Teaching the history of everyday life in eastern Europe during the era of state socialism has always been a challenge in Western universities. Pervasive Cold War stereotypes about Gulags, famines and purges crowd out topics such as the pre-1989 history of athletics, architecture or popular culture. Revisionist historians try to complicate our understanding of the quotidian experience of authoritarianism, while adherents of the so-called totalitarian thesis produce evidence to support a vision of bleak and grey societies crippled by gerontocratic one-party regimes with moribund centrally planned economies.

Given the fraught politics of knowledge production during and after the Cold War, it is occasionally refreshing to assign a book that dispenses with theory and focuses instead on vivid and compelling episodes to convey the lived realities of state socialism and its aftermaths. Since I began teaching?more than 20 years ago, the works of the Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakuli? have populated my syllabi?¨C to the unending delight of my students. Her clear and lively prose captures in bite-sized essays what most scholarly works take scores of pages to provide: a thoughtful insider¡¯s view of the sudden and unexpected transition to capitalism and democracy following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Her latest offering,?Caf¨¦ Europa Revisited, returns to the themes she explored in her two essay collections from the 1990s,?How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed?(1992) and?Caf¨¦ Europa: Life After Communism?(1997).?

Drakuli? opens with reflections on the profound disappointments of eastern Europeans who naively expected paradise with the coming of multiparty elections and free markets. In a brilliant chapter on ¡°food apartheid¡±, she exposes how Western companies sell poorer quality products to eastern Europeans under the same brand names and packaging they use in the West: fish sticks with less fish and biscuits with palm oil instead of butter. She explores the exodus of doctors and nurses from Romania, the anti-immigrant sentiments that underpinned Brexit and the rise of nationalism in Poland and Hungary. Eastern Europeans feel themselves the victims of history, she argues, and this fuels ¡°a desire to have an independent nation state and a population that is as ethnically homogenous as possible¡±.

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Perhaps most pedagogically useful for those of us teaching students born well after 1990 is Drakuli?¡¯s frank acknowledgement of the red nostalgia that some still feel for various state socialist pasts as well as the rhetorical challenges posed when trying to discuss any positive legacies. ¡°In all former communist countries in Eastern Europe,¡± she writes, ¡°it is difficult to mention the merits of communism, a system that, in a short time, brought modernization and changed an agrarian society into an urbanized, industrial one. It meant general education as well as the emancipation of women; this has to be recognized, even though such changes were accomplished by a totalitarian regime.¡±

Caf¨¦ Europa Revisited breaks down the old dichotomy: communism, bad; capitalism, good. In Drakuli?¡¯s astute observations of the Europe of today, indeed, there seems to be plenty of bad to go around.

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Kristen Ghodsee is professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (2019).

Caf¨¦ Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-communism
By Slavenka Drakuli?
Penguin Putnam Inc, 256pp, ?14.99
ISBN 9780143134176
Published 7 January 2021