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Socialism at the Milk Bar

The authoritarian socialist regimes of the twentieth century tried to rescue people from ‘kitchen slavery’ through communal eateries. In Poland, they survive and thrive.

An eatery with dark green walls and jade green trim, with counters to pick up food on the left and dining tables on the right.

Poland’s milk bars reflect the Bolshevik emphasis on communal eating. (Photo by Nicolas Grospierre)

In the centre of the Polish capital, Warsaw, is a street called Nowy Swiat — New World Street. Built in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in a neoclassical style and reconstructed very meticulously to something like its original appearance after Warsaw’s near-total destruction by Nazi Germany in 1944, it is the very heart of bourgeois […]

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