Her Life Through Their Eyes

IT is no longer a revelation that the essence of life under totalitarianism is contained not only in its extreme horrors -- the knock on the door, the gulags, the firing squads -- but also in the indignities of daily existence: the snooping neighbor, the cramped apartment, the smelly kitchen sink, the need to forage for food. These "trivial" aspects of life under the anciens regimes of the Eastern bloc are the focus of "How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed," a thoughtful, beautifully written collection of essays by the Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic.

For the people of the Communist world, the slogan "The personal is political" was true in its literal sense. "Growing up in Eastern Europe," Ms. Drakulic writes, "you learn very young that politics is not an abstract concept, but a powerful force influencing people's everyday lives." Unfortunately, the politicization of the personal was not liberating, as it was expected to be by many Western radicals, but the very opposite. "To survive, we had to divide the territory, to set a border between private and public. The state wants it all public. . . . What is public is of the enemy."

The banality of evil is personified by a "media surveillance inspector" ("A Chat With My Censor"). Affable, friendly, he tells Ms. Drakulic that journalists who go astray should be warned "tenderly," and that having studied her work, he knows "not only what but how " she thinks. Such "tender" treatment breeds chilling self-censorship: "I began to examine myself, to search for my errors, to look at my life through his eyes."

If fear is degrading, so is material deprivation -- something Westerners disgusted by the vulgarities of consumerism are apt to forget. In the essay "How We Survived Communism," which concludes the book, Ms. Drakulic paints a vivid picture of the compulsive recycling and collecting typical of Eastern European households, dictated not by environmental consciousness but by poverty and fear of shortages. "While leaders were accumulating words about a bright future, people were accumulating flour and sugar, jars, cups, pantyhose, old bread, corks, rope, nails, plastic bags," she writes. This desperate hoarding is, to her, the ultimate symbol of the failure of Communism -- this, and its inability to provide something so basic as feminine hygiene products.

One does not have to embrace stereotypes about some uniquely female sensibility attuned to the personal (as if men never write about the personal!) to acknowledge the particular burdens that scarcity in Eastern Europe has imposed on women. Not surprisingly, Ms. Drakulic concentrates primarily on women's lives. Her perspective is that of a feminist, but the Eastern European experience gives her feminism a special edge. She is acutely aware of a larger helplessness that unites women and men: "It's hard to see . . . men as a gender. . . . Perhaps because everyone's identity is denied, we want to see them as persons, not as a group, or a category, or a mass."

Though inspired by Western