Leaving it to Lolita
Dubravka Ugrešić
Tito and the Partisans laid the groundwork for a new Yugoslavia on 29 November 1943 at a clandestine meeting in Jajce, in Bosnia, right in the middle of the most gruelling part of World War II. Thanks to their boldness (at that point they had no idea how the war was going to play out), their courage, and the overall outcome of World War II, the people of Yugoslavia got a new state. For years Yugoslavs celebrated 29 November as Yugoslavia's birthday. Until it collapsed. Now each of the five (soon to be six, and perhaps, indeed, seven) little states hatched out of the ex-Yugoslavia, celebrates its own birthday.
A few years ago several of us thought we'd get together at an Amsterdam bar to celebrate the birthday of the no longer existing state. Whether as a joke, or out of nostalgia, or out of a need to get together and sniff at each other, the stuff emigration is made of! Yugo-emigrants began drifting into the bar at the agreed time: Croats, Bosnians, Serbs, Slovenes, Albanians, all of whom had turned up in Amsterdam as a result of the war.
There were two Bosnians sitting at one end of the counter. One of them made a pretence of grumbling angrily.
"Screw you, Tito, you creep!"
"Why?"
"Who ever heard of starting a country in November?"
"What's wrong with November?"
"Well, if it were May, right now we would be sizzling up something tasty on the grill."
The bartender – who was probably seeing a gathering of these proportions for the first time in his bartending career – asked:
"So what are you people celebrating, anyway?"
"A birthday."
"Whose?"
"The birthday of ex-Yugoslavia."
"Tito's dictatorship?"
"Yes, that's the one, the ex..."
"Wait a minute, does that mean that all of you are pro-dictatorship?" the bartender squinted, suspicious.
"No, we are pro-democracy," the Bosnian replied calmly.
"Then why are you celebrating the day a dictator came to power?"
"Because democracy came hand in hand with dictatorship."
"You must be crazy," muttered the bartender.
"We sure are," replied the Bosnian calmly.
How can a person start claiming something different – once sweeping generalizations have gained credence, aided by the media and widely held beliefs? How can a person explain to a bartender that things were not as he imagines, when even we can no longer tell whether things were different from how the bartender thinks they were. Haven't we – for the sake of life as it moves ever onward – touched up our personal history, bringing it closer to those sweeping generalizations?
Once when I was trying to explain to a western European friend what was happening during the war in Yugoslavia, she interrupted impatiently:
"A thing like that could never happen here!" she said, using the phrase "thing like that" so that she wouldn't sully her mouth with the word war.
"And why not?"
"Because we have democracy!" she said with conviction. Instead of her pitying me, I found myself pitying her. With such a holier-than-thou attitude she could equally have been saying "Because we have communism." It wouldn't have changed the substance of the matter.
In communist dictatorships ordinary people were not as ideologized as my bartender presumably thinks they were. Most of them, like anywhere else in the world, thought of nothing but how to get by. But dictatorships were, if nothing else, a free school for political smarts: even the most illiterate cleaning lady had politics at her fingertips. People did all sorts of things to make ends meet. They lied, cheated (homo duplex, homo sovieticus) and they brown-nosed; they performed their mini political slaloms with remarkable agility. They'd balance on the high wire above the abyss. They were flexible. Yes, they were compromisers, corruptible, scum, you name it, there is just one thing that cannot be said for them: that they were politically unaware. They snatched at political nuance in the blink of an eye. They knew the whole system of signals, they knew how to publish newspapers "between the lines" and to read between the lines with canny insight. They kept their fingers crossed behind their backs, they sported a simpering grin, they learned how to be perfect hypocrites. True, the Yugoslavs were less politically agile than the Czechs, Hungarians and Poles, simply because in "Tito's dictatorship" people fared better. They got lazy, lost their muscle tone, perhaps that is why they failed to see the signs of their own impending doom.
Back to our bartender. How can I now explain to him that in post-communist democracy, in our new "democritatorships", I have to fight for the rights I had enjoyed freely in the communist dictatorship? The right to gender equality; the right to reproductive choice; the right not to attend religious instruction classes if I chose not to; the right not to wear a cross around my neck; the right not to declare my nationality; the right not to hate my neighbour; the right to say out loud that though I may not have been living in the glow of democratic fireworks, life was not so gloomy either. (After all, in communism electrification was a big priority, wasn't it?) How can I now reclaim the rights I had under communism without sustaining big losses? Losing my job, losing my public voice; losing friends who claimed they had been blind but now they see; a plumber who refused to work for "Serbs, gypsies and Yugo-nostalgians"; an editor who became chief of police; a publisher who chose to live off the fifth edition of Mein Kampf...
Two Russian Lolitas, Lena Katina and Yulia Volkova, set the Eurovision Song Contest on fire in 2003 with their sexy on-screen smooching. There were many viewers who were delighted, as if this had been a glimpse of a new sexually uninhibited Russia (sure, during communism there hadn't been bananas, hence there must have been no lesbians).
The pair recently cropped up on YouTube with a musical number called "Yugoslavia". Lena Katina hums a sad little ditty, and meanwhile images follow one after another. A black-haired Volkova appears, who has taken it upon herself to personify Yugoslavia. Her cute face fills the screen. It never occurs to her or anyone else that with her shoulder straps she is concealing all those dark, greasy heads of Yugo-murderers and criminals. And why should this occur to her, why should she or anyone else make a connection between things that are entirely separate from one another?
The verses grieve for the demise of Big Brother and invoke the Soviet Army, that army from long ago 1949 when there was genuine danger that the Soviets might occupy Yugoslavia, to save it, just as they had "saved" the other countries of the Eastern bloc. I cannot imagine, nor do I care, how it happened that long-dead Big Brother – having traversed light years – insinuated his way into the song. What does worry me is the ignorance behind their pretty faces. They play with the war as if it is chewing gum. I am even more saddened by the media reach of these mish-mash messages – and the popularity the video spots enjoy among many of the younger ex-Yugoslavs and young Russians (there are even several versions of it, including a cartoon). They, and their pop idols, have no clue about who's who in the whole story.
My bartender would jump right in to defend them and pull the customary card out of his sleeve: those tasty television shots – which jump from the screen each time when needed like a devil from a jack-in-the-box – of a group of embittered old people waving tattered red flags on Red Square.
"Are you going to tell me the alternative is better?" the bartender asks in an orthodox tone I know so well. Ah, I don't want to say anything. I agree, they're old commies, ugly people resembling cabbages that sprouted in some field near Chernobyl...
But there is a thing that seems more dangerous to me than old people who grew up under dictatorships. So many young people, the sated children of democracy – in the East as in the West – are emptied of all ideology except the ideology of success. Comfortably snuggling into democracy, like mice nibbling leisurely at the cheese, they are harmoniously working at some future great hole. Perhaps I am worrying about the hole because the future of the world rests on the young (these last words emanate from the grave of dead communism). Because from there, from that empty hole, an obedient army may one day emerge, an army that will place itself in the service of a future manipulator. And just an ordinary manipulator will suffice. No need for a dictator.