How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

Drakulić recalls standing in a store with her daughter once, who was angry and resolute that they would not buy cheap toilet paper. For Drakulić, this was a failed attempt at “discipline” because her daughter did not understand that they can only really afford the state manufactured brand, Golub (67). At first Drakulić wanted to argue, but she found that to do so would be to engage in propaganda, the insistence that material goods were unnecessary. Instead, she realized, “My daughter was right […] it was the principle of not giving in, not surrendering the basic elements of civilized living” (67). Drakulić argues that people always knew communism would fail, they just thought it would “take a hell of a long time. In fact, one of the indicators was toilet paper” (67). The return of Golub took Drakulić to her own childhood, a time of deprivation that was “terrible because we did not know that something better existed” (68). She asserts that once they knew, “communism was doomed” (68).

As a child, Drakulić learned “what every child under communism had to learn, that you can’t find everything you need all the time and most likely can’t ever find anything” (68-69), and this was why people used newspapers in toilets.