The Retro Museum, tucked away on the second floor of a shopping mall in the Black Sea city of Varna, is a testament to the material culture of everyday Bulgarian life between 1944 and 1989. From the Chaika vacuum cleaners and Maritsa manual typewriters to simple household items like tea towels, ashtrays, wine glasses, and portable record or cassette players, the collection highlights the importance of private spaces to those raised under authoritarian regimes, evoking memories of spontaneous dinner parties and family gatherings. Although I’d seen many of these same goods in the home of my Bulgarian in-laws in the 1990s, encountering them beneath glass in 2024 reminded me that behind the bleakness of the Iron Curtain, there was life. Crushed by a government they had no part in choosing, ordinary Bulgarians turned inward, but they curated their private spaces as small sanctuaries of domestic coziness.
“Internal emigration” is the name given to this withdrawal into the personal sphere across Eastern Europe in response to Communist authoritarianism. “If I were to design a monument to the Soviet Union it would be a kitchen table. Around it would be seated a group of friends, cigarettes and vodka glasses in hand, a loaf of bread and some pickled gherkins on the table,” explained Angus Roxburgh, a foreign correspondent who lived in Moscow in the 1970s.
Back in July, I wrote at TNR about the dangers of withdrawing from the public sphere. Yes, escapism through art, culture, and nature helped East Europeans persevere despite the many hardships of life in a command economy. But it also left them uniquely unprepared to deal with the sudden changes that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because people had cultivated the habit of apathy, they stood helpless as the lofty promises of free markets and democracy descended into kleptocratic chaos.
And yet now that the soaring cost of Wonder Bread, strategic fearmongering about Haitian dog-eaters, and a toxic cocktail of racism on the rocks with a twist of misogyny have conspired to reelect Donald Trump to a second term in the White House, internal emigration sounds very appealing. I won’t lie. I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek since November 5.
But escapism comes in different flavors. As millions of Americans contemplate burying their heads in the sand, we should consider which kinds of distractions are best suited to the present moment. Disheartened democrats can learn a few lessons from those beleaguered denizens of the former Eastern bloc.
In 1983, the head of the West German mission in East Berlin, Günter Gaus, described the German Democratic Republic as a “niche society.” Gaus observed that East Germans delighted in the spaces where they could fully withdraw from politics. It was “the place where they leave it all behind and, with family and among friends, water their potted plants, wash their cars, play cards, talk, celebrate. And where they think about how, and with whose help, they could procure and organize what’s still needed to make the niche even homier.”
Gaus saw the creation of niches as a release valve where East Germans lived out their desires for individual freedom in the face of a hostile government hell-bent on promoting its own ideological agenda. But this release valve, Gaus thought, was counterproductive: The apolitical focus on the domestic rendered citizens defenseless and enhanced the absolute power of the regime.
It’s true that former socialist leaders eventually allowed and even encouraged people to attend more to their personal lives to quell rising dissent. By providing the time (shorter workdays, lower retirement ages) and the infrastructure (allotment garden plots, cultural centers, campgrounds) for the niche society to develop and flourish, GDR leaders could even point to the rich social lives of East Germans as one of the unique triumphs of socialism.
But decades after Gaus’s assessment, Oxford historian Paul Betts offered a different theory. In his 2013 book exploring quotidian life, Within Walls, Betts found East German citizens much more active and ready to resist state intrusion into their sacred private sphere, creating a kind of revised social contract.
When escapism was pursued collectively, rather than individually, it forged important social bonds. In Bulgaria, historian Maria Todorova has argued that post-Communist nostalgia emerges from this “feeling of loss for a specific form of sociability,” which frayed with the development of free markets. In Romania too, political scientist Mihaela Miroiu and historian Maria Bucur have found that people mourned the special solidarity of the past. “Our respondents contrasted the value placed on and the quality of human relationships during periods of shortage to ‘the selfishness and loneliness of nowadays.’”
Prosocial forms of escapism, then, have their uses. Right now, though, anti-Trump Americans are at risk of embracing a less productive form of retreat: Rather than deepening our social connections to others, Americans withdraw by spending more time at home and on their own.
Over the past two decades, American adults have increased the percentage of leisure time they spend alone and decreased the free time shared with members of other households. Although the Covid lockdowns exacerbated social isolation, a 2022 paper by the economist Enghin Atalay found that these were in fact long-term trends discernible well before 2020. Much of the increase in leisure time spent alone was explained by more time watching television and playing video games.
While streaming six seasons of The Crown or replaying all of The Legend of Zelda may help you forget that there is an unhinged, convicted felon about to have our nuclear codes, it won’t build the kind of social support networks needed to fight an erosion of democracy. As the political scientist Robert Putnam once lamented, “Watching Friends instead of having friends” has accelerated the forces tearing our society apart.
If we must retreat into the private sphere, we should populate it with cherished others. Friends don’t let friends binge-watch alone. Rather than reading on your own, buy an audiobook (or borrow one from Libby) and listen to it while you do a jigsaw puzzle or paint-by-numbers with someone else. Practice “scruffy hospitality” by inviting friends and neighbors over even when your house is a mess and you can only serve a frozen pizza. Watch sports with your buddies. Visit your parents. Play more board games. Congregate in a faith community. Nurture your lateral relationships of support and care in whatever form they take.
The experiences of countries like East Germany show us that making our homes a sanctuary and holding our loved ones close is a form of political work. After 40 years of dictatorship and internal emigration, GDR citizens decided they’d had enough. In the hundreds of thousands, they emerged from their allotment sheds and left their kitchen tables. At the right moment, they took to the streets and changed the course of history, even if they were still unprepared for the corrupt and undemocratic way in which the subsequent transition unfolded.
The future of the United States looks bleak. A man who already once attempted to overturn our democracy is heading back to Washington. That’s terrifying. But after four years of Trump, a global pandemic, and the worst inflation in 40 years, many of us simply feel exhausted.
If we don’t have the stamina for the sort of constant vigilance required for the defense of democracy, building a niche society can help. We can take turns as sentry, watching for the most egregious efforts by Trump and his allies to further erode our foundational institutions. Preserve yourself, but do it socially. We may need our collective strength in the days to come.
