How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

“Suddenly I caught myself thinking about fruit and about how nothing had changed. We had thought that after the revolution peaches would be different—bigger, sweeter, more golden. But as I stood in line at a stall in the street market I noticed that the peaches were just as green, small, and bullet-hard, somehow pre-revolutionary.” 

Drakulić looks to the natural world for guidance about what to expect. She admits that her contemporaries had expected nature itself to transform in response to the new politics. Instead, not only is the fruit not improved, it is barely edible—the peaches are like bullets, not remotely appetizing. Time has moved on, but food has not. 

“You are trained to fear change, so that when change eventually begins to take place, you are suspicious, because every change you have experienced was always for the worse. I remember that my own first reaction to my colleague’s news, besides happiness, was fear, as if I were experiencing an earthquake. Much as I desired the collapse of the old system, the ground was shaking beneath my feet.” 

Drakulić establishes that communist mindsets may seem foreign or surprising to her readers. Instead of straightforward celebration of the Berlin Wall’s fall, her reaction is born of decades of conditioning, perhaps even programming. The old system, much as she loathes it, was predictable and stable. She compares political change to a natural disaster, and it is not clear what the shape of her new world will be. 

“But Tanja was wrong in one thing: she believed it would go on forever like that—the same newspaper, the same faces, the same cold climate of fear and silent accusations, the immobility of the system—forever the same. What communism instilled in us was precisely this immobility, this absence of a future, the absence of a dream, of the possibility of imagining our lives differently.” 

Drakulić uses repetition to emphasize the implacable steadiness of communism’s inhumanity. Her denounced friend cannot imagine a new job, or new friends, or a more humane political system, and all of these problems are bound up together. In spiritual terms, communism is empty, and it produces only one more absence: Tanja’s death and Drakulić’s deep sense of loss, grief, and betrayal.