When the Berlin Wall fell and the formerly Communist slave states of Eastern Europe at last had their freedom, a lot of people rushed to forget the past. I suppose that is to a large extent understandable, the gaining of freedom that had been so long denied by the Communists must have pushed out the memories and the stories of what life was like under the jackboot of Communism. Like those who survived the atrocities and dictatorships of the thirties and forties those who could build new lives did and may have felt no need to dwell on their former lives and troubles.

But there is a danger in forgetting what the Communist Eastern Bloc was like. It has gone into history to such an extent that when looking at a world map with my six year old I have to explain to him that there were once places called the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia or East Germany or Czechoslovakia. He doesn’t yet understand that these were countries that once existed and neither does he yet understand the monstrous tyranny that the citizens of these countries had to live under. This time is as remote for him as the end of World War II was for me. The danger posed by forgetting what the Soviet bloc was like or how terrible a system Communism can be is that the young do not know these things and might even start to think that Communism has some value as a way of organising society.

We need the stories of what life was like under the jackboot of Communism in order to show those who didn’t experience it or didn’t live through the time of the Cold War what it was like. Those who didn’t live through that time or live in one of the Soviet Unions slave states need to understand why it’s vitally important that Communism doesn’t raise its ugly murderous head again.

Because we need to remember Communism in order to continue to condemn it and prevent Communism from rising again, I was very pleased to find a blog that is doing just that. Cold War Records is a fantastic collection of stories about life in the Eastern Bloc. It tells of the politics and politicians, the tyrants and those who worked for them, the spies who spent more time monitoring their own neighbours for ‘speech crimes’ than foreign intelligence operatives. Cold War Records speaks of the physical, sexual and medical abuse of athletes in East Germany in that nation’s quest to be the very best in the world of sport. The blog also talks about the intellectuals and dissidents who were silenced or exiled or murdered in order to prop up the Communist regimes that would accept no criticism of the way that they were run.

Cold War Records is one of those sites that should be used as an educational resource because it tells of a vanished and terrible world of Communist governments who treated their own people as the enemy. It’s a place that should be referenced whenever a left winger starts to become wistful for Communism in order to show people just how quickly, how completely and how brutally Communism destroyed nations and people.

You can find Cold War Records via the link below:

https://coldwarrecords.wordpress.com/