How We Survived Communism Summary

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“How we survived communism”, written by Slavenka Drakulic is a book devoted to depict the lives of people, mostly women`s lives in Eastern Europe during communist times. In this nonfiction work, Slavenka Drakulic successfully portray the privation of everyday life without essential products, diverse food, clothes and make up, appliances and suppressed individuality by the government. One of her main focal points in the book is on the imperfection of communist rule, mostly concentrated in inequality of sexes and individualism, and the negative impact it had on feminism, marriage and women at work. Many women desired to escape from uniformity by trying to find ways to import cosmetics, getting divorced or being part of feminist organizations…show more content…
On the other hand, communism had a detrimental impact on people`s lives, the way of their thinking and their mindset. They were deprived of hope that things will be better and not always they will experience these hardships and they will not be put anymore in tight living situations. People were also deprived of the will to resist the tyrannical regime and to stand against it. They were living in seclusion without being exposed to any kind of knowledge about what kind of life people live in the Western world. “The communist eye” is the mindset of people who lived in a communist country. “There is a deeper reason why the poverty sticks to us, why we recognize beggars and homeless, why we take it all so personally, why it hurts us. It`s because we have a communist eye.” This mindset outlasted the actual horrific regime. As a result, nowadays, men and women, have the same habits, the same way of thinking and the same behavior as they had twenty years ago. They can recognize poverty in places where other people close their eyes. They still hang their laundry in the balcony, reuse cups from yogurt and do laundry by

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