The Great Leap Backward

One late August day in 1985, Lea Ypi climbed a tree in search of peace. Her parents, branded as “intellectuals” in Communist Albania thanks to their bourgeois family histories, were feuding with their closest friends. The object of their contention—like the golden apple that caused the Trojan War—was an empty Coca-Cola can. Ypi’s mother had brought the can home and placed it on an embroidered cloth to brighten their apartment. This was a treatment that most Albanians reserved for photographs of Enver Hoxha, the brutal dictator who ruled the country for over forty years. Despite little Lea’s enthusiasm for “Uncle Enver,” her parents did not subscribe to Hoxha’s personality cult. No photo, just the Coke can. Until it disappeared.

The Ypis suspected their closest friends, the Papases, of stealing the can. An older couple with much better credentials—the wife, Donika, steamed letters open at the post office, and her husband, Mihal, was a Party member with a collection of war medals for killing Nazi soldiers—the Papases had taken a liking to the Ypis despite their social differences. The Papases even put in an occasional good word for them at Party meetings. But the accusation of theft cooled relations, and no apology would soothe the older couple’s wounded pride.

Upset at the ruined friendship, Lea hid in a fig tree in the Papases’ garden for hours, hoping that the search for her would bring the families together again. The ruse worked. By evening the families were enjoying meze and raki together and joking about the corrupting power of imperialist Coca-Cola, when Lea decided to push her luck by complaining that her parents refused to decorate the television set with a portrait of Hoxha: “They keep promising to put a photo there, and they never do it. I don’t think they like Uncle Enver.”

Everybody froze. Lea’s father dropped his fork, her grandmother’s hands trembled, and her mother “stopped speaking and looked intently” at Donika, “as if trying to guess her thoughts.” The impulsive remark of a child had turned a small squabble between neighbors into a question of life and death. Finally Mihal, the reliable Party insider, broke the spell. He admonished Lea for saying such a “stupid thing” and told her never to repeat it to anyone, assuring her that her parents “love the Party and Uncle Enver too.” And then, an odd afterthought in a still-silent room: “You must promise me that if you ever again have silly ideas like that about your family, you will come and tell me. Me—nobody else, not even Auntie Donika. Do you understand?”

Lea Ypi’s Free: Coming of Age at the End of History describes her family life before and after the fall of communism in Albania in 1990. Ypi is a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, and the project began, she says, as a philosophical exploration of “the overlapping ideas of freedom in the liberal and Socialist traditions.” Frustrated by the inability of her socialist friends in the West to recognize that “flesh and blood” human beings had lived out the theoretical abstractions they knew from books, Ypi decided to tell the stories of the people she’d grown up with.^*

Conveying the experience of living under communism is a challenging task. There was a guardedness in everyday life that is hard to get across to those who have not lived in a police state. Words could have alternative, coded meanings, or might be emptied of all meaning when they had to be parroted on command. The government’s version of reality and the one experienced by people in their daily lives sometimes differed wildly, but this difference was not up for public debate.

For different reasons, it is also hard to talk about communism with those who mainly understand it as a political project that has not yet been fulfilled. Progressives in the West have come to see the value of recovering histories of violence, trauma, and deprivation. Because they assume that criticism of communism must come from a far-right position, however, they often minimize or overlook the suffering of those who lived under Communist regimes. It turns out that it’s easier to ignore mass killings, political prisons, forced labor camps, the restriction of reproductive rights, and the persecution of homosexuals than to question one’s own mental categories.

Free is a portrait of a family at odds with itself, held together by fear during communism, then cracked apart by the chaotic events following the introduction of democratic processes and a liberal economy. It is also an allegory of competing political ideals, presented in the voices of Ypi’s relatives. Her father is a romantic skeptic, in love with revolutionaries but not with the societies they help to bring about. Her mother is a hardened realist who views life as a merciless competition for survival. And her grandmother Nini, the family’s most sympathetic figure, is the voice of pragmatic wisdom, having lived through too many political changes to put much stock in the promises of another one.

Free is also, perhaps unwittingly, testimony to an obscure legacy, hard to define but felt all the same by me and many of those I know who spent their childhoods in the Eastern Bloc. It is not so much a stance as a sensibility—toward language that means something other than what it says, toward the workings of power in intimate relationships, toward the mortality of utopias. We whose first years were shadowed by communism know that change is inevitable but not always for the good, that revolutions trumpet progress but usher in more violence. We also know fear—if not our own, because we were too young to understand the danger around us, then that of those closest to us.

Ypi’s Coke can story reminded me of an event that took place in my own Communist childhood, before my parents moved us to the West. In the early 1980s, as a result of a series of economic miscalculations, the Romanian government imposed austerity measures on the country. Food was rationed, as a good deal of domestic production was set aside for export to Russia. Severe gas and electricity shortages meant that people had to survive freezing temperatures without heat. Hundreds died in their apartments, either frozen to death or asphyxiated from gas that had been unexpectedly turned on again. In order to conserve fuel, the government instituted a dark hour each evening, shutting off the electricity at the time of day when it was most needed.

It must have been during one of these winters, when I was four or five years old, that I was riding a crowded Bucharest bus with my parents. The bus stopped briefly in front of a mural of Nicolae Ceaușescu, the great leader, the genius of the Carpathians, the most beloved son of the Romanian people. “Look,” I said innocently, “it’s the man who turns off our lights at night.” The other passengers fell silent. Amusement flickered on some faces, but no one dared laugh. At the next station, my parents bundled me off the bus and walked away as quickly as they could. And then, for years afterward, they told me this story, about a place where a little girl could condemn her parents without even knowing it.

Lea Ypi’s father had an inconvenient name. Though known as Zafo to his friends, Xhaferr Ypi shared his first and last names with a man widely considered a traitor. “The other Ypi” was the former prime minister of Albania, known as a fascist collaborator for welcoming the invading Italians in 1939. When her history lessons reached that point in the textbook, Lea was at pains to explain to her classmates that the former prime minister was no relation. “Each year, I hated that conversation,” she writes, though her parents resisted her attempts to skip school, insisting that she—and they—had “done nothing wrong.”

This was particularly frustrating as Ypi was in other ways a model student. She was attentive at school when Nora, her “moral education” teacher, explained the political philosophies of Marx and “Hangel,” and how Albanians had once “gathered in large buildings called churches and mosques” but now understood that religion was a tool used by capitalists to exploit the poor. She loved both Uncle Enver and Stalin, though it was sometimes hard to tell who was more lovable; after all, “Stalin looked straight at you, and if he felt like it, or if you behaved well, his eyes would smile.” Ypi enjoyed the educational opportunities that Communist Albania offered its children: clubs for poetry, chess, and theater, and summer camp for young Pioneers. Despite being successful in the ways her parents demanded, she felt she was somehow out of place in her family, wallowing in “wild fantasies” about some stranger or newfound relative who would bring her a “change of fortune.”

Zafo’s name was one clue that Ypi’s family was different from others. Another was the matter of her parents’ biographies. These were not the events of their own lives, as one might guess, but the sum of their family histories and pre-Communist class identities. “Biography,” Ypi tells us, was the reason her parents met and married, and it determined whether they were allowed to go to university and what they were permitted to study once there. Biography was the judgment before the action, the fall before the sin. As Ypi puts it:

Biographies were carefully separated into good and bad, better or worse, clean or stained, relevant or irrelevant, transparent or confusing, suspicious or trustworthy, those that needed to be remembered and those that needed to be forgotten.

Ypi does not spell out why her parents, who came from ethnic groups that were traditionally at odds and had little in common otherwise, were forced to marry by their biographies. I recognized the logic from Romania, where the file or “dosar” functioned in the same way. Someone who had a “bad file” because their family had left the country or because they had been imprisoned for studying literature might choose not to marry someone with a clean record, lest they “spoil their file.” Keeping someone’s file good by breaking up with them was an act of love. I have heard of a case where two people who both had bad files married each other so as to minimize the damage to others.

There were other things that Ypi did not understand while she was growing up. Her parents’ silence about the incipient protests in 1990 was one, though they seemed to listen to the news on the radio when she was in her room. Another was her mother’s occasional angry outbursts, and the way she reflexively looked up at one of the windows of the local Party headquarters when walking down the street. There was also her family’s mistrust of Ahmet, a distant relative who had just graduated from university and whose wife had been a teacher, a seemingly respectable profession. And her grandmother Nini’s insistence on teaching her French, and the old postcard from Paris she kept with the name of the sender scratched out. And her father’s refusal to explain what “Allahu Akbar” meant. Ypi’s childhood was one of codes, and like Perceval in the presence of the wounded Fisher King, she did not know how to ask the healing question:

When I reflect on all the unsolved mysteries of my childhood…I think of them as part of a truth that was always there, waiting to be discovered, if only I’d known where to look. Nobody had concealed anything from me; everything was within reach. And yet I’d needed to be told.

What Lea Ypi needed to be told, as the reader guesses early on, is who she really was.

“When freedom finally arrived, it was like a dish served frozen.” In 1990—inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall, student protests in Tirana, and the Romanian can-do spirit in the application of firing squads to tyrants—Albania’s president, Ramiz Alia, began modest movements toward reform. These culminated in Albania’s declaration as a multiparty state in December of that year and the country’s first free elections the following spring. December 1990 was also the time when the secrets around Lea Ypi began to unravel. Her mother had come from a wealthy family, with significant properties that had been seized by the state. If she sometimes glanced up at the Party headquarters, it was not only because her family had once owned the building; in 1947 her grandfather had jumped from one of its windows to avoid torture, shouting “Allahu Akbar!”

Ypi’s grandmother was the well-born, French-educated niece of an Ottoman pasha. She had a small child and some experience working in government when the new regime imprisoned her husband and upended her life. And what had kept Ypi’s father from studying the subject he wished at university was not simply the name he shared with the quisling prime minister, but the fact that Xhaferr Ypi was in fact his grandfather. University, too, was not always what it seemed. In the everyday conversation of her parents, it was a code for political prison. Graduation with good results meant a brief sentence, expulsion was capital punishment, and “dropping out voluntarily…meant committing suicide.” Most terrifying were students like Ahmet and his wife, who were clever enough to become teachers—that is, who had turned informer.

For Ypi, these revelations were a shock, rewriting her family history and breaking the trust she had had in her parents and grandmother: “I found it difficult to process the fact that everything my family had said and done up to that point had been a lie, a lie they’d continued to repeat so that I would continue to believe what I was told by others.” Albania’s political and economic transition was also not straightforward. The 1991 elections for the People’s Assembly kept the Communist-era Party of Labor in power, though there were complaints of irregularities. Strikes and violent protests followed, and foreign experts arrived to guide the country’s transition to a liberal, free-market democracy. Albanian refugees fled to Italy on a crowded ship, the Vlora, only to be held in inhumane conditions and subsequently deported home.

The second half of Free chronicles the breakdown of Albanian society as Ypi had known it, culminating in the pyramid schemes that wiped out the savings of half the country’s population and the 1997 civil war. The fall of the old order, in Ypi’s telling, also meant the loss of other, ineffable aspects of life. The complex bonds of community that had existed under communism were gone. People no longer held collections at work to help one another with large purchases. History was blotted out with silence, it being more convenient to forget who had been a Party member or a spy. An entire value system disappeared overnight, along with its symbols, its songs, its paraphernalia:

The red Pioneer scarf I worked impossibly hard to earn, and which I proudly wore every day to school, would soon turn into a rag with which we wiped the dust off our bookshelves. The stars, medals and certificates, and the very title of “pioneer,” would soon become museum relics, memories from a different era, fragments of a past life that someone had lived, somewhere.

The little red neckerchiefs that marked the Communist version of the Scouts meant different things to people of my generation. For some, they were the sign of an ideology that had exhausted itself, yet another example of rote obedience. For others, they served as proof of academic excellence: though almost all children were expected to join, the cleverest and best behaved were allowed in first. Some remember the hassle of keeping them clean and ironed, and how they absentmindedly chewed on the corners. A number of people have told me, almost wistfully, that they were among the last Pioneers, sworn into a brotherhood remarkable at that point mainly for the speed of its passing.

The loss of such symbols was the slightest of the traumas to come. These included: the disappearance of Ypi’s close friend Elona when she left on a ship to Italy with her boyfriend; the accidental gun death of a classmate; the decline of Zafo’s health after he lost his job and was hired to impose “structural reforms” on the country’s largest port by laying off many of its Romani laborers; and the sudden breakup of her family when Ypi was seventeen years old and her mother spontaneously left on another ship during the civil war, with only Ypi’s younger brother in tow. As she narrates these painful events, her voice grows ironic, borrowing the knowing vocabulary of international experts now flooding Albania: “transition,” “free individual initiative,” “shock therapy.”

It is here, too, that Ypi develops her main argument about the relative nature of freedom. If freedom is the power to do what one wants, there is no effective difference between a system in which people are prohibited by law from fulfilling their dreams and one in which they are hindered by lack of money. A version of this claim appears early in the book in Zafo’s voice, when he explains, “In capitalism…it’s not that the poor are not allowed to do all the things that the rich can do. It’s that they can’t do them, even if they are allowed.” Years later, when Albania’s borders open, it becomes clear that freedom of movement, a human right touted by the West, was easy to advocate for as long as no one was showing up in the ports and embassies of Western countries asking to be let in. “But what value does the right to exit have,” asks Ypi, “if there is no right to enter?” By the end of the book Ypi, speaking now as a professor who teaches courses on Marx in London, concludes, “My world is as far from freedom as the one my parents tried to escape.” The difference, she claims, lies in the nature of their failures.

What, then, is freedom, if it is not to be found in the promises of communism or capitalism? It is Nini, the warmly charismatic grandmother to whom the book is dedicated, who teaches her the answer:

In the end, my grandmother said, we are always in charge of our fate. “Biography” was crucial to knowing the limits of your world, but once you knew those limits, you were free to choose and you became responsible for your decisions. There would be gains and there would be losses. You had to avoid being flattered by victories and learn how to accept defeat. Like the moves in chess my mother used to describe, the game was yours to play if you mastered the rules.

It is a liberating idea, at least at first sight. Freedom lies in being responsible for one’s actions within the confines of any given society. Elsewhere, Nini insists that whatever the vagaries of her life, whatever the losses she suffered, she had not lost herself or her dignity. Nini’s understanding of a freedom that is personal and internal is threaded throughout the book, as when Ypi comments on scenes from her childhood by noting which choices she made and what consequences she experienced.

There are commonsense objections to this. It is true that neither capitalism nor communism offers its citizens perfect agency—nor has any other society in human history. In all systems, people experience certain limits on their freedom to make choices and can choose whether to stand by the consequences of their decisions. But surely some consequences seem more just to the people living with them than others? To pick one example from the lives of women close to me: in the Romania of my childhood, both contraception and abortion were illegal. Among the results of Ceaușescu’s hardline natalist policy by the end of the 1980s were Romania’s notorious, abusive, disease-ridden orphanages; a sky-high infant mortality rate; and the highest maternal death rate in Europe, with most of those deaths due to illegal abortions. Agents of the Securitate, Romania’s secret police, were posted in hospital maternity wards to look into suspected cases of abortion, and prevented doctors from helping sick women until the patients had informed on their abortion providers. The absence of sex education did not help matters, contributing to high rates of HIV infection. The choice to have sex can bear serious consequences anywhere. But is a woman dying from a kitchen-table abortion really as free as one allowed to buy and use contraception? And what use to her is her inner dignity as she bleeds out?

One might also ask whether it is such a simple thing to maintain one’s inner freedom in a totalitarian state. If the state determines the contents of everyone’s education, does that not have an effect on the inner lives of a populace? What about dissenters forced to torture one another in political prison as part of their “reeducation”? If secret police break down the bonds of trust between even the closest of family members by manipulating people to inform on their loved ones, as both Romania’s Securitate and Albania’s Sigurimi did, is their dignity not necessarily affected? Is it possible, in other words, to have a concept of freedom separate from the ideals of justice or proportionality? It is all well and good to claim that “we never lose our inner freedom: the freedom to do what is right,” but when dissidents know their families will be targeted in retribution, the consequences of standing up for one’s ideals can be unbearable.

In fact, Ypi’s memoir tells a more complicated story. She is aware that her family experienced communism as a denial of liberty, whereas she “equated liberalism with broken promises.” But the two halves of Free—stability and communal solidarity under communism, violent chaos under post-1990 liberalization—also correspond to a split between Ypi’s innocent childhood and her knowing adolescence. On a purely intellectual level, it is clear that Ypi understands the broken promises of pre-1990 communism. She is critical, for example, of Western Marxists’ inability to acknowledge the devastations suffered in her home country, and insists that “behind every personification of an economic category” in Marx’s Capital, “there was the flesh and blood of a real person.” Still, she lands on an absurd equivalence between one of the Eastern Bloc’s most repressive tyrannies and any given capitalist society. The only reason I can think of for her inexplicable conclusion is this: by structuring her philosophical inquiry as a memoir, with members of her immediate family representing particular positions, she winds up mingling her analysis of history with her feelings toward her family members.

Throughout Free, there is one person who stands for the cold spirit of capitalism: Ypi’s mother, Doli. Doli is the person who nurses the greatest resentment about her family’s loss of wealth and status, whose frustration is most likely to slip out even before 1990. Her entrepreneurial spirit is relentless. She brings home fifty chicks from a collective farm and tries to raise them in the bathroom, knowing that most of them will die there. She makes Lea sell loofahs on the street, “alongside the Romany girls hawking lipsticks and hair clips.” After a forced early retirement, she becomes active in the antiCommunist Democratic Party, Albania’s main opposition, leaving her family at home to give fiery speeches bolstered by the novel vocabulary of economic liberalization. She has a fighter’s spirit—“her will was made of gunmetal,” writes Ypi—and makes many of her decisions without consulting the rest of the family. She is convinced that people are, at their core, evil, and that only the protection of private property can keep society from descending into violence. She believes that, given the right conditions, “everyone…would have the opportunity to become as rich as her ancestors had once been.”

Doli is in many ways a charismatic figure. In one scene, a visiting French women’s group asks her if Albanian women ever suffered harassment. “Sure,” she replies, “I always carried a knife.” She is also no fool: though she comes across as a true believer in the Western promise of freedom, she has little time for foreign aid organizations that ignore the needs of the people they claim to help. Doli’s efforts to recover her family’s properties, derided by Zafo and Nini, are ultimately successful and help pay for Ypi’s university education. But in Ypi’s account, her mother is also the one who does the most to destroy her family unit. It is Doli who persuades Zafo to sink their savings into a doomed pyramid scheme, because investing is what “the rest of Europe” does. It is Doli who pushes her husband to run for office as an MP, a career that gives him a front-row seat on the civil war. And it is Doli who decides to save her son from the war by escaping to Italy but leaves her daughter behind.

That this is a traumatic experience is evident: the teenaged Ypi loses her voice. In a sense, the adult writer does too. The events of the civil war, including Doli’s abandonment of her family and her subsequent stay in Italy, are told mainly through an excerpt of Ypi’s diary from January to April 1997. From a human perspective, it is understandable that she might not want to revisit this painful period by writing about it. From a critical perspective, interrupting her narrative with a diary entry seems like a defensive move, a way to avoid delving too deep into the emotions it brings up. Only a hint of Ypi’s feelings comes across when she resumes the story. The turquoise dress she means to wear to her end-of-school celebration is too long, and her mother is not around to make the alteration: “I resented that she wasn’t there.”

How much a memoirist owes her readers is open to debate. Surely a writer has the right to nurse some wounds in private and to present her loved ones in a way that all can live with. There is more to life than one book. At the same time, experienced readers of memoir can compromise on facts—they know that memory is faulty, that characters will be altered and dialogue invented—but they will not compromise on emotional truth. What seems true in Ypi’s Free is the way that personal tragedies were bound up with political policies under communism. As families focused on survival, they developed their own intimate regimes of silence. And while there are literary genres and devices available to reflect totalitarian life—surrealism, satire, coded allusion—there is still no adequate language for what happens after the walls fall, when people become nominally free. But the taboo that seems to animate Ypi’s philosophical argument is a universal one: unspeakable rage at one’s mother.