How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

Drakulić recalls her grandmother doing laundry weekly—a major production in Yugoslavia at the time. Drakulić notes that “she was our servant—and our washing machine” (43), and her hands showed the physical wear and tear the chore required. She would wash the laundry multiple times, boil it on the stove, and also starch it. Drakulić describes smelling “the very cleanness itself” afterward (43), though her mother used the state-run laundry. Her grandmother perpetually lamented this, and left Drakulić her best sheets, which Drakulić herself does not use, because she is “afraid they would not be as white as she would like them to be” (45).

Drakulić recounts feeling “puzzled” and also “patronized” after reading a Time magazine article describing Soviet laundry habits, which mirror the ones Drakulić herself remembers. She calls the reporter an “anthropologist” and notes that state socialism never solved the problems of domestic labor for women because it always had more pressing issues. Drakulić imagines a utopian future where all other social issues were solved, and finally women would awaken to new appliances and a “brand new refrigerator stuffed with food” (47). Drakulić returns to the “genuine surprise” in the article that appliances have not been mass produced, and how this proves that American and socialist societies were “two different cultures” (47-48).

Eventually, washing machines became more available in Yugoslavia, which was good because shared machines didn’t technically belong to anyone so lacked maintenance: The common laundry room eventually became a storage space. Private washing machines became status symbols, but even then detergent shortages are persistent, so women still do laundry by hand. Drakulić reminisces that in Eastern Europe, balconies themselves “are dryers” and every window has tubes fixed to it for hanging clothing on lines. These lines are “announcing that you are entering a different, female territory” (52), which Drakulić finds makes new cities in the region look friendly, as she finds them only on side streets. Drakulić’s grandmother taught her how to “read” laundry: to note who was a good housekeeper, how many people were in a family, and their ages. She waxes poetic, arguing that she will always hang her laundry because it is the only way to “smell the wind” (53). Drakulić finds that she, too, is unable to abandon the washtub, as modern Zagreb still has power and water outages. Even today, an Eastern European woman “has no way of knowing what democracy will look like” (54). 

Drakulić recounts finding her old doll on a trip to West Berlin, identical to the one she had as a child on her first trip abroad to Italy. The trip with the doll as emotional support was also her first experience with carsickness, and she recalls that her grandmother’s sympathy was likely because “I had not been fortunate enough to have been born in a country where cars were normal” (57). In an Italian department store, Drakulić sees her first near-life-sized doll and brings it home, transfixed. The doll can talk and blink its eyes. She looks at her old doll with disgust. It made her the envy of her classmates because, “for the first time in my life I owned something important,” but a doll so fancy is less useful for play, and Drakulić misses her old doll and finds the new one “beautiful but too distant” (59).

For games, Drakulić used paper dolls made by a friend, and delighted particularly in dressing them in different outfits. Such dolls were “a reflection of our reality. We realized that one day we would grow up and we wanted, when that day came, to be beautiful” (61). Influenced by illicit reading of film magazines, they copied their dolls to resemble stars like Brigitte Bardot and Rita Hayworth. She recalls that these dolls provided her with profound knowledge: “for a woman it is more important to have a consciousness of her body than of her self” (61-62). She attempts to raise her own daughter “neutrally” and encourage play with other kinds of toys. For a time she thinks this was effective, as her daughter has no interest in the Italian doll, and she herself feels the childhood treasure has become “old” (62).

Much later, her daughter asks for a Barbie, and Drakulić worries that she has made her feminism “a house of cards” (63). Drakulić’s daughter reminds her of her childhood longing for a Barbie that her mother dismissed, and Drakulić takes this as a lesson that “any kind of ideology could reduce us to poverty and emotional suffering” (64), meaning that this is a trap not unique to communism. Drakulić admits that she bought her childhood doll in Berlin because it signified “intimacy and security” in a time when life itself seems like her Italian doll that was too beautiful to use. A post-Communist world is remote like that doll, a world of insecurity where people are “trying to reach a future that is constantly escaping us” (64-65).