The Basics of Communism

Rather than go exhaustively through the specific details of how the communist period unfolded in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, this pathway will examine certain key features of the communist regimes that generally applied across both decades and borders. For someone completely unfamiliar with the ideology of communism and the forms that it took across the Eastern bloc in the 20th century, exploring the specifics of each country or the way that its ideology and execution of it changed in time has the potential to confuse rather than explain.

The five features that we will explore are the centralization of power, the state’s tendency to reach into its citizens’ lives, the divide between public and private life, the state’s reaction to resistance, and the contested legacies that it left behind across the entire region. The clips presented take us across the different eras of Czechoslovak communism to paint a general picture of the forces that affected people living in communist regimes and the memories that those people are left with now.

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Friends from Moscow

Questions:

  • Who do you think is arriving on the plane, and who is there to greet them?
  • What is the atmosphere of the meeting and the clip in general?
  • Imagine yourself as one of the men coming off the plane, one of the men greeting them, one of the people behind the barricade, one of the children in red scarves. How do you feel in each situation? What are your motivations for coming to the event?

 

This clip, which was part of a short propagandistic film made about a Soviet delegation’s visit to Prague in the 1970s, illustrates just one example of how power was concentrated in the Eastern bloc. Each country had its own government, but Moscow was more or less the driving force across the whole region, and loyalty to the Soviet Union was of paramount importance. The moments when the satellite countries attempted to forge their own paths (Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, for example) and the resulting crackdowns from Moscow that followed are the exceptions that prove the rule. This centralization of power did not just apply across state lines, however. A key feature of communism as a system was a centrally controlled economy, which meant that the government dictated the activities of each industry and there was no room for entrepreneurship or advancement for those not loyal to that system.

In the next section, we’ll explore another expression of that loyalty to the system, this time with a clip set in the 1950s.

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Rewriting History

Questions:

  • What are the children doing?
  • Why are they doing it? Where do you think the order for them to do it comes from?
  • How do you think that action could have affected their lives overall, or the lives of their parents and families?

 

We can use this clip from the 1990 film Lenin, the Lord and Mother to discuss two important elements of the communist regimes in the Eastern bloc. First of all, the scene is placed at a key moment in history – the early 1950s, when the show trials were taking place in Czechoslovakia and in the other countries that had fallen under the Soviet Union’s influence after WWII. In the early years of the communist regimes, under the leadership of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, the show trials were a strategy that the regimes used to demonstrate what the penalties for disloyalty to the Communist Parties would be. Thousands of Party members and “class enemies” (including members of other political parties, freedom fighters, or wealthy farmer, for example) were marked as disloyal, whether or not they actually were, and chosen to be very publically purged. These purges reached even to the highest echelons of the Parties. Those deemed to be the worst traitors were then sentenced in the show trials, trials where the verdict was decided before they even began and which were broadcast widely for the whole country to see, all as a strategy to scare the populace into falling in line. 

The action in the clip, of the children tearing out pictures of one of these so-called traitors, illustrates the degree to which the regimes required that their citizens outwardly agree with them. The students, of course, would have had no particular opinion about the man in question and whether he betrayed the country, and then the teacher passes on the party line, dictating what to believe. The teacher herself, then, brings up another interesting question – does she believe that the man in the picture betrayed the country? There were undoubtedly many staunch communists and Party supporters throughout the communist period, but it was not always easy to tell the difference between those who were merely loyal to it for one reason or another and those who had absolute faith in the fairness of its policies and could square that with their own experiences and consciences. Tearing out the pages also, however, illustrates the level of control that the regimes attempted to hold over all areas of life, to the point of even attempting to adjust the history that children would learn in schools.
Of course, there were always individual people who chafed at that level of control. The following section shows an example of the regime’s reaction to one of them, but it takes place about 30 years later, in the 1980s. During the 1950s, the punishments for such transgressions would have been much harsher.

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Invasion of Privacy

 

Questions:

  • What is going on in the clip?
  • What does the secret policeman offer to the woman who was searched? What are some of the choices she is facing right now?
  • In what various ways are the couple being punished? Why do you think the regime might treat dissidents so harshly?

 

Resistance to the communist regimes took many forms across the Eastern bloc. On the larger scale, this included attempts at changing the regime, like the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, or the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s; on a smaller scale, dissident communities in the various countries tried to spread their ideas, while the Party kept a very close eye on them and their activities. No matter the scale, though, any actions like these represented very real threats to regimes that relied so heavily on their citizens outwardly complying with their demands. Although the small dissident communities did not have access to any sort of mass media, they often tried to circulate their ideas in quieter fashion — like through samizdat literature, which they would publish clandestinely and circulate in small groups, potentially avoiding the attention of the state.

Large and public acts of resistance were roundly quashed and often brutally punished — the Hungarian Uprising ended in a Soviet invasion and its leader was executed amid the arrests of thousands of people who had taken part; the Polish communist government imposed a period of martial law in order to quell political opposition in the aftermath of Solidarity’s initial success; and the dissidents were often arrested or exiled in response for taking part in dissent. To the regimes, such responses were a matter of necessity — leaving the dissidents in peace would have given them the chance to share their ideas with a greater segment of the population, which was not a risk they were willing to take. You’ll see in the next section, though, that the general population had to think about more than just not engaging in acts of dissent.

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What We Don't Talk about

Questions:

  • Why did the student get in trouble?
  • What do you think are some potential consequences of his action?
  • Can you see anything in common between his action and the actions of the dissident communities? How could the student’s action have represented a threat to the regime?

 

The dissident communities, of course, never made up large segments of the population, and card-carrying Communist Party members were also never in the majority (membership in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, for example, hovered around 10%, and that was one of the highest rates of membership in the bloc). That left the vast majority of the population somewhere in the middle – people who may have either supported or resented the government, but who for whatever reason did not want to get involved in politics. The nature of the regimes, however, required outward agreement and loyalty from their citizens, so those who wanted to live without trouble from the state had to create and maintain a stark divide between their public lives, in which they displayed obedience and deference to the government’s demands, and their private lives, where they could speak more freely.

The student, by parroting his father’s statements about unsuccessfully trying to cross the border and calling into question the textbook and teacher’s pronouncements on the subject, has unknowingly crossed that border between public and private. The teacher, acting as a mouthpiece of the state and the ideology, then punishes him for it. Those who resisted even through such small acts as not publically displaying their loyalty were punished quietly but soundly — they were barred from the best jobs, their children could not attend the best schools, and they were only permitted to travel abroad in rare cases. These sorts of unwritten rules led to a strict boundary between the public life and the private life. The child in question here has not yet learned the importance of that boundary.
The instances explored about together paint a rather negative picture, but it is important to point out that not everyone looks back on the communist past in an entirely negative way — and they have good reasons for not doing so. Below, you’ll see another side of the story, in which women are confronted with an ideological documentary made about them from the 1950s.

 

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Back to the Past

Questions:

  • Do the women enjoy the video? Why or why not?
  • How did the cooperative change their lives? How have their lives changed since the collective?
  • Why do you think they remember the period in this way?

 

This is an excerpt from a documentary made in the post-communist era, and the clip shows first a propagandistic film from the 1950s and then the people who appeared in that film, over 40 years later. The propagandistic film came from the period of agricultural collectivisation in the early 1950s, when the smaller scale farms were claimed by the government and melded together to form large agricultural collectives. For the farmers who were driven off their farms and sometimes exiled or sent to work camps (see Forced Eviction), this is of course a period remembered with animosity. As the video shows, however, some people might remember the period without the overarching political context and instead think back on the social benefits of the system. Collective memory of the communist period and its legacy are fraught with nuance, but they are nonetheless often oversimplified in the public discourse to serve current political aims, leaving outside observers with the impression that communism as a system was bad for all of its citizens. This impression, however, leaves out the experiences of those whose lives during the communist period changed for the better — which was not an insignificant group.

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