by KRISTEN R GHODSEE
View from the West Berlin side of graffiti art on the Wall in 1986. The Wall’s “death strip”, on the east side of the Wall, here follows the curve of the Luisenstadt Canal (filled in 1932). PHOTO/Wikipeda
Millions of Russians and eastern Europeans now believe that they were better off under communism. What does this signify?
‘[T]he people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes understand, to provoke collective tears.’
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
The public memory of 20th-century communism is a battleground. Two ideological armies stare at each other across a chasm of mistrust and misunderstanding. Even though the Cold War ended almost 30 years ago, a struggle to define the truth about the communist past has continued to rage across the United States and Europe.
On the Left stand those with some sympathy for socialist ideals and the popular opinion of hundreds of millions of Russian and east European citizens nostalgic for their state socialist pasts. On the Right stand the committed anti-totalitarians, both east and west, insisting that all experiments with Marxism will always and inevitably end with the gulag. Where one side sees shades of grey, the other views the world in black and white.
Particularly in the US, labour supporters and social liberals who desire an expanded role for the state hope to save the democratic socialist baby from the authoritarian bathwater. Fiscal conservatives and nationalists deploy memories of purges and famines to discredit even the most modest arguments in favour of redistributive politics.
For those wishing to paint 20th-century communism as an unmitigated evil, ongoing ethnographic and survey research in eastern Europe contradicts any simple narrative. Even as early as 1992, the Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakuli? ‘worried about what would happen to all the good things that we did have under communism – the medical care, the year’s paid maternity leave, free abortion’. As governments dismantled social safety nets and poverty spread throughout the region, ordinary citizens grew increasingly less critical of their state socialist pasts.
A 2009 poll in eight east European countries asked if the economic situation for ordinary people was ‘better, worse or about the same as it was under communism’. The results stunned observers: 72 per cent of Hungarians, and 62 per cent of both Ukrainians and Bulgarians believed that most people were worse off after 1989. In no country did more than 47 per cent of those surveyed agree that their lives improved after the advent of free markets. Subsequent polls and qualitative research across Russia and eastern Europe confirm the persistence of these sentiments as popular discontent with the failed promises of free-market prosperity has grown, especially among older people.
In response, east European conservative and Right-wing governments have created museums, memorials and days of commemoration to honour the victims of communism. In 2008, conservative politicians signed the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism to increase educational efforts about the crimes of communism, followed by the 2011 creation of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience, a consortium of organisations striving to promote their view of the 20th century in European history textbooks: a view that equates communism with Nazism, as one of two totalitarianisms.
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