The gap between state socialism as a political and economic ideology and social plan, and socialism as it was ‘actually lived’ in the Soviet Union and the satellite states of Eastern Central Europe, created what might arguably be considered one of the most pervasive grey zones in history. The contradictions between ideology and lived lives, and the impossibility of matching the state plan to everyday economics, laid public social and economic spaces open to continual ambiguity and uncertainty. Uncertainty and ambiguity became ordinary, and created the conditions for social and economic practices that straddled the border between legal and illegal, acceptable and corrupt. Such practices were so widespread that they formed the common stuff of everyday lives.

In this chapter I address the question of the ordinariness of what is variously referred to as the second, informal or grey economy in Eastern Europe. Looking at ethnographic material I consider the vague and constantly shifting border that existed between the state and second economies during socialism, and the way that negotiating this border was very much part of everyday life and the ordinary. I then move on to compare the socialist period to the next two periods: the decade after socialism, marked by severe economic and political restructuring; and the period of EU accession, when a new economic authority and new rule of law were introduced. I show that in each of these periods the grey economy parallels that of the state, dominates many aspects of everyday life, and has its own kind of morality that links it to the family and household, relations of trust, and extended sociality. I suggest that this grey area of the ordinary and everyday is different from the realm of corruption and criminality because it is perceived as an area of trust, morality and intimacy.

Uncertainty, Ambiguity and Misrecognition

I first went to Poland in 1977. I arrived at Krakow airport on a cold September night, and it took me hours to get through customs.