I don’t understand how anyone can support…
- A regime that surrounded its entire border with barbed wire, in the early years even carrying 3,000 volts like the Nazi concentration camps, minefields hundreds of meters deep and guard towers. If someone made it over the fence without stepping on a mine, they set a pack of dogs on him, and one of them already had its teeth in him.
- A regime that never spoke a single word of truth, that lied only to stay in power. Take Chernobyl: elevated radiation was measured in Northern Europe and even the USA, the whole world already knew about the accident thanks to satellite photos, yet the regime admitted a “minor” accident only after 3 days.
- A regime in which someone had more than others only through bribes, where what mattered was not a person’s competence but their political file and connections.
- A regime that would not allow even a hint of progress unless some party commie approved it.
- A regime that threw out all the students and professors who disagreed with communism and sent them to do the hardest labor, such as the “Bridge of the Intelligentsia” in Prague, built by the intellectual elite – lawyers, doctors, scientists, .
- A regime that murdered or imprisoned for decades even the most devoted communists, because some felt that they might loosen the regime, or because that was the order from the Soviets and the paranoid Stalin (Slansky, Husak, etc.).
- A regime that threw people into prison without trial or evidence, where they were tortured, including with electric shocks. Or it sent them to the Gulags, where they worked on largely pointless projects, such as digging a canal with nothing but pickaxes. They went home only once a comrade decided the prisoner had been re-educated. Or they were sent to Jachymov or Mayak in Russia, where everyone died of radiation within a year.
- A regime that kept an army not to fight foreign soldiers but to beat its own people. The Visegrad Four was the only military alliance that ever invaded itself (the occupation of Czechoslovakia)
- A regime that seized all property and ran things so badly that for months on end there were no sanitary pads, toilet paper, and more. Ketchup was produced, but it never reached the shops because no one was making the caps. The whole machinery of the economy kept jamming and grinding more and more.
- A regime that banned people from playing and singing; all it took was for some petty bigwig to feel that an artist was no longer promoting the ideas of communism.
- A regime that tried to enslave everyone’s bodies and minds.
- A regime that pretended we were going up, while we were constantly sinking to the bottom.
- A regime that made no sense whatsoever.
And I understand Russia in 2019 even less. In 2008, Stalin was named the 3rd greatest Russian (even though he was Georgian by nationality – https://www.denik.cz/svet/ruskostalin20081229/ ), and in 2017 he was already 1st ( https://www.echo24.cz/a/wpiMT/nejvetsi-rus-je-stalin-pak-hned-putin).
In 2019, Stalin is viewed positively by 70% of people: https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/zahranicni/rusko-sovetsky-svaz-sssr-pruzkum-spokojenost-prezident-vladimir-putin-kritika-rezim.A190806_091631_zahranicni_dtt
And according to a survey in 2014, 55% of people wished for a return of the USSR ( https://www.e15.cz/zahranicni/vetsina-rusu-chce-navrat-sovetskeho-svazu-1083510)
The only person who can defend communism is someone who feels like a failure; under communism everyone was a loser, so nobody noticed.