The lived experiences of communism should serve as a cautionary tale

In Sunday’s general elections in Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) came second for the first time since World War II. Its electoral success is a result of a worrying global far-right resurgence trend. As a university lecturer, I have observed that as a reaction to this phenomenon, many young people are becoming interested in far-left ideologies, such as communism. Students study Karl Marx as a significant political thinker and frequently applaud other communist ideologies’ writings for their critique of class relations and capitalism.

It is crucial for young people to understand that these ideologies did not end up just theories as they did as they did as they did. In dozens of countries in Europe and Asia, Marxist-Leninist parties used communism as their political ideology, leading to oppressive totalitarian regimes.

The communist regime&nbsp, in my country, Czechia, which in the 1940s was part of an entity called Czechoslovakia, has left a horrific legacy. Today, on the 77th&nbsp, anniversary of the election that brought the communists to power in Prague, I cannot help but think about how the regime scarred the lives of&nbsp, many families, including my&nbsp, own.

I was a young child when the Velvet Revolution of 1989 came out, and I learned from the stories of Czechoslovaks living under communism. In reality, the nationalization of the means of production meant stealing factories and homes from wealthy citizens so that the state could turn them into farmhouses or residences for top communist state officials. In reality, this was a bleak and oppressive world. Fair elections and free speech were just ideas.

In that world, individuals ‘ opportunities to study, travel, or secure good jobs were often determined by their “unblemished political profile” rather than their abilities. In consequence, it was common to find qualified individuals who sided with the government holding positions in poorly paid, stigmatized positions, while Communist Party members who were active remained in positions of leadership despite poor academic performance or lack of experience. “All of this became commonplace for us.” No one believed the totalitarian regime would fall, my mother recently said to me.

Those who criticized or confronted the regime received a lot of money. There are many accounts in academia and the media of the brutal practices of the State Security (StB) directed at Czechoslovak citizens deemed “enemies of the state”: mass surveillance, blackmail, arrests, torture, execution, and forced emigration. The stories of high-profile dissidents, such as the executed lawyer Milada Horakova or the imprisoned writer Vaclav Havel, who became the first democratically elected Czech president, are well known.

However, the public is unaware of many other people’s experiences with oppression. The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes has documented the cases of about 200, 000 people arrested in communist Czechoslovakia due to their social class, status, opinions, or religious beliefs. Of these, 4, 495 died during their time in prison.

This large group of inmates, largely unknown, includes my father. He was labelled “dangerous to communist society” in 1977 and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

A copy of the old, yellowed paper file with the title “Verdict in the Name of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic” was hidden under a drawer on the living room table when I was in my 20s. My father and a friend were found guilty of avoiding military service and spreading anti-political views, according to the faded typewritten text.

When the Communist Party seized control of the nation during the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, my father vehemently opposed the army’s leadership. He resisted serving in the army because it had failed to fulfill its primary duty to protect the nation and its citizens.

In order to stop the emerging democratic reform movement, known as the Prague Spring, 200, 000 soldiers from the Soviet Union and other communist European nations invaded in the summer of that year. By the end of the year, 137 Czechs and Slovaks were killed. The Soviet Union permanently stationed troops as an occupying force in Prague to keep control there. Before they withdrew in 1991, Soviet soldiers raped hundreds of women and killed 400 people.

Despite the brutal violence and crimes, the Communist Party still considered the Warsaw Pact armies to be Czechoslovakia’s allies.

So the court condemned my father for “being against the Communist Party and society, damaging relations between the Czechoslovak Army and the Warsaw Pact forces due to his selfish reasons, and being a huge disappointment, given his promising working-class background”. He was about to marry my mother when he was just 22 years old.

When I inquired about the document and his time serving time in prison, he said nothing. My mother was the only one to explain that she was “very pregnant and lost the baby.” Your father informed me that he would be leaving for work for some time when he saw me at the hospital. Later, I found out he was in prison”.

The prison guards did not receive the letters that my mother had sent to my father. She repeatedly attempted to get close to him, but she was denied access. When the prisoners returned from their forced labor, she hoped to see him while she was waiting outside. “I saw him once for a few seconds. He had no hair and was just a thin figure. He looked exhausted. We waved at each other”, my mother recalled. My father was released after 10 months for good behaviour.

Recently, I finally managed to persuade my father to visit, with me, the National Security Archive in Prague. We hoped to learn more about the person responsible for his arrest and who had spied on him, perhaps a friend or even a member of our family. To our disappointment, the staff handed us a thin file with a note: “The majority of the documents with your father’s name were destroyed by the State Security”.

The communist regime destroyed documents just before it fell to conceal the most of what it did and to elude scrutiny. A prison guard who had attempted to coerce my father into spying on other prisoners was the object of what we did discover.

The prisoner is a good choice for providing information to us because he is friendly and well-liked in the collective. He is emotionally dependent on his fiancee, which can be used against him”, the document read. Perhaps his refusal to work as a spy was the main factor in my father’s failure to receive any of my mother’s letters and face isolation threats.

However, many people worked for the regime, which makes it difficult for families to reconcile with loved ones who were on the other side. This collaboration was motivated by a fear that having a “poor political profile” would lead to job loss or a lack of promising prospects for their children, or by a belief in political propaganda. Simply put, families faced a terrible choice every day, faced with betrayal and paranoia from being spied on, and faced with a terrible choice.

This also happened in my own family. For instance, my mother’s brother was a notorious StB officer who blackmailed people to get information on dissidents and helped to arrest many people, probably even my father, while my father was a political prisoner.

One of my mother’s side’s border guard units was known for shooting and killing people trying to escape the Eastern bloc, while my paternal grandfather attempted to flee the country to West Germany. My paternal grandmother, who wrote articles for one of the party newspapers Rudé právo (Red Law), denied any wrongdoing by the regime, including the arrest of her own son. She also wrote articles for the Communist Party.

In 1993, a democratic court reinstated my father’s criminal record and he was freed. Members of my family’s security forces positions were fired. However, the choices, beliefs and deeds of the past continue to affect the present.

Numerous families, including mine, have relations that have been impacted by communist trauma. Many people lost their loved ones to political violence, including executions and imprisonment in harsh conditions.

People who read theoretical Marxist and Leninist works or embrace communist ideas in Western settings where they have little to no prior experience with communist regimes frequently fail to acknowledge these actual histories.

This disapproval helps to identify the shortcomings of communist regimes, which introduced new economic and social inequality and committed serious human rights violations in the process.

We must learn from those who have been subject to totalitarian regimes when looking for a real alternative to the current social and political climate. Our understanding of major political theories should be based on the lived experiences of those who have been subjected to such political systems. Only then can we stop historical wrongdoing from happening again.

Source: Aljazeera