Monthly ration in Poland, early 1980s

My wife was born in ( but too late to remember) a former Soviet state.

Talking with her grandma is pretty interesting. Recently with global inflation, some of the grandmas friends were speaking fondly about government controlled price of bread.

Then my grandma (in law) who still has more of her marbles than any 91 year old I've ever met said "lol, yeah that was the price on the sign, but there was no bread in the store!"

"Ooooohhhhh yyyeeaaaaahhhh....."

Note - a shitload of rambling below and going off topic, but worth a read.

Too young for that, but my brothers, parents and grandma lived through it. There's plenty of articles available about that shit though, if you want more sources. Personal stories like they somehow got a hold of licorice. I don't know if they managed to get it / it was available, or if they got it from my uncle who managed to move to West Germany. So my eldest brother went to my grandpa and asked him "grandpa, do you want these sweets?". Grandpa wasn't one to throw away food, so he said sure. Bro then went "is it good?" "Yeah it's good" "cause I gave it to the dog and he hated it". My second oldest bro bit the dog and told him (slurring his speech cause he was missing teeth at the time) "now you know how it feels". They both were hatching a plan to go into a "scary" basement together in the house. So the second oldest went "dude, you go down there first and scream if there's something scary so I can run".

I remember my parents telling me about how they got their car - the legendary Fiat 126p, "maluch" or "little guy". They were pretty well off, dad was a "supervisor of supervisors" in a mine - I'd compare it to middle management in an IT company? There were miners, "sztygars" (direct supervisors, safety inspectors directly next to the miners) and he was a "nadsztygar" which is "oversztygar".

If you want a "folk" song from Silesia - check out "Eye of the sztajger" by kabaret Nol Nejm - it's a song about a lazy miner who slept behind the digging combine (industrial machinery underground to dig the coal). He dreamt up a "leprechaun" type of figure appearing to him. Miners have a folk tale of "Skarbek" - a legendary figure that shows miners where "treasure lies" - not gold, but "still reflective / shiny - black gold" - of course meaning good quality coal. So Skarbek pops up in his dream, offerring him "something that's reflective / shiny like gold" and he takes it. He later gets caught by the "sztajger" (i.e. sztygar), shows his bag and he's been stealing lightbulbs lmao. Everything to the tune of "Eye of the Tiger" and the chorus going on about "eye of the Sztajger - sees everything, knows everything, has a notepad and notes everything, I'm telling you, crouched tiger, hidden dragon, he's not James Bond, he's not Kloss he's an eyeeeee, of the sztajger".

Kloss was another spy-figure, agent J-23, a polish spy that assumed the identity of a captured by the soviets german officer of the Abwher - german intelligence. A very popular TV series in PRL (polish people's republic, Poland under the soviet regime).

For an actual folk song (and not a meme) alternatively listen to FEET - Maglownia which is about a dude that has to wring out wet clothes his wife just washed. He wants to go play soccer with the boys after "szychta" (shift, usually in the mines), but his wife catches him and he has to "turn and turn and wring it out and getting pissed off, turn and turn, no way out, I'm not a dude that argues a lot, turn and turn, like an idiot, maybe I'll get to buy a halba? (0.5l, usually of vodka), turn and turn, I got blisters, I've had enough wringing". This one is incredibly catchy, you've been warned lol.

I got more stories from WW2, since grandma talked about it a lot in her older years. My dad was always rolling his eyes going "aight grandma, sure that happened". I had grandpa's parachuting wings from after WW2, sadly no number on them left for the amts of jumps. Now my niece has em in "her" lego bucket which was mine when I was a kid.

We have "A bridge too far" by Cornelius Ryan. It's completely unglued now, but the back of it has grandpa's address on it, when he was in an artillery battery going with the allies. He had something to do with Market Garden, but I don't remember what - for sure he didn't jump.

Fav story is Grandpa Johann (grandma was German, Johann was Polish, this is from her POV). They lived in Knurów, which is like a stones throw away from Gliwice (Gleiwitz) where everything started. A year before 1939 grandpa Johann and like four of his buddies were going to "guard the border" - get shitfaced drunk in the mornings, wearing "the uniforms from the uprising" (I'd assume the Silesian uprisings 1919 - 1921). They had one mauser and a pistol among the five of them. He also had a second uniform at home when the one got inevitably dirty from them being shitfaced drunk and rolling on the ground in the mud. They might've had more weapons each, but only brought one in turn, guess they didn't want to carry too much, and just have an excuse why they're away from their nagging wives.

Then 1st of September, 39' came. Grandma was cooking something and suddenly she heard "szzzzip, szzzzzip, szzzzzzzip". First thing she thought was "fucking Johann pissing off the German army again" (she used a regional word which could roughly be translated to "poke", but more in a sense of Steve Irwin in South Park "jamming a thumb up its ass" type of poke). Then she saw grandpa Johann in his full glory, jumping over fences. She said "how mighty he looked, fit like a gazelle, only slightly stumbling from the vodka". Then she noticed the Germans in "their beautiful long coats, with even longer carabines". She said they went after Johann and his buddies, but by the time they cleared the first fence with their long coats and guns "the mighty Johann Gazzelle was so deep in the woods they never found him". She panicked, grabbed the second uniform he had and stuffed it into the small oven for cooking, so it'd burn down. She also grabbed the pistol he had (and didn't bring to the border for some reason lol) and threw it into the septic tank / the shitter. The small oven choked on the heavy, wool uniform and started smoking the entire house. The germans came to see what's happening and to put out the possible fire. Luckily she was german, so in perfect "Dojcz" (deutsch, german) she told them that it's fine and to fuck off lol.

Dad doubted grandma till one faithful day they were connecting the house to a working sewer system and didn't need the septic tank. So they pumped it out and found remains of a pistol, almost completely rusted through, but the shape was unmistakable.

Later grandpa was hauled off by Wehrmacht and forced to fight on some front (don't know which one, probably western). He had leave, went back to Knurow and married my grandma "so she could get some money from the government in case he gets killed". He later got captured by the allies and they started talking to him in german. Obviously he knew some (since silesian has a lot of german words in it, as evident by some of my explanations of words above). They asked him where he's from, he said Gleiwitz. "But that's Poland" "yes" and then the dude, in perfect Polish went "why the fuck are we speaking German then?" "You tell me". So he enlisted with the allies. My mum and brother made a map of where he went for a history project for highschool, dude basically went all over Europe including Italy IIRC? It was weird as fuck. Sadly I have shown this to my middle school teacher, he took it and forgot to give it back. But yeah, grandpa survived the war, went back to Grandma and my dad was born in 1950. No idea if either of my uncles were older or nah, maybe a year or two?

My maternal grandpa defended the bells of a local church during WW1 from being taken away by the germans and melted into ammunition. They were from the XVth century. There was a wooden church there, built in 1447. In 1723 they built a second wooden church in place of the old one, that burned down during WW2. The bells survived till today and have recently been shown off to the public and rung again, for some occasion. I think it might've been 90 years of the opening of the new church. If interested, google "popielow dzwony" - popielow is the village name. They defended the bells, then took them and burrowed them somewhere, then dug them up after the war and returned them to the parish.

Also my dad has a notepad from his youth full of stupid rhymes, jokes and naughty puns which I recently found in the basement. He said not to read it so we stopped, but not before hearing the best pickup line ever. "Mis" means "teddy" or "small bear". "Misie" is plural. "Mi sie" means "for/to me". So you ask "have you heard the tale of three little bears? You look good to me, take off your clothes for me, give yourself to me". In polish it's "podobasz misie, rozbierz misie, oddaj misie".

Edit: also check a comment I replied to this comment, about german citizenship and us being a family of traitors lol

Authoritarian dictatorships that move wealth and power to the top at the expense of the peopel don’t work. “Communism” is barely on the radar, you can stick whatever label you want on it.

1987 certainly wasn’t the height of the USSR

I had the opportunity to visit Detroit in 2017 at the height of the USA. It was a hell-hole. Capitalism doesn’t work.

Meet the black market.

did you say abe lincoln?

What was the reason for rationing, was it inflation, unemployment, drought or what? I though Poland economy was free to do what it wanted, or was it subject to the same problems as the Soviet Union?

Are you referring to 'Victory Gardens' in WWII?

If so, that's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, since Poland had been at peace for over 35 years.

I can see why. Like if I was flat broke, these rations would be super welcome, but as an ongoing totality of what I could have for all of my labor? No, fuck that! The people at the top were obviously hoarding all the wealth, which seems to always happen every time this form of government is tried.

Is 20 cigs a day honestly the average nowadays?? Mind blowing and sad. My mum who was an addicted smoker since she was 10 years of age and went through maybe 5 to 10 cigs a day.

That's a starvation diet for a full grown male. Hell, that's even less than a very small female adult would need.

I wonder why it's 1.3kg. The soviet union adopted the metric system, so it seems like an odd choice. Maybe Poland had a historical measure that size.

That's excluding our hard on for AI the last few years. Would love to see this updated.

I'm surprised by how much natural gas makes up the mix.

Power usage levels in the US, though, are insane compared to mother countries.

electricity is only a tiny fraction of energy use.

Power for the power god

time to self-host a powerplant?

Rather than stimulus checks we need to be using the money to subsidize alternatives. And we can just switch subsidies. Some examples of that include that by reducing cattle subsides we can subsidize lower emissions meat alternatives or even offer free classes on how to cook meals that happen to be lower emissions, and we can stop funding airports and put that money into rail systems, similarly by removing mandatory minimum parking and reducing road funding that money can be put into transit solutions that enable less car centric lifestyles.

75% of sugar output exported to the Sovs while the citizens of Poland 'enjoyed' sugar rationing.

Comunimsm is not that bad! It only has a 100% failure rate, but that's the CIA/UFO/Soros fault!

Here in the USA I can buy whatever I want, even if it's bad for everyone.

It's the cigarettes that kill me!

Apparently it's not just you, cigarettes are killing several people.

You are assuming they have land to grow those fruits and vegetables on.

I might bring tankies out of the woodwork for saying this, but I remember one time a tankie told me that scarcity in communist countries is by design and it's a good thing, after I pointed out that people had to be on the waiting list just to get a car. What if the person lives in rural with no access to public transport?

I understand capitalism is wasteful, but doing the extreme opposite and making people wait to own a car or giving someone bare essentials is not a good thing. Having a scarcity economy is not good, especially considering that the Soviet Union produced more tanks than cars throughout its history. The American military industrial complex is rightly criticised for overspending, but communist countries are worse since the case is that more tanks were made than civilian cars. It means more budget went to the military than to producing consumer good. Talk about priorities.

Philosophical options aside, meat and butter are very energy dense food sources.

But it would make sense replacing that cooking oil with a large tub of universal purpose vegetable based butter: it would introduce more available calories, both for cooking and direct consumption.

This makes so much more sense.

Didn’t know! I limited potatoes sounds good

There's no yeast included though. Are they also maintaining a sourdough starter with that ration? Also a brioche would probably use up quite a bit of their ration for the month and possibly last about a week. Lastly, who puts vodka in rice?

One cup of uncooked rice does not make enough for me for dinner, I don't know how you think two can dine on that.

Nice, that was super fast. I guess it's probably enough for one person to survive if they practically don't move at all the entire month, for a little while at least.

Still not pleasant I imagine.

But what if I wanted to eat the soap?

You get another 333 calories from the sugar, add it to the vodka!

Easy

Yes. I'd also eat those bags of sugar and flour that I totally overlooked

Here's a fun fact, people generally underestimate the number of calories in a thing by 20-30%. Which you have also just done.

The total calories consumed each day if it's all consumed in 3 days, not including the cooking oil or the vodka, would be 11,145.

Holy shit that's a lot. I use about 10 grams per portion of 1 meal, usually breakfast.

I don't eat that daily but even like that, 30 full days non stop , that's like 300 grams

What the hell are you guys doing up there with a pound of butter?

Oh no, don't tell me. I don't want to know

That was it. No more than that. Worst thing is that almost all this products are from Mexico. Before the collectivists and leftists took power in Venezuela, we used to make all these products

Left to right

4 blue pasta packages, 200 grams each

4 green rice packages, 1 kg

4 yellow spaghetti packs. 200 grams each

6 shredded tuna cans. 130 grams each

1 oil bottle. 1 liter

2 red bottles, tomato sauce/ketchup. 220 grams each

2 orange packs, corn flour, 1kg each

1 pack of refined sugar, 1kg

1 white pack, dry whole milk, 500 grams

2 green packs, black beans, 1kg each

3 yellow packs, egg spaghetti, 290 grams each

3 red packs, elbow shaped spaghetti , 200 grams each

1 blue pack, lentils, 1 kg

Take into account that this is supposed to last a family of 4 a month. If it ever arrives.

Because it's assigned per family

Also, as most of these products are from Mexico, the transportation is not the best and most of the time they arrive corroded, open by rats, or with less or very different products than advertised

So yeah I'm glad I escaped the collectivistic hellhole with my family mostly intact