The lived experiences of communism should serve as a cautionary tale

Al Jazeera

25-02-2025

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 part of a Europe-wide trend of far-right resurgence that has worried many. 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 key political thinker and often admire the old ideas of Marxism and the writings of other communist ideologues for their critique of class relations and capitalism.
As young people engage with these ideologies, it is important for them to be aware that they did not remain just theories. Communism was applied as a political ideology of the Marxist-Leninist parties in dozens of countries in Europe and Asia, which resulted in repressive totalitarian regimes.
The communist regime in my country, Czechia, which in the 1940s was part of an entity called Czechoslovakia, has left a horrific legacy. Today, on the 77th 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 many families, including my own.
I was born soon after the 1989 Velvet Revolution and grew up hearing about what it was like to live under communism for Czechoslovaks. It was a bleak and oppressive world in which the nationalisation of the means of production in reality meant stealing factories and homes from wealthier citizens so that the state could turn them into farmhouses or residences for top communist state officials. The concepts of fair elections and freedom of speech were mere dreams.
In that world, individuals' opportunities to study, travel, or secure good jobs were often determined by their 'unblemished political profile' rather than their abilities. As a result, it was common to find qualified people who disagreed with the regime working in poorly paid and stigmatised jobs, while active members of the Communist Party, despite poor academic performance or lack of experience, occupied top positions. 'This all became normal for us. No one believed the totalitarian regime would fall,' my mother told me recently.
Those who disagreed with or confronted the regime paid a heavy price. 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.
But there are many other stories of people who faced repression that remain unknown to the public. 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.
My father belongs to this mass of prisoners who are largely unknown. He was labelled 'dangerous to communist society' in 1977 and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
When I was in my 20s, I found an old, yellowed paper file hidden in a drawer of the living room table, with the title 'Verdict in the Name of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic'. The fading typewritten text revealed that my father, along with his friend, was found guilty of avoiding military service and spreading negative political opinions.
My father strongly disagreed with the Communist Party leading the country, and he refused to serve in the army because it had failed in its primary duty to protect the country and its civilians during the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
In the summer of that year, 200,000 soldiers from the Soviet Union and other communist European countries invaded to suppress the democratic reform movement that was emerging – what came to be known as the Prague Spring. By the end of the year, 137 Czechs and Slovaks were killed. To maintain control in Prague, the Soviet Union permanently stationed troops as an occupying force in the country. Until they withdrew in 1991, Soviet soldiers killed 400 people and raped hundreds of women.
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 just 22 years old and was about to get married to my mother.
When I asked my father about the document and his time in prison, he fell silent. Only my mother shared a few insights: 'I was heavily pregnant and lost the baby. Your dad came to see me at the hospital and said he would be leaving for work for some time. Later, I found out he was in prison.'
My mother sent my father dozens of letters, but the prison guards did not deliver them. She tried to visit him several times but was not allowed to see him. She would wait outside the prison, hoping to catch a glimpse of him when the prisoners returned from their forced labour. 'I saw him once for a few seconds. He was just a thin figure with no hair. 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 find more information about who had led his case and who had spied on him – perhaps a friend or even a family member? 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.'
To hide as much of what it did as possible and make people forget, the communist regime destroyed documents just before its collapse. What we did find was a document from a prison guard who had tried to coerce my father into spying on other prisoners.
'The prisoner is friendly and very popular in the collective, making him a good candidate for delivering information to us. He is emotionally dependent on his fiancee, which can be used against him,' the document read. Perhaps his refusal to become a spy was the main reason why my father was never given any of the letters from my mother and was threatened with solitary confinement.
Many people, however, collaborated with the regime, which makes it difficult for families to reconcile with loved ones who happened to be on the other side. This collaboration was driven either by belief in political propaganda or by fear of having a 'poor political profile', which could result in job loss or a lack of good prospects for their children. Simply put, families were confronted daily with a horrible choice; their lives were riddled with betrayal and the paranoia of being spied on.
This also happened in my own family. For example, while my father was a political prisoner, my mother's brother was a notorious StB officer who blackmailed people to obtain information on dissidents and contributed to the arrest of many citizens – probably even my father.
My paternal grandfather tried to flee the country to West Germany, while one of my uncles from my mother's side worked in a border guard unit known for shooting and killing people trying to escape the Eastern bloc. My paternal grandmother was an active member of the Communist Party, writing propaganda columns for one of the party newspapers Rudé právo (Red Law) and denying any wrongdoing by the regime, including the arrest of her own son.
My father was rehabilitated by a democratic court in 1993 and his criminal record was expunged. My family members who had worked in the security forces were expelled from their positions. However, the choices, beliefs and deeds of the past continue to affect the present.
There are many families like mine whose relations continue to be marked by traumatic experiences of communism. Many lost family members or relatives to various forms of political violence, including imprisonment in harsh conditions and executions.
People who read theoretical Marxist and Leninist texts or embrace communist ideas in the Western context – where there is no direct experience with communist regimes – often fail to acknowledge these real histories.
This lack of acknowledgement helps sanitise the flaws inherent in communist regimes – which promised to eliminate economic and social inequalities but introduced new ones and, in the process, engaged in grave human rights violations.
When searching for a genuine alternative to the current social and political climate, we must learn from the experiences of those who lived under totalitarian regimes. Major political theories do affect our society, and thus, the lived experiences of those who suffered under such political systems should inform our understanding of them. Only then can we prevent the repetition of historical wrongdoings.