EUROPE: Millions Miss the Iron Curtain

By Pavol Stracansky Reprint | | Print |

Pavol Stracansky

PRAGUE, Nov 24 2004 (IPS) - Millions in Eastern Europe remain convinced that life was better for them before communism collapsed 15 years ago.

A survey in the Czech Republic showed that one in five Czechs, older people particularly, would like to see a return to communism. More than half of pensioners said the country was wrong to choose democracy in 1989.

Opinion polls in other former communist countries have shown that many older people feel that life was better for them under communism.

In Poland and the former East Germany longing for communism has become widespread enough to earn a word of its own – ‘Ostalgie’ – partly after the German word ‘ost’ meaning east.

In a survey in Slovakia by the MVK agency last month half the respondents said they were dissatisfied with changes since 1989.

In Russia where successive Soviet regimes were among the most repressive in the world, the Russian Communist Party (KPRF) is still widely supported.

This longing for a return to communist rule reflects a mix of social insecurity and plain nostalgia among older people in the former eastern bloc, experts say.

"It is a combination of nostalgia and the very human reaction that people have when they look back at their youth and see things in a certain rosy light," Jan Buncak, lecturer at the sociology department at Comenius University in Bratislava told IPS. But it is also about "concerns over a lack of security in terms of jobs and benefits that everyone had guaranteed under communism."

The transition from centrally planned to free market economies that followed the fall of Eastern Europe’s communist regimes brought an end to guaranteed employment and state financial support for everyone. Prices of goods were no longer fixed and state subsidies for needs like power and heating have been gradually withdrawn.

Unemployment in former eastern bloc countries is now far higher than in western Europe. Poland and Slovakia have among the highest unemployment rates in Europe at 19 and 14 percent respectively. The Czech Republic has nine percent jobless.

Crime and public order is also seen by many as a greater problem today than under communism. Communist leaders saw public order as paramount to a well-functioning state apparatus, and the police state they set up has been cited repeatedly as a major reason for the relative rarity of organised and violent crime in communist states.

"There was much more order in society then, and much less crime," Antonin Kutek, a Czech former communist party member now turned businessman said in a comment to the Czech newspaper Mlada fronta Dnes. "People had far greater respect for the police, prosecutors and the courts."

These fears over social security and public order have been translated into real support for communist parties in some countries in the region.

In the Czech Republic polls regularly show the Communist Party (KSCM) getting 15 to 20 percent support. It has 41 MPs in a total 200.

The Slovak Communist Party (KSS) took six percent of the vote in the last parliamentary elections in 2002, making it one of the three largest opposition parties. The Russian Communist Party (KPRF) won more than 12 percent of the vote – the second highest – in the parliamentary elections in late 2003.

But few believe that communism will again become a dominant political force in Eastern Europe, because communist parties have the support only of the older generation.

"Across the post-communist region those who have nostalgia for communism or those that support it politically are all people over 50 years old," Buncak told IPS. "The younger generations have no interest in communism at all."

The poll in the Czech Republic earlier this month carried out by the Median agency showed that a massive majority of people below age 40 do not want a return to communism.

Only eight percent of respondents age 15 to 19, three percent in their twenties and seven percent in their thirties wanted a return to pre-1989 kind of society. Thirty-one percent in their fifties and 56 percent in their sixties wanted a return to communism.