The lived experiences of communism should stand as a warning | Opinions

In Sunday’s general elections in Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) achieved second place for the first time since World War II. This electoral success is part of a broader Europe-wide resurgence of far-right parties, which has raised significant concerns. As a university lecturer, I’ve noticed that in response to this trend, many young people are turning to far-left ideologies, such as communism. Students are studying Karl Marx as a central political thinker and often admire the traditional ideas of Marxism and the writings of other communist theorists for their critiques of class relations and capitalism.

As young people engage with these ideologies, it’s crucial for them to recognize that communism was not merely a theoretical concept. It was implemented as the political ideology of Marxist-Leninist parties in numerous countries across Europe and Asia, leading to oppressive totalitarian regimes.

The communist regime in my home country, Czechia—part of Czechoslovakia in the 1940s—has left a harrowing legacy. Today, on the 77th anniversary of the election that brought the communists to power in Prague, I am reminded of how the regime scarred the lives of countless families, including my own.

I was born shortly after the 1989 Velvet Revolution and grew up hearing about life under communism in Czechoslovakia. It was a grim and oppressive existence where the nationalization of the means of production often meant confiscating factories and homes from wealthier citizens to repurpose them as farmhouses or residences for top communist officials. Fair elections and freedom of speech were distant dreams.

In that world, opportunities for education, travel, or securing a good job were frequently determined by one’s “unblemished political profile” rather than their abilities. Consequently, many qualified individuals who opposed the regime found themselves in poorly paid, stigmatized jobs, while loyal Communist Party members, regardless of their academic or professional shortcomings, occupied top positions. “This became normal for us. No one believed the totalitarian regime would ever fall,” my mother recently told me.

Those who disagreed with or resisted the regime paid a heavy price. Academic and media accounts detail the brutal practices of the State Security (StB) against Czechoslovak citizens deemed “enemies of the state”: mass surveillance, blackmail, arrests, torture, execution, and forced emigration. The stories of prominent dissidents, such as the executed lawyer Milada Horakova or the imprisoned writer Vaclav Havel—who later became the first democratically elected Czech president—are well-known.

However, many other stories of repression remain untold. The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes has documented around 200,000 people arrested in communist Czechoslovakia due to their social class, status, opinions, or religious beliefs. Of these, 4,495 died in prison.

My father belongs to this largely unknown group of prisoners. In 1977, he was labeled “dangerous to communist society” and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

In my 20s, I discovered an old, yellowed document in a living room drawer, titled “Verdict in the Name of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.” The faded text revealed that my father, along with a friend, had been convicted of avoiding military service and spreading negative political opinions.

My father vehemently opposed the Communist Party’s leadership and refused to serve in the army, which had failed to protect the country and its civilians during the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

That summer, 200,000 soldiers from the Soviet Union and other communist nations invaded to crush the democratic reform movement known as the Prague Spring. By the end of the year, 137 Czechs and Slovaks had been killed. To maintain control, the Soviet Union permanently stationed troops in Czechoslovakia as an occupying force. Until their withdrawal in 1991, Soviet soldiers killed 400 people and raped hundreds of women.

Despite this violence, the Communist Party considered the Warsaw Pact armies to be Czechoslovakia’s allies.

The court condemned my father for “opposing the Communist Party and society, damaging relations between the Czechoslovak Army and the Warsaw Pact forces, and being a huge disappointment given his promising working-class background.” He was only 22 years old and about to marry my mother.

When I asked my father about the document and his time in prison, he remained silent. My mother shared some details: “I was pregnant and lost the baby. Your dad visited me in the hospital and said he would be away for work. Later, I learned he was in prison.”

My mother sent dozens of letters, but the prison guards never delivered them. She tried to visit him multiple times but was denied. She would wait outside the prison, hoping to catch a glimpse of him as prisoners returned from forced labor. “I saw him once for a few seconds. He was thin and bald, exhausted. We waved at each other,” she recalled. My father was released after 10 months for good behavior.

Recently, I convinced my father to visit the National Security Archive in Prague with me. We hoped to uncover more about who had handled his case and whether someone had spied on him—perhaps a friend or family member. Disappointingly, we were handed a thin file with a note stating, “Most documents with your father’s name were destroyed by the State Security.”

To obscure its actions, the communist regime destroyed many documents just before its collapse. What we did find was a report from a prison guard who had tried to coerce my father into spying on other prisoners.

“The prisoner is friendly and popular among his peers, making him a good candidate for gathering information. He is emotionally dependent on his fiancée, which can be used against him,” the document read. My father’s refusal to spy likely explains why he never received my mother’s letters and was threatened with solitary confinement.

Many people collaborated with the regime, driven either by belief in its propaganda or fear of a “poor political profile,” which could cost them their jobs or limit their children’s prospects. Families faced daily betrayals and the paranoia of being watched.

This dynamic played out in my own family. While my father was a political prisoner, my maternal uncle was a notorious StB officer who blackmailed dissidents and contributed to many arrests—possibly even my father’s.

My paternal grandfather attempted to flee to West Germany, while an uncle on my mother’s side served in a border guard unit known for shooting escapees. My paternal grandmother was an active Communist Party member, writing propaganda for the party newspaper *Rudé právo* (Red Law) and denying any wrongdoing by the regime, including her son’s arrest.

My father was rehabilitated by a democratic court in 1993, and his criminal record was expunged. Family members who had worked in the security forces were dismissed from their positions. However, the choices and actions of the past continue to shape our present.

Many families like mine still bear the scars of communism, having lost loved ones to imprisonment, harsh conditions, or execution.

Those who study Marxist and Leninist texts or embrace communist ideas in Western contexts—where there is no direct experience with communist regimes—often overlook these harsh realities. This lack of acknowledgment glosses over the inherent flaws of communist regimes, which promised to eliminate social and economic inequalities but instead created new ones while committing severe human rights abuses.

As we search for alternatives to today’s social and political challenges, we must learn from those who lived under totalitarian regimes. Political theories profoundly impact society, and the lived experiences of those who suffered under such systems should inform our understanding. Only then can we avoid repeating the mistakes of history.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.