A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism by Slavenka Drakulic Page B

“manifestation,” “Banner of Peace, World Children’s Assembly,” was held in Sofia, under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
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    At a time of such a feudal type of rule as Zhivkov’s in Bulgaria, of strong oral tradition, myths, folk songs, and fairy tales—because in spite of all the lip service, none of this was eradicated by the decades of socialist government—it was also normal to keep dancing bears.
    Why, then, did we animals see in Lyudmila the possibility of salvation at all? I think we believed that, if she understood art and beauty and their importance in life, there was hope for this society and its primitive treatment of animals. Not to mention the fact that her father, like all other Communist heads of state, was a hunter! But she believed that animals have souls! Surely she would do something about bears dancing under her nose with burned paws and bleeding noses? If only she knew about us! If only the ruler knew the real condition of his subjects, he would change it, for sure. Rulers are just. Surely she was just. Or so we hoped for a while.
    I must say that, frankly, I was impressed that she was a vegetarian. This custom was pretty much unheard-of in Bulgaria. Yes, there were some sensitive souls who couldn’t eat meat because it belonged to a slaughtered animal. Instead of a piece of meat on the plate, they would see a little calf calling for its mother. But such individuals were few and far between. People ate meat if they could buy it; anything else was considered to be eccentric and likely to be ridiculed, maybe even declared as the “decadent influence of the capitalist West.”
    At first I thought that to be a vegetarian in a country where many people could not afford to eat meat—where such a diet was not a matter of taste or choice—was an extraordinary, enlightened decision. You have to be really high-minded and spiritually oriented. Because vegetarianism is more than a diet—for example, as when an ill person is prescribed vegetarian food. It is also more than a taste preference, like when you do not enjoy the taste of meat. It is an ideology, and it fit well with her other ideologies. But apparently I was wrong. Long after Lyudmila was gone I understood how easy it had been for her to be a vegetarian. She defended the rights of other living beings, mostly mammals, because animals are like people; they feel pain, they feel fear. Therefore, she appeared more human herself. On the other hand, she did nothing to change their conditions. Her activity in our favor was restricted to just that—not eating meat. And hoping that one day everybody would come to the conclusion that it is not moral to feed on creatures that endure as much pain as humans do.
    I naively imagined how, for example, she could have given the order to ban the capture and torture of wild bears. Or, for that matter, to let people travel abroad and then decide for themselves what beauty and light and harmony are. But this would have required much more from her than grand words. It would have also been more dangerous to deal with human than with animal rights. At the time, human life was seldom perceived in its single form; it was usually seen as only a mass, a crowd. Our princess fled to the safe sphere of the spirit and light. When she spoke, it was in the lofty language of symbols and poetic metaphors. There was no real change; there could not be any. In the end, even if her intentions were good, our life went on without change. Freedom—be it for animals or for humans—was not her priority. How could it be? She had little or no contact with real life, with real underdogs and underbears. She simply did not see us as being enslaved . The simple truth was that socialist leaders could not care for us animals because they did not care for people either. We were all the same to them.
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