How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

Slavenka Drakulić was born in Croatia in 1949. In 1979 she founded the first feminist group in Yugoslavia. She studied literature at the University of Zagreb and worked as a journalist in Croatia until 1992. She has published both novels and nonfiction, in Serbo-Croatian and in English. In the 1990s, she gave interviews in the Western press about the situation of women in Eastern Europe, arguing that equality under the law in systems like Yugoslavia did not result in real dignity of work for women, support for families, or relief from unremitting domestic labor. She collaborated with Gloria Steinem to establish women’s organizations in Eastern Europe.

Drakulić’s nonfiction has primarily dealt with communism, women’s issues, the Balkans in war and recovery, and the meaning of the communist past. After How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, she wrote Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of the War, followed by Cafe Europa: Life After Communism, in 1996. Balkan Express examines Yugoslavia’s dissolution in personal terms, its costs to social cohesion, personal lives, and the moral integrity of individuals. Cafe Europa, like How We Survived Communism, explores the effects of the communist past on Eastern Europe, and how those divisions persist into the present even with the