“The East Block? It never existed!”

Viennese market researcher Rudolf Bretschneider, director of the Fessl & GFK - Institute, collects data about eastern Europe. What does his mountain of information reveal about the people in eastern Europe?
Florian Klenk in conversation with Rudolf Bretschneider.

What do the new members of the EU like, what do they eat and what do they think? A discussion about allegedly lazy Poles, Moldovan flower markets, alcohol - free beer in Russia, collecting jokes in totalitarian times and the reason why violence did not flare up after the collapse of Communism.

Florian Klenk: Professor Bretschneider, you collect data about the eastern European markets. Let’s start with the everyday things. Why does washing powder packaging in the East often look completely different to packaging here?
Rudolf Bretschneider: If you want to be successful in a market then you have to learn to understand its special characteristics. You have to get to know the different traditions. The colours of packaging are one example. These can have completely different meanings in different countries. The size of the boxes can also differ regionally. After the political changes, strangely enough small boxes of washing powder sold better in Poland, although the large ones were in fact cheaper.

Why was that?
At the time people didn’t want to spend so much money at one time. And there wasn’t space to store the large boxes in the typical small Polish apartments.

Which markets are changing most quickly these days?
The service industry, telecommunications and foodstuff markets

What do east Europeans like to eat at the moment?
Convenience foods and ready-made products are much in demand. Lack of time is a growing factor in eastern Europe. But the characteristic traditions in each country are important. Each country wants its own kind of noodles. Some want more potatoes, others more rice. If you want to be successful you have to know about these products. For example: the Americans wanted to test low-alcohol beer in Moscow at the beginning of the 1990s. At that time I said: it is a waste of time to test the product there, you can simply sell it, the Russians will like everything because there is nothing to buy in Russia. Around then Marboro cigarettes were even used as currency. But just look what happened: the Russians simply laughed at low-alchohol beer, they didn’t want it.

We still have a great number of cliches about the East. Some people warn about criminal gangs of those too lazy to work, others are worried about losing their job through cheaper competition. If you examine  your mountain of data what does the reality look like?
“The eastern European” per se simply doesn’t exist. We must understand that it is best to forget all the old cliches. The countries which we ought perhaps to call “Central Eastern Europe” were never an East Block and they certainly don’t form one today. They always felt independent and always had special regional characteristics. Agrarian societies today still have very a different mentality to industrialised or urbanized countries.

Were there or are there common features?
At that time many people didn’t have a colourful view of the future - no matter what they wanted to do, The future was uniform. With the changes caused by the transformation process the future is more colourful but also more uncertain. The societies are more varied. We can discern different speeds among different sectors of the population and a tendency towards individualisation.

Who are the winners? 
Above all the people who are now around 30 years of age, who received a very good education in the totalitarian era within a lengthy school system. What we call “human resources” are particularly well developed among this group. We see this in the number of people who are learning a second and third language. Many people learned Russian which they didn’t want to learn at the time. Today many are rediscovering the value of this language. An astonishing number of people can speak English and German, particularly in the Czech Republic.
The desire to learn is extremely high, as people know that the area of their profession offers the only chance of improving their personal situation. When we opened our  first Fessl & GFK Institut office in the East at the beginning of the 1990s we were surprised by the relatively high level of know-how about methods and the knowledge of languages which we discovered among the groups dealing with social research. In the matters of questionnaire technique, random samples and analysis of electronic data these people were good. They cultivated long but also unusual traditions.

For example?
There were researchers who systematically collected jokes - perhaps for the propoganda ministry or other state bodies - to use them as indicators of development.  They sat on a giant hill of jokes,so to speak. Whether they were very successful in their aims I don’t know. Incidentally, I myself also collected caricatures from eastern and central Europe, albeit unsystematically, as they reveal a great deal about the economic situation. I recall a cartoon that was widespread in Hungary around 1990:  two beggars standing against the wall of building together hold out a hat, beside them is a sign saying “joint venture”. Around that time everyone in Hungary was forming joint ventures. In Russia there was  a cartoon where a midwife lifts up a baby and says: “Funny, that’s the third baby today born with a bullet proof vest!”

Did people in eastern Europe like giving you information about their habits? Or were they distrustful?
There was absolutely no problem in collecting data. On the contrary, people wanted to tell us their entire life stories. We were mistaken for complaints boxes! It was perhaps the first time that these people has a chance to tell someone about the hardship of their lives without fear of punishment. We have no idea how much things have changed for the better!

At the same time there is appalling poverty. How long will it be until something is done to combat it?
The poverty will continue to exist for a long time. But our newspapers too often show only the negative side. Pessimism is no longer the entire picture, even in Moldova. which is constantly described as Europe’s poorhouse. The Moldovans get very annoyed about this. They have dreadful problems with migration, prostitution and crime. If you go to Chisinau you see collapsed buildings where the rubble has never been cleared away. But now you can also see very clean modern shops and there is a flower market 300 metres long. You ask yourself who can afford so many flowers when everyone is poor.

And? Who can afford to buy these flowers?
If you look at the official statistics then you ask yourself how the people manage just to survive on the income calculated by the statistics office. But that would be overlooking the enormous black or grey economy, these different forms of economies that are not taken into account in the official statistics.

Do you have to conduct black market research as well as normal market research?
Black market is perhaps too simple a label. I would prefer to speak of a subsistance economy. Like in the 1950s in Austria people don’t plant flowers in their gardens but vegetables, they help each other harvest them, they store foodstuffs by pickling them in winter. We did the same not all too long ago, but we have forgotten these techniques.

Yet at the same time you can find the most modern shops in the cities of the poor eastern European countries. 
Yes, because many of these developments are happening faster than they happened in Austria. A lot of people who visit Hungary or Poland are surprised when they seen supermarkets and hypermarkets that look far more modern than similar facilities here, generously dimensioned and easy to find your way around in.
In fact today one can forget a lot of the old prejudices about the “east”. People from there no longer come to Austria to shop. They find the offers, better priced and well organized, at home. They want the most modern technical equipment, the newest PCs  they are also rapidly moving into the world of Internet. The Czech Republic has roughly the same level of Internet use as Spain or Portugal, while Slovenia has reached our level.

Does this mean we have to rethink our clichés?
Many of our clichés were stupid and based on old prejudices. It used to be said: The Poles are lazy they cannot work properly. The Poles had a joke that went: “You pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work”. From the moment a different economic system operated in Poland people started to work hard. Now there are no longer shop closing times in Poland, only shop opening hours. They are unbelievably hard-working. The Mafia cliche about Russia is also out-of-date. Today in both Moscow and St Petersburg you encounter a constantly growing middle-class that wants to travel and consume. These people do not throw wads of notes around the place but they can afford a trip abroad.

What are the most surprising conclusions from all you data?
Eastern Europe is not a foreign world. But until a few years ago there were many amazing phenomena last seen in Austria in the postwar period. Such as the nighttime markets in Moscow. On the outer ringroad there was a black market in spare parts for cars that was tolerated, where the customers used to go looking for parts with torches.
The biggest miracle is that, despite the unbelievable economic difficulties it was possible to handle the real dissatisfaction by democratic elections. There were many changes of government but no blood spilling, the patience of the population was great enought to prevent aggressive confrontation. The prospect of EU membership was certainly important and decisive in this area.

Rudolf Bretschneider is director of the  Fessl & GFK-Institut and board member of the IDM (Institut für den Donauraum und Mitteleuropa/ Institute for the Danube Area and Central Europe). He lectures at Vienna University in the department of  journalism and communication sciences. From 1986 to 1993 he was the publisher of the “Wiener Journal”. His publications include “Maß genommen” (1999), “Konsumgesellschaft” (2000), “Menschen - Marken -  Meinungen” (2000).

Florian Klenk is an editor with the Vienna city newspaper, Falter. In 2004 he won the Leopold Ungar Prize, which is awarded for committed journalism on social themes.