Volumen 34 (2016): Edición 1 (December 2016)
ECONOMIC CRIME

This is a speech by superintendent Tomasz Trawinski, the regional police commander in Poznań, who opened the first of the series of conferences devoted to the history of financial crime in Poland. The present threat of escalating financial crime is not only the concern of the agencies established for fighting this abnormality, but also of other institutions which can potentially be of help in fulfilling this task. In this field, the Polish police is open to new forms of cooperation and one of them is the collaboration with academic and scientific centers.

It might seem natural to think that the socialist model of the economy, and a reality where collective property prevailed, eliminated the problem of financial crime. But did it really? This paper, which presents the scale of this type of crime as reflected by GUS (Polish Central Statistical Office) statistics, is an attempt at answering this question. At the same time we would like to present the “3 Cs” model (circumstances, character, chance), in which all the “C” factors occurred simultaneously, but on each occasion each of these had a different impact on the particular criminal act.

Financial crime was one of the recurring themes in crime stories written in the period of socialist Poland. The writer who first undertook this subject was Leopold Tyrmand in his book “The Man with the White Eyes” (1955). The publication of this book is considered one of the symptoms of the cultural “thaw” and the end of real socialism. Tyrmand shows crime which develops when the state, cooperative and private businesses meet, but also the corruption and powerlessness of Citizen’s Militia. During Władysław Gomułka’s administration (1956–1970), this problem often recurred e.g. in the books written by Anna Kłodzińska and Barbara Gordon. Very often the villain was the “fraudulent director”. Both the meat scandal and the leather scandal were described in crime novels. Edward Gierek’s administration (1970–1980) was the time when the theme of financial crime was abandoned, but it returned after the introduction of martial law in 1981. This time, it was pointed out that it was the previous administration that had committed frauds. Crime novels accurately described the economic abnormalities of socialist Poland, the hampering of individual initiatives and the omnipresent corruption, but they also reflected the state’s policy towards the people in power who were illegally gaining wealth.

In socialist Poland, in the reality of centrally planned economy, average citizens experienced chronic deficits of basic commodities. Although the intensity of the problem varied, at no time could one say that the official market fully satisfied the demand for basic or luxurious goods sought by citizens. On the one hand, the market was steered manually, prices were set and kept on the same level for many years, and the volume of production and its cost was centrally planned, but on the other hand, salaries in national companies were raised, which resulted in unsatisfied demand for the goods that the official market lacked. How, then, did average citizens deal with these problems? How, by committing more or less serious financial crimes, did they become players in the black market game, the stake of which was satisfying their own needs? This article attempts at describing the situation in this specific market in various periods of socialist Poland. It also tries to demonstrate which products were the most desirable and most often sold in the black market. Most citizens of socialist Poland, knowing that their behavior is against the law, limited their participation in the black market to purchasing or selling the most urgently needed products.

The pivotal motive behind financial crime in the real socialist states was the chronic shortage of goods and services. In the case of Poland under the Gomułka administration (1956-1970), a factor which contributed to the prevalence of practices considered economically criminal was, ironically, the liberalization of the government in the period following Władysław Gomułka’s rise to power. The procedure of issuing new licenses to private and co-operative manufacturing businesses fostered illegal practices, because the new businesses needed supplies of deficit resources. Private trade businesses struggled with similar problems. The authorities tried to prevent financial crime by concentrating on publishing new laws which allowed heavy punishment for those behind the biggest economic scandals. In this field, the penal policy was shaped by the top authorities of the communist party, and their decisions were binding for the institutions of the justice system. Such decisions of the top authorities of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PUWP) were behind the death sentence for Stanisław Wawrzecki, who was charged with fraudulence in meat trade in Warsaw. Poles’ attitude towards financial crime was not clear-cut. One the one hand, in their letters to authorities, many Poles expressed their support for severe punishment for those responsible for the biggest fraud, while others objected towards capital punishment for Wawrzecki. The information we have on the dynamics of confirmed financial crimes does not provide a clear answer whether it was actually related to the severity of the punishments.

The subject of this article is financial crime among workers, in particular industrial workers who were supposed to be the “vanguards” of the new political system created in Poland after the year 1944. The paper will concentrate on theft in industrial plants and its motivations. This text also discusses the speed with which these negative – both for the economy and the Polish society – phenomena were shaped in the times when the experience of occupation and the new political experiences created unique circumstances their emergence.

Systemic transformation in Poland after the Second World War led to deep transformations within the economy. It did not, however, change the way people thought. Despite the chaos of the post-war period, in which all the negative features shaped in the period of occupation manifested themselves, it seemed that the conceptual leaders of the Polish political and economic life would create new quality. However, it soon turned out that old habits die hard and the system created by communists opened a field for many abuses. This was accompanied by a sense of impunity, as the most prominent personalities in a given region were also involved in economic scandals. All this resulted in the creation of “cliques” in which both prominent Party activists and people put by the Party in high positions (usually also members of the Polish United Workers’ Party, PUWP) played important roles. On the one hand, after 1956, surveillance by the Security Office (UB) or Security Services (SB) was not that strict anymore, and on the other, the so-called “private initiative” started to develop fast – therefore the more “entrepreneurial” individuals started to exploit the situation and gain wealth. Abusing one’s position to organize large-scale thefts was considered relatively normal. This happened in various forms: sometimes directly, but more often by supporting or even organizing private projects with the use of the national, though unsupervised, supply of raw materials or products. This way, the Party members grew richer at the expense of the companies they worked for. This business was relatively widely tolerated by ordinary citizens, who saw it as an excuse to also “organize” goods individually for their own purposes in the companies which employed them. This common belief that “everybody steals” allowed people to justify their own dishonesty. Any attempts to fight this problem failed to produce satisfactory results. The diagnosis, even if correct, had to face reality, in which the pursuit of a better quality of life by the Party elites collided with the officially promoted ascetic lifestyles of the “ideological communists”, who, like Władysław Gomułka, did not understood the new times.

Nationalization and the introduction of state-controlled economy led to the emergence of abnormal social phenomena, including system-specific crimes. Economic transformations were the foundation of the systemic revolution carried out in the first decade after the Second World War, therefore they were the subject of interest for the Ministry of Public Security. That is why financial crimes were treated just like political crimes, which was also justified by legal provisions, as no specific definition of this type of crime existed. This allowed the authorities (secret police, prosecutor’s office, courts, media) to interpret the events according to their will and current political needs, and, as a result, to administer various overt or covert repressions (death penalty, imprisonment, forced cooperation with the secret police).

The birth of the “Solidarity” Independent Self-governing Trade Union in 1980 was accompanied by a strong revisionist movement. The Polish society expected punishment for the previous administration, led by Edward Gierek, as it was their policy up to that point that resulted with enormous external debt and ubiquitous shortages of consumer goods. A lot was said about wastefulness, corruption and professional negligence, both in the state administration and in the managements of Polish companies. And these opinions were somehow justified, as evidenced by the results of audits performed by the Supreme Audit Office (Najwyższa Izba Kontroli, NIK) in the years 1976–1980. Information recorded in the audit documentation was in line with the social attitudes. Due to formal and legal conditions back then, NIK auditors could not inspect the most important companies, however they managed to prove that the scale of illegal actions committed by directors and managers was large and increased year by year.

The article refers to the economic consequences of the post-war division of Europe into the capitalist West and communist East. One of the consequences of this division was the creation of peculiar crime phenomenon on the eastern side of the “iron curtain”, which consist on exploit the prices and goods availability differences between wealthy West and backward East of Europe. This being the case of illegal movement of goods, begun from the 1940s, between those two worlds. In article you can find the outline of characteristic for the whole Polish “People’s” Republic period smuggling conducts. The key subject of following text is first of all the problem of car smuggling in the 1980s, which wasn’t researched by polish historians before. In this interesting for us times in Western Europe (West Germany, Austria, France) and in Scandinavia at least few groups of organized crime were active in a areas of car stealing and smuggling a luxury goods into Poland. The essence of following article are the presentation of these groups, their bosses, criminal practices and techniques and indication of the cooperation between polish car smugglers and western countries citizens. Sources for this text are based first of all on operational and investigation records of former Security Service collected in archives of the Institute of National Remembrance.

The article describes a failed attempt to attribute financial crime – embezzlement of the money belonging to the Greater Poland Headquarters of the Local Council of the Polish Scouting and Guiding Association – to scoutmaster Jan Poplewski. However, from the very beginning, the security services were interested in his anti-systemic activity, i.e. inspiring illegal activities among young scouts in the Stalinist period. This story serves as an example for exploring the underresearched problem of attributing various crimes to the opponents of the system, in order to discredit them and use this fact for propaganda purposes. The scale of this problem is impossible to estimate at present, but sometimes it is possible to describe individual cases – for example the case of scoutmaster Jan Poplewski.