A spectre is haunting Macalester’s campus — the spectre of Sovietism.
And I’m weirded out.
Let me be clear — I think the leftist and liberal beliefs held by most of our student body are great, and I strongly agree with most of them. I am so grateful for attending a school where student workers get to unionize, 75 faculty members vote to remove Israeli universities from the pre-approved list of study-away programs and where the UN flag flies, for better or worse, by the American one in front of Weyerhaeuser Chapel.
I am all for reinterpreting and reclaiming Marxism, communism and the workers’ movements. I am all for socialism. I don’t see a world in which I wouldn’t be.
But I pose this question: where does cool and progressive socialism end and harmful glamorization of historic communist leaders and regimes start?
I am from the Czech Republic. A country where, according to the majority of its citizens, almost every single problem the Czechs face can be traced back to the communist regime imposed on our state for 40 years.
It took me a while to stop associating every reference to communism with gulags. Before I arrived at Macalester, I only associated communism with oppression, censorship and ugly grey sculptures all around Prague that commemorate victims of unjust trials and working camps .
You can imagine my confusion when I first heard s o m e o n e use the word camaraderie in class or had the hammer and sickle on a t-shirt.
My first time in the United States was my first day at Macalester. I do not know what it is like to grow up here, and it is not an experience I can ever claim to understand. I don’t know what it’s like to be from a place where you can buy a gun before you can buy a pint of beer, or where you have to think twice before calling an ambulance because you might not be able to pay the bill. I acknowledge that there is a lot I do not know.
Let me speak on what I do know — how uncool the USSR was. Between 1917-87, the Communist Party that governed the Soviet Union murdered approximately 61,911,000 people. Out of those, 54,767,000 were their own citizens. Most of the communist-, socialist- and Marxist-leaning people that I have met at Macalester are aware of these atrocities and are not trying to erase this history. To believe that capitalism sucks doesn’t mean believing killing millions of people was acceptable. Thus far, I have only met one person who told me they were a Stalinist. (Stalin was responsible for 15-20 million of these deaths.)
What I can’t understand is the inappropriate use of visual and rhetoric references to the USSR. I understand that the symbol of a hammer and sickle or quoting Lenin as a heroic thinker connotes different ideas to others than it does to me. But what good does it do to take inspiration from sovietism? In my mind, there is nothing to take away from dictators. I cannot understand picking and choosing from an agenda that destroyed entire nations through colonialism, oppression and xenophobia. This isn’t another “separating the art from the artist” sort of debate. I do not see a world where you can separate a political regime from the millions of people that it killed. No system is perfect, of course. All politics result in some kind of violence and aggression. I’m not suggesting that we should favor capitalism instead of what Marx proposed. I just ask that we remain critical of our beliefs.
Because having nice things to say about Soviet authoritarianism doesn’t make you a better communist. It makes you an idiot at best and ignorant at worst.
