How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

Drakulić recalls visiting a friend’s grave for the first time—a pilgrimage she has delayed for years, as Tanja died five years previously. She vacillates about whether her friend’s story matters, and declares that “she wasn’t a hero; sometimes I think she was a coward” (1). Her friend committed suicide by turning on the oven, but did the dishes before her death—which may have been an impulse toward order or a desire to prolong life with one more task.

Drakulić argues that on one level, Tanja’s death by suicide can read as “one more unhappy love story” (2) as her married lover had recently died. Before this, she had aborted his child because he refused to leave his pregnant wife for her. But the larger context is Tanja’s work as a journalist. She wrote an article for a newspaper defending the use of privately-owned pinball machines, as part of a larger argument against nationalizing personal property. To Western eyes this might seem “innocent,” but the article touches on a larger political issue, the debates over “the privatization of the economy” (3). Tanja’s article defended privatization too strenuously at a time when it was falling out of favor. The newspaper she worked for published a profuse apology to signal to state authorities that it “[…] will make sure it doesn’t happen again’’ (5). Tanja experienced this “as a rejection of her as a journalist, as a colleague, as a person” (5). Colleagues no longer spoke to her, and she discovered that “you can’t drink your coffee alone” (6). While she still received a salary, nothing she wrote could be published: “the earth beneath her was crumbling” (6).

Tanja understandably believed she had no way out, because “she believed it would go on forever like that” (7)—that communism would remain a way of life in Yugoslavia. This mindset of permanence was universal. Drakulić declares, “we learned to think: This will go on forever, no matter what we do” (7). Drakulić laments that her friend could not wait, that “she struggled to survive but in the end she lost” (7). Looking at the flowers on her friend’s grave, Drakulić recalls their last visit together, in 1985. Her friend discussed suicide, was thin, and preoccupied with talk of death. Drakulić recalls that, “suddenly it seemed to me that as she uttered the word ‘death’ she felt a chill running down her spine. But I was not sure. I blame myself for that” (8). Drakulić recounts her distress at the news, holding the telephone and screaming.

The next day, she visited her friend’s apartment—her first private space, as her parents had traded a larger family apartment for a smaller home. Drakulić recalls how tidy the space was, how it was full of fresh flowers, as if her friend had been trying to “assert control over the chaos of her life” (9). Drakulić places her friend’s death in larger perspective, arguing that communism has many victims, and asking how many more there will be, those ordinary people who “just couldn’t stand it anymore” (9). Drakulić imagines her friend in an afterlife, hopeful that Tanja was correct that coffee must be consumed in the company of others, and that death has truly brought an end to her solitude.

Drakulić opens with a visit to Poland, where a friend takes her to a privately-owned pizza restaurant. The atmosphere is in stark contrast to the rainy city, like a “dreamland where there is everything—pizza, fruit juice, thick grilled steaks, salads—and the everyday life of shortages and poverty can’t seep in, at least, for the moment” (12).She notes that to appreciate the magic one must contrast it with a coffee shop where there is no milk available, and no juice either—her friend orders a Coke, available as it would no doubt be “in the middle of the desert” (13). Drakulić laments that “Nobody seems to mind the paradox that while fruit grows throughout Poland, there is no fruit juice yet Coke is everywhere” and especially prized as a status symbol due to its association with America (13).

Food shortages are so ubiquitous in Eastern Europe that it impossible to equate what is available on the shelves with anyone’s tastes or preferences. The word “like” in itself invokes another universe, a more capitalistic one with “a possibility of comparing quality and taste” (14) because lived experience allows for choice. Drakulić recalls seeing a news article about a Romanian man who ate an entire banana, including the peel, because he was unfamiliar with it. He nevertheless declared that “it tastes good!” as a kind of philosophical investment in the “hope of the future” (14), a future where more kinds of food were possible. Drakulić notes that her mother had a similarly political relationship with food—a refusal to waste it because of her memories of World War II. Even dinner parties are structured by shortages. Drakulić notes that bringing a cake is a sign of great labor if one made it personally, as this meant hunting for eggs and flour. On a trip to Prague, she discovers cakes are impossible to buy and that she must bring ice cream as a hostess gift instead.

On a trip to Bulgaria, Drakulić finds that potatoes prepared multiple ways are the only items on offer for dinner. Instead, her friend says, “we are used to swallowing politics with our meals,” content to discuss elections and the limits of the mass media (16-17). Drakulić argues that politics is never distant in Eastern Europe, and always remains a “palpable, brutal force directing every aspect of our lives, from what we eat to how we live and where we work” (17). Life is defined by shortages, and “bread means safety” (18). Drakulić argues that the “banality of everyday life is where it has really failed, rather than on the level of ideology” (18), as mothers could not get adequate formula for their babies and had to feed them expired milk which caused mass illness. Drakulić recalls a trip to New York in the 1980s, and realizing that economic security came from strawberries being available in the winter. She visits the same friend who was in New York with her then, and there are still no strawberries in Poland. Parents feel that “food is love” (20) and save the best for their children. Drakulić states that this life of shortages remains with her and all her friends.

Drakulić recalls her mother’s beauty routine: a cucumber face mask, followed by shampoo of the only kind available, and a vinegar rinse as conditioner. She calls her mother “a magician who created beauty out of nothing” (22), using very limited makeup and wearing a dress for a rare evening out that she sewed herself. Drakulić notes that while communist states produced very few consumer goods, and beauty was considered a “bourgeois” concept, “women still wanted to be beautiful” (22). Within this desire, the economy of shortages and an ideology that gratified labor produced a “totalitarian aesthetic” (23). State-sponsored fashion was created by a “lack of choice” (26). Drakulić argues that most women who desperately pursued fashion did so out of a desire to express themselves as individuals. Reading magazines like Vogue was depressing because even the paper quality was higher, leaving aside the unattainable aesthetics. They left the young and naive Drakulić and her friends convinced that “the other world was a paradise” (28)—while all fashion magazines attempt to create desire out of a sense of lack, for Communist women this sense is deeper, and political, since it connects this longing to a sense that one’s reality can never provide anything beautiful. It engendered a desire to “risk one’s life by trying to escape” (29).

Drakulić recalls her own childhood in terms of time spent learning to sew, as this was the only way to truly individuate in clothing. She also recalls her mother returning from a trip to Italy with new items, including a nightgown Drakulić thought was so fancy she should “wear it to the theater and not to bed” (29). The greatest foreign luxury at the time was a belt for sanitary napkins, a shortage Drakulić still confronts as an adult. She purchased tampons on a trip to New York and on future travels “sprinkled Eastern Europe with tampons” (30). In many places, even cotton batting is in short supply: The absence of appropriate sanitary products is considered “humiliating” (31), and Drakulić takes it as a broader sign of how deeply communist regimes failed women. She argues that the women of Eastern Europe “deserve more respect than they get, simply because just being a woman—not to mention a beauty—is a constant battle against the way the whole system works” (32).