Stasiuk doesn't spare real socialism. However, when accusing the Polish People's Republic, the USSR, or the People's Republic of China, he also defends the ordinary residents, appreciates their individualism and their typical, generations-long means of coping with the toil of everyday life – regardless of whether it is caused by people, grand politics, or nature. Occasionally, however, the author's emotions takes over and he adds a touch of protectionism and patronization, especially when he continually hears the mantra-like: “it used to be better.” Back in the day, under communism, people on the State Agricultural Farms “received a plot of land and could farm potatoes. But most of them didn't feel like it. After all, they could die of starvation. Their fate was carefully planned”, Stasiuk writes with a dose of irony. However, when communism was falling, the same people, thanks to their individualism, were able to reassemble the world out of the “collectivist mash.”
East is filled with nostalgia, but bereft of illusions and sentiment, as the world ended up going in the right direction. How long for, though? The post-communist void has been filled with wild capitalism. According to Stasiuk, both systems are the reverse and obverse of the same luciferic modernity, which, in its pride, rebelled against people in the name of an abstract, arbitrary idea of the Human. That is why he understands the fears and difficult fate of the listeners of the Maryja Radio Station, and that is why he condemns shopping malls and misses the 10th-Anniversary Stadium, Europe's largest market, where the East and West met, while the “cursed people of the Earth” finally “reached for what they deserved.”