Kaska's snap shots

Working people

May 1st was a very important day to the communists - in Poland before 1989. It was a good opportunity to send the message the system intended to send via impressive mass festivities. The authorities used to organize parades of working people, with military and folkloristic accents. When you think about it now it was a truelly phantasmagoric potpourri of eastern European communist beliefs.

Many of you who know only tv pictures of communist parades think of a monstruous demonstration of totalitarian power a la Breshnev or nowadays North Korea. Probably fake missiles rolling slowly in front of a tribune filled with a dictator and his entourage. Every body deadly serious.

Forget these pictures. Only parades for the 1st of May that I remember were these in the 80s in small towns. It was a holiday, so my parents always took me to Jaslo, a Subcarpathian town of 40.000 inhabitants. This is where my grandmother lived. In places like that the authorities had a real dilemma about the parade. If they make a big parade, there will be not enough spectators to watch it. The big deal was to find the balance. In course of the 80s it got harder and harder because as much as you could make certain people participate in the parade because they worked for certain institutions, the more critical it was to make spectators to come and watch. People simply cared less and less and they knew that the system is too weak to persecute the masses.

My father took me to watch a parade in the mid 80s once. He said, let's go there, you will see, you will have a good laugh. A six years old doesn't really get the joke when it comes to dying convulsions of a system. She will not grasp it exactly the same way as she is not able to grasp a calculation with two unknowns, dear father! But I am coming off my topic.

Anyway, it was the only time I saw a real communist parade for the 1st of May, a parade with many gaps, because people did not know how to march. The spectators were no serious at all and it all had some folk atmosphere in it. Sooner than my parents thought, the world stopped, a change came, parades were over. And it is better this way. Yet, Polish catholics still kept the 1st of May free. It is good to have a day off even if it was once a communist holiday. To balance it out, there is an additional national holiday on May 3rd - the Constitution Day, once forbidden by the totalitarian regime.

So nowadays Polish just take the rest of the week free and take off for nine days, heading to their grandmothers or just for holidays. They call it "The long May weekend". And because there are plenty of happy, lazy Polish catholics out there, Kaska's snap shots organized a small parade of working people here. Somebody needs to work. Enjoy!