Gone but not dead

[Behind the Aegis]

"They may be returning, but they're not themselves any more." Over a decade ago Yoram Bronowski wrote these words in Haaretz to describe a phenomenon that fascinated observers of the post-Communist world at the time - a wave of achievements for the post-Communist parties. Parties in Eastern Europe that had shed their original ideology and become fans of NATO and the European Union, or those - mainly the Russians-Ukrainians-Belorussians - that were less ashamed of their Communist past, and under cover of various colors tried to return to the political arena.

Today, too, as was the case a decade ago, those who are trying to take stock of life after the death of Communism are encountering a fascinating world of the survival of leading personalities without the Marxist ideology. Survival through reinvention as capitalists, frequently with underworld connections. Cynics claim that Communism has not disappeared, but is waiting for the upcoming retirement of the millions of representatives of the regimes in the former Soviet Union and its allies. It's no wonder that the leadership of the pensioners' parties is composed of Communist apparatchiks, who meet not only to share memories but also to guarantee their income.

Marx was right in 1848 when he wrote about the "specter of Communism"; even today this specter is haunting post-Communist societies. The Communist legacy is alive and well, occasionally bothersome, present, eroding a society that is trying to flourish once again, preventing the shaping of the collective memory of the era, and distorting the confrontation with the past.

It appears that never has there been an ideology and a regime that prepared its life after death, albeit quite hastily, as thoroughly as did Communism. Here, the legacy splits into two parts - the legacy of Communism, both as an idea and as a regime, and the legacy in the realm of society, memory and even nostalgia.


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[Ken Burch]

1. The main reason the "former Communist" parties have made a comeback

Is that, in much of Eastern Europe, voting for them was the only to vote against the Western-imposed austerity programs Eastern Europeans have been forced to live under. The sad part was that those "former Communists" kept the austerity in place anyway.

When they overthrew Stalinism, at the risk of their own lives in most cases, they should NOT have been subjected to massive unemployment, huge cuts in social benefits and a level of economic dislocation that forced hundreds of thousands to become guest workers or in some cases undocumented aliens in Western Europe.

It was bound to happen when the West insisted on replacing hard-line Stalinism with hard-line capitalism.

They should have been allowed progressive choices. If they had, none of the old dinosaurs would be making political comebacks.