What was life like behind the iron curtain?
May 28, 2008 7:31 PM Subscribe
What was daily life like behind the iron curtain? I recently returned from a vacation in a former Warsaw Pact country and could not help but wonder what things were like there 20 years ago.
I have a couple of friends over there, but I got the impression that the memories of this time were painful and they didn't like discussing them. I am asking anonymously (and being a bit vague about the country) because one of them is on MeFi.
In case you also lived in that time and general location or know something about it, I'd be curious to hear about things like:
How much did the government control your daily life?
Were you able to listen to any outside media like maybe radio stations from bordering countries, shortwave radio, or bootleg cassette tapes?
Do you feel your view of the West at the time was accurate, based on what you know now?
What did you like and dislike most about it?
Is my feeling that people don't really like to discuss this true?
If there are any books or movies that do a good job of explaining this, I'd like to know. My goal here is to understand my friends a little better by learning about what they might have experienced.
I have a couple of friends over there, but I got the impression that the memories of this time were painful and they didn't like discussing them. I am asking anonymously (and being a bit vague about the country) because one of them is on MeFi.
In case you also lived in that time and general location or know something about it, I'd be curious to hear about things like:
How much did the government control your daily life?
Were you able to listen to any outside media like maybe radio stations from bordering countries, shortwave radio, or bootleg cassette tapes?
Do you feel your view of the West at the time was accurate, based on what you know now?
What did you like and dislike most about it?
Is my feeling that people don't really like to discuss this true?
If there are any books or movies that do a good job of explaining this, I'd like to know. My goal here is to understand my friends a little better by learning about what they might have experienced.
I really recommend How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed.
posted by drycleanonly at 8:02 PM on May 28, 2008
posted by drycleanonly at 8:02 PM on May 28, 2008
See, immediately, the amazing, wrenching movie The Lives of Others. It's on cable these days - I just Tivoed it. Saw it in the theatre last year and haven't stopped thinking about it since. I haven't seen a better, more visceral depiction of East Germany under the Stasi.
For a lighter, yet still bleak, depiction, also don't miss the excellent Goodbye Lenin, about tragicomic attempts to keep the illusion of the regime alive for a bedridden woman.
posted by CunningLinguist at 8:24 PM on May 28, 2008 [3 favorites]
For a lighter, yet still bleak, depiction, also don't miss the excellent Goodbye Lenin, about tragicomic attempts to keep the illusion of the regime alive for a bedridden woman.
posted by CunningLinguist at 8:24 PM on May 28, 2008 [3 favorites]
If you see the Lives of Others, you will understand why no one likes to talk about it.
posted by CunningLinguist at 8:25 PM on May 28, 2008
posted by CunningLinguist at 8:25 PM on May 28, 2008
I second drycleanonly's book suggestion. Also, I recently saw 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. At the end of the movie the characters (or one of them) basically decide not to talk about what happened to them too.
posted by PY at 8:33 PM on May 28, 2008
posted by PY at 8:33 PM on May 28, 2008
Some Czech friends were visiting, and they said they didn't bother seeing The Lives of Others because to them, it would be a documentary.
I highly recommend the book Stasiland.
I never visited Eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall fell, but what I heard from people who lived there or visited at that time backs up the movies and books that people have mentioned in this thread.
posted by lukemeister at 10:02 PM on May 28, 2008
I highly recommend the book Stasiland.
I never visited Eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall fell, but what I heard from people who lived there or visited at that time backs up the movies and books that people have mentioned in this thread.
posted by lukemeister at 10:02 PM on May 28, 2008
I've got to respectfully disagree about The Lives of Others being amazing (not to hijack the thread and make it a debate about that). I tend to be a pretty generous viewer, but as a film I thought it was a predictable melodrama. I'm consistently surprised by its popularity.
I remember "The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism", by Tina Rosenberg, being a gripping read. People finding out that their spouses had been informing on them for 20 years, and so on. It won the National Book Award, but I recall there were some hoary writing here and there.
posted by Beardman at 11:06 PM on May 28, 2008
I remember "The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism", by Tina Rosenberg, being a gripping read. People finding out that their spouses had been informing on them for 20 years, and so on. It won the National Book Award, but I recall there were some hoary writing here and there.
posted by Beardman at 11:06 PM on May 28, 2008
Just a snippet. My high school Russian teacher was "lucky" enough to live in the USSR during the Brezhnev administration. Leonid was apparently quite bad at enunciating, and as such his speeches, which were mandatory listening, were filled with malaprops that make W's look pretty pale. For example, when trying to say "systematic", or systematichesky, he wound up saying "seesky-moseesky" which means "shitty sausages". Thus, entire rooms of students would snicker to themselves.
To top it off, Brezhnev's funeral was disrupted when his pallbearers actually dropped his casket en route to his grave, during the nationally-televised, mandatory-viewing ceremony. In America, such a televised gaffe would have been replayed every second for the next year. In the USSR, the clip didn't even make the evening news.
So, basically, people didn't quite buy into their government's act, and on more than one occasion shared a collective aborted snort-laugh.
posted by Doctor Suarez at 11:48 PM on May 28, 2008 [1 favorite]
To top it off, Brezhnev's funeral was disrupted when his pallbearers actually dropped his casket en route to his grave, during the nationally-televised, mandatory-viewing ceremony. In America, such a televised gaffe would have been replayed every second for the next year. In the USSR, the clip didn't even make the evening news.
So, basically, people didn't quite buy into their government's act, and on more than one occasion shared a collective aborted snort-laugh.
posted by Doctor Suarez at 11:48 PM on May 28, 2008 [1 favorite]
My folks emigrated from Hungary in the early 1980s. They don't seem to have many problems talking about most aspects of life behind the Iron Curtain, and neither do their friends and relatives - for them, it isn't so much "life behind the Iron Curtain," but just "life." They engage in nostalgia for their youth as much as baby boomers in the US do - in fact, some of my aunts and uncles are prone to that reality-free form of nostalgia which makes them long for the days of old without acknowledging that there were some real problems living in Hungary before the "rendszerváltás" - "system change." Not that there aren't problems in Hungary today, of course, but living in socialist Hungary wasn't a paradise either.
From what I have gathered listening to people and the media, Hungary, particularly post-1956, was a slightly less grim place than other Eastern Bloc countries. It was known as the "most lively barracks" - which I think is a nice way to sum up both aspects of Hungary during this time. Large parts of rural Hungary were in a nearly feudal state prior to WWII, and the socialist government responded to do this with land collectivization and cooperative farms. This targeted large landowners, sure, but moderately well-off peasants as well. Where the government didn't take land outright, they took farming implements and livestock (pigs, horses), so people were forced to choose between joining the cooperative farms (putting their land into the communal pot, and then being assigned land to tend by the coop - not necessarily the same land) or watching their children starve.
My father's parents held out until the early 1960s, at which point they couldn't really survive on the meager harvest of their garden any longer, so they joined the coop. At this point, it seems like there was not enough heavy industrial equipment to mechanize the entire agricultural process. Up to the late 1960s, at least in my father's area of the country, a lot of the agricultural work was manual - the planting, weeding and harvesting of crops other than grain (sugar beets, beans, onions, etc.) By the time of my youngest uncle in the early 1970s, this was all mechanized, and whole families didn't spend all of their time in the fields.
The store in my father's village stocked an absolutely minimal amount of goods - a single type of bread, a single type of apricot jam, salt. And there was only a single store, no one was authorized to open another. This is a rural area, I highly doubt Budapest was like this.
As far as censorship - radio signals from the West were jammed- my father likes to tell me about staying up late at night to pick up the faint signal from Radio Free Europe, so he could listen to the Rolling Stones and the Who - clearly knowledge of Western culture penetrated even into the smallest villages, but it was a struggle. Access to information in general was a challenge - in rural areas, most people didn't have access to books and newspapers outside of their children's text books and the state-sponsored press. There were only a few publishers in the country, all of those under the control of the government, of course. Even in the 1970s, my father talks about how there was a single Hungarian-Arabic dictionary in the national library. When he studied Arabic, he had to use two dictionaries: one English-Arabic, one English-Hungarian.
The thing that most sticks in my craw, and what is the most difficult for my parents and grandparents to talk about, is the effects of the rampant cronyism and corruption - my mother's parents owned a small home in a small town (near my father's village - my parents met in high school), and for 20 years they could not evict the tenant so that they could move in. Instead, my mother and her two parents lived in a single 10' by 10' room with a stove in the corner and a bathroom/outhouse they shared with 3 other families. My grandparents came from families considered part of the intelligentsia before the war, and thus they were suspect, not good communists, and so couldn't get anything accomplished. Once my grandparents sold their interest to someone better connected, he managed to evict the tenant in a matter of months and move his family in. In one of the other three families which shared the outhouse, the husband was an attorney before the war. That level of education made him suspicious after the war, and he worked as a manual day-laborer for the rest of his life, barely able to support his wife and children.
Similarly, with my grandmother on the other side, she was from a peasant family, but didn't really manage to get herself in good with any members of local communist party. During the war, her first husband was killed (leaving her a widow at 19), and she inherited his house and land in a nice part of the village. One of the members of the local party took a fancy to that particular piece of property, evicted her, got her assigned another house (in much worse condition, with less fertile land attached to it), threw her out - she had no recourse but to swallow that and move on.
When commenting on the high percentage of obese people in the population today, my parents always bring up the fact their in their high school, there wasn't a single fat student, except the butcher's daughter - since the butcher got first choice of meat, skimmed off the best for himself, either to eat or to sell on the black market, and sold the rest as he liked.
Passports, when they were issued, were designated as being valid for only certain countries - I have a passports of my mother's which is good only for certain parts of Europe. Certain goods and services were extremely hard to come by. Telephones, for instance - for some reason, it took an act of God (or a sympathetic party member) to be given a phone line, even well into the 1990s. Automobiles, of course, particularly hard to come by, well into 70s. My father recalls when a car a week went through his village. In addition, there were certain types of cars which only highly connected party members could acquire.
There are positives to this time, of course. With the exception of Budapest and a very few larger cities in the countryside, most of Hungary before the war was extremely rural, the result of policy during the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy which designated Hungary as the breadbasket, the Czech Republic as the industrial center, and Austria the administrative heart of the empire. There was not a great deal of infrastructure in place, and what there was was destroyed in the world wars - Budapest, as the largest urban center, was the most industrialized, and it was absolutely devastated in the war - all five bridges across the Danube were destroyed. It is hard to know which achievements can be attributed solely to the socialist government and which are the results of simply rebuilding the country in a new era.
I do know that my grandmother, who finished school at age 12 so that she could go work on her parents' land and as a maid in the house of the local nobleman, saw all four of her children finish secondary school (meaning school until age 18), with three of them finishing gymnasium (academic high school, as opposed to trade school), and two of them even attending university. My father was the first person from the entire village to attend university - I don't think that would have been as feasible a generation prior. There was vastly increased access to hospitals and medicine - every small village has to this day has a doctor's office which holds hours at least weekly. As most people were employed by large government companies, they could vacation in state-sponsored vacation homes in other parts of the country, with many near Lake Balaton, an extremely popular holiday area in Hungary. This was impossible for most rural or poor Hungarians a generation prior.
I think that some of the more unthinking nostalgia focuses upon things like this - remembering back to long weeks on the Balaton with friends and co-workers, when you didn't have to pay for a thing, and not recalling the true price of those weeks of vacation.
So, that is a long, rambling and second-hand account of some aspects of life behind the iron curtain.
posted by that possible maker of pork sausages at 11:59 PM on May 28, 2008 [25 favorites]
From what I have gathered listening to people and the media, Hungary, particularly post-1956, was a slightly less grim place than other Eastern Bloc countries. It was known as the "most lively barracks" - which I think is a nice way to sum up both aspects of Hungary during this time. Large parts of rural Hungary were in a nearly feudal state prior to WWII, and the socialist government responded to do this with land collectivization and cooperative farms. This targeted large landowners, sure, but moderately well-off peasants as well. Where the government didn't take land outright, they took farming implements and livestock (pigs, horses), so people were forced to choose between joining the cooperative farms (putting their land into the communal pot, and then being assigned land to tend by the coop - not necessarily the same land) or watching their children starve.
My father's parents held out until the early 1960s, at which point they couldn't really survive on the meager harvest of their garden any longer, so they joined the coop. At this point, it seems like there was not enough heavy industrial equipment to mechanize the entire agricultural process. Up to the late 1960s, at least in my father's area of the country, a lot of the agricultural work was manual - the planting, weeding and harvesting of crops other than grain (sugar beets, beans, onions, etc.) By the time of my youngest uncle in the early 1970s, this was all mechanized, and whole families didn't spend all of their time in the fields.
The store in my father's village stocked an absolutely minimal amount of goods - a single type of bread, a single type of apricot jam, salt. And there was only a single store, no one was authorized to open another. This is a rural area, I highly doubt Budapest was like this.
As far as censorship - radio signals from the West were jammed- my father likes to tell me about staying up late at night to pick up the faint signal from Radio Free Europe, so he could listen to the Rolling Stones and the Who - clearly knowledge of Western culture penetrated even into the smallest villages, but it was a struggle. Access to information in general was a challenge - in rural areas, most people didn't have access to books and newspapers outside of their children's text books and the state-sponsored press. There were only a few publishers in the country, all of those under the control of the government, of course. Even in the 1970s, my father talks about how there was a single Hungarian-Arabic dictionary in the national library. When he studied Arabic, he had to use two dictionaries: one English-Arabic, one English-Hungarian.
The thing that most sticks in my craw, and what is the most difficult for my parents and grandparents to talk about, is the effects of the rampant cronyism and corruption - my mother's parents owned a small home in a small town (near my father's village - my parents met in high school), and for 20 years they could not evict the tenant so that they could move in. Instead, my mother and her two parents lived in a single 10' by 10' room with a stove in the corner and a bathroom/outhouse they shared with 3 other families. My grandparents came from families considered part of the intelligentsia before the war, and thus they were suspect, not good communists, and so couldn't get anything accomplished. Once my grandparents sold their interest to someone better connected, he managed to evict the tenant in a matter of months and move his family in. In one of the other three families which shared the outhouse, the husband was an attorney before the war. That level of education made him suspicious after the war, and he worked as a manual day-laborer for the rest of his life, barely able to support his wife and children.
Similarly, with my grandmother on the other side, she was from a peasant family, but didn't really manage to get herself in good with any members of local communist party. During the war, her first husband was killed (leaving her a widow at 19), and she inherited his house and land in a nice part of the village. One of the members of the local party took a fancy to that particular piece of property, evicted her, got her assigned another house (in much worse condition, with less fertile land attached to it), threw her out - she had no recourse but to swallow that and move on.
When commenting on the high percentage of obese people in the population today, my parents always bring up the fact their in their high school, there wasn't a single fat student, except the butcher's daughter - since the butcher got first choice of meat, skimmed off the best for himself, either to eat or to sell on the black market, and sold the rest as he liked.
Passports, when they were issued, were designated as being valid for only certain countries - I have a passports of my mother's which is good only for certain parts of Europe. Certain goods and services were extremely hard to come by. Telephones, for instance - for some reason, it took an act of God (or a sympathetic party member) to be given a phone line, even well into the 1990s. Automobiles, of course, particularly hard to come by, well into 70s. My father recalls when a car a week went through his village. In addition, there were certain types of cars which only highly connected party members could acquire.
There are positives to this time, of course. With the exception of Budapest and a very few larger cities in the countryside, most of Hungary before the war was extremely rural, the result of policy during the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy which designated Hungary as the breadbasket, the Czech Republic as the industrial center, and Austria the administrative heart of the empire. There was not a great deal of infrastructure in place, and what there was was destroyed in the world wars - Budapest, as the largest urban center, was the most industrialized, and it was absolutely devastated in the war - all five bridges across the Danube were destroyed. It is hard to know which achievements can be attributed solely to the socialist government and which are the results of simply rebuilding the country in a new era.
I do know that my grandmother, who finished school at age 12 so that she could go work on her parents' land and as a maid in the house of the local nobleman, saw all four of her children finish secondary school (meaning school until age 18), with three of them finishing gymnasium (academic high school, as opposed to trade school), and two of them even attending university. My father was the first person from the entire village to attend university - I don't think that would have been as feasible a generation prior. There was vastly increased access to hospitals and medicine - every small village has to this day has a doctor's office which holds hours at least weekly. As most people were employed by large government companies, they could vacation in state-sponsored vacation homes in other parts of the country, with many near Lake Balaton, an extremely popular holiday area in Hungary. This was impossible for most rural or poor Hungarians a generation prior.
I think that some of the more unthinking nostalgia focuses upon things like this - remembering back to long weeks on the Balaton with friends and co-workers, when you didn't have to pay for a thing, and not recalling the true price of those weeks of vacation.
So, that is a long, rambling and second-hand account of some aspects of life behind the iron curtain.
posted by that possible maker of pork sausages at 11:59 PM on May 28, 2008 [25 favorites]
The post above (though second-hand) seems pretty 'recognizable' to me, although it's about Hungary and I lived in what was then Yugoslavia.
One thing to realize is that while the West portrays the Communist period in Eastern Europe as relentlessly monotone and grey, there were (and are) huge, colorful differences in the situations in each country, within the regions of each country and amongst different peoples in each country or region. So it makes a big difference which country you have in mind. I'll ramble forever about this if I'm allowed, so let me answer your questions one by one in hopes of maintaining some structure:
How much did the government control your daily life?
That's hard to answer. In Yugoslavia, in many ways, not a whole lot more than the American government does. Access to anything imported was limited, but my father had Beatles records and I had a Barbie doll. There was usually ample food and all that. I read fashion magazines as a young teenager. My father had his own business and members of my family procured "foreign" jobs in places like Iraq and Turkey for a few years without being part of the Party. Travel wasn't that restricted, but our currency was worthless, so it was financially impractical to travel much. You couldn't reasonably expect to engage in a lot of activities allowed in America - like anti-government demonstrations - but most people don't do that anyway, even in America! Religion was downplayed in school, society and government, though I had very devout relatives. (In some ways, that was a better system than the chaos I see in America re: religion.) But, my father was jailed and beaten severely after being reported for having made some sort of comment about Tito. He wasn't quite the same afterwards, I don't think. So there was kind of a level of paranoia that had some real basis. It should be noted that Yugoslavia was the most open Communist country in Europe - more so than even Hungary, which was pretty open.
But I've studied in Hungary and Romania and know a lot about those places too. One's life was very strictly controlled in Romania, especially in the later Ceausescu years, when something like abortion (free, open and easy in Yugoslavia) was a serious, serious crime. And some incredible percentage - well into double digits - of Romanians were forced to inform on others to and by the Securitate, who were much more brutal than most of what we had in Yugoslavia. So again, this varies country by country. And by era, as well.
An aside: PY wrote: Also, I recently saw 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. At the end of the movie the characters (or one of them) basically decide not to talk about what happened to them too.
Well, it should be noted that the one *not* having the abortion was, in all likelihood, shit-scared that the other would mention it to someone, get reported and then both girls would be put away. So it was more a thing of caution than an unwillingness to discuss it per se.
Were you able to listen to any outside media like maybe radio stations from bordering countries, shortwave radio, or bootleg cassette tapes?
Cassettes were widely bootlegged and sold brazenly in the open in Yugoslavia. We had punk and reggae bands and I knew all about postpunk and strange avant-garde stuff. I always found radio pretty stale - they mostly played old folk songs, and although I like these, it was repetitious. Sarajevo - my town - was in the mountains and it would have been hard to get a signal from even twenty miles away.
Do you feel your view of the West at the time was accurate, based on what you know now?
I was 'odd' in Bosnia. I was an ambitious and anachronistic girl in a very patriarchal society. I fit in better with the West, but even so my view was somewhat idealistic. But keep in mind, I was starving and had lost my parents and all my possessions due to the war, so anything different sounded great! I am still surprised to find how thoroughly uneducated and insulated many Americans are, how little they know even about their own language, literature, art and so on. Forget about topics relating to geography, history, science, etc! With all this wealth and opportunity, people here really do tend to bask in total ignorance. (That's why I like this forum - smart people!) I was also astonished at how little "real" culture there is - so many chain restaurants, so much bland music on the radio, everything is Big and Hollywood and there is little regional deviation in anything. Twenty kilometers out of Sarajevo was a different world, but here it's all kind of the same.
What did you like and dislike most about it?
Traditions were preserved better - my grandmother and I sang the songs that she sang with her grandmother. Cooking (but not cuisine per se) was much better and more real. My professor in Hungary mentioned, when looking back, that "you could work one day and buy 30 books with the money!" Theatre, cinema, concerts, cultural events were so cheap as to be almost free. People shared much more of everything - we were all in the same boat. We laughed a lot more than I do now, families and friends were closer. There was much less superficiality and much less materialistic "baggage." That's what I liked.
I didn't like the relative lack of opportunity, but it's a double-edged sword - here, where there is so much opportunity, people do little with it. My society was fairly sexist (which isn't Communism's fault); there was a lot of forced patriotism. But in Yugoslavia, it wasn't too bad until the very very end. In Romania or Hungary (especially Romania), it was a totally different story.
Is my feeling that people don't really like to discuss this true?
I think what many Americans don't understand is that life was simply life. It's a bit like someone asking you to go on and on about America in the 1970's - most people wouldn't have much to say. In some places, it's not polite to bring it up because many people were complicit in misdeeds and there's no way of knowing who was who. For my cousins in Sarajevo, you still have to work and go to the market, and a lot of the same people are still in charge just under a different name. There's more freedom, but it's not exercised, as people have to pay the bills and maybe save for a holiday or something. The young people aren't any more interested than most Americans would be to hear all about life in the Eisenhower era from their parents. Old people are generally screwed by being "too late," and many people in their 40s and 50s are struggling to make adjustments and not get shut out of things as well. In places like Romania, there are new struggles with inadequate pensions, or the resurfacing of conflicts which predate the World Wars - like Magyars who lost their homes to Romanians and now want them back. So looking back, for many, is kind of a luxury. We lived through it, it's not so special or unique or captivating for us.
The other thing is, for many people things are about the same, or even worse. Corruption and cronyism (mentioned above) are rampant still, for instance. And as a friend in Romania said, "We used to have so much money, but there was nothing to buy. And now there's plenty to buy, but there's no money!"
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the film "12:08 East Of Bucharest," which is a new Romanian film (I got it through Netflix) about a talk show host in an unnamed provincial city who gathers two people (and several callers) together to discuss whether the "revolution" took place in their town, or if they only benefitted from struggles elsewhere. No one can agree on anything, and the feeling is that only history will sort it all out - we've got other things on our minds, and to dwell on this, well, you'd have to be a kind of crank. It's a funny film, and would give you a good idea of why these questions don't generally get great responses.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 1:54 AM on May 29, 2008 [27 favorites]
One thing to realize is that while the West portrays the Communist period in Eastern Europe as relentlessly monotone and grey, there were (and are) huge, colorful differences in the situations in each country, within the regions of each country and amongst different peoples in each country or region. So it makes a big difference which country you have in mind. I'll ramble forever about this if I'm allowed, so let me answer your questions one by one in hopes of maintaining some structure:
How much did the government control your daily life?
That's hard to answer. In Yugoslavia, in many ways, not a whole lot more than the American government does. Access to anything imported was limited, but my father had Beatles records and I had a Barbie doll. There was usually ample food and all that. I read fashion magazines as a young teenager. My father had his own business and members of my family procured "foreign" jobs in places like Iraq and Turkey for a few years without being part of the Party. Travel wasn't that restricted, but our currency was worthless, so it was financially impractical to travel much. You couldn't reasonably expect to engage in a lot of activities allowed in America - like anti-government demonstrations - but most people don't do that anyway, even in America! Religion was downplayed in school, society and government, though I had very devout relatives. (In some ways, that was a better system than the chaos I see in America re: religion.) But, my father was jailed and beaten severely after being reported for having made some sort of comment about Tito. He wasn't quite the same afterwards, I don't think. So there was kind of a level of paranoia that had some real basis. It should be noted that Yugoslavia was the most open Communist country in Europe - more so than even Hungary, which was pretty open.
But I've studied in Hungary and Romania and know a lot about those places too. One's life was very strictly controlled in Romania, especially in the later Ceausescu years, when something like abortion (free, open and easy in Yugoslavia) was a serious, serious crime. And some incredible percentage - well into double digits - of Romanians were forced to inform on others to and by the Securitate, who were much more brutal than most of what we had in Yugoslavia. So again, this varies country by country. And by era, as well.
An aside: PY wrote: Also, I recently saw 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. At the end of the movie the characters (or one of them) basically decide not to talk about what happened to them too.
Well, it should be noted that the one *not* having the abortion was, in all likelihood, shit-scared that the other would mention it to someone, get reported and then both girls would be put away. So it was more a thing of caution than an unwillingness to discuss it per se.
Were you able to listen to any outside media like maybe radio stations from bordering countries, shortwave radio, or bootleg cassette tapes?
Cassettes were widely bootlegged and sold brazenly in the open in Yugoslavia. We had punk and reggae bands and I knew all about postpunk and strange avant-garde stuff. I always found radio pretty stale - they mostly played old folk songs, and although I like these, it was repetitious. Sarajevo - my town - was in the mountains and it would have been hard to get a signal from even twenty miles away.
Do you feel your view of the West at the time was accurate, based on what you know now?
I was 'odd' in Bosnia. I was an ambitious and anachronistic girl in a very patriarchal society. I fit in better with the West, but even so my view was somewhat idealistic. But keep in mind, I was starving and had lost my parents and all my possessions due to the war, so anything different sounded great! I am still surprised to find how thoroughly uneducated and insulated many Americans are, how little they know even about their own language, literature, art and so on. Forget about topics relating to geography, history, science, etc! With all this wealth and opportunity, people here really do tend to bask in total ignorance. (That's why I like this forum - smart people!) I was also astonished at how little "real" culture there is - so many chain restaurants, so much bland music on the radio, everything is Big and Hollywood and there is little regional deviation in anything. Twenty kilometers out of Sarajevo was a different world, but here it's all kind of the same.
What did you like and dislike most about it?
Traditions were preserved better - my grandmother and I sang the songs that she sang with her grandmother. Cooking (but not cuisine per se) was much better and more real. My professor in Hungary mentioned, when looking back, that "you could work one day and buy 30 books with the money!" Theatre, cinema, concerts, cultural events were so cheap as to be almost free. People shared much more of everything - we were all in the same boat. We laughed a lot more than I do now, families and friends were closer. There was much less superficiality and much less materialistic "baggage." That's what I liked.
I didn't like the relative lack of opportunity, but it's a double-edged sword - here, where there is so much opportunity, people do little with it. My society was fairly sexist (which isn't Communism's fault); there was a lot of forced patriotism. But in Yugoslavia, it wasn't too bad until the very very end. In Romania or Hungary (especially Romania), it was a totally different story.
Is my feeling that people don't really like to discuss this true?
I think what many Americans don't understand is that life was simply life. It's a bit like someone asking you to go on and on about America in the 1970's - most people wouldn't have much to say. In some places, it's not polite to bring it up because many people were complicit in misdeeds and there's no way of knowing who was who. For my cousins in Sarajevo, you still have to work and go to the market, and a lot of the same people are still in charge just under a different name. There's more freedom, but it's not exercised, as people have to pay the bills and maybe save for a holiday or something. The young people aren't any more interested than most Americans would be to hear all about life in the Eisenhower era from their parents. Old people are generally screwed by being "too late," and many people in their 40s and 50s are struggling to make adjustments and not get shut out of things as well. In places like Romania, there are new struggles with inadequate pensions, or the resurfacing of conflicts which predate the World Wars - like Magyars who lost their homes to Romanians and now want them back. So looking back, for many, is kind of a luxury. We lived through it, it's not so special or unique or captivating for us.
The other thing is, for many people things are about the same, or even worse. Corruption and cronyism (mentioned above) are rampant still, for instance. And as a friend in Romania said, "We used to have so much money, but there was nothing to buy. And now there's plenty to buy, but there's no money!"
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the film "12:08 East Of Bucharest," which is a new Romanian film (I got it through Netflix) about a talk show host in an unnamed provincial city who gathers two people (and several callers) together to discuss whether the "revolution" took place in their town, or if they only benefitted from struggles elsewhere. No one can agree on anything, and the feeling is that only history will sort it all out - we've got other things on our minds, and to dwell on this, well, you'd have to be a kind of crank. It's a funny film, and would give you a good idea of why these questions don't generally get great responses.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 1:54 AM on May 29, 2008 [27 favorites]
andrei codrescu writes about life in communist romania. he's mostly an essayist, so you'd probably just have to flip around through his books to find the particular pieces, but his other stuff is good, so you wouldn't be wasting your time.
posted by thinkingwoman at 4:36 AM on May 29, 2008 [1 favorite]
posted by thinkingwoman at 4:36 AM on May 29, 2008 [1 favorite]
Seconding How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed.
posted by awesomebrad at 5:56 AM on May 29, 2008
posted by awesomebrad at 5:56 AM on May 29, 2008
Seconding Stasiland, for the German perspective. My future in-laws are both from Hungary -- father left right before the revolution, mother in the seventies. When she went back for the first time after the Wall came down, I remember how incredibly *angry* she was. What stuck out in my mind the most (talking about transiting through Budapest on the way to her village): "There were people sleeping in doorways! THEY would have never let that happen."
And I giggled a little, because by "they," she meant the communists, and she'd been a Party member (she more or less had to, she was a teacher), and I thought deary me, she's having communist NOSTALGIA? She got to leave! What about the people who were left behind?
But then, having lived in Germany, I remembered my favorite, favorite word: Ostalgie. (More or less "nostalgia for the East.") Plenty of my East Berlin-living friends will say out loud, with no sense of irony at all, that things WERE better before all those rich fucking westerners moved in and ruined our little town. There was a t-shirt for sale in Alexanderplatz which, roughly translated, said "God protect us from storms and wind / and westerners that are in the east." So yes, Goodbye Lenin was a funny movie for me, too...
posted by bitter-girl.com at 7:18 AM on May 29, 2008
And I giggled a little, because by "they," she meant the communists, and she'd been a Party member (she more or less had to, she was a teacher), and I thought deary me, she's having communist NOSTALGIA? She got to leave! What about the people who were left behind?
But then, having lived in Germany, I remembered my favorite, favorite word: Ostalgie. (More or less "nostalgia for the East.") Plenty of my East Berlin-living friends will say out loud, with no sense of irony at all, that things WERE better before all those rich fucking westerners moved in and ruined our little town. There was a t-shirt for sale in Alexanderplatz which, roughly translated, said "God protect us from storms and wind / and westerners that are in the east." So yes, Goodbye Lenin was a funny movie for me, too...
posted by bitter-girl.com at 7:18 AM on May 29, 2008
I had family living in East Germany before the wall came down. We (my American family) actually went to visit them in the summer of 1989, months before the wall. I was only 11, so my memories are sort of fuzzy and very oriented towards an 11-year-old American kid's perspective. But what I do remember:
Cliched grey, cement-block cities. Our cousin's family had a pool but were still on a waiting list for a car. Everything seemed more traditional than with our family in West Germany: the food, the gender roles, the pastimes. My parents had to register with the police when we got to town. My brother had brought a handheld video game which our 17-year-old cousin was completely obsessed with, we left it with him. Our first night there, my parents stayed up with the adults. Apparently my mom's cousin's husband got a bit tipsy and started ranting about the government (as people will do) and his wife got up and closed all the windows, even though there was a field separating their house from the neighbors. My mom did say, though, that her cousin said things were getting better and they expected changes soon.
So sort of a fairly "normal" life, but a bit more traditional and with some paranoia.
posted by lunasol at 7:33 AM on May 29, 2008
Cliched grey, cement-block cities. Our cousin's family had a pool but were still on a waiting list for a car. Everything seemed more traditional than with our family in West Germany: the food, the gender roles, the pastimes. My parents had to register with the police when we got to town. My brother had brought a handheld video game which our 17-year-old cousin was completely obsessed with, we left it with him. Our first night there, my parents stayed up with the adults. Apparently my mom's cousin's husband got a bit tipsy and started ranting about the government (as people will do) and his wife got up and closed all the windows, even though there was a field separating their house from the neighbors. My mom did say, though, that her cousin said things were getting better and they expected changes soon.
So sort of a fairly "normal" life, but a bit more traditional and with some paranoia.
posted by lunasol at 7:33 AM on May 29, 2008
I grew up in a former Soviet republic, but was quite young when I left. Still, I can talk some about my family.
Housing was scarce, even in the medium-sized city we lived in. My grandparents, aunt, housekeeper, and me all lived in a two-bedroom, one bath apartment - and my grandparents were relatively well off, as you can guess by the presence of a housekeeper. I lived with them because my parents didn't have an apartment of their own, even after they were married they stayed in my other grandmother's 1-bedroom. Eventually they got off a waiting list and were able to move into a newly built apartment block on the outskirts of the city, but I was in school by then and they didn't want to move me. So, about a 7-year wait for an apartment.
The educational and professional opportunities varied. There was discrimination against minority ethnic groups such as Jews. My grandfather was a well-respected veteran and university professor, so his wife (lawyer) and his kids (teacher and historian) had good jobs despite minority status. There was definitely a lot of nepotism and string-pulling to set stuff like that up. My other grandmother, on the other hand, was in a blue-collar profession, and her daughter (my mother) had trouble getting into the courses she wanted and ended up in a pretty dull job herself. On the other other hand, everyone was poor, so aside from a bit of prestige prestige, career issues didn't seem to hinder one's social life much.
Being a kid was actually pretty nice. There was widely available and good quality day care, good schools, no huge problems with bullying and classism like one sees in the US. It was also safe for kids to roam freely - or it was considered safe, anyway. I ran alll around the neighborhood from a very young age - probably 5 or 6. I wasn't allowed to cross the major road near my house, but still let me access any number of smaller streets, parks, and even an adjacent university campus. Standard warnings not to go off with strangers were given but people were really very nice to children, in my experience.
I think I actually had a better childhood than many kids who grew up in America, but the older members of my family had it worse. Severely constrained career options, rampant discrimination, lack of material goods and housing - but on the other hand, no one was expected to have a huge house or a new wardrobe every season to keep up appearances.
posted by Mr Bunnsy at 8:01 AM on May 29, 2008
Housing was scarce, even in the medium-sized city we lived in. My grandparents, aunt, housekeeper, and me all lived in a two-bedroom, one bath apartment - and my grandparents were relatively well off, as you can guess by the presence of a housekeeper. I lived with them because my parents didn't have an apartment of their own, even after they were married they stayed in my other grandmother's 1-bedroom. Eventually they got off a waiting list and were able to move into a newly built apartment block on the outskirts of the city, but I was in school by then and they didn't want to move me. So, about a 7-year wait for an apartment.
The educational and professional opportunities varied. There was discrimination against minority ethnic groups such as Jews. My grandfather was a well-respected veteran and university professor, so his wife (lawyer) and his kids (teacher and historian) had good jobs despite minority status. There was definitely a lot of nepotism and string-pulling to set stuff like that up. My other grandmother, on the other hand, was in a blue-collar profession, and her daughter (my mother) had trouble getting into the courses she wanted and ended up in a pretty dull job herself. On the other other hand, everyone was poor, so aside from a bit of prestige prestige, career issues didn't seem to hinder one's social life much.
Being a kid was actually pretty nice. There was widely available and good quality day care, good schools, no huge problems with bullying and classism like one sees in the US. It was also safe for kids to roam freely - or it was considered safe, anyway. I ran alll around the neighborhood from a very young age - probably 5 or 6. I wasn't allowed to cross the major road near my house, but still let me access any number of smaller streets, parks, and even an adjacent university campus. Standard warnings not to go off with strangers were given but people were really very nice to children, in my experience.
I think I actually had a better childhood than many kids who grew up in America, but the older members of my family had it worse. Severely constrained career options, rampant discrimination, lack of material goods and housing - but on the other hand, no one was expected to have a huge house or a new wardrobe every season to keep up appearances.
posted by Mr Bunnsy at 8:01 AM on May 29, 2008
Around 1990, just after Perestroika but before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, I got to know Dr. Nina Uraltseva, a visiting professor from Russia.
She was (still is, I suppose) kind of a big deal--Professor of Mathematics and head of Mathematical Physics at St. Petersburg University, well-respected, trusted enough by the Party to be sent to the US on research trips. We, a newlywed grad school couple, had her over for dinner a couple of times, and my (then) wife, a math PhD student, helped her to get settled in her temporary home.
She was continually amazed that we, a dual-grad-school couple, lived a better life than she did back home. It's the little things that I remember--she said she needed a pot to cook meat. When we asked what kind of pot, what kind of meat, she was confounded; she wasn't used to having options. She didn't understand why beef, poultry, and pork were different colors. She knew what guacamole was (?!?), but didn't recognize grated cheese. Her greatest delight before heading home was going to the grocery store for a food-shopping spree. She couldn't take anything back with her, so she just feasted before she left. Back home, she lived in a one-bedroom apartment with her mother, two hours away from her job, and she felt lucky to have that.
After things opened up a bit, she came back for another visit. Her story of life before and after Perestroika stays with me--before, no one could get bananas. They simply were not available, even in a 6-million-person metropolis such as St. Petersburg, for any amount of money. After Perestroika, they were available, but no one could afford them. For some reason, this story really sticks with me. I've always been able to assume that I could get a banana when I wanted one. I'm not talking about luxury items, or even seasonal or exotic fruits. I'm talking about a freaking banana.
posted by MrMoonPie at 9:16 AM on May 29, 2008
She was (still is, I suppose) kind of a big deal--Professor of Mathematics and head of Mathematical Physics at St. Petersburg University, well-respected, trusted enough by the Party to be sent to the US on research trips. We, a newlywed grad school couple, had her over for dinner a couple of times, and my (then) wife, a math PhD student, helped her to get settled in her temporary home.
She was continually amazed that we, a dual-grad-school couple, lived a better life than she did back home. It's the little things that I remember--she said she needed a pot to cook meat. When we asked what kind of pot, what kind of meat, she was confounded; she wasn't used to having options. She didn't understand why beef, poultry, and pork were different colors. She knew what guacamole was (?!?), but didn't recognize grated cheese. Her greatest delight before heading home was going to the grocery store for a food-shopping spree. She couldn't take anything back with her, so she just feasted before she left. Back home, she lived in a one-bedroom apartment with her mother, two hours away from her job, and she felt lucky to have that.
After things opened up a bit, she came back for another visit. Her story of life before and after Perestroika stays with me--before, no one could get bananas. They simply were not available, even in a 6-million-person metropolis such as St. Petersburg, for any amount of money. After Perestroika, they were available, but no one could afford them. For some reason, this story really sticks with me. I've always been able to assume that I could get a banana when I wanted one. I'm not talking about luxury items, or even seasonal or exotic fruits. I'm talking about a freaking banana.
posted by MrMoonPie at 9:16 AM on May 29, 2008
I grew up in Romania, and we had no bananas either, except maybe once or twice in my entire childhood. For what it's worth, bananas ARE exotic fruits that grow only in tropical climates far, far away from the old Iron Curtain. To put it in the kind of language that would be used in school by our teachers to describe the West, the quotidian availability of bananas in the United States is a clear sign of its economic imperialism and shameless exploitation of our brother and sister workers in Central America.
posted by agent99 at 9:55 AM on May 29, 2008 [2 favorites]
posted by agent99 at 9:55 AM on May 29, 2008 [2 favorites]
I have a cousin who was an artist in the Soviet Union and immigrated to the US in the early 1980s. In the USSR he was "lucky" enough to belong to the artists union and was given a stipend. He was supported by the state so he could make art. But he had to make "acceptable" art. He was a sculptor and made the type of monumental social realism which he abhorred.
When he came to the states he could make the type of sculpture he wanted but, of course, he was no longer supported by the government. His studio was in the dark basement of an apartment building. And he had to find a job. He started working for Hasbro and one of his first jobs there was to sculpt heads of GI Joe dolls. It was a middle management perk that if you did a good job your head became a GI Joe!
Monumental realism on another scale.
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 10:10 AM on May 29, 2008 [5 favorites]
When he came to the states he could make the type of sculpture he wanted but, of course, he was no longer supported by the government. His studio was in the dark basement of an apartment building. And he had to find a job. He started working for Hasbro and one of his first jobs there was to sculpt heads of GI Joe dolls. It was a middle management perk that if you did a good job your head became a GI Joe!
Monumental realism on another scale.
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 10:10 AM on May 29, 2008 [5 favorites]
More about life right after the Wall fell - and about the wonderful bananas - in this thread.
posted by CunningLinguist at 12:25 PM on May 29, 2008
posted by CunningLinguist at 12:25 PM on May 29, 2008
WalterMitty sent me a link about German bananas. I had no idea that the story I was told was such a common trope. Fascinating.
posted by MrMoonPie at 1:16 PM on May 29, 2008
posted by MrMoonPie at 1:16 PM on May 29, 2008
Mod note: This is an answer from an anonymous reader.
How much did the government control your daily life? Depends on what you mean by that. They pretty much try to control everything through every official you interact with in your daily life. Also, government controls every enterprise in the country and every thought process in the country. So through these, I say our daily life is very much rationed. The thing to keep in mind is, people grew up knowing nothing but. This is a very wide topic and hard to answer in a short e-mail.
Were you able to listen to any outside media like maybe radio stations from bordering countries, shortwave radio, or bootleg cassette tapes? Not legally. Some people were listening to Voice of America and Radio Liberty. It was not legal and if caught, people would get into a lot of trouble, including prison. And government had some static scrambling devices to interfere with those stations delivery. It worked. It was very hard to get what is actually being said. Some of us didn't have the patience.
Do you feel your view of the West at the time was accurate, based on what you know now? No and it was beyond the reasonable misconception about the places you haven't been in. To be fair, I don't think the west has accurate view of our countries.
What did you like and dislike most about it? Oh please, this is so big. The regime is absolutely inhumane in its mildest form. Has no regard for an individual - at all and on every level. It is beyond being inefficient and it is corrupt and criminal to its core. And all these features are in the nature of the beast. One can't have what is called a communist regime without those qualities. And besides, killing millions of people - FOR NOTHING - and millions for appearing to be different - how is that for what I hate most? Lives spent in prison because your parents were rich before the revolution or because you were late to your work by 20 min, how is that for a bad thing? Or people voting for a single candidate and always "yes", would you like it? Not being able to speak your mind - ever, would you like it? Always thinking that somebody around you is a KGB informant - in any group of people, like that? There is one semi good thing - it is predictable. And predictability is good, even if it is a bad thing you can count on. Every other good thing to me is not inherent in the regime but rather despite of it or not an intent.
Is my feeling that people don't really like to discuss this true?I don't know. A lot of people don't have as strong feelings or positions as I do.
If there are any books or movies that do a good job of explaining this, I'd like to know. My goal here is to understand my friends a little better by learning about what they might have experienced. Sologenicin's books give a good view into a certain period. East West movie gives a good window into the same time. For the modern times, I have no idea what is translated into English.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:18 PM on May 29, 2008 [1 favorite]
How much did the government control your daily life? Depends on what you mean by that. They pretty much try to control everything through every official you interact with in your daily life. Also, government controls every enterprise in the country and every thought process in the country. So through these, I say our daily life is very much rationed. The thing to keep in mind is, people grew up knowing nothing but. This is a very wide topic and hard to answer in a short e-mail.
Were you able to listen to any outside media like maybe radio stations from bordering countries, shortwave radio, or bootleg cassette tapes? Not legally. Some people were listening to Voice of America and Radio Liberty. It was not legal and if caught, people would get into a lot of trouble, including prison. And government had some static scrambling devices to interfere with those stations delivery. It worked. It was very hard to get what is actually being said. Some of us didn't have the patience.
Do you feel your view of the West at the time was accurate, based on what you know now? No and it was beyond the reasonable misconception about the places you haven't been in. To be fair, I don't think the west has accurate view of our countries.
What did you like and dislike most about it? Oh please, this is so big. The regime is absolutely inhumane in its mildest form. Has no regard for an individual - at all and on every level. It is beyond being inefficient and it is corrupt and criminal to its core. And all these features are in the nature of the beast. One can't have what is called a communist regime without those qualities. And besides, killing millions of people - FOR NOTHING - and millions for appearing to be different - how is that for what I hate most? Lives spent in prison because your parents were rich before the revolution or because you were late to your work by 20 min, how is that for a bad thing? Or people voting for a single candidate and always "yes", would you like it? Not being able to speak your mind - ever, would you like it? Always thinking that somebody around you is a KGB informant - in any group of people, like that? There is one semi good thing - it is predictable. And predictability is good, even if it is a bad thing you can count on. Every other good thing to me is not inherent in the regime but rather despite of it or not an intent.
Is my feeling that people don't really like to discuss this true?I don't know. A lot of people don't have as strong feelings or positions as I do.
If there are any books or movies that do a good job of explaining this, I'd like to know. My goal here is to understand my friends a little better by learning about what they might have experienced. Sologenicin's books give a good view into a certain period. East West movie gives a good window into the same time. For the modern times, I have no idea what is translated into English.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:18 PM on May 29, 2008 [1 favorite]
WalterMitty sent me a link about German bananas...which I now see is also linked in the thread that CunningLinguist linked to.
posted by MrMoonPie at 1:18 PM on May 29, 2008
Cortex, do you know if the use of the present tense in that anonymous comment you linked to is a byproduct of a language problem or something worse? The guy isn't posting from Pyongyang is he?
posted by CunningLinguist at 6:02 PM on May 29, 2008
posted by CunningLinguist at 6:02 PM on May 29, 2008
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by prefpara at 7:46 PM on May 28, 2008