How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

Drakulić sits with her friend Vesna, who has discovered a pair of stockings with a run in them. When Vesna tries to throw them away, her mother objects, and the two of them squabble over her mother’s thriftiness. Her mother is calm, insisting that it is not that she lives in the past or haunted by the memory of past shortages, but that “you never know what might happen” (180). Drakulić reflects that communism and its constant shortages produces a specific relationship to objects. Because of a constant “fear for the future,” people are constantly collecting objects and then “turning it into something else” (181), until it must be thrown away because it has no imaginable use. She makes particular note of “objects that normal people in normal countries usually throw away (otherwise known as packaging: bottles, jars, cups, cans” (181), and that people especially prize objects made outside of the country. Another key category is “objects that might disappear” (181), which covers many varieties of food and supplies. This is because it is impossible to know what will be available for sale, and this helps drive constant collection of objects.

From personal experience, Drakulić describes repurposing old pants as a mop, and that all clothes eventually become “around the house clothes” before they’re discarded (182-83). People also consistently keep shoeboxes, to store photos and to avoid having to throw away documents the state might someday request. As far as record-keeping is concerned, “a shoebox is almost like a computer, full of neatly stored data to survive in a system that is designed to destroy the individual” (184). Glass jars are particularly prized, “because you can store other objects in them that you can collect” (184), and cans are used as flowerpots. Her friend Vesna admits she still collects plastic yogurt cups, remembering using them for paint cups as a child. Vesna reflects, “we are hungry for things and afraid of the future. It’s deeper than I thought” (186). This hunger was particularly avid for any object coming from another country, even candy wrappers.

Drakulić recalls that her grandmother’s cupboards after her death included food staples but also insulin, “even though nobody in the family is diabetic,” and that the whole apartment looked like a “museum of communist shortages” (188). The most stunning relic was an entire drawers of plastic bags neatly folded. Drakulić argues that it was this hoarding out of “fear for the future” (189) that explains why the regimes did not last. She reflects, “if the politicians had only had a chance to peek into our closets […] they would have seen the future that was in store for their wonderful plans for communism itself. But they didn’t look” (189).

Drakulić writes to her editor, explaining that a new afterword for her book is impossible, as she writes from inside the new atmosphere of war. She realizes she is becoming more and more surrounded by death, and that it has changed her. She laments that contrary to her past hopes, war has come to Europe, “But it was not impossible, and it will take so long to understand” (194). At first, war was “only a word,” and its realities could be distant, read about rather than experienced. Drakulić realizes that she and her friends, including those who have become refugees, grew up immersed in the myth that after World War II, “Europe had learned its lesson” (195).Drakulić realizes that while the war can be understood historically as the outcome of long historical problems, a reaction to Tito’s death, and the collapse of communism, she also wishes to understand it as a moral problem. She realizes she has internalized war’s logic since she has divided her friend who is a “refugee” into another kind of person, separate from herself, a “citizen” (196). Drakulić finds she cannot write about economics, about feminism, or abortion access, because “there is too much death around me” (197).

Drakulić uses family relationships to illustrate communism’s profound effect on intellectual life; specifically, mental habits in relationship to objects and ownership. Communism creates uses out of objects that do not exist elsewhere, like shoeboxes standing in for computers and cans as flowerpots. While some of her categories of objects remain fixed—like objects from abroad—others reflect instability, as almost anything could be an object in danger of disappearance. This instability is perhaps most obvious in the system’s ultimate disappearance. In calling her grandmother’s house a “museum,” Drakulić effectively compares communism to a vanished civilization, a relic of a world that no longer exists.

Drakulić’s themes of daily life and material existence take on a new urgency as she discusses the coming of civil war to Yugoslavia, and the country’s eventual splitting apart. She finds that fear of war, too, leads to shopping trips and shortages. As in her correspondence with a Western feminist, Drakulić is caustic about the international response to her country’s plight, noting that it pales in significance beside the Gulf War because Yugoslavia has no oil. Her reflections on war are similar to her earlier thoughts on censorship and how it operates: While war has obvious material consequences and costs lives, Drakulić notes that it also shapes her internally. She has made war real by consenting to wait for it, and internalized its logic by separating herself from refugees. With war’s arrival, conceits like literary theory and isms like feminism have no hold on Drakulić’s everyday struggle for meaning and existence in the face of so much death around her.