What is the theme in How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed by Slavenka Drakulic?

Perhaps the most important theme of How We Survived Communism is that communist social institutions are correlated with a communist mindset and that the communist mindset outlives the destruction of communist institutions. When communism fell in the late eighties and early nineties, many in Eastern Europe expected dramatic cultural and economic change. While some countries did get better off, on the whole, things improved more slowly than expected. Slavenka attributes this to a continuing communist mindset.