"The West" was a colloquial name used in Poland to denote countries that were not in the Soviet area of dominance. This collection of countries actually included the geographical South and South-East, like Italy or Greece, and even some of the East, e.g. Israel or Japan or Australia.
For each official travel to the "West" in the 1970s, to attend a conference or a school, or for any other purpose, Polish scientists received "money allowance", which was, independently of the destination and of the duration of the stay abroad, the equivalent of 10 US dollars in the currency of the country of destination. Needless to say, this was miserably inadequate to meet the challenges of ordinary life in the "West". More senior scientists could use their private money, earned in the "West" during earlier travels, but those going there for the first time, with no extra money, faced horror. This happened to me in June 1976, when I went to Italy to attend a 2-week course at the Enrico Fermi School in Varenna.
I was naive enough to describe my hardship in the official report that I had to submit to the Polish Academy of Sciences after I returned. I did not expect that my report would change anything. My secret plan was that the report would stay in the archives of the Academy, to be used by future historians as a source of information on communism. I assumed that nobody would care to read it instantly. I was wrong. Somebody did read it.
For those readers who understand Polish, here is the report in full. To quickly come to the most interesting part, begin reading at paragraph 2 of page 2.
For those who don't, here is the abstract. After describing the importance of the Fermi School and the scientific aspects of my participation in the course, I complained about the horrors of having to make do with 10 dollars during 2 weeks. This is humiliating, I said, and allows for survival at the economic level of a beggar. My meals and lodging were paid for by the Italian Physical Society, so in principle I did not need any more money, except for small amounts to pay the airport fee and to buy the tickets from the airport to town and back. But, here I translate the key sentences:
"However, a person who must scrupulously avoid all occasions on which he might have to spend any money, does not come to a party given by the course's director for the participants -- in fear of having to pay the bill, does not participate in the excursion in which everybody else takes part, and cannot afford to have lunch on the departure day, when the hotel allowance came to an end -- of course attracts the attention of the company because this style of behaviour is not proper for a citizen of a civilized country. Unfortunately, we have no other choice. Nobody will demand of the Academy to give us foreign money for free, but it is difficult to understand, why it is forbidden to us to exchange some of our own money to a foreign currency."
(This was another peculiarity of communism. Since the communist economies were, by design, carefully isolated from the non-communist markets, nobody knew the real value of the communist currencies. So, to simplify matters, money exchanges were generally forbidden, and allowed only under most unusual circumstances. In a way, this was reasonable. Independently of the adopted rate of exchange, read out from the stars in every case, the Polish government used to find itself at a loss -- nobody in the world wanted to take Polish money; it was just useless outside the country. There was, of course, the black market that had its own rate of exchange, much above any official one, but the official communist theory said that there was no black market (in fact, the theory had it that in communism there is no market at all), so it would be a shame to adopt the black market rate as the official one.)
OK, this was a side-remark. In the last paragraph of my report I complained about the behaviour of the administration workers at the offices of the Academy. My documents had been sent back and forth several times between those offices and my Institute, which caused that the theoretical deadline to apply for the Italian visa had passed. This was obviously a fault of those ladies, so, it would be appropriate for them to try to save the project. Instead, I said, they vigorously tried to persuade me to give up on this travel. I had to take the matter into my own hands, and 8 days were enough to get the visa. Two weeks before the travel it turned out that my passport expired, and the person responsible for it did not take care about extending its validity on time. (Well, another explanation is needed here -- we were not allowed to keep our passports at home. They were stored in a safe house in the offices of the Academy and handed over to us only just before the travel. We had to give them back to the Academy within a few days after return.)
After someone at the Polish Academy read my first report, the answer came to me in the form of a handwritten note, signed by our director. I do not blame him, he just had to hand down to me the decision of someone who was higher up in the chain of command. The note (in Polish) can be viewed here , and it says the following:
"Dr. Krasiński:
Dept. III [of the Academy] urgently(*) asks for a new report from Italy
-- with an elaborate factual part
--- without the remaining part
[director's signature]
(*) Necessary condition for the approval of the next travel.
21 July 76"
Any resistance would not have made sense. In the worst scenarios I might have been refused any foreign travel for a long time, fired from my post, even brought to court and perhaps sentenced to jail (for the abuse of dignity of the "Polish People's Republic" or something like that), while the original report would not make it to the public anyway. So I wrote a dull, purely factual report, with a list of titles of lectures included just to make it longer. Here it is, for completeness, but it is not really worth reading, so I do not give the English translation.
But petty punishments came anyway. Half a year later, I was about to go to another school in Erice (Sicily), this time as a lecturer. One other person from my Institute was going there, too, but he had no role to play, he just wanted to be there ("there" means Sicily rather than the lecture room). The Academy decided that it would pay for the airline ticket of only one of us, and the director of our Institute decided that the awardee would be the other guy. In this case I see no justification for this decision. Fortunately, I could afford to pay for the airline ticket myself, and I did.
The lady-officers at the Academy remembered my report and did not hesitate to show off their unfriendliness on several later occasions. But this did not bother me. According to a popular belief, which is entirely credible, they all held double positions -- one at the Academy and one at the "Security Service", i.e. the communist secret police. I guess my contempt for them was often visible. This did not make my life easier, of course -- I had to face all possible problems myself, and could not count on any help from their side. But in the end, we scientists won in this silent war. The monster-women just disappeared from sight when communism fell in 1989, the elaborate bureaucratic structure that employed them, a permanent perfect parasite, went into a sleep mode, and for nearly 20 years now I did not have to talk to them any single time; I do not even remember when the last time was. And, by the way, even while they still ruled, I went everywhere I wanted, they did not manage to ruin any of my travel plans, although they were close to it a few times.