My 10-year-old son loves history and geopolitics. A few days ago he asked me, ”What was life under Communism like?”
“That might take a while to answer,” I smiled.
“Well, it was hardly good, was it? Being sent to Siberia – “
“That happened a great deal,” I replied.
He was curious, partly because he had made friends with a boy from the People’s Republic of China. I told him that the modern version of Communism was very different from the old Soviet and European one, even if the end objective – to maintain power – was the same.
“You grew up with it. Tell me more about it.”
“Well, I’ve known many people who lived under Communism at one time or other. I think their stories would tell you far more than anything I have to say.”
“Then tell me them.”
As I often write about Communism and Cold War-related places to visit in Europe, I thought it would be good for readers to hear these stories. Two of my friends have sadly passed away, but it’s important that their stories are heard anew and not forgotten.
So here are ten tales from behind the Iron Curtain. Some names have been changed.
Safran, Ukraine
Born c. 1910, Died Manchester, 1990s
An old man lived in the back room of the rental house I lived in as a student in my first year in Manchester. A quiet fellow, he didn’t say much, but had a steady stream of visitors. I asked him a few questions, but he didn’t seem to understand. I asked my Polish landlord about him, as I had heard him speak with him downstairs in his room.
Safran was a walking hidden history lesson of the 20th century. At first I gleaned some information from my landlord.
Where he was from?
He was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
But where in the Empire?
It became the Soviet Union.
Well, that narrowed it down a bit. What language did he speak?
It’s a dialect.
Weeks before, the Soviet Union had collapsed. So where in the Soviet Union was he from?
Not far from Romania. I think they call it the Bukovina.
But he’s speaking a Slavic dialect. I know quite a few words from when I learned Russian.
He’s from the countryside. The nearest city was Chernovtsy.
Off to the University Library I went, as you did in those pre-internet days. He was from Ukraine, which most people still (erroneously) called ‘the Ukraine’ at the time. It had just voted overwhelmingly for independence from the USSR.
I often opened the door for his visitors, most of whom were fellow Ukrainians. And it was from these people that I found out most about Safran. He was a farm worker who had escaped to the west in the chaos of the Nazi retreat. He eventually made it to Manchester, his identity so suppressed that he couldn’t – and his landlord couldn’t – even tell me where he was from.
The other Ukrainians I met were more forthright, and told me about the Nazi invasion. One of them described it to me as being ‘stuck between two versions of Hell’ – with Stalin ruling one, and Hitler the other. Stalin had already killed millions of Ukrainians in the artificially created Holodomor famine of 1932-33, and deported a great many more to the gulags to the east.
I remember one specific date from my time in that house – 2nd December 1991. It was the day after the results of the referendum confirming Ukraine’s independence, and the UK and many other states officially recognized this on the 2nd. The old guys came to Safran’s to celebrate. They insisted that I join them. They also sent me out twice to the off licence around the corner to stock up on the vodka.
I had far more than I should have, and eventually tore myself away to see Nirvana play at the Manchester Academy. Weirdly, I remember more about the time celebrating Ukraine’s independence than I do the gig.
Safran later moved to an old people’s home. In my last conversation with him at his old house, I asked him about Ukraine. ‘Please see Bukovina one day for me,’ he asked, his eyes welling up with tears. I promised him I would. I still haven’t, over 30 years on, but I will honour it one day.
Tomáš, Czech Republic
‘That little old man you met – he was the Party boss until the Velvet Revolution’
A Czech friend told me about the time he watched in horror as his son met the former General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, having no idea who he was.
He and his son were attending an event at one of the Prague district town halls. He thought he recognised a slight figure sitting at the end of a small table, but initially thought it was probably someone who just looked like him. Ten minutes later, while supping a beer with a local dignitary he turned around and saw his son pulling up a chair next to him.
My friend Tomáš was born the same year as me, 1970, two years after the Prague Spring reforms were brutally crushed by the Soviet Red Army. The First Secretary of the Communist Party, and main instigator of reform, Alexander Dubček, was removed from power after Leonid Brezhnev ordered in the tanks from Moscow. He was replaced by the more compliant Gustáv Husák, who remained in charge until 1987.
Under Husák, the Party launched a wide-ranging purge, imprisoning anyone they considered too reform-minded. The luckier ones lost their jobs or, like Dubček, got a demotion to a provincial outpost where he wouldn’t be a threat to the regime.
Another guest confirmed the identity of the old man to Tomáš. This seemingly harmless old man was one of the regime’s chief enforcers, leading the purge and process of ‘normalisation’ in Czechoslovakia – the reverting to a much harsher form of state rule. This was followed by a long period of stagnation in Czechoslovakia, and one of the few interruptions to this was when this little man took over from Husak as General Secretary of the Party in 1987. For two years, he was the leader of Czechoslovakia.
Two years later, as Mikhail Gorbachev loosened the reins on the countries of the Warsaw Pact, one by one they began to break the shackles of Communism, In November 1989, barely a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this little pensioner dismissed all opposition demands. As the demonstrations grew in size and momentum, he and the other members of the Presidium (the equivalent of the Soviet Politburo) resigned en masse. Within a few days, they had formally abandoned power after over 40 years of totalitarian rule.
Tomáš went over to his son after he had finished speaking with the pensioner. “Do you know who you were just speaking with?”
“His name is Pan (Czech for Mr) Jakeš.”
“Do you know who he is – or rather was?”
“No. He said he is 95, and I said he looks very good for it.”
“That man is Miloš Jakeš. He was the leader of Czechoslovakia at the time of the Velvet Revolution. He led the repressions after the Prague Spring.”
“That little guy did THAT?……”
Anna, Ukraine
‘They didn’t charge him with anything – they just sent him to Karaganda for twelve years’
Anna is from northwest Ukraine, close to both the Polish and Belarussian borders. She was born shortly after Ukraine became independent, and so has no memories of life under Communism. However, her family were profoundly affected by the totalitarian regime under which they were forced to live.
Their traumas began in in the late 1930s when one of her relatives was deported east to a gulag prison camp in Siberia, only to be released early to serve in the Red Army as the Nazis pressed east towards Moscow in the winter of 1941. He survived the war.
Worse was to follow when the dreaded knock at the door in the middle of the night came once again. This time her grandfather was taken away. No charges were laid against him. The family made enquiries with the local and regional police. Nothing. They didn’t know, so they said.
Weeks turned into months, with no news. Eventually, after a year, they found out that he was being held in a forced labour camp. Nobody explained why, or told them where. But at least he was alive.
Her grandfather did eventually make it back home to Ukraine – twelve years later. He had been forced to work in a salt mine in Karaganda, over 2,000 miles (3,200 km) to the east, in what was then the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, now the independent nation of Kazakhstan. He never did know why he was taken there, but, as Anna said to me, ’This was the time of Stalin. There never had to be a ‘why’’.
Olga, Russia
‘They were born in the Soviet Union. They will die in the Soviet Union. Even though it doesn’t exist’
Some people still miss Communism. Olga isn’t one of them – she was born in the early 1980s, and hadn’t really formed enough of an opinion of it by the time it collapsed. But her parents thought the collapse of the USSR was a complete disaster.
For them, the Soviet Union had been an object of pride and prestige. They had defeated the Nazis in World War Two (there were some minor skirmishes in the West too, like D-Day….). They had become an industrial powerhouse. They were the first country to launch a dog and a man into space. The man even came back. They ruled over the biggest country in the world, even if the ‘Union’ of Soviet Socialist Republics was not exactly a willing one.
Things began to unravel in the 1980s, with the disastrous Afghanistan invasion, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and then the policies of liberal-minded Mikhail Gorbachev. This meant that not only did the USSR lose its dominions in eastern and central Europe with the fall of the Iron Curtain, but the Soviet Union itself imploded, with its constituent republics voting overwhelmingly for independence.
The vast majority of people from these former Soviet republics look on their time under Moscow as a dark chapter in their nations’ histories. Not so Olga’s parents. Life was good in the Soviet Union, certainly for them. They weren’t trucked off to Siberia, unlike many. They wish to this day that it had never ended.
I asked Olga whether they thought things had improved for them since the end of the Soviet Union. She said there were a lot more goods in the shops. But for her father, this wasn’t a plus point. “I never even saw a banana in the Soviet Union,” he said. “I lived 40 years without a banana. So if I can have one now, no matter. I didn’t need a banana in the Soviet Union, and I don’t need one now!”
I didn’t ask, but I wonder if her father did allow himself the luxury of 2-ply toilet paper….
Ruth, Bulgaria
‘My parents left with nothing. But they were the lucky ones.’
My late friend Ruth was lucky too. Lucky to have even been born. Had it not been for the King of Bulgaria’s insistence that his country’s Jews were to be left alone by the Nazis and not deported, her parents wouldn’t have been alive to conceive and have her in 1947.
But by 1949 things were turning bad under the new Communist regime. Several religions were banned, so her parents emigrated to Israel. They barely had enough money for the boat there, but weren’t going to stay around.
Ruth travelled the world during her career, but didn’t return to the country of her birth until 1990, when she was 43 years old. Her return there gave her the same jolt most Westerners got when they first saw life behind the Iron Curtain.
‘I didn’t really remember Sofia, only my parents’ photos,’ she told me. ‘So when I saw all those concrete tower blocks everywhere, I just didn’t recognize it at all.’
She eventually made contact with an old friend of the family, who had lived through over 40 years of Communism. ‘They controlled everything, what you could read, what you could sing, what you could think,’ the friend told her. ‘We were all trapped here, we couldn’t get out.’
Gjergji, Albania
‘When Hoxha died, my mother rubbed her eyes with onion juice to make it look like she was crying’
Leader-for-life Enver Hoxha withdrew Albania from the Soviet orbit in the 1950s, after revisionists condemned his role model, Joseph Stalin. He aligned with Chairman Mao and China for a few years, but by the 1970s he had turned Albania into the most isolated country in Europe.
Hoxha’s methods were old-school Stalinist. Any opposition was forbidden, as were any traces of what was deemed alien and foreign. So Hoxha banned a multitude of things, from religion (Islam and Christianity) to beards to saxophones. Hoxha was a textbook case of a paranoid despot, and his Sigurimi state security force (the equivalent of the NKVD and later KGB in the Soviet Union, and the Stasi in East Germany) rooted out any perceived opposition, killing or imprisoning anyone seen as a threat.
The personality cult of Enver Hoxha grew through his reign, and by the 1970s he was portrayed as an all-knowing leader, his quotes appearing everywhere from banners on public buildings to the pages of school textbooks.
Of course all this would one day come to an end, and this happened in 1985, after he had ruled Albania for 41 years. Public outpourings of grief were the norm. People like Gjergji’s mother feared that if she didn’t show how sad she was at Hoxha’s death, she’d be in trouble with the new leadership, even marked down as a potential ‘enemy of the people’.
So every time she left her house, she rubbed onion juice into her eyes every time she left the house. This continued for weeks, even after his funeral.
And all of her neighbours did exactly the same thing.
Frank, East Germany
‘You waited ten years for a Trabant, and it took nearly as long to get the thing started’
When the Communist East German government built the Berlin Wall in 1961, they called it the ‘anti-fascist protection wall’. It was a typically perverse Communist way of twisting things around. It was built to keep the East Germans in the German Democratic Republic, to stop the exodus to the West.
And it was East Germans who were shot trying to get across, over or under the Berlin Wall. There was hardly a queue of ‘fascist’ Westerners trying to cross to the East. If someone had ever pointed out this contradiction to then Party leader Walter Ulbricht, they would have ended up behind bars for a very long time, or would have been ‘disappeared’.
East Germans had very restricted personal freedom, and lived a life that was substantially poorer in material terms than that in the west. Frank now drives an Audi, something he has done for well over thirty years, but before the Berlin Wall fell, his family owned a Trabant, the cult East German state-produced car.
You had to go on a waiting list to get a Trabant. This took ten years on average, twelve in Frank’s father’s case. It took a long time for the body of the car – a compound called Duroplast – to harden sufficiently for it to be usable. Then there was its lack of speed. ‘My first Audi went from 0-100 kilometres an hour in about six seconds. I don’t think the family Trabi ever got to 100. Come to think of it, it could just about make it to 80, and then you worried that it was about to explode and incinerate us all.’
The Trabant was also an environmental hazard, spluttering out clouds of blue smoke wherever it went. Some drivers tried to add oil to the fuel, which only made the smoke worse.
See Also: Trabant Museum Prague – discover the Communists’ unintentionally comical car
Michal, Czech Republic
Michal was born a few months before the Velvet Revolution, so doesn’t remember life under Communism, But he has grown up surrounded by the after-effects of the totalitarian system, and the transition to a free, capitalist world has been far from smooth.
He is relieved to have avoided any memories of Communism. ‘It was a completely absurd world. It’s exactly like George Orwell, and also Franz Kafka,’ he comments, referring to the man who is now Prague’s most famous author. Kafka was banned by the Czechoslovak Communist government, so his parents grew up in the city having never heard of him.
However, a bit of literature censorship didn’t bother many Czechs. Communism obviously had many flaws, but to some people it was like a safety net, a protective blanket. The state provided them with their housing (usually in the form of panelak apartment blocks), provided jobs and a moderate income, and kept food and beer prices artificially low. This meant that many could exist quite comfortably within the Communist system, living a quiet life provided that they didn’t step out of line with the authorities.
The end of Communism in the former Czechoslovakia was called the Velvet Revolution for the relative smoothness (i.e. lack of bloodshed) of the change. But in the months ahead, what was a new era of promise and hope for many filled others with dread.
With the end of Communism, all the certainties of life were swept away. From then on, an enterprise would only stay in business if it turned sufficient profit. If it didn’t, there were no more state subsidies to keep it afloat. So a presumed ‘job for life’ was no more.
Michal’s uncle and aunt both resented the new capitalist system, as both lost their jobs at a mill in a rural Czech town. He said that, when he was growing up, they both ‘missed Communism’. His parents, both of whom were delighted to be rid of the old system, would sometimes get into repetitive arguments with them.
His father would say, ’You never liked the Communists. You just kept your head down and your mouth shut like everyone else. ‘
‘I know,’ his uncle replied. ‘At least they looked after us. Now, I’m often afraid to get out of bed.’
Iulia, Romania
I’ve heard many horrifying stories about Communism, but Iulia’s is possibly the most harrowing of all.
She grew up under the Communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, the only Eastern European leader to be violently overthrown in 1989. He contributed to his own fate by ordering violent repression of any protests against him, with an instruction to fire upon protesters, killing them if necessary.
Which is where Iulia’s brother comes in.
After leaving school, he signed up with the Romanian Army. This was as good as it was likely to get for someone growing up in rural Communist Romania, where opportunities were limited.
He could never have foreseen the consequences of his decision. In December 1989 mass protests broke out against Ceaușescu, and it soon became clear that he had little popular support. Now, with the purpose of propping up this Stalinist autocrat, Iulia’s brother had to fire live ammunition at a crowd of protesters in the square of his home town. That would have been bad enough. However he recognized some of his classmates and schoolmates among the crowd fired upon.
That evening blighted her brother’s life. He has been ill with PTSD for the past 35 years, and has hardly worked since.
A few days after that evening, Ceausescu and his wife were shot following a military trial, bringing to an end over 40 years of Communism in Romania.
Eszter, Hungary
Eszter grew up in northeast Hungary, just outside the city of Miskolc. The industrial city was rebuilt after the Second World War, with many typical apartment blocks. ‘It was the sort of place that made you want to travel,’ she told me. But unlike her counterparts in East Germany, Eszter – and Hungarians generally – were far less restricted in their movements.
Before the Berlin Wall fell, Eszter had been able to travel to Czechoslovakia (very close to Miskolc), Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, West Germany and Finland. What millions of East Germans would have given for that.
And with less restrictions, life was more bearable for many Hungarians than it was elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc. Eszter was also grateful for what she says was a very good education, with a strong emphasis on culture.
I asked her whether she yearned for a return to the pre-1989 set-up. She laughed. ‘No, it could never happen here now. There were many bad things – but it wasn’t all bad. It was good for many Hungarians, but the history books don’t mention that.’
Life Under Communism – Final Thoughts
I hope you have found this article interesting. The Communist and Cold War period is fascinating, and this patchwork of stories tells you a lot about what life was like under Communist regimes.
I’ve written numerous articles on Communist and Cold War attractions around Europe – here are some for you to peruse:
Communist Prague – 18 sights from Prague’s Communist past
Cold War Museum Prague – an underground nuclear bunker in the centre of Prague
Retro Museum Prague – superb museum covering everyday life in Communist Czechoslovakia
Best Berlin Cold War Sites – from the Brandenburg Gate and Berlin Wall to Stasi prisons and more
Zagreb 80s Museum – a lighter-hearted look at life under Communism in 1980s Yugoslavia
Stasi Museum Leipzig – in the infamous Runde Ecke building, home to the Stasi in the city that broke the Communist East German regime
Nikolaikirche Leipzig – the church where the ‘Peaceful Revolution’ began
Stasi Museum Dresden – grim Museum in former Stasi and NKVD prison
Bautzen Germany – includes a section on Bautzen II, the dreaded Stasi prison where East German political prisoners were incarcerated