For those wishing to paint 20th-century communism as an unmitigated evil, ongoing ethnographic and survey research in eastern Europe contradicts any simple narrative. Even as early as 1992, the Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulić ‘worried about what would happen to all the good things that we did have under communism – the medical care, the year’s paid maternity leave, free abortion’. As governments dismantled social safety nets and poverty spread throughout the region, ordinary citizens grew increasingly less critical of their state socialist pasts.

A 2009 poll in eight east European countries asked if the economic situation for ordinary people was ‘better, worse or about the same as it was under communism’. The results stunned observers: 72 per cent of Hungarians, and 62 per cent of both Ukrainians and Bulgarians believed that most people were worse off after 1989. In no country did more than 47 per cent of those surveyed agree that their lives improved after the advent of free markets. Subsequent polls and qualitative research across Russia and eastern Europe confirm the persistence of these sentiments as popular discontent with the failed promises of free-market prosperity has grown, especially among older people.

In response, east European conservative and Right-wing governments have created museums, memorials and days of commemoration to honour the victims of communism. In 2008, conservative politicians signed the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism to increase educational efforts about the crimes of communism, followed by the 2011 creation of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience, a consortium of organisations striving to promote their view of the 20th century in European history textbooks: a view that equates communism with Nazism, as one of two totalitarianisms.

In Poland and Ukraine, democratic governments have banned communist symbols, slogans and songs, and the Ukrainian government forced name changes on villages and towns with nomenclature that sounded too communist. In the most extreme case, the Ukrainians have legislated an official history about a recent past through which many present-day citizens have lived. If a journalist tries to discuss any positive aspects of life between 1917 and 1991, the law allows the government to shut down the newspaper, magazine or blog, and carries a potential prison sentence of five to 10 years. Free-market capitalism has not brought freedom of the press. ...

So far, we have been labouring to make what is – to those trained in logic at least – an obvious point: the rhetoric of the anti-communists does not amount to a successful argument. We therefore should consider the possibility that the anti-communists are not trying to make an argument; perhaps they are not trying to give reasons. Maybe they are simply appealing to emotion, hoping that the ‘pitchfork effect’ will make it easy for them to render communism all bad all the time. But why? And why now? ...

When Trump attributed blame to ‘both sides’ for the Charlottesville violence in August 2017, many Americans baulked at the idea that ordinary people protesting white supremacy be designated the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis. But this was no accident on Trump’s part. Right-wing nationalists have a good reason to construct a looming godless bogeyman threatening to take away our freedoms. A similar rhetoric can be found in Germany where the government has recently begun to equate the far-Right hooliganism of the neo-Nazis with the increasingly powerful Antifa movement, shutting down the website responsible for organising the massive G20 protests in August 2017, and attempting to silence what they called ‘vicious Left-wing extremists in Germany’.