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Slavenka DrakulićHow We Survived Communism and Even Laughed
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Essays 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Essay 7 Summary: “Forward to the Past”
Drakulić recalls standing in a store with her daughter once, who was angry and resolute that they would not buy cheap toilet paper. For Drakulić, this was a failed attempt at “discipline” because her daughter did not understand that they can only really afford the state manufactured brand, Golub (67). At first Drakulić wanted to argue, but she found that to do so would be to engage in propaganda, the insistence that material goods were unnecessary. Instead, she realized, “My daughter was right […] it was the principle of not giving in, not surrendering the basic elements of civilized living” (67). Drakulić argues that people always knew communism would fail, they just thought it would “take a hell of a long time. In fact, one of the indicators was toilet paper” (67). The return of Golub took Drakulić to her own childhood, a time of deprivation that was “terrible because we did not know that something better existed” (68). She asserts that once they knew, “communism was doomed” (68).
As a child, Drakulić learned “what every child under communism had to learn, that you can’t find everything you need all the time and most likely can’t ever find anything” (68-69), and this was why people used newspapers in toilets. For the regime, toilet paper was a “luxury item” (69). Drakulić describes her classmates from peasant backgrounds using newspaper, while her own parents used notepaper that was slightly more forgiving. She did not like Golub—named from the word for pigeon—and was childishly frightened it was “made of pigeons”—a fear fueled by stories of soap made from the corpses of Nazi concentration camp victims (70-71). Drakulić recounts that because toilet paper was a luxury, her peers likely stole it from school. Once, a schoolmate had to borrow notepaper from her because her father insisted she have no means to hide bad grades. This lack of privacy was universal in Yugoslavia, as “only where there is no privacy can there be total control” (72).
In the sixties, living standards rose and there were more kinds of toilet paper and soap available, but Drakulić was still stunned by the quality available in a schoolmate’s apartment because his father was a senior party official. This was in stark contrast to the ones she could access, which always reminded her they were “in a system that neglected basic human needs” (73). Drakulić indicates that living standards rose further in the seventies, with redesigned bathrooms becoming a potent status symbol and a sign of “socialism with a human face” (74), along with more kinds of soap and shampoo. Golub’s return signified coming economic collapse, though by this time more people could travel to Italy or Austria for toilet paper. This economic crisis alienated the younger generation, who “were not ready to accept a deteriorating standard of living in the name of an ideology they didn’t believe in, whose symbol was Golub” (75). Drakulić notes that the transition to a new political system has not improved things in this area—“democracy doesn’t guarantee you toilet paper, in fact it doesn’t guarantee you any paper at all” (75). Drakulić fears her daughter may not live in an entirely different regime, after all.
Essay 8 Summary: “A Chat With My Censor”
Drakulić receives a phone call from her censor in the state security apparatus, who asks her for an “informal meeting and a chat” (76). She explains that there is a special branch of the secret police for “surveillance of the media,” which is a complex job as the party line fluctuates on major issues on a regular basis (76-77). The censor calls her at home, and Drakulić is intensely curious: She does work for a political magazine but is not a Party member. Part of her, though, thinks of the worst of Soviet totalitarianism, as described by writers like Solzhenitsyn and Koestler, and “curiosity is quickly replaced by fear” (77).
She reviews her articles, then her private life, wondering which may be responsible for the official interest. She says, “I have to admit that I’m traveling to the West much too often, that I do have connections there” (78). Her censor is an unremarkable man, “the type you might meet at a party but wouldn’t recognize again” (79). The man tells her a story of her name found on a piece of paper in the pocket of a jailed person. This “jailed man” has connections to an “enemy of the state” (79), and the censor wants her to account for her name on this list. She tells him that journalists have one thing in common with dissenters: “they both needed connections and information” (79). Drakulić then argues that it would even be unsurprising if her name appeared in the pocket of “a terrorist or of the French prime minister or of Warren Beatty” (79).
The two of them chat about banal topics, and then the censor declares he has a soft spot for most journalists, that he can usually “warn them tenderly” (80) away from errors after following their work closely and knowing how they usually write. He claims that he knows Drakulić well, including “not only what but how you think” (80). He then divulges that he only asked for the meeting to know what she looks like, and notes that she is more attractive in person. Drakulić goes to see her editor, who lectures her loudly and then indicates that his office is bugged with a microphone. She remarks that the microphone is a tool “so we don’t have to chat with our censors too often” (81). She argues that the true purpose of the meeting occurred between the phone call and the event itself, because the censor forced her to doubt herself and question her entire life. She concludes that she could still be found guilty at any point, because it is “not a question of facts but of their interpretation” (81).
Essay 9 Summary: “The Strange Ability of Apartments to Divide and Multiply”
Drakulić considers the lack of personal privacy endemic in communist regimes through the stories of several women. One, Andrea, is a university professor who will never be able to afford her own apartment unless she gets married and still lives with her father. Even this is no guarantee, as “maybe she will bring her husband in and have a child or two, all in the same space—that would be normal” (83). Another friend, a divorced single mother, regrets that her “whole life has been controlled by her parents” (84). A Polish friend “divorced her husband but not her mother” (84). She lives with her son in a two-bedroom space that requires her mother to sleep in what is technically the living room. The housing crisis was born out of the postwar desire to move to cities for work, and never truly solved by any of the Eastern European governments.
Drakulić recalls her own living situation with her first husband, with the baby sleeping in the living room that was also the study during the day. As a child, her immediate family lived with two strangers who “had no connection to us,” and the bathroom was also their kitchen (87). Drakulić quotes the Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky, famous for describing his childhood living “in a room and a half” about how divided rooms acquired the “status of an architectural norm” (88). Drakulić connects this to a wider socioeconomic stasis: Younger people can survive with a shortage of jobs as long as they live with their parents, and even if they can get jobs they pay badly. Drakulić calls this “youth discrimination.” In this scenario, “[d]ivorce becomes impossible” (89), Drakulić notes, as grandparents eventually become indispensable childcare.
The more achievable life stage is to hope a larger apartment becomes “smaller and smaller”—that families trade larger apartments for smaller ones that individuals or nuclear family units can live in separately (90). Drakulić calls apartments “life prizes” in her society, and places “to withdraw from the omnipotent eyes of the state” (91). People remained steadfast in their retreat, no matter how small the spaces.
Essays 7-9 Analysis
Drakulić deepens her engagement with the themes of consumerist failure and the state’s intrusions into private life. In “Forward To The Past,” toilet paper becomes much more than a hygiene item, as she uses it to measure sociopolitical progress. The arrival of the Golub brand of cheap toilet paper is an improvement over using newspapers, while its return points to broad systemic failure to provide for the population. At the same time, the new system has not made toilet paper any more reliable. Her daughter’s refusal to accept the inferior product shakes Drakulić out of her a subconscious acceptance of and adherence to the dehumanizing party line of simply accepting what one cannot change—even the bad things. She makes a point to suggest that younger generations, like her daughter, aren’t equipped mentality to handle this betrayal by the state; she endured shortages as a child so is used to having things and then going without.
Drakulić is a skeptic of all visions of progress, whatever their ideology, because progress can always reverse course and leave people with the bare minimum or nothing at all. She notes that even developed countries can fall victim to this, and the current coronavirus pandemic exemplifies this viewpoint. When the pandemic began in North America, for some reason people began hoarding toilet paper to the extent that, in a short span of time, toilet paper was practically unavailable on the market. There were concerns of people going without in the short term, while others not only hoarded it but sold it at exorbitant prices. Despite this happening in the United States, these actions would fit the definition of a failed state in Drakulić’s terms as the means of production and accessibility (not to mention people turning on one another) failed to protect the people that the state is supposed to protect.
In her consideration of both censorship and housing, Drakulić examines the problem of privacy. Her censor is able to call her at home, and to consume her thoughts to the extent that she considers every aspect of her writing and her private life for its possible political unreliability. Her recollection of Solzhenitsyn’s accounts of the Soviet Union and the KGB adds to her fear and cements her argument that socialist systems have certain structures in common even as their languages and cultures are distinct. Sowing doubt, for instance, is a powerful weapon that the state wields to achieve its goals. In the end, the meeting is anticlimactic: The censor even flirts with her, perhaps another reminder of his power and her greater vulnerability as a woman. Her realization that the meeting’s true purpose is to remind her to self-censor in the future, and to keep her on guard and anxious about her life, is resigned in tone but chilling. The purpose of censorship is internal control, reaching into the mind and heart, as much as it is editing of any particular content.
The theme of privacy emerges more literally in the essay on apartments, as so many of Drakulić’s friends live with their parents and near-grown children, in carved out spaces known as rooms that would not be understood as such elsewhere. This reflects a broader economic stasis and lack of real stability, as young people face low salaries as well as a housing crisis. The only possible social progress is an apartment “multiplying”—trading a larger space so that more people have privacy. This matters because the state is so ever-present, so intrusive, that any living space where the government is absent, no matter how small, is deeply cherished. Though Drakulić’s censorship experience indicates that privacy at home may not be limitless, it does provide a refuge for individuality.
