I shared this story with a friend recently as I found it rather beautiful. Unfortunately, I wasn’t alive at the time of Communist Poland (I would have loved to visit) so this was shared to me by someone older.
Flowers have a particular meaning in Poland. During the communist period, Poland had a very successful tropical flower industry.
Under communism, energy was essentially free. It was regarded as essential to life and a kind of human right.
No one got paid much money, the average salary in Poland in the 1980s was $400 a month. The deal with the government would be that you live in public accommodation with subsidised food and cheap energy. As a result the Poles would have quite a basic standard of living.
But because of these extraordinarily low energy prices, Poland had a flourishing tropical flower industry. And it was very much the norm in communist Poland to, if you were going to have dinner with someone, give them flowers.
Poland was a very genteel, bourgeois society, unlike Russia, which never went through a process of bourgeoisification. It never had a middle class.
It would be the Tsar and the serfs, or some autocrat, king, or emperors who got replaced over time by communist leaders, politburo, bureaucracy, nomenklatura, and then ordinary people.
Whereas in Poland, they had a flourishing civil society between the wars. They had a very strong middle class.
They had a really different set of cultural norms and expectations to the Russians. So for example it was absolutely the done thing to be extremely good in Polish. Because they were so snobbish about language.
Language was a vehicle for identity. Poland was occupied between 1795 and 1914 by Prussia, Russia, and Austro-Hungary. Poles had to make their way with three occupying powers, depending on where they lived.
So for the culture to survive there was a very strong idea of ‘emigration into the soul’. Language became a vessel for national identity in a way that it doesn't in other countries, because they didn't have anything else.
Part of that bourgeois culture meant that when you went to visit someone, you gave them flowers. And so you would always arrive to people’s houses with these marvellous, not very expensive flowers - orchids, birds of paradise type flowers, things like that. But you'd never give someone a potted plant.
One day, I remember asking, “Why do you always give flowers?”
Someone said, "Poles are very grand, it’s because cut flowers die."
In other words, there is a magnificence, an incredibly romantic and evanescent quality to these extraordinary flowers, because they didn't last very long.
But in that brief moment, they are very beautiful.
In Poland, which is a country that periodically flourishes and is then visually cut down, there is a certain resonance.