring workers and helping fuel Poland’s astounding economic growth, which is among the highest in Europe.

At the same time, countless have failed. More than 13,000 people--about 20% of the local labor force--cannot find work at all, also among the highest levels in Europe. Huge state-owned enterprises have let go thousands of employees, with a local sweater factory the latest in a long line.

About one-third of the 1,800 garment workers at the Cotex factory will be out of work by Christmas in a last-ditch effort to make the company competitive. When it opened in the 1970s, the operation was already outdated, having been stocked with antiquated East German equipment. It did not matter then, but today half the machines sit idle because they were designed to sew poor-quality sweaters for export to the Soviet Union, a market that collapsed with the Iron Curtain.

“There is a new reality here that we have had to accept: If you are not good at your job, you will lose it,” said Teresa Bonatowska, a 20-year Cotex employee and union leader. “And even if you are good at your job, you may lose it too.”

But Plock has accomplishments, and among the most heralded has been bringing in the coveted symbol of the capitalist West--Levi Strauss blue jeans. Since 1992, Levi Strauss’ factory No. 273 has churned out more than 2 million pairs of jeans a year from a nondescript refurbished warehouse stuck among a collection of apartment buildings not far from the center of town.

Town authorities were so eager to get Levi Strauss that they agreed to lease the football-field-sized warehouse to the U.S. company for less than a penny a year, enough to persuade Levi Strauss to cut off negotiations with other Polish bidders. Foreign investors, particularly big-name ones, were seen as Plock’s ticket to instant fortune and full employment, and town officials went to extreme lengths to please the San Francisco pants maker.

But the foreign investment euphoria has fizzled. No other Western companies have planted their roots in Plock, and local authorities, reflecting a growing public disenchantment with the failed miracle, have become decidedly more hostile toward the jeans giant. Complaints about noise and water pollution top the list of gripes, followed by general resentment toward a hoped-for cash cow that has not lived up to its promise.

“Levi became a symbol of disappointment in Plock, and some local politicians wanted to build political capital at its expense,” said Wieslaw Ryszard Kossakowski, a former City Council member who was elected to Parliament last year.

Officials at Levi Strauss said it has been a bumpy road. The company has had trouble filling middle-management jobs because of the dearth of experienced Poles familiar with Western business practices. Customs regulations have been costly and onerous, a particular concern since most of the jeans are exported--Poles cannot afford the $60 price tag--and almost all the fabric and raw materials have to be imported.

Levi Strauss would like to find Polish suppliers, but so far none have met minimum quality standards--even for basic items such as pocket liners. The Poles also have poor records of meeting deadlines and filling orders on time, company officials said.

Levi Strauss’ operations director, Jim Watson, a plain-speaking bearded Scotsman, said that the plant makes money and produces a high-quality product but that the headaches of doing business in Plock have been more severe than ever imagined.

“You can’t always concentrate on what you came here to do,” Watson said. “It is like there is a thorn always in your side.”

The experience at Levi Strauss has been watched closely across town at Petrochemia Plock, the huge state-owned oil refinery that provides about 8,500 well-paying jobs in town and processes two-thirds of the fuel consumed in Poland. The refinery is on the lookout for a foreign investor willing to drop $1.5 billion to make it competitive with Western oil companies.

The sprawling refinery is the second-largest taxpayer in Poland and the biggest contributor to the Plock city budget. Its future, in some form, is secure, but the relative calm of the last five years is likely to soon pass. Company officials say they do not intend to lay off workers, but they acknowledge that such pledges are really contingent upon who buys into the enterprise.

The uncertainty at Petrochemia hangs over Plock like a dark cloud of its noxious emissions. Five years ago, workers would have celebrated the prospect of a Western investor buying the company, but today “privatization” has become a word of fear and distrust, a precursor to joblessness.

Assistant Director Dariusz Krajowski-Kukiel, 38, one of the company’s new breed of managers, is keenly aware of the task before him. The direction that the oil giant and the city of Plock take over the next few years will largely be determined by people like him--go-getters who are young enough to envision a better future but old enough to remember the miserable past.

“We are trying to build a new image,” Krajowski-Kukiel said from a newly refurbished office at the otherwise drab company headquarters. “We want to make it so that when you say you are from Plock, you have reason to be proud. That was not the case under socialism.”