Research into the memory of communism in Central and east Europe points to any shared elements and strong local differences between countries. While people across the region remember political repression, surveillance, restrictions on civilian liberties, shortages of goods, and the ideological force of the state, each society interprets this era in its own way. Much of this explanation depends on individual countries’ national histories and their relation with Moscow. For example, in Poland and Lithuania the collapse of communism meant regaining independence. People saw it as a long-awaited return to freedom. By contrast in Belarus, the early 1990s were viewed more as a consequence of the russian Union’s disintegration than a consequence of a home freedom movement.
Selective remembrance
Overall, the memory of communism unfolds in both authoritative and private forms. Public institutions keep it alive through museums, exhibitions, monuments, and commemorative plaques. In regular life, families pass it down through individual stories, pupils learn it during past lessons in schools, and media weave it into national narratives. While any social groups and institutions place a stronger emphasis on suffering and resistance, others nurture nostalgia for the stableness and community the strategy erstwhile seemed to offer.
This selective remembrance frequently hides the regime’s darker sides. Simplified narratives reduce the past to “totalitarianism and russian occupation”, which overlooks the differentiation between the brutality of Stalinism and the later, more liberal, versions of socialism – specified as Yugoslavia’s self-management model or Hungary’s “goulash communism”, which opened space for limited economical and individual freedoms.
Each of these perspectives drew legitimacy from different documents, individual histories, and symbolic gestures. With the transition, fresh memory institutions were created but their critics accused them of imposing a single imagination of the past.
In Poland, efforts to remove communist symbols began with the dismantling of old monuments, the renaming of streets, and modification of state emblems. Although the fresh non-communist government framed these actions as anti-communist, they frequently simply replaced 1 set of heroes with another, which were just more compatible with the fresh patriotic canon. In the years following, the Polish parliament passed “lustration” (cleansing) laws, which were meant to vet public officials for past collaboration with the communist safety services. Additionally, in 1998 a fresh legal act was passed which created the Institute of National Remembrance. However, many conservatives found these steps inactive inadequate. It was thus only after the political victories of the conservative forces in 2005 and 2015 that they felt they had the minute to prosecute their imagination of a state free from the communist legacy.
Over time, public debate shifted from judging communism to evaluating the systemic transformation that took place in the 1990s, as well as analysing Poland’s place within a united Europe. The deaths of the last authoritative communist leaders, General Wojciech Jaruzelski and Czesław Kiszczak, lowered the emotional temperature of these discussions. Yet, rather shortly after, attempts to rekindle a strong sense of historical memory – most visibly through the cult of the “cursed soldiers” (anti-communist underground forces after the Second planet War, any of whom had been accused of alleged crimes – editor’s note) – began to make fresh myths alternatively than resolve old conflicts. Agnieszka Mrozik, a student of the communist period and its contemporary remembrance, describes this phenomenon as a form of “prosthetic memory”: a space filled with contradictions and ambivalence, where the past endures in the collective imagination as a legacy of shame, guilt, and a persistent request for moral reckoning.
Archives, legacy and nostalgia
Looking from a regional perspective, we can say that the memory of communism has unfolded in 3 dimensions. The first involves documenting crimes through historical investigation and the beginning of archives. The second focuses on reflecting upon the material and social legacy of the era – from architecture to institutions. Finally, the 3rd expresses nostalgia for everyday life in socialist states, which can be seen in the renewed interest in the fashion, cuisine, and pop culture of that time and which is frequently detached from the political context of this period. In Poland, this position was first widely discussed after the publication of a book by Filip Springer, a photo-reporter, who through his photos and reports showed the functionality of socialist architecture and argued that its rejection stemmed more from political prejudice than from flaws in design.
By questioning the myths of the post-1989 transformation, left-wing intellectuals have besides redefined the knowing of the communist state. For example, the philosopher Andrzej Leder argued that the years from 1939 to 1956 in Poland were a time of deep, though brutal, social revolution that dismantled the feudal order and enabled mass upward mobility, creating the foundations for today’s mediate class. Thus, in his view, the period of the People’s Republic of Poland should not be seen only through the prism of oppression but besides as a phase of profound social change. In a akin way the nostalgic image of interwar Poland was challenged by Kacper Pobłocki, Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak, and Kamil Janicki, who exposed the social and economical inequalities that defined that earlier era.
Beneath these debates lies the question as to whether communism can always truly be forgotten. To answer it, the historian Alexei Miller distinguishes between 3 types of forgetting, arguing that only what he calls “understanding-based forgetting” can lead to reconciliation. And yet in Poland, reckoning with the past has taken place more through symbols and media debates than through genuine systemic reform. That is why the historian Antoni Dudek argues that, unlike in Czechia or erstwhile East Germany, Poland has never conducted a full verification of its communist past. In Germany, for example, broad public access to Stasi archives and strong civic education programmes facilitated greater transparency, which were aimed at helping the society face its history.
These instances show that the pace of dealing with the communist past has been uneven across Central and east Europe. While Poland intensely debated de-communization in the 1990s, in Ukraine the mass removals of Lenin monuments – the alleged Leninopad – began only during the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. This process was further accelerated after Russia’s aggression in Donbas and later the full-scale invasion that started in 2022. In the Baltic states, the memory of communism remains powerfully negative, which is simply a consequence of these countries’ experiences of russian occupation, their proximity to Russia, and the presence of large Russian-speaking populations. In the Western Balkans, the memory of the socialist period is closely tied to Tito’s legacy and what is referred to as “Yugonostalgia”, which emerged much earlier than akin sentiments did in another states.
Overall, the memory of communism in Central and east Europe remains dynamic, emotionally charged, and full of contradictions. It intertwines trauma with the request for moral reckoning, and nostalgia with ongoing reinterpretations shaped by contemporary challenges. Thus the central task present is to make a way of remembering that does not erase or deny, but alternatively weaves the past into a coherent sense of historical identity. Only through specified integration can societies decision beyond the wars over memory towards a genuine reconciliation – both nationally, within their own borders, and across the region.
Kinga Anna Gajda is the manager of the Institute of European Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
Michał Kuryłowicz is an assistant prof. at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków at the Department of Eurasian Area Studies.
