I think there’s a social energy and a confidence that comes to a people who overthrow an oppressor and take charge of their own national destiny. I saw this first in Zimbabwe in the early 1980s, a country which achieved majority rule and legal Independence in 1980 after 90 years of struggle against white-minority rule. This national confidence may appear even when, as arguably happened in Poland’s case, the successful overthrow of colonialism is initiated in the metropole, and not in the colonies.

For the last half of the 1980s, the Government of the Soviet Union (under Gorbachev and his team of reformers) was significantly more liberal than most of the USSR’s client regimes in Eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia, for example, the communist government in the last years before its downfall in 1989 tried to ban radio broadcasts and newspapers from the USSR!! As so often with colonialism (eg, Britain in India, France in Algeria, Portugal in Angola and Mozambique), freedom comes to the colonies only after a change of regime in the mother country.

So the pizazz you witnessed may have its roots in centuries-old Polish national character, or it may be due to more recent events. As with most cultural effects, probably both these causes (and others) are at work.

p.s. SMOKING?????