Capitalism

Katarina Hall | From the January 2026 issue

Warsaw, Poland, is a living museum of economic systems. It's a city where concrete reliefs of stoic factory workers decorate a building that now houses a Kentucky Fried Chicken, where a Soviet-era apartment block stands beside a glass tower filled with coworking spaces.

Not even 35 years after escaping Soviet-style central planning, Poland has become a capitalist success story—the world's 20th-largest economy and among the most prosperous of the former Eastern Bloc nations. The country's transformation isn't just visible in gross domestic product figures; it's on every street corner and in every bite.

At lunchtime, you can step into a bar mleczny, where beet soup and pierogi still cost a few zloty. A few blocks away, in a converted power plant, bartenders pour small-batch IPAs.........

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