Book: How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed/Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism
Author: Slavenka Drakulić
Publication Year: 1991/2021
Genre: Journalism/Essay
Croatia is another of those countries that we know something about for all of the wrong reasons. The former country of Yugoslavia, which comprised the now independent states of Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Kosovo and North Macedonia, suffered a series of devastating conflicts following the fall of the Berlin Wall and through much of the 1990s.
As Slavenka Drakulić notes in Café Europa Revisited, no other Eastern European communist country lived through a period of such prolonged bloodshed. Czechoslovakia splintered into the Czech Republic (now Czechia) and Slovakia. Latvia (see: Latvia), Estonia and Lithuania regained their independence after being absorbed by the Russian leviathan. Some, like Albania and Belarus, seemed to carry on much as before.
Drakulić observes that much of this has to do with the relative lack of restrictions (relative to the likes of Poland and Hungary), following the death of President Tito in 1980. Yugoslavian citizens had greater freedom to travel into the west than citizens of the Eastern Bloc. Though, in other regards, censorship and shortages of pretty much everything were as harsh as anywhere else.
There was, Drakulić notes, not the level of political conflict one finds in Poland with Lech Wałęsa and the Solitarity movement of the 1980s. Nor the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, or the revolutions in Hungary in 1956 and 1989. As such, Yugoslavia was a smouldering pot of resentment that boiled over in the decade following the end of the Soviet era.
The result of this was what we witnessed on our TV screens for much of the 1990s. Tower blocks bombed to obliteration. Blood stained roads and pavements in the aftermath of mortar attacks and indiscriminate sniper fire. The unsettling knowledge that newspapers and news channels only cared because it was happening in Europe and to white people. Too many examples over the last thirty years give weight to that feeling.
It is interesting to compare Drakulić’s two books under consideration. How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, published in 1991, but including some pieces written before the wall came down, gives a glimpse of Eastern Europe in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Russian Communism. 2021’s Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism, which, as the name suggests, is a follow up to another book, Café Europa, also written early in the post Communist period, shows how the optimism faded as quickly as the west’s promises of prosperity and reconstruction.
To illustrate the effects and after effects of communism, Drakulić describes the mundane details that people in the west take fro granted. The availability and quality of sanitary products. The nebulous quality of toilet paper as an indication of the country’s fortunes, like some second world version of the stock market. The versions of products western companies sell in the East, made with reduced or substandard ingredients, which they justify by saying people prefer that way.
Yugoslavia in many ways had its own socialist micro-climate, separate from the rest of Soviet controlled Eastern Europe. The countries that made up its borders were an Eastern Bloc in miniature. Religion wasn’t banned as it was elsewhere n the east (it was, however, rarely practiced openly for fear of persecution). Although Drakulić’s was subject to censorship (one chapter of How We Survived Communism describes a meeting with the official charged with censoring her work), she spent much of the Soviet era travelling across both sides of the Iron Curtain.
It is easy to forget that many people in the east thought about Russian communism in much the same way as those in the west. When you know you are being lied to, you learn to read between the lines. What isn’t said is just as important as what is. Journalists like Drakulić learned to write about the truth behind the propaganda without actually talking about it. Such acts of subversion could be heavily punished if not carefully disguised.
The opening chapter of How We Survived Communism concerns Drakulić’s friend, Tanja, a Slovenian journalist who took her own life in 1985. She wrote a seemingly innocuous article about pinball machines that led to her public ostracision. The piece included reference to private enterprise, which was then being introduced to booster the country’s flagging economy. The Communist party objected and the paper was forced to issue an apology. Tanja kept working for the paper, but none of her articles would ever be published again. She was shunned by her colleagues and friends refused to be seen with her in public.
Drakulić speculates on the reasons for her friend’s death, as people always do when a loved one takes their own life. She concludes that ultimately Tanja thought her purgatory would never end. That communism would reign supreme in Yugoslavia forever. Yet jusr four years later, the wall came down. Two years after that and Yugoslavia ceased to exist. Drakulić asks how many others like Tanja died because they thought they would never escape. It is impossible to know.
It is a reminder that all empires end, even if they persist for a thousand years. The Soviet era is in many ways comparable to the fall of Rome (although Rome lasted ten times as long as the Soviet Union). A power vacuum was left behind. A lack of leadership led to chaos after everything had been controlled from Moscow for the previous forty five years.
There is an image that does the rounds on social media of the difference between West and East Berlin at night. You can clearly see where the Berlin Wall divided the city due to the difference in lightbulbs. To the west they are so bright as to be almost white. To the east they are a dull orange. More than thirty five years since the wall came down, the economic prosperity that has seen Germany become the powerhouse of Europe has barely trickled towrds the east of the country (you would think it would be a good place to build an observatory or two).
This is the point of much of Café Europa
Revisited, written 30 years after the Berlin Wall was demolished. The cafes, which
are the talking shops of Croatia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, might have fancier
lighting and furniture than before, but the hope and optimism Drakulić
saw in people’s faces when writing her first Café Europa collection has faded. 
Berlin street lights photographed by Chris Hadfield aboard the ISS
It is part of the same exploitation and abandonment by the west that has seen so many risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean from Africa in recent years in search of a better life. Or the politicking in Great Britain that led to Brexit (to which the final chapter of Café Europa Revisited is dedicated).
There is more to say, but I am conscious there are five other former Yugoslavian countries to cover in this project and we will return to the region many times before the end.
Drakulić is a writer for all of Eastern Europe. Her books takes us to Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Hungary, Albania and her native Croatia. In doing so, she lights upon generations of one family living in one small apartment and the vagaries of owning land in Yugoslavia. Of life under the Stasi in East Berlin and travelling to Sweden from Zagreb in the 1970s. Of the continuing threats to freedom and democracy that persist in much of the former Soviet sphere.
Fiction is my comfort zone, but fiction doesn’t always cut it if you want to make sense of the world. Which is why I always try to mix things up by reading journalism and biography and poetry and theatre. Drakulić’s writing is the perfect overview of life in Eastern Europe before and after the Soviet Union. We have talked about the wars in Yugoslavia, but said very little about them (or the importance of the Balkans in 20th century history in general). Yet with five other countries to visit, I am sure there will be much to tell in the future.
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| Slavenka Drakulić |
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