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Faruk Šehić
make us be like them in every
way possible – frowning,
moustachioed men who
performed important tasks
for the existence of our great
and powerful State. But I
didn’t want a moustache and
wasn’t in a hurry to grow up.
I believed in the red of my
Pioneer scarf.And intheblood
of all earthly proletarians,
whowould close ranks in their
dim, underground factories,
thirsting for world revolution,
when Marx, Engels and Lenin
would raise them from the
dead. Later it would just take
Karlo Štajner’s anti-Gulag
classic
7000 Days in Siberia
for me to strike communism
from the list of beloved,
sacred ‘isms’ in my high-
school diary, albeit it in pencil
and with a wavering hand. In
the language of the Party, I
had had become a revisionist;
I was like Rosa Luxemburg,
whom we hated because
she had abandoned the true
current of the revolution
and become a vile agent of
imperialism – at least that’s
the way it was served to us
in the Marxist textbooks.
Everything had to be in the
service of our powerful State,
the fourth-largest military
force in the world, whose
wings of steel we were more
thanproudof. Evenour town’s
park boasted small patriotic
trees (more like bushes)