Introduction
After WWII, the world witnessed a new competition for dominating between the newly emerged superpowers of the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union along with its allies. In the following paper, the result of this competition for people’s minds and hearts during the Cold War will be discussed. After the evaluation of comments by people who experienced living in communist states a conclusion can be made that their life was marked by many hardships including the watchful “communist eye”, political persecution, miseries, and evils of injustice, forcible equalizing, ideologization, and economic difficulties such as shortages of food products along with everyday objects and desperate queues.
Main body
The opposition of the East vs. the West during the Cold War can be defined as the antagonism between socialist countries including the Soviet Union and its allies, and the capitalist countries including the United States and their allies. According to Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, this antagonism could be observed in numerous areas including military, political, ideological, economical, and cultural ones. The opposition began after WWII, when the rivalry for domination in the world between the new superpowers began and continued until the 1970s, or according to some opinions, until the very fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Cold War was fought in a number of the most important areas, and it was not only about the rush of armament. It seems that the greatest battles were fought in the ideological, cultural, and economical fields. In this invisible war, the citizens of communist states had a sad lot in life as they went through a variety of serious problems.
According to the comments of eyewitnesses, people’s life in Eastern Block countries was full of hardships and inconveniences. In her book, “How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed”, Slavenka Drakulic, a journalist from the former republic of Yugoslavia, describes her own experience in socialist Yugoslavia, and the experience by many other citizens of socialist states. The title of this book is a sad irony as citizens of socialist states did not laugh too much. Drakulic addresses numerous areas of life under the communists where people were disadvantaged by the regime including political freedom, cultural self-actualization, and even banal daily routines.
People’s life was full of fears on the reason of the all-seeing eye of the Communist Party. Dissidents were persecuted and cruelly punished for their nonconformist way of thinking. The very idea of freedom of speech was lost and forgotten for the reason of strict and omnipresent censorship. Even the works of arts including poetry and prose, cinematography and painting, music, and stage productions were subjected to strict censorship. During this period Slavonic culture was considered to be one of the richest cultures in the world with its incredible literature genre masters, amazing painters and composers were in prostration. There exist no decent works of art during this period as the Communist censorship killed the creative spirit of the nation.
The other immense problem people regularly faced was product and food supply. The simplest things of the household were hard to find almost all over the Soviet Union and the other socialist states. Eastern Block countries were in economic isolation which caused shortages of important goods of daily use. Surprising is the fact that their own industry was not able to produce such important goods. As a result, one of the most common terms during Soviet times was “deficit”. “Deficit” or shortage of goods for sale was among the most irritating problems for the soviet citizen because people did have money, but they had nothing to buy. Even available goods including furniture, clothing, footwear, and utensils did not look attractive enough and they were all the same. In soviet people’s houses, a similar atmosphere with the same Yugoslav cupboard, Rumanian sofa, Polish bedroom set, and Czechoslovakian set of utensils was a common picture of those days.
Women’s and children’s experience in the Soviet Union during the Cold War was rather discouraging as well. Women could not buy the simplest objects they needed on a daily basis beginning from clothes and items of hygiene and ending with cosmetics and perfumery products. Soviet children were also disadvantaged on the reason of goods shortage as most of them did not have many toys, and what they could have was not very nice as a rule. Even buying food products such as bread and dairy was a serious problem for soviet mistresses as it often required spending two to five hours in the queue.
The East can be critiqued for its totalitarianism along with the breakdown in its economic system causing significant difficulties in people’s daily life. For the most part, Drakulic’s critique of East vs. West is just and pertinent. The only moment which presented a measure of the difficulty to me during reading this book was the utterly dismal scene that the author was trying to show. The impression is that this book’s overall tone is ordered by someone who is trying to dramatize the situation. It is true that people in communist countries were very unlucky, but they were not poor and economically disadvantaged. Drakulic lived in a former Yugoslavia where people felt much better than in the other countries of the Eastern Block, but for East Germany. People from the Soviet Union often traveled to Yugoslavia to buy clothing, footwear, furniture, or other objects of daily usage which proves that life in that country was better than it is described. However, even the citizens of the Soviet Union did not complain about their life in the way that Drakulic did. The common opinion about this book expressed by the former citizens of socialist states living abroad is that it is an artificial exaggeration. I had a similar impression from the very first lines of this book, and it seemed to me that I was reading about life in the Nazi concentration camps.
Conclusion
In conclusion, in the opposition of East vs. West, the capitalistic countries became winners in the ideological, cultural, and economical fields. Such a conclusion can be made after analyzing comments by people who had to go through the hardships of living in socialist states. These people express their bitter disappointment caused by such serious problems as forcible equalizing, ideologization, political persecution, and economical hardships including shortages of goods and endless queues. In her book, “How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed”, Slavenka Drakulic mentions numerous facts of failure by the Communist regime proving capitalists’ victory in the rivalry of the Cold War
Bibliography
Drakulic, Slavenka. How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. The United States: Harper Perennial, 1993.
“Seventeen Moments in Soviet History”, 2012, Web.