Nostalgia for Confinement
Why are some in Russia and Eastern Europe pining for the communist system that once oppressed them?
Liberal democracy’s claim to be a superior form of government rests on its protection of choice, freedom, political accountability, the rule of law, and civic equality. The free press and broadcast media in such states comprise a necessary pillar of this system, and they open their columns and screens to almost every sort of opinion. Liberal democracies also valorise those who seek to bring liberalism and democracy to authoritarian states, often at great cost to themselves—Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Lech Wałęsa in Poland, Vaclav Havel in what used to be Czechoslovakia, Liu Xiaobo in China, and most recently, Alexei Navalny in Russia, who was tortured to death in the coldest region of his country.
I spent the best part of a decade as a journalist covering countries in Central Europe and then in the Soviet Union at a time when they were leaving autocracy for freedom. One of the last of the Central European states I went to was Romania, which experienced a 20th century more hideous than any of its fellow communist states in a rough neighbourhood. Ruled from 1965 by Nicolae Ceaușescu, a communist who broke with Moscow, its people were poor, cold, hungry, and oppressed by the Securitate secret police. Ceaușescu cut heat and rations to pay back his nation’s debt, and because women were forbidden from using contraception or obtaining an abortion, large numbers of children were given to terrible state orphanages.
I travelled to Romania a few days before Christmas in 1989. A rally addressed by Ceaușescu at the Communist Party headquarters in Bucharest’s main square had turned rebellious. He and his wife Elena tried to escape, but they were captured, hastily tried by a kangaroo court organised by their former comrades, and executed by firing squad on Christmas Day. The nation rejoiced: one of communism’s monsters was dead and Romania had returned to Europe. Ion Iliescu, whom Ceaușescu had pushed out of the leadership, became president and held free elections. The country opened up, and branches of McDonald’s and Starbucks soon appeared on city streets.
Soviet communism’s demise was differently constructed but just as decisive. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had spent five years tentatively introducing small freedoms. Glasnost was designed to open up debate, while perestroika was supposed to bring elements of the market to a wholly statist economy. Glasnost worked too well, and taboos on what could be said and published rapidly toppled to the consternation of Soviet conservatives; perestroika disrupted industries and supply networks, causing shortages of everything. To add to the misery, Gorbachev (who was teetotal) briefly restricted the buying of alcohol, a move that made him very unpopular (which, for other reasons, he remained).
In both Romania and Russia, the post-communist era was chaotic. A few people managed to become fabulously wealthy, but the vast majority became poorer, especially in Russia. In Romania, Ceaușescu’s autarchic economic policy had demanded the inefficient domestic production of virtually everything, and most of the highly subsidised production plants have now collapsed. Unemployment soared, and millions of Romanians left to find work in Western Europe and North America. During a recent trip to the former industrial town of Roșiorii de Vede, I learned that around a third of the town’s population had left for the West, and every one of the ten factories had closed. The recently formed New/Far Right party, the Alliance for the Union of Romania, is attracting thousands of potential voters (according to its local leader).
The West had been oversold. Widespread assent had greeted Francis Fukuyama’s belief—expressed in his book The End of History and the Last Man, and more briefly in an earlier essay on the same theme in the National Interest—that liberal democracy was “the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run [his italics].” But people do not live in the long run. Communism was the only system most Romanians and Russians had known, and they had been taught that it was superior in every way to democracy and capitalism.
Younger generations yearned for the West’s freedoms and older generations yearned for its prosperity. But as communism collapsed, the countries in which it had ruled became socially and ideologically unmoored. Freedom produced a corrupt and corruptible new political class largely populated by former officials of the Communist Party and secret police. Meanwhile, market reforms in Russia (and most of the other former Soviet republics) made life poorer for the majority, at least in the short run. Romania saw little of the promise of Western wealth until the European Union began to provide the country with substantial aid—a net contribution of €26.5bn over the first decade since it joined in January 2007. These were large sums for a country of 19m people (the population declined by around 3.5 million people between 1991 and 2021).
Disillusion has brought nostalgia for an ordered life and the comforting myth that communism privileged the working class. In her book Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Communism, the leftwing US scholar Kristen Ghodsee writes:
Abstract rights usually play second fiddle to the material and social conditions of our interactions with colleagues, family and friends. People vote every four years, but they share meals three times a day … nostalgia for communism has become a common language through which ordinary men and women express disappointment with the shortcomings of parliamentary democracy and neoliberal capitalism today.
In an article for Open Democracy, journalist Kurt Biray notes that: “The populations of many of these states accepted and internalised values such as socialist patriotism, which converged with the traditional nationalist and other pre-existing norms of the region.” Two of the many books written about this period—my former colleague Chrystia Freeland’s Sale of the Century and David Hoffman’s The Oligarchs—were both sharply aware that the great wealth of the few was accrued alongside the impoverishment of the majority, but day-to-day reporting only acknowledged this fitfully.
Tomislav Kardum
As a correspondent in Moscow during the post-collapse years, I was occasionally invited to give a talk about the West to a friend’s sociology class at Moscow State University. I spoke about the greater freedom of speech and opinion that citizens enjoyed, but I was also careful to mention the large gaps between rich and poor and the wide class divides in European and North American states. During the Q&A, most of the enquiries—especially from the female students—related to my salary, the size of my flat in London, and the cost of food and clothes. These well educated and clever students, in their late teens or early 20s, wanted to get some sense of what the West offered, and how they could measure their own lives against mine.
My friend had taught Marxist sociology for most of her long working life and she had been Communist Party secretary of her faculty. Now, she lived alone in a small Stalin-era flat having lost her husband to cancer years before and she had to come to terms with the upending of her largely unquestioned view of society and the world. She did not always defend her beliefs, but she did worry that the close family ties and friendship groups of the communist era were loosening as people struggled to find a firm footing. She was not, of course, alone in this fear.
Many of my generation of correspondents covering the former communist states—especially Russia—were as much proselytisers of the virtues of liberal democracy as we were describers of post-communist turmoil. Most of us saw the remaining communist parties—which (inexplicably!) continued to attract quite a lot of support—as dinosaurs that failed to realise they were destined for extinction (they had not read their Fukuyama). We believed that Russia’s economic reformers led by Yegor Gaidar, the prime minister in Boris Yeltsin’s first presidential term, were largely right. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were busy pumping money into the Russian economy, and those institutions certainly approved of Gaidar and his team as they sought to end price controls and the huge state subsidies to industry.
But this “shock therapy” caused prices to jump and factories to close. Communists and others thought these reforms were an outrage, and they forced Gaidar’s resignation (though he remained an adviser to the government). Lines of citizens—mainly elderly women—stood or sat by the entrance to metro stations selling their possessions. As correspondents, we covered all this, but we generally approved of the “shock” and argued that the pain would be worth it in the long term. But the sacrifices demanded of ordinary people might have been better noted.
Foreign-affairs journalism is necessarily more concerned with high politics and diplomacy than with high-street economics, and it therefore suffers from an over-reliance on elite opinion. Understanding the loss of financial security brought about by the fall of the communist administrations was hard for Westerners, who did not always pay enough attention to views that ran against the grain of Western consensus, particularly the liberal-democratic worldview taken for granted by most media organisations.
We have also been slow to understand the extreme patriotism the Putin regime has encouraged, though it was high even without encouragement. Nor have we fully grasped that a citizenry—even a well educated citizenry with a substantial liberal minority—can be convinced to prefer an all-powerful leader after centuries of rule by tsars and commissars made that seem like the natural order of things, and that a brief interlude of shambolic democracy might make authoritarian rule seem attractive by comparison. Now, as Russia appears to take the initiative on the eastern front in the third year of its invasion of Ukraine, support remains high, as does the belief that Ukraine is rightfully theirs. The Russian state is more savage and repressive than at any time since the fall of communism, but its grip on the populace remains tight.
In 1989–91, my Western colleagues and I all believed that freedom, democracy, and the creation of an independent civil society were the natural default position for those living under communist tyranny. For many of the people living in these states, however, communism provided a confined life that was improving incrementally. Nostalgia for confinement is not a mystery, even in a country cursed with a cruel dictator like Nicolae Ceaușescu. We have to look more closely at liberal democracy’s flaws, and the support given by the West to regimes which bulldozed limited but relatively secure working-class lives, if we are to understand why disenchantment is growing among the West’s working classes and the new Europeans in the east.
