How come that the Nuremberg trial of communism has never taken place? The question comes from Stephane Courtois, an editor of The Black Book of Communism. The French historian argues that some communist states „committed crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes against peace”, and while Nazism produced a death toll of 25 million, four times as many – a total of 100 million people – fell victim to communism worldwide. At the same time, a movement hallmarked by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is gaining popularity with the party s national director Maria Svart articulating that  „our ultimate goal really is for working people to run our society and run our workplaces and our economies.”

This suggests that DSA would welcome a return to the communist system that, in many countries in Europe and Asia, has not only undermined economies but also ruined the lives of millions of people and families in the 20th century.
 

Following World War II, nearly all the families in the so-called „Eastern Bloc” occupied by the Soviet Union were subjected to some form of communist repression. By the early 1950s, most families in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania or in the Baltic states had the shared experience of having at least one relative taken away for forced interrogation or forced labour. Family members who remained at home lived in fear of being relocated or their animals and crops being seized by the state. The political system functioned through terrorising its subjects: leaders and functionaries of the communist party encouraged citizens to report their relatives to the authorities. Their favourite slogans such as „the imperialists have infiltrated the ranks of communists” or „everybody is suspicious, even those who are not” also reflect their paranoid visions of the perceived enemy.

Communist destruction in Central and Eastern Europe

 

Hungary was the first country in the former „Eastern Bloc” occupied by the Soviet army to dedicate a day of remembrance to the victims of communism. Hungary s parliament passed the law declaring 25 February a memorial day for the victims of communism in 2000. In three years following World War II, about 35 thousand Hungarians were arrested for their political conviction or religious beliefs, and more than 1,000 people were executed or tortured to death. An additional 55,000 people were deported to forced labour camps in either Hungary, or the Soviet Union. After ruthlessly crushing the 1956 revolution, an attempt to restore democratic order, the communists have arrested around 26 thousand people and executed 350. According to researchers estimate, communism has claimed around 116 thousand victims in Hungary, excluding families that were torn apart by mental and physical terror, where parents have been separated from their children, often on false, trumped-up charges.

Following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, Soviet troops occupied more than half of Poland s territory. After the occupation, the Soviets began Poland s communist conversion and, as part of that process, they deported some 320 thousand people in several waves, including political prisoners, to forced labour camps in the Soviet Union. Another notable incident is the Katyn massacre, which saw some 22 thousand Polish military and reserve officers, policemen and border guards slaughtered and dumped into mass graves by the Soviet secret police (NKVD). The massacre has since become an eternal symbol of red terror in Poland. After the war, isolated pockets of Polish patriots kept fighting against the communists up until 1956. Following the Augustów uprising in 1945, the Soviets arrested more than 7,000 Polish resistance fighters and executed nearly 700 of them. NKVD also set up 206 forced labour camps in Poland, where an estimated 300 thousand Polish „dissidents” were detained and starved. Historians estimate that some 50 thousand Poles were convicted and executed between 1944 and 1956.

Czechoslovakia functioned as a democratic state between the two world wars, until the Red Army took control in 1945 and helped Czech communists to power through electoral fraud. Following the Hungarian and Polish examples, the communists gradually forced opposition parties out of politics and deported their leaders, introducing a communist dictatorship in 1948. Private property and freedom of speech were abolished, with the latter lasting well into the late 1960s. The country s freedom movements culminated in the Czech revolution of 1968, also referred to as the Prague Spring, with a proclaimed goal of developing a „socialism with a human face.” The Soviet Union s communist leadership was quick to respond. Citing the Warsaw Pact, it mobilised the armies of its Central European allies and stifled the movement using tanks and artillery. Although the death toll was relatively low (53 Czechs and 19 Slovaks were killed, according to official figures), the violent intervention has prompted around 300 thousand people to emigrate from Czechoslovakia up until 1989, when the so-called „Velvet Revolution” eventually triggered a much-anticipated regime change.

Despite the more than 100 million victims associated with communism, the ideology is very much alive today and, in terms of its public denial and condemnation, there is no such universal agreement that is already in place regarding Nazism. The Reds are part of the governing coalition in Spain, Belarus, Argentina and Venezuela, among a number of other states. Although in most countries of the former „Eastern Bloc”, communists have transformed or merged into existing socialist parties, communist parties continue to exist even today – for instance in Italy and France – albeit with a marginal support.