A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism Quotes

“Demonstrating reverence (born out of fear of his father) to this insignificant son, they bowed to the shadow of a man and his times—and not to the shadows of the thousands of people executed or dead in labor camps and prisons during his reign.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“She stopped believing in the leadership of the Communist Party and, moreover, in Communism as a system. She lost the comfort of thinking that Albanian Communism was just a matter of the wrong people in the wrong place—that the idea was right, only the practice was wrong.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“Knowledge of any kind was a curse in our society. The more access to knowledge and information a person had, the more suspicious it was.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“The first secretary as a matter of principle should not trust anyone, not even his friends, much less a family with such suspect members. Rather, he should have followed good old Stalinist credo: Trust is good—but control is better.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“way. Her fear and her conscience turned her into a writer—but isn’t that often the case in many a dictatorship? Not that it helps; many writers have experienced just the opposite. Therefore, she hid it carefully.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“But the minister’s soul was a dark, menacing, evil soul. Yet, his own! This was the most tragic thing for me, to see how dark his soul was.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“what is one supposed to call a shadow without a man?”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“way, I happen to know that there is astonishingly little psychoanalytical practice even today. Not only in Albania but in the whole of the formerly Communist Europe as well. Obviously, the Communists did not care about individuals, much less about the problems of their psyche.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“is. What do you do when there’s not even an idea of a common interest, a common good?”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“I observe that when an individual in this society feels pretty lost and helpless, he doesn’t know how to take responsibility for his own life, much less for that of the poor dogs in his neighborhood. It doesn’t help that democracy, so far, means only that those who are up stay up, like in a kind of a merry-go-round of power. It also could be a laissez-faire attitude of this society in general, which hasn’t woken up properly from the Communist slumber.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“The totalitarian power structure resembles a house of cards. You should be very careful when you try to remove a single card, that we all know. But, oddly enough, it’s hardest to remove a card from the very top—then it’s called a coup d’état.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“In my long life I’ve learned that security is what matters most, both to dogs and to humans. One can witness that now, in this period of total insecurity.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“Who trusts the police?”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“charity never is a solution for social problems. You see, there we are, I’m calling for a systematic solution, and that, of course, is to slip into politics! Yes, politics about dogs. They, too, are intelligent creatures; they need rules.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“decision. In former times, what you habitually call Communism (although there was communism and Communism), politics used to rule our lives in a more obvious way. I mean, both our and our human cohabitants’ lives, since our destinies are intertwined.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“most important ingredient of any goulash—as well as goulash communism—is tolerance.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“paprika. But goulash changes constantly—as does national identity, composed of many more elements than a nationality, a language, a history, or a tradition. To such an extent that it is nowadays called a multiple identity.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“national identity was perceived as static, as something cast in stone: There is a people; there is a language, culture, tradition—as well as a food, I might add—so there should be a state, too. And all that (except for the state) is God given and has to be guarded with one’s life, because it is always under threat from its enemies. Still, today apparently there are people who propagate this calcified idea of national identity.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“indeed, for the Socialist political regime we had. In the last decade, however, sooner than you could say the name of this stew, the recipe for goulash turned into a question of nothing less than—national identity!”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“West. I saw that in my part of the world there is nobody to protect women; no government will take care of their rights if they don’t learn to do so themselves. Now, my task in this book is, as I said, to introduce the reader to”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“Women in the former Communist countries are, generally, worse off. They were the first ones to lose jobs and the last ones to get them.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“In my political scientist’s opinion, women are the biggest losers with the downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“simplicity. By the way, let me declare here and now that I consider all females of all kinds to be emancipated if they can earn their own living and can make their own decisions independently. To me, economic independence is the main criterion for emancipation.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“The main principle of goulash communism became, to quote him: “He who is not against us is for us.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“the reader should imagine Stalin as a kind of Darth Vader, the lord of the “dark force.” On the other hand, his army did defeat Hitler. The experience of living under socialism teaches us that political leaders are neither heroes nor villains—but sometimes even both.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“with the same question of ingredients: How far could one go in introducing various additions and changes—and still call it socialism? His unorthodox mixture of ingredients from both the planned and the market economies made our bellies full, our newspapers more liberal, our piggish rights more respected.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“Moreover, a whole generation of scholars, if not two, suddenly had their pasts invalidated—even if they weren’t teaching Marxism, even if they had never been sympathetic to Marxism at all.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“But there are some from their grandparents’ generation, and even their parents’, who got sentimental and invented fairy tales about what allegedly used to be a “better life,” times when equality ruled (equality or egalitarianism are the terms they seem to use for a lack of every kind of megadrilles, haplotaxida, i.e., food in general). Equality in hunger? In lack of bananas?”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“newcomers, one could get everything in those huge churches (called Shopping Malls) celebrating Consumerism, anything at all without even a prayer. But there was kind of a trick that this religion played on its believers.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“the religion newcomers found on the banana side had nothing to do with these old, bearded, invisible Men. Rather, this particular type of religion was founded on an irresistible and therefore powerful (although foolish!) desire to possess things.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism