The Crazy Commie Tour

This afternoon we began a great adventure in Krakow as we headed out on the “Crazy Commie Tour”.  First we met our guides at the hotel, who were two bright and smiling young women. After brief introductions, they proceeded to take us around the corner and introduce us to the cars we were going to use on our tour: a 1966 Black Trabant, and a 1989 Green Trabant.    

Trabants were introduced in 1957, and did not change at all through the end of production in 1989. When introduced they were thought of as bad cars, and at the end of production they were still bad cars.  

We climbed into our respective Communist cars and headed out to an area of Krakow called Nova Huta ("new factory"), built by Stalin to showcase his idea of the perfect home/work place.  

This newly constructed area consisted of a set of apartment buildings that housed 100,000 people. The apartments had hardwood floors and tall ceilings, and were very nice for post-war Poland. There are parks and green spaces, restaurants, and everything needed for a comfortable life, style including a trolley stop that went to the city center of Krakow in about 30 minutes.   The streets were all named after Communist leaders and important Communist events of the day.  

The people living there needed a job as well, so they built a HUGE steel mill a short 15 minute walk away.  As steel plants do, it smoked and polluted the air so badly that the buildings all turned black.   But the black skies were airbrushed out of the pictures that were included in the many propaganda articles showing how this was better than anything else (including in the US), and it would be the model for all future construction.  There are even bomb shelters… hey, you never know; this was cold war Poland. To top it all off, there was a HUGE statue of Lenin in the middle.

Fast forward to today.  After the fall of communism in 1989 the area went through a series of ups and downs.. Currently it is on the way up.  The apartments are considered large and affordable, and there are new restaurants on the bottom floors.  The transportation is convenient, so it is easy to get to anywhere, and the parks are very pretty.  It is getting to be the “Brooklyn” of Krakow.  The steel mill is still in operation, but has been sold to an Indian company and is much smaller and pollutes less. The Lenin statue is gone, and all the streets with Commie names now are things like “Ronald Reagan Place”.

It was fun to see this area and learn about its past.  It's interesting to note that this was a “one off”, and other communist apartment complexes were not as nice, nor well built..  

We got back in our Trabants and headed a few blocks away to where a cold war era Russian Tank was sitting.  After some quick pictures, we visited the steel mill entrance for more pictures, and then it was back to our hotel.   Our guides let us know that we had been “brainwashed” by them in Communist style, and then they were off on their way in a puff of smoke.  

Donna, Joan, Lenny and I were pleased that we did not have to push either of the Trabants during our trip.  The company owns seven of them, and barely keep three running at a time. 

Karl