Goodbye communism

An image of a communist-era apartment in Warsaw. Photo: Patrycja Grochowska-Mejer / Shutterstock

Research into the memory of communism in Central and Eastern Europe points to some shared elements and strong local differences between countries. While people across the region remember political repression, surveillance, restrictions on civil liberties, shortages of goods, and the ideological pressure of the state, each society interprets this era in its own way. Much of this interpretation depends on individual countries’ national histories and their relationship with Moscow. For example, in Poland and Lithuania the collapse of communism meant regaining independence. People saw it as a long-awaited return to freedom. By contrast in Belarus, the early 1990s were viewed more as a consequence of the Soviet Union’s disintegration than a result of a domestic freedom movement.

Selective remembrance

Overall, the memory of communism unfolds in both official and private forms. Public institutions keep it alive through museums, exhibitions, monuments, and commemorative plaques. In daily life, families pass it down through personal stories, pupils learn it during history lessons in schools, and media weave it into national narratives. While some social groups and institutions place a stronger emphasis on suffering and resistance, others nurture nostalgia for the stability and community the system once seemed to offer.

This selective remembrance often hides the regime’s darker sides. Simplified narratives reduce the past to “totalitarianism and Soviet occupation”, which overlooks the differentiation between the brutality of Stalinism and the later, more liberal, versions of socialism – such as Yugoslavia’s self-management model or Hungary’s “goulash communism”, which opened space for limited economic and personal freedoms.

Each of these perspectives drew legitimacy from different documents, personal histories, and symbolic gestures. With the transition, new memory institutions were created but their critics accused them of imposing a single vision of the past.

In Poland, efforts to remove communist symbols began with the dismantling of old monuments, the renaming of streets, and modification of state emblems. Although the new non-communist government framed these actions as anti-communist, they often simply replaced one set of heroes with another, which were just more compatible with the new patriotic canon. In the years following, the Polish parliament passed “lustration” (cleansing) laws, which were meant to vet public officials for past collaboration with the communist security services. Additionally, in 1998 a new legal act was passed which created the Institute of National Remembrance. However, many conservatives found these steps still inadequate. It was thus only after the political victories of the conservative forces in 2005 and 2015 that they felt they had the moment to pursue their vision of a state free from the communist legacy.

Over time, public debate shifted from judging communism to evaluating the systemic transformation that took place in the 1990s, as well as analysing Poland’s place within a united Europe. The deaths of the last official communist leaders, General Wojciech Jaruzelski and Czesław Kiszczak, lowered the emotional temperature of these discussions. Yet, quite soon after, attempts to rekindle a strong sense of historical memory – most visibly through the cult of the “cursed soldiers” (anti-communist underground forces after the Second World War, some of whom had been accused of alleged crimes – editor’s note) – began to generate new myths rather than resolve old conflicts. Agnieszka Mrozik, a scholar of the communist period and its contemporary remembrance, describes this phenomenon as a form of “prosthetic memory”: a space filled with contradictions and ambivalence, where the past endures in the collective imagination as a legacy of shame, guilt, and a persistent need for moral reckoning.

Archives, legacy and nostalgia

Looking from a regional perspective, we can say that the memory of communism has unfolded in three dimensions. The first involves documenting crimes through historical research and the opening of archives. The second focuses on reflecting upon the material and social legacy of the era – from architecture to institutions. Finally, the third expresses nostalgia for everyday life in socialist states, which can be seen in the renewed interest in the fashion, cuisine, and pop culture of that time and which is often detached from the political context of this period. In Poland, this perspective was first widely discussed after the publication of a book by Filip Springer, a photo-reporter, who through his photos and reports showed the functionality of socialist architecture and argued that its rejection stemmed more from political prejudice than from flaws in design.

By questioning the myths of the post-1989 transformation, left-wing intellectuals have also redefined the understanding of the communist state. For example, the philosopher Andrzej Leder argued that the years from 1939 to 1956 in Poland were a time of deep, though brutal, social revolution that dismantled the feudal order and enabled mass upward mobility, creating the foundations for today’s middle class. Thus, in his view, the period of the People’s Republic of Poland should not be seen only through the prism of oppression but also as a stage of profound social change. In a similar way the nostalgic image of interwar Poland was challenged by Kacper Pobłocki, Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak, and Kamil Janicki, who exposed the social and economic inequalities that defined that earlier era.

Beneath these debates lies the question as to whether communism can ever truly be forgotten. To answer it, the historian Alexei Miller distinguishes between three types of forgetting, arguing that only what he calls “understanding-based forgetting” can lead to reconciliation. And yet in Poland, reckoning with the past has taken place more through symbols and media debates than through genuine systemic reform. That is why the historian Antoni Dudek argues that, unlike in Czechia or former East Germany, Poland has never conducted a full verification of its communist past. In Germany, for example, broad public access to Stasi archives and strong civic education programmes facilitated greater transparency, which were aimed at helping the society confront its history.

These instances demonstrate that the pace of dealing with the communist past has been uneven across Central and Eastern Europe. While Poland intensely debated de-communization in the 1990s, in Ukraine the mass removals of Lenin monuments – the so-called Leninopad – began only during the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. This process was further accelerated after Russia’s aggression in Donbas and later the full-scale invasion that started in 2022. In the Baltic states, the memory of communism remains strongly negative, which is a result of these countries’ experiences of Soviet occupation, their proximity to Russia, and the presence of large Russian-speaking populations. In the Western Balkans, the memory of the socialist period is closely tied to Tito’s legacy and what is referred to as “Yugonostalgia”, which emerged much earlier than similar sentiments did in other states.

Overall, the memory of communism in Central and Eastern Europe remains dynamic, emotionally charged, and full of contradictions. It intertwines trauma with the need for moral reckoning, and nostalgia with ongoing reinterpretations shaped by contemporary challenges. Thus the central task today is to develop a way of remembering that does not erase or deny, but instead weaves the past into a coherent sense of historical identity. Only through such integration can societies move beyond the wars over memory towards a genuine reconciliation – both nationally, within their own borders, and across the region.

Kinga Anna Gajda is the director of the Institute of European Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

Michał Kuryłowicz is an assistant professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków at the Department of Eurasian Area Studies.

communism, heritage, memory, research