How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

Drakulić recalls 1989’s various political revolutions, and that in many countries, like Czechoslovakia, they were joyful affairs. This was not the case in her home city of Zagreb, which greeted political change like “a sour old lady who, awakened from a half century of sleep, found herself in a land she didn’t know among people who didn’t know her” (143). Drakulić then turns to her current task, watching her neighbors stand in line to vote in the country’s first free elections. She wonders if this election is really different, especially compared to the years when “They were forced to vote for the communists, as if the communists needed voting for” (144). Drakulić finds herself similarly unexcited, musing, “somebody promised me something, (but who was it, the communists, the CDU, that attractive girl Europe?), and here I am, confused, staring down the street on election day” (145). She imagines that future young people will be told to remember this date as historic, but she wonders if her own generation will share this sense.

Drakulić notices, finally, part of what explains her unease. There are no celebratory or festive indicators, no bright colors. She asks, “if this is a historic moment, as they were trumpeting from all sides, how come on this sleepy Sunday morning nothing is reminiscent of a holiday?” (146). Drakulić recalls that voting in her youth was more festive, if not especially meaningful:

Tito’s picture on the wall was usually adorned with a wreath of flowers draped round it, and two small paper flags, like the ones they gave us in Pioneers at school, to greet him or the important foreign visitors sitting beside him in long black limousines (147).

She used to imagine becoming an honored pioneer and eating candy with Tito. As she stands in line to vote, she finds herself relieved; “Tito wasn’t gazing at me, but through a window, into the bright future that only he could see that will forever remain a secret to us” (148). Drakulić wonders if her longer history of nonvoting has somehow been held against her, “not by God, but by some party bureaucrat, which in this country amounts to the same thing?” (148).

In the present, Drakulić finds herself waiting in another line, as she must provide additional documentation in order to vote. She is in good company, though, and she wonders if this is an indicator of emerging democracy and investment in the system, as “Only this patience revealed that there was something strange going on, something more important than Sunday family lunch” (149). This does not improve Drakulić’s mental state, however, as she says, “I got scared by a visible lack of joy” (150). This even translates to the photographs of the candidates for office. Though Drakulić argues that this is because candidates are not used to being photographed, and the technology is bad, it gives the impression that the elections are more like a “funeral […] for the past, for the system that we hated but knew how to manage, living within it” (150). Even definitive results in favor of the new democratic party did not produce a celebration, and Drakulić notes, “that cautious, sour old lady Democracy in the center of the city was asleep. A prince on a white horse was there, but it seems she didn’t recognize him” (151).

Drakulić describes her relationship to religion as very straightforward and in line with her father’s Marxist orthodoxy: atheism and a conviction that “religion is the opiate of the masses” (152). She recalls celebrating Easter secretly with her grandmother, and hiding this from her father. Before he died, Drakulić’s father made more room for religion, and agreed to let her brother have a religious funeral when he died. Watching her father in a pew with his head bowed made Drakulić realize that “the armor of communist ideology that had constricted him had long ago lost its meaning” (154-55). The following Christmas, Drakulić decides to attend Mass with her mother, in a local church she knows well but has never visited. While the ritual itself doesn’t move her, she is moved by what it means to her mother, exclaiming, “after all these years, she still knew all the words!” When the priest attributes all of the recent revolutions to the hand of God, Drakulić is skeptical, asking, “why had God waited so long?” (157). She feels that “after being hungry for this kind of freedom, I had overeaten” (157). Drakulić decides after this, “my first Christmas mass was going to be the only one—at least for me” (157).

In 1987, Drakulić returned from a trip abroad to find that her home city had been freshly painted, and the buildings “looked like cakes with freshly whipped cream” (160). She notes that this was not in response to sudden need—the city had been deteriorating for years—or to popular demand. She scoffs at the very idea of citizens getting petitions met, stating that the official attitude was more likely to be “who cares what they want or don’t want, they’d better mind their business” (160). She soon learns it was a matter of external pressure and international prestige: Zagreb was hosting an athletic competition and many foreign guests would be in the city.

Drakulić finds herself discomforted by this constant distinction, “a way of thinking that opposed Zagreb and the world so bluntly” (160). She wonders if this contrast is a mentality, or is measurable in differences of infrastructure, building maintenance, or road quality. Drakulić soon discovers that all over the region, the paint fades quickly from the newly maintained buildings, even in Prague. She declares, “The unpainted facades look even dirtier because of the newly painted ones, and the painted ones were slowly absorbing the sepia color from the very air” (162). Budapest gives her the same impression that the city is “slowly decaying” (163).

Drakulić notes that there may be environmental reasons for this sense, like air pollution, but she is ultimately convinced the larger problem is existential and philosophical. She insists, “the cities have been killed by our decades of indifference, our conviction that somebody else—the government, the party, those ‘above’—is in charge of it. Not us. How can it be us, if we are not in charge of our own lives?” (164). Drakulić sees this crisis as tangible and highly visible, as people litter readily because “Public space begins outside the apartment. Public equals state equals the enemy” (164). Drakulić argues that real recovery from communism will require reimagining how to treat public space, “like an old fashioned batiste handkerchief, embroidered at the edges, that one has to wash and iron to be able to use it again” (166). She argues that the efforts at renewal made by new democratic governments have been unable to alter “the nostalgia and hopelessness of the East European soul, its inner cynicism” (167). She supports the renewal of old towns in European cities, to prevent cities from becoming like “a shell without a pearl,” and she suggests that observers come to her city to discover that “history is a metaphysical category” (168).