The Berlin wall fell in November 1991, marking the beginning of the end for  Communism in Europe and the reopening of the Eastern bloc. In reality the spectre of communism continued to haunt those who had lived under totalitarianism. The Taste of Ashes is a beautiful yet sad recollection of the author’s, Marci Shore, an associate professor of intellectual history at Yale, travels throughout the old eastern bloc in the 1990s. Part history and part travel writing, it retells the memories and stories of individuals as they fit into the history of the regimes they lived in. 

The most obvious memories of communism in Western popular culture are the police state and informant neighbours. Recent stories of curtain-twitching neighbours reporting on each other to the authorities during the coronavirus crisis for going out twice in a day pale into comparison as banal mundanity of the everyday to the betrayals from friends and families under regimes in Eastern Europe. How easy it is to slip into that mindset though. How cheaply our integrity sells. 

In the novel The Joke by Czech author Milan Kundera the committed Communist party member and university student Ludvik writes a joke about Trotsky on a postcard to his girlfriend. For this, he is expelled and sent to work in the mines where he often looks back on the moment of his expulsion — his professors and closest friends raising a hand to cast him out. 

“Since then, whenever I make new acquaintances, men or women with the potential of becoming friends or lovers, I project them back into that time, that hall, and ask myself whether they would have raised their hands; no one has ever passed the test: every one of them has raised his hand in the same way my former friends and colleagues (willingly or not, out of conviction or fear) raised theirs. You must admit: it’s hard to live with people willing to send you to exile or death, it’s hard to become intimate with them, it’s hard to love them.” 

A sense of suspicion can survive long after the fall of the regime. This was especially felt in Czechoslovakia, as it entered the painful period of “Lustration” (a Roman purification ceremony) which revealed the extent to which so much of the population were informants. The exciting new world was intercut with revelations of betrayals of the old. Shore describes how even some of those most admired were exposed for cooperating in some way, shaking the confidence even in some of the resistance leaders that had helped bring about this new free political order. 

Speaking to the father of one of her students at the school she taught at in Czechoslovakia, Shore recounts how far the culture of informing and spying spread. 

“His family did not go to May Day parades; every year he and his wife asked that their children be excused because the family would be away in the countryside. One year the teacher appointed one of his son’s classmates to spy on them: she had suspected they had not really left town.” 

It is a reminder that it was not only the state spying on its citizens but its ideology permeates so deep that many normal people are turned into curtain-twitchers, poking their noses into the lives of others.

In the same conversation, he narrates about the stagnation under communism. Shore writes, ‘around 1970 time had stopped; afterward there was no movement, only stagnation. He had never believed he would live to see a way out.’ Instead of innovation and progress, there was only bureaucracy and management. 

Attitudes and culture survive years after the systems that created them disappear. It is no surprise that a country that had banned entrepreneurism for years, found itself with a lack of entrepreneurial, or can-do spirit, in the population at large. The ‘computer says no’ attitude of bureaucracy was not immediately replaced by the initiative and hustle of capitalism. 

“The realm of the not possible was expansive: it included the new, the uncommon, the difficult, as well as the vaguely inconvenient, the previously unconsidered, that which someone was not in the mood to do at the moment. And nothing could be done without the proper rubber stamp. To acquire the proper stamp, it was usually necessary to acquire a series of them, each a prerequisite for the next. A given stamp was generally in the hands of a single person, a local bureaucrat who had been made inordinately powerful by such a possession and who might prove to be capricious, or greedy, or resentful – or simply absentminded, or ill, or lazy, or indefinitely on vacation.” 

Among the students she taught briefly in Czechoslovakia, Shore noted:

“My students were bright – they had been accepted to the only university preparatory school in their region – but they were also passive, in some sense deadened at sixteen or seventeen. They preferred memorization and rarely expressed any opinion. Communist content had been purged from that school, but a certain totalitarian for – or rather an acute sense of the world’s restrictiveness – lingered.”  

Shore’s work is remarkably easy to read, and adept at portraying the wide range of emotions felt by the people she met. From the apathy of many, to the sorrow of many of the Jews visiting the countries of their parents, to the anger of those Jews left behind in what others see as simply a graveyard country. A generational divide in attitudes is also observed with the excitement of the young at new opportunities and an almost romantic view of the old for some of the security of the old regime, especially after their pensions became quickly eroded by the inflation of the 1990s.

Also interesting is the nervousness of a return to fascism, especially relevant by what we are currently seeing in Hungary but also seen by how the far right in Germany (the NPD) have historically been more successful in the east of the country. In many of the countries she travels through there is a struggle to come to terms not only with the faults of communist regimes but also with those of many of their predecessors as well. 

Marci Shore’s book is an excellent lockdown read, and a healthy reminder of what impact the sort of society we are just having a glimpse at — but which became all too miserably the norm for those in Eastern Europe under the oppression of socialism.