What are the motifs in How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed by Slavenka Drakulic?

One of the most powerful moments in How We Survived Communism occurs when Slavenka recalls a speech she gave to a socialist scholars' conference concerning women in Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism. Slavenka announces that she has just come from Bulgaria and pulls one sanitary napkin and one Tampax out of her purse and holds them in the air. She tells the crowd that women in Bulgaria have neither sanitary napkins nor Tampax, and they have never had them. The same goes for women in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and the Soviet Union. Slavenka argues that the reason communism failed is that because "in the seventy years of its existence, it couldn't fulfill the basic needs of half the population."