Maria Genova - Communism, Sex and Lies

The only peaceful solution for the East German government was to open the borders. That happened on 9 November 1989 and we watched incredulously and surprised at the euphoria of the Germans. One of the most iconic images in history, the German-German border, no longer existed. The East Germans could get into their Trabants and simply cross the border. It seemed surreal that just recently there were wooden structures on both sides of the Brandenburg Gate, from which you could look out on the enemy. Sometimes two groups of people would simply stare at each other. And now that was all over, as if such scenes had only existed in the lively fantasies of writers. Would we ever be able to travel freely to the West? I wondered. The answer to that question came sooner than I thought.

Olga called me the next day to tell me that the leader of the Bulgarian communist party had been removed from power. I thought it was a silly joke, but within a few hours the whole city was buzzing with rumours. We almost talked in a whisper, because just imagine it wasn’t true and someone from the secret service was listening to us! Normally we weren’t afraid that someone was eavesdropping, but this was a serious matter. Removing a communist leader from power was tantamount to a revolution. A revolution without a drop of blood being spilled. It sounded too good to be true.

It wasn’t completely true. There had been a change in leadership. A communist minister replaced our party leader, who was sent for a well-earned pension after many words of thanks. Of course, it was involuntary, but during communism hardly anything was on a voluntary basis. You could see on the television images that our happy dictator could hardly believe the news himself. His surprised expression spoke volumes. Everything was possible now, because if someone could replace the most powerful party leader, then it was possible to do that to his replacement also.

The euphoria spread like a forest fire in a country where it hadn’t rained in years. We were no longer controlled by fear. The violence could no longer be hidden behind lies, while the same lies were defended with violence. The previous generations had been prepared to sacrifice their present for the future. We weren’t any longer.

The communist ideal was corrected itself by reality. It was too good to be true that everyone was equal and no one was unemployed. Apparently, this didn’t work out in real world. The party had discovered the holy grail: if you create equality in poverty, then no one feels poor. We considered the hunger in some African countries to be poverty and not the lack of luxury articles on the Bulgarian market.

We were breathing the air of freedom and could hardly imagine that we had been silenced just a few months before. Should I blame myself and my generation for swallowing the party’s complete nonsense at face value instead of revolting against it? We were simply scared for an elusive higher power. We were trapped in a vicious circle, which we could hardly break through with our own strength. Only the higher power, the party, could do that. Even though this scenario seems completely unbelievable, a miracle had happened. The communists thought the change in leader would make them stronger, but all of a sudden out of nowhere small opposition groups were set up. The floodgates had been set open.

We were finally free and that meant real elections. The competition was between the reds, the communists, and the blues, a conglomeration of various anti-communist parties and groups. I was 18 years old, I was allowed to vote for the first time and for the first time there was a choice. My Dalmatian dog had a blue balloon fastened to his collar, the colour of the opposition. When my grandparents saw that they threw the door shut in my face. That was how awful they thought my anti-communist provocation was. I heard they cried together after that incident, because they loved me and didn’t want to push me away. Yet at this point in time there were more important things than my grandparent’s sorrow. I had to participate in a large manifestation to show my support for the opposition.

We cut open the many years of silence with the scissors of the first massive protest. It was a celebration to be able to shout ‘Long live the communist party, but only in our memories’. Some of my peers had made banners with texts such as ‘Hurray, our teachers no longer have to twist the truth’ and ‘Lies have short legs, the communists only have toes’.

Olga had found a large old flag somewhere and carefully cut out the images of the hammer and sickle. Everyone around us wanted to hold the flag with the hole. For the first time, we felt connected to thousands of strangers by the power of a joint belief. Now that we were actually protesting against communism, we felt the strength of comradeship, which the communists had been promoting all those years. Only we were not allowed to use the word comrade any longer, because that word had some stigma attached to it. We even had to address the teachers at school with ‘Mrs.’ or ‘Mr.’ instead of ‘comrade’. It sounded strange at first, but people soon got used to it.

At the end of the manifestation we walked home waving the flag. Nearly every passer-by smiled at the hole in the flag. Only a few angry old communists gave us reproachful glances, but even they didn’t dare say anything. The spirit of the times had completely turned in just a few weeks’ time. At least in the big cities. The countryside was still a bastion of communism. If we had waved the mutilated flag there, we would probably have been beaten up.

The party made good use of the achievements of the system by placing visions of terror in their minds about a government run by the opposition. They would lose their jobs because the land would be returned to their previous landowners, they would have to pay for their healthcare and the free market economy would mean that their wages and pensions would be worth nothing. To my ears, such threats sounded like lies from the propaganda machine, but the farmers all fell for them. In the end, it was the farmers with their common senses who were closer to the truth than the city intellectuals who believed in the strength of the Western model. The worst scenarios became reality, while the opposition learned the hard way how to run a country.

I couldn’t believe that the conversation topic of politics would weaken our strong family ties, but that was the case all over the country. Discussions led to broken friendships, violent arguments between colleagues and even divorces. My grandmother and grandfather could not understand why their granddaughter was on the side of the opposition. The fact that their son had also converted to the ‘blues’ was a slap in their face. Many people who had been loyal members of the communist party voted for the opposition after the revolution.

‘Of course I haven’t betrayed my old ideals,’ my father said. ‘My ideals have been betrayed by the party long ago, because it made promises it could not keep.’

‘Perhaps our leaders met so often to prepare nice plans that they just didn’t have the time to implement them,’ I said.

My father smiled. ‘It’s a shame I’m no longer that naïve that I believe that. We were all ripped off by false history and media information. Even though I realized this after my travels to the West, it was dangerous to adjust my thoughts at a time when freedom of speech didn’t exist. I couldn’t overthrow a totalitarian system on my own.’

As soon as my father and other disappointed party members weakly believed that the new spirit of the time could not be put back in the bottle, they dared to give their real opinions. The euphoria erupted: we would quickly build another country. We hadn’t realized that cleaning up the mess of communism would take years. The words of the famous Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sounded nearly prophetic: ‘The clock of communism has chimed its final hour. But the concrete colossus has not yet collapsed completely. Instead of freeing us, we might be crushed under the rubble.’