Firstly I am not an expert but allow me to give a little limited input.
Propaganda spread by the CIA/US, a reactionary national character and some shortcomings of the system.
Obviously the US had Radio Free Europe which sent propaganda into many countries but this was not the only mechanism. The Soviets did not practice total information control nor prevent people from leaving to go on vacations so you have propaganda as well as glowing stories of what the west looks like (two cars for every family, two chickens in every pot, etc) that they were never going to achieve because the imperialist capitalist core desires to subjugate and exploit them, not give them a US quality of living. But they believed this, they believed in the Potemkin village of West Germany.
Poland honestly has always been in the last 100 years pretty reactionary and really even before that. For hundreds of years you had pogroms against Jews in Poland. Poles happily abetted the Nazis in exterminating Jews and others in the holocaust, there is a reason a number of death camps were in Poland. They now deny this active collaboration and you can see that Poland is a reactionary hell-hole these days and getting worse. Some of this is down to the religion, large amounts of the populace are Catholic. Not your ever so rare liberation theology extremists, nor your Church 5 times a year casual Catholics, but backwards, bigoted, hateful, weird, traditionalist diehard Catholics. The kind who hate gays, hate people different from them, are very judgemental and so on.
The Soviet Union by the 80s had problems. There were revisionists, there was corruption, there were many problems and the whole thing was beginning to look rusted and tired because of these. This is deserving of an entire post or several so I won't go into the details. Let's just say the golden period had passed and more people were growing pessimistic and cynical about the whole thing.
The first part is most important, they were convinced by the propaganda, by the standard of living in the west (that they were never going to have and still don't), and by leaders helped directly by the CIA, US State Dept, and so on that they could have their cake and eat it too. That they could overthrow this imagined brutal soviet communist rule and install some sort of friendly rule through the people directly via local unions and thus have the western standard of living and opulence as well as independence while retaining workers rights and power. This of course was a lie.
they were convinced by the propaganda, by the standard of living in the west (that they were never going to have and still don’t)
Half of this is the assumption that -- along with an idealized version of capitalism -- a transition to capitalism would leave all the social supports (e.g., housing) of socialism intact. Of course, capitalism went about dismantling the state programs that provided social support, so the result was exactly what you see in other poor capitalist countries: unfathomable wealth for a few, with poverty (or at least precarity) and a hollowed-out social state for the rest.
No. I'm sorry. I meant to say in the Polish people there were long-existing strands of reactionary thought and sympathy, helped along by the local religion (Catholicism)
Firstly I am not an expert but allow me to give a little limited input.
Propaganda spread by the CIA/US, a reactionary national character and some shortcomings of the system.
Obviously the US had Radio Free Europe which sent propaganda into many countries but this was not the only mechanism. The Soviets did not practice total information control nor prevent people from leaving to go on vacations so you have propaganda as well as glowing stories of what the west looks like (two cars for every family, two chickens in every pot, etc) that they were never going to achieve because the imperialist capitalist core desires to subjugate and exploit them, not give them a US quality of living. But they believed this, they believed in the Potemkin village of West Germany.
Poland honestly has always been in the last 100 years pretty reactionary and really even before that. For hundreds of years you had pogroms against Jews in Poland. Poles happily abetted the Nazis in exterminating Jews and others in the holocaust, there is a reason a number of death camps were in Poland. They now deny this active collaboration and you can see that Poland is a reactionary hell-hole these days and getting worse. Some of this is down to the religion, large amounts of the populace are Catholic. Not your ever so rare liberation theology extremists, nor your Church 5 times a year casual Catholics, but backwards, bigoted, hateful, weird, traditionalist diehard Catholics. The kind who hate gays, hate people different from them, are very judgemental and so on.
The Soviet Union by the 80s had problems. There were revisionists, there was corruption, there were many problems and the whole thing was beginning to look rusted and tired because of these. This is deserving of an entire post or several so I won't go into the details. Let's just say the golden period had passed and more people were growing pessimistic and cynical about the whole thing.
The first part is most important, they were convinced by the propaganda, by the standard of living in the west (that they were never going to have and still don't), and by leaders helped directly by the CIA, US State Dept, and so on that they could have their cake and eat it too. That they could overthrow this imagined brutal soviet communist rule and install some sort of friendly rule through the people directly via local unions and thus have the western standard of living and opulence as well as independence while retaining workers rights and power. This of course was a lie.
Half of this is the assumption that -- along with an idealized version of capitalism -- a transition to capitalism would leave all the social supports (e.g., housing) of socialism intact. Of course, capitalism went about dismantling the state programs that provided social support, so the result was exactly what you see in other poor capitalist countries: unfathomable wealth for a few, with poverty (or at least precarity) and a hollowed-out social state for the rest.
deleted by creator
Wow thanks for the insightful response. So the government at the time was actually reactionary? Where can I lean more about this instead of Wikipedia?
No. I'm sorry. I meant to say in the Polish people there were long-existing strands of reactionary thought and sympathy, helped along by the local religion (Catholicism)